Reclaiming Your Power: Surviving Workplace Chaos and Doing Great Work with Melissa Swift

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Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to Success. Today's guest is Melissa Swift. She's the founder and CEO of Anthrom Insight, a leading organizational effectiveness consultant, and she's just released a brand new book, hot off the presses, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World. But here's why I had to bring on Melissa right this moment. We're all, you know, in the middle of chaos. Modern work, we have interruptions, group chats, emotions, we have tech changes, and yet we're still supposed to deliver great work in the middle of all of that. Melissa doesn't just diagnose the problem. She gives a real framework to reclaim power, even when we feel like everything around us is falling apart. So Melissa, I am thrilled to have you on and learn what you've learned from your studies with high-stake professionals, firefighters, emergency room doctors, air traffic controllers, people whose lives are really on the line. So thank you so much for coming on Your Brand Amplified.

Oh, I'm thrilled to be here, and I'm thrilled for this conversation. As you said, some of these issues are very live right now. All the time.

I mean, just before we jumped on, I was feeling that chaos, right? Oh my goodness. So how did you choose this as an area that you were passionate about, wanted to do more research in?

Yeah, so it's interesting. Sometimes your readers will choose something for you. So my first book, Work Here Now, was all about, you know, starting to explore some of these problems in modern workplaces. And it— I talked about team-level solutions and organizational-level solutions. And then I got all these people coming up to me having read that book and going, you know, Melissa, you— the problem, yes, you nailed it, and you have great solutions for organizations, great solutions for teams. But like, what can I do? What can I personally do to try to mitigate some of these, as you said, some of these gnarly forces that are really affecting me badly? And, you know, I got that question over and over enough times, I said, all right, well, that's, that's what the second book has got to be about then, right? So that's the journey I'm gonna go on.

Yeah, I, I appreciate you listening so clearly to what your engaged audience was asking for. I think that's something that we need to do a lot more of, and we're not always good at that.

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. I actually just wrote like a little LinkedIn post about how I write, and one of the pieces was that you really do have to before you sit down to write, you have to define what does your audience want from you. That, that's really important, that we've all got, you know, fun stuff floating around our brains that doesn't necessarily help anybody in the world. And, and that lens of what's really helpful to somebody in the world, it's one I, I spend a lot of brain space on that.

Yeah. So, you know, you talked about the audience demanded this. Can you talk about the state of work as you see it and what was a breaking point for you, if you had one in your own journey?

Oh my goodness. So I think, like so many of us, I definitely had at least one breaking— because, you know, there's probably multiple breaking points, but at least one, you know, during COVID Because it, you know, COVID, it kind of reminds me of this, like, an old Russian joke about the streetcar being empty and the, the streetcar driver continuing to call the stops, right? It was kind of a metaphor for the old Soviet Union where you were just doing things even though it didn't make sense to do them anymore. COVID felt like that for me. It felt like we're in this massive mess and yet we're still just adhering to these rituals and we scheduled these meetings. And meanwhile, it's like the walls are falling down, you know, things are going nuts. And so that, that to me was this big moment of consciousness to say, okay, well, we got to, we got to fix some of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

That's, that's really powerful. And I, I do agree. It was a breaking point. It was also an inflection point. It was a point when a lot of people were able to shift things, but not successfully all the time. So I'd love to hear a little bit about the effectiveness architecture that you put together, the knowledge, knowledge, methods, people ability, technology ability. So will you talk about that framework and how you created that, how you realize that this is something that everybody needs to think about when they're, we're thinking about our own effectiveness.

Yeah, it's interesting because I've worked with in my career as a consultant a lot of different kind of skills frameworks, right? And in general, they're distinguished by a high level of complexity. You know, we have 30,000 skills in our skills ontology, we have 50,000 skills in our skills ontology, and there's a reason why organizations benefit from that. But if you're an individual and you're, you're not going to sit there and be like, well, I'm going to just go through a checklist of 30,000 skills and see which ones I have. This It's not happening. So, I started to really look at what is kind of the underlying superstructure behind all these long lists. And I came to, you know, some pretty simple, uncontroversial stuff, right? That you have to know something for every job. And some of these frameworks, like the old Hay Group framework back in the day, had a category called know-how for a reason. You gotta know stuff. You have to have a way of doing things. And this is one that actually was a bit of a dog that didn't bark for me, that I could see in a lot of these skills frameworks, they didn't have a lot about how people put it all together. It was all discrete tasks, discrete tasks, discrete thing, this thing over here. And there wasn't a lot about how people systemically did work. And I thought that was an important, important category because when you think about the people you've worked with, right, that makes a big difference. So that's how I kind of came to methods. And then You know, for all the stuff we talk about, soft skills over here, we need all these AI skills over— there's just a perennial thread of people skills and tech skills. I mean, I talk about this in the book, that if you were hunting with a group of like Cro-Magnons, you had to be able to like use your little spear and, you know, and you had to be able to coordinate with your other Cro-Magnon. You know, it's— some of the stuff isn't rocket science, they're just kind of perennial categories. So thinking about those 4 categories, if you keep it really simple at that level, then you can go super deep about what does knowledge really mean, you know, what about explicit knowledge versus tacit knowledge, how do I build on that, how do I build learning, you know, you can go a lot deeper on each one if there aren't 30,000 literally different things.

