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SPECIAL NOTE: This podcast was originally recorded as part of the "Talent Unleashed" podcast, which never launched because Theresa was too optimistic about her time capabilities. We decided to honor the guest(s) and publish it under this brand instead.

Enjoy :)

Big Ideas:

• What does it mean to unleash talent? 
• When learning spreads out across multiple areas of your life
• Mix of theoretical and practical aspects of learning - using the learning
• Intrinsic motivation and curiosity
• How do organizations support curiosity individually, and across an organization?
• Learning offered versus learning people want
• Just in time learning
• Encourage curiosity, but don't provide the infrastructure to harness it
• Gig Learning - short term assignments to allow people to learn in different aspects of the organizations
• Intersection of harnessing curiosity and unleashing talent
• Change the narrative around talent - talk about individuals rather than about resources
• Holistic thinking - not about moving people on a chess board
• How best delivering to all people in the organization to satisfy their curiosity?
• Linking people to their own personal purpose within the organization, not just the organization's purpose
• If want to unleash talent, have to be curious about talent
• Unleashing talent isn't just about promotions
• Squiggly careers 
• Everybody's 100% looks different
• What structures need to be in place to help manager unleash talent on their teams?
• When people are promoted to managers, but don't want to be a manager
• Understanding that the people you manage are who deliver to the client 
• Managers don't necessarily have the capacity or resources to manage well
• Getting to know the individuals well enough that you know what inspires them, what demotivates them
• What makes a poor manager poor? (Micro-management, Magpies, Chasing their own agenda, etc.) 
• Rise in managers who care about individuals 
• Poor management isn't address - people quietly quit or change teams 
• What's your purpose as a manager?
• Connection between purpose and unleashing talent 
• Breaking down silos in the organization, so people can see where their purpose can be realized, if it isn't already
• Understand ourselves and our own limitations in order to unleash others talent

DAVE MILL'S BIO:
With over 25 years experience in the learning and development industry. In that time he has facilitated internationally and covered a wide number of subjects from driver training on forklift trucks to facilitating senior leaders to flourish through change.

He is currently a senior consultant and SME in the People Development and Effectiveness Centre of Expertise for Kantar (the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company).

In his many previous lives he trained as a horticulturist, spent years as a night club and mobile DJ, built a career in retail manager, was a charity and corporate event MC and compère, and is a trained hypnotherapist.

He lives in Leamington Spa in the UK with his wife. He has 2 children, is a ‘born-again’ gardener, has recently started writing poetry, still DJs occasionally, loves reading

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Check-In:

• What's better, love or money? Which has more power, love or money? What's more powerful, love or money? 

Big Ideas:

• Money as a substitution for time
• Infatuation can be a very powerful motivator. 
• Differentiation between moments of happiness and love
• Putting love into leadership 
• People going back to work just to see the people
• Power and the complexity of human relationships 
• Power has a negative connotation
• Having power is a privilege
• Your relationship to power can hold you back, especially if you think of it as negative
• Power over, power to, power with (Brené Brown)
• When power is used to "control you" may give you a negative view of power
• 4 Elements of Power as per Ted Jenkins
  • Power of position
  • Power of expertise
  • Power of connections
  • Power of personal authority
• 6 Elements of Power as per French and Raven (1960's source)
  • Formal Power
  • Power of Consequence (power of sanction and reward)
  • The other 4 are the same as above
• Women use their power of expertise almost to a fault
• Extroversion and Introversion are not scientifically backed
• Power of position/legitimacy is given - we agree to give others that power
• Can one have power of position without any of the other powers?
• Is "authority" the right word? Confusion of power and authority
• Is authority, really about charisma?
• Personal authority and the relationship with trust
• Information brokers - knowledge power
• Information is not the same as expertise
• Connection between money and power
• Politicians starting with personal authority, which leads to connections, and then to position
• What are we gaining by giving people power over us?
• Power over you is like being in a prison
• Grow our own sense of power, and continue to have choice
• Societal and group power
• Systems changing from outside, not from inside
• Is power of personal authority, connection, and expertise enough when the power of position is so strong? 