Yeah, you mentioned something really important, the people skills and the tech skills, and you didn't just say AI, right, because AI is a form of technology. It's one of many tech skills we may need. Do you feel like in today's world, one of the things that is getting lost is the soft skills, the people skills? And then, you know, we're expecting everybody to have this knowledge and just dive right into AI as another tech tool, but we also aren't educating them on the how-to.

Yeah, it is fascinating to me that we decided to sort of roll out a big technology with so little education around it. And the trainings that I've seen, a lot of times it's just organizations playing catch-up. It's like frantic little videos about this is what AI is, and it's not a lot of guidance about how to actually use it. And then at the same time, where you see organizations really rise or fall, a lot of times it's, it's around the people skills. It's around the, the human skills and very, very basic things. It's like, if you think about it, did anyone ever teach you how to write an email? Have you ever taken a class on how to write a good email? And we write how many of these things in a day? And it's just a simple human communication task. There is nothing fancy about it. That is just pure people skills. How do I express myself in writing? But, you know, we— that stuff is lacking. And I think it more and more. So let's think about the example. I always use the example of self-checkout. So, you know, technology has taken a big chunk of, OK, instead of a cashier, I'm checking things out myself. But think about there's still a human worker standing right there to make sure everything from I can check out properly to I don't steal all the items. And that poor human worker is in a really interesting people skills challenge where they have to calm down like the old lady who can't use the checkout. They have to potentially stop thieves, which a cashier, that wouldn't have been part of their job 10 years ago. You know, they have to kind of be modified IT support when it's not working with probably fairly limited tech skills knowledge, but also all the people skills. People don't give IT help desks credit where credit is due for the people skills they have to demonstrate. So, you know, that's one example of like, oh, we automated this role. Well, yes, but now we need all these, we still need all these people skills. I think we're, we're just kind of behind on valuing them, training for them, reinforcing them, all of that. Yeah.

I love that you used an example of something that we all interact with, if not on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, going to a store, the grocery store, the electronic store, whatever the clothing store, whatever the case may be, and dealing with people and sometimes dealing with machines and having that experience and having to understand what the other person is experiencing because I think we often don't think about the workers who are actually having to manage all of our different issues, whether it's we're trying to do the automated checkout and we can't get the machine to work, and they have to problem solve while they're also trying to serve customers, and somebody in aisle 3 needs something and there's nobody there. So it can become really complex. And this maps to my next question, which is 4 trends that are actively making us less effective that you've identified. Can you walk us through them and do you think there's one or the other that's hitting founders and employees specifically particularly hard right now? Yeah, great question.

So the four trends that I talk about in the book are work intensification, hyper-emotional workplaces, hyper-transparent workplaces, and chaos. And, oh God, on any given day, you know, it flips around which of those is the, the, you know, sort of the biggest issue. But I think right now, honestly, chaos is kind of the order of the day. I think chaos is where there's just— it's, you know, we're in a world where we've got a lot of economic uncertainty, we've got geopolitical uncertainty, we've got just a very fluid business landscape, you know. And that's, that's challenging in and of itself, even if you're on the side of your startup is, let's say, benefiting from that fluid landscape, you know. Chaos— it— you can be a beneficiary of chaos too, but at the end of the day, it always kind of creates these challenges and these, these stressors. And so that's in my work with leaders, I'm just, I'm hearing a lot about chaos right now.

Yeah. And what are some ways that we can manage the chaos or take a step back and kind of pull ourselves out and get back to a stronger foundation in our businesses?

I think first of all, you got to understand which type of chaos you're dealing with. And this was like a really big kind of emotional intellectual journey for me writing this chapter because I sit down to write this chapter and I'm like, I hate chaos, right? Like, I'm just not a chaos fan. I can't stand it. It makes me nuts. And so I start doing some research, and I find this beautifully written blog that I quote in the chapter, and it starts with the sentence, "Chaos is the science of surprises." And I'm like, oh, this— I love science, I love surprises, right? This is great. The science of surprises. And that made me take a step back and say, okay, There's the natural chaos of the world, right? The science of surprises, right? The, you know, the butterfly flaps its wings over here and suddenly there's a tsunami over here, right? That— okay, natural chaos. And then there's the part that I actually hate, which is people operating chaotically. I cannot stand it when people behave chaotically at work. It's a real kind of bête noire for me. It makes me nuts. And you need— it's two different sets of strategies. So when it's natural chaos, a lot of it is kind of trying to get out ahead of it. It's you're using scenario planning. OK, well, if things went this way, if things went that way, let's have a plan in advance, right? You know, you're just being kind of savvy in a lot of different ways and just try to ride the wave and being sensitive to this is natural chaos versus this is an unnatural level of chaos. So, you know, OK, we're shipping orders for the holiday season, natural chaos, right? It's always going to be a little crazy. Versus, whoa, this is not like last year, do I have a supply chain problem, right? So that's natural chaos. When people are operating chaotically, you need different strategies. You need to really barricade your boundaries and say, okay, I will tolerate no chaos in, you know, this particular thing. So, you know, for instance, you might say, okay, I'm working for a big company that's like a little all over the map. But when it comes to how we communicate to my people about their compensation, darn it, like we're not going to be chaotic about that because that's too important. So you're, you're setting up more of those kind of boundaries, you know, around. And you're also, you're doing things like, there was a great Dahlia Lithwick article in Slate many years ago about order and chaos Muppets. So her contention, she was writing about the Supreme Court, by the way, it's like a very scholarly article, but her contention was that, you know, some of the Muppets are like Kermit, right? They're organized, they're very orderly. And then some of the Muppets are like Miss Piggy or Animal. And so what you want to do when people are operating chaotically is have a good understanding of who around you is an order Muppet and who's a chaos Muppet. Because sometimes you want to bring in an order Muppet and have them like calm everything down and just, okay guys, we're gonna get it, you know, the way Kermit the Frog does or tries to. And sometimes Actually, if people are operating chaotically, you wanna throw someone else chaotic into the mix cuz they're gonna be a little more cool with what's going on, right? You wanna deploy your Chaos Muppet, like, okay, animal, go for it, you know? And so that, you know, it was a, that chapter was a real journey for me personally cuz it made me think a lot about, you know, not all chaos is created equal, right?

Yeah. Thank you for bringing back something from my childhood.

I love it. The Muppets. Yeah.

It's such a, such a great way to humanize and to help us identify and mirror or think about those experiences. And where are we living in chaos that we can control versus not control? Which brings us to some of the things that you studied, these firefighters, emergency room, air traffic controllers, people we know that if they don't give the right cue, right? Or the right signal, or they miss something. Accidents happen, deaths happen, a lot of other tragedies. So can you talk about why you chose to study those kind of professionals, what the lessons that, you know, translated into the business world were, and, and yeah, just the why.

Yeah, it, it's interesting. That one came in a lot of ways out of my sort of personal experience working for consulting companies. That a lot of times it felt like, again, we were just a little loose with how we were doing things. And we would kind of joke over the years that, you know, "Oh, it's good we're not brain surgeons," you know, like, "Well, we just caught 75 errors in that deck," you know, "Oh, okay, well, we're not doing brain surgery. Everything's going to be fine," you know. And after a while, as kind of a student of work and how work gets done, I just got really interested in, okay, are these people actually working differently? Like, what is going on over there that they can, you know, not make 75 errors in a 75-slide deck? And what I found was really interesting that, you know, when you look at the 4 areas of the Effectiveness Architecture, they do each area differently, completely differently than most of us do in sort of standard, like, white-collar work. And again, that was a real learning experience for me, you know, in, in doing some research and doing these interviews about You know, these are just folks looking at the world differently. Like, I'll give a concrete example. Technology, right? Like, you know, how many of the technologies that you use at work would you say, like, you're like an absolute, like, guru on, right? No, we never feel that way. In contrast, I was talking to this firefighter a couple of days before he was about to go to a course about rope. So they were getting a new kind of rope. And okay, there's a raging fire all around you. You can't be like, oh geez, this is a little slippery, you know? Like, right? Oh, it doesn't tie the way the old one did. You can't figure that stuff out. Stuff out in real time. And so they were going to spend 2 days studying how to deal with the new rope. And that's amazing, right? That is a level of kind of synchronicity with technology that, again, you know, I'm not saying it— the average person at work switches between applications 1,200 times a day. That doesn't mean you're using 1,200 apps. That's just 1,200 switches back and forth. But it implies a decent number of apps you're using. You're not going to be at that level of proficiency with all of them, but maybe pick one or two. And if you got really, really good at a tiny handful of the technologies you use, your working day might be better. It's a really interesting kind of example.