Resources:

• Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman
• Love as a Business Strategy, by Frank E. Danna and Mohammad F. Anwar
• The Work Lab, by Microsoft
• How Women Rise, by Sally Helgeson and Marshall Rosenberg
• Rising Together, by Sally Helgesen

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Check-In Question

• If you were invisible, what's the first thing you would do?
• What good can you do while being invisible?

Big Ideas:

• 4 quadrant matrix - Caring Personally, Challenging Directly
  • High Care, High Challenge - Radical Candor
  • High Care, Low Challenge - Ruinous Empathy
  • Low Care, High Challenge - Obnoxious Aggression
  • Low Care, Low Challenge - Manipulative Insincerity
• Industry dependent  (ie, manufacturing more direct, healthcare less direct)
• gender dynamics at play - women not wanting to challenge directly for fear of being labelled a "B*tch", men don't want to be seen as weak
• Can compassion be radical?
• Compassion using the heart and the mind
• Radical - getting to the root of things
• lay down unilateral power, hold each other accountable
• Radical means essential
• end of command and control with pandemic
• "I can't believe this trust thing is working." ~CXO of some company
• Invite them to give you feedback first and make it a regular part of your day, even in small conversation
• Get to know your team about their career aspirations
• Assumption that people want to advance - Rock Stars versus Super Stars
• Assess how giving and getting feedback
• Ebb and flow between being a rock star and super stardom
• Often only way to grow is to be a manager - what about those who don't want to be a manager? 
• Often only reward the managers financially, not the ICs
• Difference between learning and growing up the ladder
• Pair the care and the candor all the time 
• Passive, aggressive - assertiveness as the third way
• Not falling prey to either or
• Permission parenting, authoritarian parenting, authoritative parenting - finding the middle ground
• We are human and won't always walk the perfect path
• Bill Gates - "Give me the bad news."
• Cultural implications around radical candor
• Use too many disclaimers to soften negative feedback, which takes away the candor
• Recency and latency biases make us  forget the middle in the "Sandwich" technique
• So many nuances
• Normalize radical candor
• Invite public criticism as a leader, so you show people you are willing to take it
• Otherwise, give all radical candor in private
• Often more care than candor
• Fear in speaking up and saying things
• When impact doesn't match intention
• I can't always measure the impact I will have on people 
• Sometimes the way we see the truth can hurt someone, but does that mean we shouldn't say it? 
• Can people take your "Radical Candor"?
• Inquisitive radical candor - test the waters first?
• Knowing the right time to give feedback - it will land different in different circumstances
• "Radical candor is not measured at the mouth of the speaker, but at the ears of the listener." 

Resources Mentioned:

• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

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Check-In:

• What do you think the purpose of life is?

Big Ideas:

• Failing reference models
• Shift from the meaning of crisis to the crisis of meaning
• What's the meaning of work?
• Reference models on how to live together (the Greek pantheon, organized religion, science, governments)
• Does work give us meaning?
• When we get the message that meaning at work is overrated
• Effort in making community
• In the past, work didn't need meaning because we got meaning elsewhere
• Are organizations built to provide meaning to employees?
• Cultural aspect of meaning making
• People resigning because looking for meaning
• Domains that provide meaning and purpose - autonomy and relatedness
• People turning toward personal purpose because not finding it at work
• Personal development focused on autonomous
• Deriving meaning from volunteer work
• Volunteering because it's heart-felt or because it's duty (someone told me to)
• When your work touches your heart, do you need to volunteer to find meaning?
• Universal income - will people still work?
• If we don't want people to leave their work, people need to feel connected to their work and connected to the people they work with
• Who's responsible for the meaning?
• Meaning is so personal 
• Individual why supporting the team shy
• Companies giving time and space for employees for meaning-making
• People want something more than just salary
• Social, financial, and ecological aspects of meaning - measuring each
• How are companies measuring social and ecological impact dimensions?
• Is it a company's responsibility to provide meaning? 
• Peace when you find meaning
• The journey to create meaning is part of the process
• Meaning as an evolutionary process

Resources Mentioned:

• Healing Circles Global
• Landmark Education
• Find Your Why by Simon Sinek
• Beyond Zero documentary

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Check-In:

• If you had the whole world's attention for 30 seconds, what would you say or do?

Big Ideas:

• Hypocrisy and leadership
• Immorality in leadership
• Do leaders have to be good people?
• We think of leadership as for the good of the people
• What tactics are immoral leaders using to get people to follow them?
• Leadership as a pipeline - a relationship between people
• How you position yourself in respect to other people
• Leadership can be about how you hook and attract them
• Charisma as a tool to attract people
• "Othering" of people - politicians using this tactic to gain followers
• Commonality and the group to bring people together
• Using fear with your own people to hold them
• Totalitarianism versus Populism
• The leadership purpose is different from the tools
• Inverse charisma - how you draw people in based on how you listen to them, not how you talk
• Charisma as a source of power - do people give you charisma?
• Shifting leadership depending on our audience - some people need to be listened to, some people need to be inspired
• Adaptive or situational leadership
• Leading from the front, not the back
• Cultural aspects of leadership
• Open and closed ways of leadership
• Our own biases shift how we perceive a leader as good/bad
• Leaders who are reassuring and are perceived as "strong" - people looking to leaders for strength
• Leaders are leaders because they help other people not feel afraid
• Idea that leadership starts from within
• People wanting to be told what to do and how to think
• Power over versus power with/power to
• What do you do when you want to offer people power, and they don't want it?
• Freedom is hard. Ignorance is bliss.
• Do people really want autonomy?
• Are we participants in the creation of immoral leadership?
• Amoral leadership - leadership without morality
• Immorality creates an us/them 
• Should leadership be moral?
• Trust is a psychological mechanism, value is what you think is important
• Can we try NOT to use the moral lens when talking about leadership?
• Pragmatism versus morality
• Take morality off the table and listen for their values
• How we embody values can look different
• How stay on debate without arguing
• Power in having a structured debate with a strong moderator
• Debating from the opposite side of your beliefs
• Constructive conflict that leads to innovation and creativity
• Disagreement isn't the same as conflict
• Leadership is when you stay outside of our "animal self" - you stay above the fray
• "People are hard to hate close up. Move in." 
• Easy for us to form opinions about other people without really knowing them
• Change the conditions by which you measure people and you can say anyone is anything
• Does a leader need to go beyond morality?
• Easy to other people for othering others
• Values as a factor in conflict because of it's rigidity
• Globalization has led to value conflict

Resources Mentioned:

• The Human Library

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Check-In: 

• Share an experience when you felt great as part of a long-distance team, or a team in general.

Big Ideas:

• Is virtual the right word?
• Long distance, remote, or virtual - Are they interchangeable?
• Long distance being more neutral
• Virtual teams used to be for individuals meeting for a certain project, where not everyone worked for the same boss
• Who's the hub for all the spokes?
• Who owns the team? Compliance versus ownership
• All teams have a culture, but no one person owns the culture, it's the responsibility of everyone on the team
• Proximity allows us to "read" cues more easily 
• Beyond 40-50 feet level of engagement drops
• Distance and availability are both factors
• Virtual reduces spontaneous interactions
• Proximity bias - asking people who are closer
• Us/them them in hybrid settings
• Settling for lowest common denominator when accomodating remote?
• What's the best experience for the team?
• Long distance reveals the true team dynamics - especially the "bad" ones
• Good leadership systems work across all types of disruptions
• Leadership first, location second
• Keeping hours of your manager when you are in a different time zone
• Managing for activity versus productivity
• If you have an empowered, trusted team, where they do that doesn't matter
• There are some organizations where proximity matters
• Can the work be done no matter where people are?
• Every annoying policy was created because of one person or incident
• Policies can create discrepancies
• Pilot before policy
• 2/3 of our workplace communication takes place in writing - we don't do it very well
• What role does time (when we work) play in the culture we want?
• Rather than having conversations with people, managers create policies
• Managing to the exception
• Do the rules of the company demonstrate trust?
• What is the IT of culture?
• Communication, collaboration and culture - the little things
• Does everything have to be a meeting?
• Shift in how our relationships have developed over time - more and more online
• Having 1:1 conversations with teams, even online
• Be wary of transactional communication because they don't build relationships
• What works in person ? Translate that intentionally to online spaces