Yeah, in the corporate world, we're often not given the time to be able to actually spend that much time and intention studying something to get to that level.

Absolutely. It's a piece of guidance that I give leaders because everyone's always like, how do I get my team to adopt technology better? And I say, time and space, and let people play with them. That's the other piece about, you know, part of what will go on in that, that training with the rope is they're just like getting a sense of it. And we're not— we don't give people, to your point, time to just get a sense of the technologies they're using because that's how the learning really happens.

Yeah. I was just speaking to a colleague about this because for one of my classes at USC, we're re-envisioning all of the assignments as a first step before we can get permission from the, you know, big curriculum honchos to redo the entire course. But we're incorporating different forms of technology because the students, I mean, they're there to learn and this is learning they may not get time for out when they get their real job, but they'll already have that foundation. So they may not become perfect at any one of them, but they'll be proficient. They'll know how to use different forms of technology, a lot of it in generative AI, whether it's creating videos with it or graphics or whatever the case may be. But they'll have that edge on their, you know, future work for workplaces. But it is something that we don't see a lot of people do out in the quote real world. But you're reminding me of, um, I was in Vietnam last October looking at different businesses and there was a business that took all of their engineers and over the course of a couple years had them train in different certifications that they would not do otherwise, right? And they're all related to learning new tech, AI, and they did this on the company's dime. And I was like, this is so brilliant because they actually cared about their workforce. They realized they needed to upskill their workers. And we're not often given that space and that place. So, you know, in terms of personal effectiveness, it can make us feel like we're not enough, we're not performing enough, our jobs are on the line.

Yeah, and it's a great example of, to exactly your point, there's a systemic issue and then we feel it personally. And then we kind of get dinged for it. Like if I see one more article about workers lack the skill, well, whose fault is it that workers lack the skills? Most people are great self-directed learners. And when you scratch the surface, a lot of folks have taught themselves. I mean, my favorite example is years ago, I was doing some work for a ball bearings company. And they were in like a, you know, smaller city in the Midwest. And they were about to go out and hire some really high-priced robotics talent, you know? And this was gonna like break the bank for the ball bearings company. And then they just did this survey, "Hey, anybody ever done anything with robots?" And it turned out they had all these employees who were like building robots in their garages, right? They had taught themselves robotics. And I think I have a very positive view of human nature. I think that's what the average person does, right? We like— people like to learn, people like to teach themselves stuff. So if people lack the skills that are needed, it comes back to exactly what you're saying, that the average organization hasn't done the kind of thing you're describing where they've really created time and space for learning.

Mm-hmm. Wow. So, you know, you've worked at large organizations or worked with large organizations, Mercer, Korn Ferry, Deloitte, Capgemini. You're also a columnist for MIT Sloan Management Review. How did you see, you know, you're hearing from, from people who are readers who are really hungry for this information in your work with these large organizations as, as a columnist, did you see the same kind of thing, this interplay of Hey, we love what you're writing. We love this lesson, but we also really need—

we're urgent to learn more about our personal effectiveness. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's been so interesting writing the column that I get feedback from literally all over the world. I mean, that's the most fun thing is like you wake up and there's a LinkedIn post about your writing in a different language, you know, like, oh, this is, this is so great. But time and time again, people say, that's what I want. I want those concrete strategies that you put in the article. That's what I need because it's sort of like we've been recycling the same water of kind of tired hackneyed suggestions for years and years. And people are like, "Give me some fresh water. Like, I'm thirsty," you know? And it's interesting also in my work with large organizations, how much of the dialogue always kind of, no matter if you start at the 100,000-foot level of we're going to re-engineer the organization, redesign work or hear about, you know, we're going to replan your workforce, the conversation ends up at ground level about, well, people spend too much time in meetings, we have trouble working across traditional silos, like just very, very nitty-gritty. People don't have time to do the things that we want them to do. And so that was kind of a trend that fascinated me over years and years and years of doing like the big picture, very elevated work. Is that what would actually enable this work up here is this work down here of, you know, we gotta engage with some of these very basic ways of working and create an organization where stuff goes on okay at ground level, otherwise our loftiest ambitions never get realized.

And this sounds simplistic, but really this is difficult.

Oh yeah, it's very much in the category of simple but not easy. This stuff is, this stuff is really, really hard. And again, that's part of why I anchored the book toward what can individuals do, because I think also this is some of the impetus on organizations. You know, you may go in with the best intentions and say, we're going to redesign all our meetings in the organization. Okay, fine, fabulous, love it, love systemic redesign. But the reality is, while you're working through that and the time it really takes to do things like that, which, you know, is it— that's hard yards, that's not easy stuff. While you're doing that, give people some ways to just kind of fight their way through the immediate challenges right now. That, you know, sometimes people will actually get upset with me in venues like LinkedIn. They're like, well, you're telling people not to make systemic fixes. No, not at all. Please make systemic fixes, but they're difficult and they take time and people should be helped while that process is going on. Yeah.

People shouldn't just feel like they're static. They should also feel like they're able to learn and grow. While this ship is moving. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I love that. And there are, you say, 4 sources of effectiveness. Can you talk us through what each one looks like and which one you are and why that matters?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, knowledge shows up as kind of the underlying understanding of your job. So, you know, that might be for a doctor, you know, all the stuff about how the human body works. Methods is how you put it all together. So take that same doctor, it might be how do you get in a rhythm of in a 15-minute appointment with a patient getting all the information you need, moving on to the next one, flowing in, how you integrate your notes, how you keep, you know, advancing your knowledge, right? You do all the, the how pieces fall under methods. You know, people is just kind of a standard, you know, people, and they're not anything fancy. That's the interesting thing about the people one is people sometimes try to create, again, these elaborate visions of what it means to be good with people. And it's simple stuff. Can I make myself understood? Can I listen to other people? Right? That's one a lot of leaders are short on. Can I listen to other people and then take action on like what they told me? You know, things like, can I enlist people to help me in a non-manipulative way? And that's a really interesting one, right? Can I get people to do what I need them to do through genuinely positive methods that are not manipulative? So that's kind of the people bucket. And then the tech bucket, again, this is another one that gets crazily mystified that, well, oh, it's— I need these advanced AI skills. No, it's, it's, do you understand the basics of how certain kinds of technology work? Do you understand how certain systems work together? How does data flow through the organization? Can you debug things if they break? Can you kind of like, you know, tweak it like the way you like hit the soda machine, right? You know, like it can kind of hit the machine and get it to work again. So, this is pretty simple, you know, simple but not always easy stuff. And so, when you think about those 4 things, there's going to be one you're great at and there's going to be one you're less great at. So, for me, not like I'm a knowledge person, right? Like, I just love, you know, random facts and all this. I just, oh, it's so good. I'm least good at methods. I'm least good at kind of the, like, the, the operational side. That's my, you know, kind of greatest weakness. And I talked about in the book that people will stereotype you, and you need to be able to sort of overcome how people will stereotype you. So for someone who's good at knowledge and not good at methods, the stereotype is always going to be, well, you know, she's book smart but not street smart. And I used to get that all the time in my career, constantly. So the thing I learned how to do is how to tell stories based on practical reality and my actual experience that would show that, like, look, this lady's gotten her hands dirty. This is not just book smart, you know, knowledge. And so it's, I think, for everybody, like, knowing which one you're good at and which one you're least good at. And then not what's true of you, but how people will stereotype you and being able to fight that stereotype. Is super important. Yeah.

I love that you know your superpower and you've also learned how to show people in the area that they may think that you're limited in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that's how mismatch can happen, right? And that's something we would probably need coaching or consulting on is if we know we're good with people, terrible at systems, we hire people just like us. We don't hire people for the skills we need in our business or for the other areas in our businesses.

So true. Or just the rhetoric is being shaped by one group or another. So like right now, all the rhetoric about AI is being shaped by a group of people whose strength is technology. And that's awesome. But, you know, we're not all going to be Sam Altman. That's okay. That's totally okay. It takes all types to make a company and pushing everyone into this one box. If you're not good at these one of the four things, then you kind of stink. It's both unfair, but it's also not good for companies. Because if you really did have a company full of— and I guarantee you OpenAI is not a company of all just entirely people who are good at tech, right? Like, every company in the world, every department, you will find all four flavors. So, you know, it's— I think it's, it's a helpful lens. And to your point, you don't want to— I worked with a company years ago that said something about— they had a phrase about don't hire replicants. Like don't hire yourself over and over. I love that. It's, it's really good guidance.