Resources:

• The Long Distance Leader by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel
• The Long Distance Teammate  by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel
• The Long Distance Team by Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel
• Virtual Not Distance Podcast

Wayne Turmel Bio:
For 25 years, Wayne Turmel has been obsessed with how people communicate—or don’t—at work. He is an internationally recognized expert in remote work and the evolving workplace who is the author of 15 books and has spoken around the world. He is best known for the Long Distance Workplace books: The Long Distance Team, Long Distance Teammate and The Long-Distance Leader. Originally from Canada, he now lives and works in Las Vegas. Marshall Goldsmith has called him “one of the unique voices in Leadership.”

Linkedin

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Check-In:

• What is one key trait that makes successful people successful?

Big Ideas:

• Thinking better with other people
• "We think best when we think socially." 
• Social constructivism 
• Group think -- we let loyalty take the place of our thinking
• Think for yourself, before you think with others
• Use tools/methods to help people think better
• Think first, share second - Alone Together
• When the first person anchors the rest of the sharing
• Speaking last as a manager
• Divergent thinking before convergent thinking
• Giving ideas space - go into a room together to define the problem, brainstorm alone, then back together with all the ideas
• Diverging first as not being natural
• Push for convenience and efficiency which gets in the way of the social way of thinking
• Check-In is seen as a waste of time, yet it creates a synchronization at the beginning of a meeting
• How to diverge when we don't feel psychologically safe
• What creates groupiness? Learn together, Train together, Feeling together, Engage in rituals together, Synchronicity (body, meals)
• Lost the sense of "groupiness" at work
• Role-playing games - must let everyone's roles play out
• Having structure for debating with one another can make it fun
• Disagreement and conflict aren't synonymous - disagreement is about ideas, conflict is personalized
• Leaders as moderators for healthy disagreement
• Do managers need to be trained in running meeting design, moderation, etc?
• Starting meetings with music?
• Different neural pathways are used when learning versus when teaching
• The jigsaw method of teaching - learn a small part and then teach it to others
• Must learn to think for yourself through reflection time
• The more roots something has, the more powerful
• Offloading information by making it visual, talking about it, journaling
• Busy-ness isn't always productive 
• Foster different ways of thinking about things - using objects
• The importance of evaluating others' ideas not just expand on your own. 
• Arguing across cultures - different cultures approach it differently
• Arguing as not being seen as team-playing
• Creating a system for disagreement combined psychological safety
• Productive disagreement versus unproductive conflict

Resources:

• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

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Check-In Question:

• Share a memorable meeting experience.

Big Ideas:

• Rituals in meetings
• Clear structures in meetings get to a result
• How we feel in a meeting matters
• Power dynamics in meetings
• A common ritual - rotating "leadership" of the meeting
• Rituals can vary depending on the type of organization and their values and the spirit of what you are doing
• Check-ins would be great in every organization, but the questions will change
• Check-ins can set the tone of the entire meeting
• Not all groups need to connect and build trust together
• Airport book advice - not all advice is right for you
• Tailor the ritual to the context
• Levels of maturity in the ways that people gather
• Each leader has to decide how they want to meet
• Meetings both reflect and create our culture
• Stopping all meetings isn't the answer
• The courage to step up and change the meeting culture in an organization
• Creating intentionality in your meetings
• 16 core types of meetings within an organization
• What is the value/opportunity in the meeting?
• Every time we have a conversation with someone, it's a meeting
• Putting people into a room to solve a problem doesn't work
• Having an intention and outline is usually all we need to have a great meeting
• Great practice - Not calling meetings "meetings" - give them a specific name to the purpose
• What impacts meetings are hard to count
• Can other work exist around all the meetings that are recommended?
• Meeting load increases in any crisis
• Asynchronous communication can reduce the needed meeting time
• Meeting Free Fridays - time block rituals
• Meeting time depends on many factors - human attention spans
• True collaboration takes longer
• Time box status reporting - async if possible

Resources:

• Lucid Meetings
• The Four Agreements  by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Where the Action Is: The Meetings that Make or Break Your Organization
• 16 Types of Meetings
• Meeting Guides and Templates
• The Art of Gathering  by Priya Parker
• Getting to Yes by William Ury
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
• New Rules for Work 

Elise Keith Bio:
J. Elise Keith is the founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, a meeting innovation company dedicated to making it easy for teams to run successful meetings every day. In 2020, Lucid Meetings was recognized as one of the top 10 global influencer brands on the topic of remote work and virtual meetings.

In 2023, Elise and David Mastronardi from the Gamestorming Group joined forces to host the New Rules for Work experiment, a four-part program seeking reliably excellent ways to unleash team creativity in meetings.

Elise is the author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization .

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Check-In Question:

• What do you look back and think, "I would never do that again?"

Big Ideas:

• We do our best thinking when are up and moving around
• Gestures help us think through ideas 
• "We use our brains entirely too much."
• Do we use our brains, or does our brain use us?
• Most of our best ideas come when not trying to think through something
• Thinking harder is counter-productive
• Protestant thinking is against fun and all about hard work
• Not wrestle with ideas, but play with them
• What is professional?
• Definitions of seriousness that drive our learning
• Rise of ADHD in the US and the increase in seat time in schools
• 20 minutes in nature was better for ADHD students than the medications
• More productive after micro-breaks
• Think will think better after a break, but think better because of the break
• Don't separate our movement from our work - invite movement into your day
• Walking meetings
• More accurate when walking while thinking (Radiologist study)
• Nietzsche had the best ideas while walking
• Mobile intelligence
• Not separate the mind from the body
• Level of conversation is elevated when we are elevated
• Afraid of chaos - children were "little savages"
• Play time versus work time
• "The opposite of play isn't work, the opposite of play is depression." ~Stuart Brown
• Emotional regulation being improved when spend time outside
• Importance of natural light to working
• The privilege of having access to green spaces
• Bringing nature into built spaces to support productivity
• Awe - the word and the sound
• We are not too different from our environment
• Leaders creating space for movement (modeling)

Resources:

• The RACI Method
• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• Pomodoro Technique

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Check-In Question:

• Do you think the internet is making people more or less social than we used to be?

Big Ideas

• Look at the quality of connections
• Move to virtual was an opportunity for many
• What is remote work?  What do I do in the office? How do I cope with back-to-back calls? Do I have to watch recordings of missed meetings?
• How do we collaborate together in this new transformation?
• When culture does not exist, how do you create it?
• What do we need to do to create great learning experiences where people are engaged?
• Small bites of learning, 15-20 minutes per day
• Community and connection to talk about your learning
• Difference between knowledge/content and skill
• Skill requires connecting with people and comparing your learning
• Transferring knowledge to skill base - learning to assimilate it
• Reading a book in community - learning more than I would alone
• Social constructivism - people construct knowledge together
• Change of scenery, movement, and other people support us to think
• What can you influence yourself?
• Shift expectations for how we attend meetings - listening or presenting
• Trust and safe spaces to help people break the "rules"
• Resistance to do things differently - break the boundaries
• What keeps us in front of our screens?
• Social price to pay for breaking the boundaries - Will people take us seriously?
• Role-modeling is really important
• Showcasing what learning can do for me - keeping my intellectual side
• Not being forced to learn
• Transparent about what learning and why - skill gaps, or curiosity
• Taking time to learn gets me, slow down, be vulnerable
• Craving out time for learning and development - not a one-off, part of the working week
• Following your own curiosity creates momentum
• Mandatory learning can create box checking
• Learn and engage differently when forced to learn something or self-initiate
• "I think a learn-it-all will always be better than a know-it-all in my book." -Microsoft CEO, 
• How do organizations provide the space and the financial means to keep learning?
• Leaders modeling learning and inviting people to learn with them
• Learning being fun
• Leaders helping raise the "power" standing of their employees
• Lead by example and create positive experiences for my team
• Short term satisfaction versus long term gains
• The power of coaching and a learning network

Resources:

• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• Stephen Covey
• Discover Your Clifton Strengths by Gallup (Don Clifton)
• Clifton's Strengths Finders

You can connect with Lisa Davidian here. 

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