Yeah. I've seen in my own small businesses that I need that person who's going to keep us organizationally sound. Like I can put together, I can create all the SOPs and all the things, but I still need that person who's going to even keep me on task. And I know that's a shortcoming of my own. And I, I think it's important then we have to find those people so that we can find success in our own businesses or organizations. Whether you are the leader or even if you are the employee, right? That person who's trying to find their own individual effectiveness, knowing that you can have a partner in your department perhaps to help guide you.

Yeah, and I think that it's a wonderful observation. I think people don't do that enough, of you don't have to be everything in yourself, right? You can find that folks, folks with complementarity. Like, I had someone at a prior job who was just wonderful at methods, right? He was like, just operationally awesome. And we worked really well together because, you know, there was that complement— there was that complementarity. You know, he was like less of a knowledge person, I was more of a methods per— you know, so it was like yin and yang, and it was a great way to work with somebody.

Going back to these high-stakes organizations, you talked about how they were— the firefighters had training, pretty intensive training on this rope because they can't— they're not going to want to go into a fire and have to learn on the job. I think some of the other things that you've pointed out are, you know, team dynamics and chaos. We talked— you talked a little bit about emotions. So how do we get clarity and how do we get teams to work when there is a lot of chaos going on in our organizations?

Well, and one of the points I make in the book is by the time things get really crazy, again, it's not the time to figure out, right, how teams should work together. So one of the things that I recommend leaders do is what often goes wrong, and this can be true even in like very small entrepreneurial organizations, right? This doesn't have to be a massive company thing, is that we work in teams of teams, that not everybody reports to the same boss or everybody does the same function. You know, even in a tiny organization you can get this dynamic. And then that's where when things get chaotic, the roles aren't clearly defined because the roles were defined but within your own original team, but if you're working two teams together, like, forget it. All the role clarity goes out the window. Yeah. So I always recommend that leaders figure out who your team is teaming with and be buddies with their leaders and just get that dialogue going. And it, it's always okay, I think, when teams are teaming up together, or even when things have gotten a little crazy within a team to say, pause, pause. What, literally, what is everyone's role? Within this? Because so much falls apart on the basis of role clarity being poor, either that, you know, nobody's doing the thing or two people are doing the thing or people are fighting about doing the thing. And those role clarity discussions, for some reason, they've kind of fallen out of how we work. And I'm in favor of really bringing them back, verbalizing them, you know, ending every meeting with, okay, who is going to do What? And it sounds so silly and basic, but again, you know, you see extraordinary levels of role clarity in high-stakes work. You know, you can't be the firefighter holding the rope at the top of the building and the person rappelling down the side of the building, right? You can't be both people. But in the business world, like, oh, you can double hat. Like, no, no, no, bad idea, bad idea, not a good idea. You know, similarly, think about within a hospital. Everyone's role is defined with acute clarity, right? You are not the anesthesiologist and the surgeon. No, no, no, no. So, you know, there's, there's a virtue to, to doing that. I think there's part of what happened was there's a bit of cultural myth-making about, well, we just want everything to be loose and creative, but loose does not actually equal creative. If you can get the roles really crisp, there's more room for creativity because your brain isn't constantly struggling with what the heck am I doing here? Yeah. Yeah.

Such a fair point. As we're talking, I'm thinking about, you know, the managing the chaos because there's chaos. You mentioned supply chain or geopolitical events or the economy. Not always things that we can control outwardly, but we can still make provisions inside our companies and organizations. And I'm thinking about gray rhinos, black swans, right? Yeah. Yeah. The difference between the two of them. And I, I like to bring those examples to my students as well. For them to start thinking about organizations and how there are things we might not be able to plan for, but if there are things that we think might be happening, we can plan for them. Is that something that you also see as part of an individual's effectiveness as well as the group dynamic?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you can sit there— scenario planning doesn't have to be a giant exercise. You can take 15 minutes and just say, okay, what are 5 things that might happen next and what am I gonna do? You know, I actually, as an entrepreneur, I spend a lot of time thinking about that, right? Because the buck stops with me. So I always have to have a plan. And to your point, what's going to happen next? Who knows? So I, I just, I spend, you know, a certain amount of time on just kind of mental preparedness. And again, there are going to be things you can't guess, but the chances that you've guessed something somewhat adjacent to it, the The more time you spend on scenario planning, the more chance that is that that'll happen.

As we're thinking through these concepts, how do we know if our job is set up for effectiveness or not? Because sometimes we might realize we're trying to do everything we can, but we're swimming uphill. It's not us, it's the actual system that we're part of.

Yeah, it's, it's so interesting. This, this was a question that started to really plague me as I was writing this book, and that's, that's where chapter 10 came from. Because I sort of, you know, was sitting there thinking, gosh, I would really hate it if someone went through this book and deployed all the strategies and still like, ooh, something wasn't working. And then I reflected a lot on my own life. I reflected on what I've seen inside client organizations, what I've seen friends go through, et cetera, et cetera. And there is this recurring theme of you may just not be set up for success. And the diabolical thing is the more motivated you are, the more really locked in you are about doing a great job, you will just bang your head against the wall endlessly. And that's— it's unhelpful. It doesn't get you anywhere to just keep trying when— I've heard it expressed as gravity forces you can't fight. You know, there may be forces you can't fight. So, I sat down and I said, "Okay, let me do a little bit of a taxonomy of what that looks like." And I really dug in, especially to my executive interviews for that. I mean, okay, okay, you guys are a bunch of like really illustrious executives. What have you seen? And It's a range of stuff. You know, maybe your job is fundamentally broken. And your job being broken, it's generally this. It's that the resources you are given don't match up to what you're expected, the outputs you're expected to produce, right? So, you know, you're, and a lot of times this will, people will give you a seductive pitch for this. We want you to lead through influence. And what that actually means is this job doesn't have the actual power to do what it needs to do, or we want you to be scrappy. What that means is you're not getting the money, the people, right? So organizations do a little gaslighting around this stuff. So your job may be broken. The organization may not want your job, which you're like, that's weird, Melissa. They just hired me to do it. Why would they? But the reality is a lot of times, especially for external hires, I think you really have to watch this when you're joining a new organization. They will hire someone to do work that the organization inherently rejects. So I, I interviewed a great consultant in Joel González, and he was talking about a classic example of this is that an organization would be like, we're going to set up an innovation function, and then they hire all these cool innovators from the outside. And the reason why they had to do that was they have a culture that hates innovation. And then the people come in and they're like, oh, it's really hard to innovate here. They're like, no, you're just bad at your job. And then they fire them, they get other people, you know, it this horrible loop. So the organization may, you know, another classic one is you get hired to be a change agent because the organization's not capable of changing on its own, you know. So those are, you know, kind of a couple, you know, you may have a boss who's constantly reaching over your shoulder. If your boss is determined to do your job, and, you know, we've all been there, that you may not be able to extricate them from your job. So if they're in your job, you can't do your job because your boss is doing it. You know, you may be just kind of— you may be up against values that don't resonate for you. So if your values are truly in conflict with the organization's values, and I've seen some really vivid examples of this, then ultimately you're not going to be effective because they are trying to accomplish something that you do not actually agree with. Or you may just be failing to get traction and not even know why. And at a certain point, like, stop the madness. You don't have to, you know, it's great. We wanna introspect, we wanna make ourselves better, but at a certain point you have to be able to say, okay, if this is the situation, I can't be effective here. What now?

Yeah. And that's when you have to choose to walk away or to stay. And that's a harder and harder decision, I think, in light of the job market, the uncertainty around the job market and economics right now. And just the general instability and chaos that we feel externally, you know, not even— I mean, beyond just being in our own businesses. Absolutely.

And I, you know, I say in that chapter, like, you know, both of my parents grew up pretty poor. I would never say, just, just quit your job, it'll be fine. You know, like, that's really irresponsible advice. You know, there's, you know, people have bills to pay and all that. So it's important to think about it as like a series of concentric circles. The First thing you can do is always have a conversation with your boss about your job, you know, and sometimes that'll fix it. Sometimes they will say, well, ooh, you don't have the right resources, or okay, this is wrong and maybe you should be part of this, you know. So start there. Then are there other roles within— if you like your organization, like you're not having a big values conflict or something, okay, are there other roles within this organization? And then you can kind of keep concentric. Okay, are there roles at like a direct competitor? Okay, do I need to get out of the industry altogether? But you don't have to take like the biggest leap immediately, and you don't have to do anything rash. It's just start your process. Yeah.

So when we're thinking about what we can do, right, what's a founder or an employee, somebody who's working in a role, they might love the organization, they might be very passionate about it, but they're also feeling like they're stuck. They don't have a lot of control. Their workday is just horrible, they come home unhappy. What are 3 steps they could take this week right now after listening to start reclaiming their effectiveness?

Well, I think number 1, have a conversation with your manager. And if you're a founder, have the conversation with yourself. I have all kinds of, you know, conversations of this type with myself, you know, about prioritization. And really say, what is vital to get done and what is less vital. You know, that's a lot of times things happen very unintentionally in organizations. And so someone may have dumped on you 78 different things and they didn't even realize they've just been sprinkling these things. You may have dumped them on yourself. Again, I do this to myself all the time, right? Or like, okay, Melissa, you told yourself to do this, don't tell yourself to do that. You know, it's just a thing that happens. So, you know, number one, you know, start with prioritization. Number 2, creating time and space wherever you can. So, you know, is there one meeting this week, one meeting that I don't need to be in? Or again, if it's— you're in charge of all the meetings, is there one meeting I, I can, I can cancel and just get a little bit of that? This dynamic, I think, of very, very back-to-back-to-back-to-back days is, is not helping any one of us. You know, that our, our performance in any given meeting, Kaya stinks because we're in so many meetings and you're just not getting the headspace and the thinking space. So see if you can just brute force clear some space. And then number 3, think about your sort of like how work is flowing to you, like you between you and any teammates you may have. And again, if you're, you know, a founder, it may be people in your ecosystem, people that you partner with, right? It doesn't have to be literal teammates, you know, to people who potentially report to you or work for you and just, you know, kind of take a second and say, how is all that water going through the pipes? You know, am I, am I doing— a lot of times in large organizations, if you really take a step back, you'll see that you're doing a part of someone else's job. And that's a powerful insight. And, you know, I joke about in the book, if you can figure out a way to hand work back to your boss, awesome. Like, you're, you're a star, right? Generally not possible, but there may be work that literally should go to other people. It's interesting, when I did some research on work intensification last year, that was one of the findings of the research was the people who felt a bit saner and more anchored and more effective were actually just going back to people and saying, "You know what? Nope, that is actually your job." And it's so countercultural in so many organizations, like saying, "Not in my job description." That's like a dirty phrase. But actually, people who are really effective are great about knowing what's in their job description. You're right. And it might be the expanded version. It's never gonna be just the bullet points you got when you were hired, but knowing really crisply what drives the effectiveness of their job and doing that and not doing all the other stuff.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and that other stuff is the distraction. It is the things that create more chaos, get us bogged down, and make us feel less effective. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, when you take a step back, you kind of know what it is too. That's the interesting thing. But it's just most of us are— it's highway hypnosis, right? We're just driving down the highway and we're totally— we're not even thinking about it. Yeah.

This is just the start of our conversation. I have some questions I'm going to ask you when we get off about speaking engagements and things like that, because I'd love to bring you into some organizations that I work with. But this conversation's been really fun and also clarifying. I think anybody who's listening You know, it's probably there's an area that they're maybe not feeling as effective in right now, and we need to figure out what we excel in, what our strongest pillar is, so we can double down on our superpowers and figure out who else we can work with that might be that gap to our blind spot. I'm really excited to share your book, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World. We'll have the link in the show notes to that and to your website and everything else. So I want to ask, do you have any last comments, any last advice you want to leave with the audience?

I would say don't beat up on yourself. I think work is really, really hard right now, to our whole conversation, right? It's chaotic out there, it's overloaded, and I see people constantly saying, gosh, I just, I feel like I can't do it. And I want to say, number one, it's not your fault, and two, there are things you can do. And just leave people with that empowering message.

Fantastic. And I always ask my guests, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, just words that continue to inspire you?

Oh, good question. I mean, I would say, so I always think, I think a lot about, 'cause I, you know, as a writer, I always think about the Oscar Wilde quote about, "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one." Because a lot of the communications guidance I give leaders these days is the way you can show people, you know, you didn't use AI to write whatever you wrote, but also the way you can punch through in this noisy, crowded world is brevity. And I think that the art of brevity, that for me is, is a real touchstone. Yeah, I love that.

Thank you so much, Melissa. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I really enjoyed reading your book, and I'm excited to share your message and your learnings with everybody beyond my audience as well as this audience right here.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

Amazing. And thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it. Please leave us a rating review, share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. And again, we'll have the links to Melissa's book and how to reach out to her directly in the show notes. And I'll be back again with another amazing guest very shortly. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.