#H2HChat: The Importance of Humanizing the Workplace with Shawn Murphy

Hey everybody, how are you doing? We're back for another HDA Chat. That means that it's Monday, and it's Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time. I'm back in San Jose, very excited to be here on Pacific Standard Time, and I am talking with Sean Murphy, who I'm going to introduce here in a second. Before I do that, let me say a quick hello to my lovely co-host, Suzy. Hey everybody. Live from New York City. How are you doing?

I'm doing well, Bryan. I'm doing well.

Nice, nice.

Not much else to say. Super excited for this chat, I have to say. As I think I tweeted out, this is just like such a cool topic.

I'm live with Sean Murphy, who I'm going to introduce here in a second. Before I do that, let me say a quick hello to lovely co-host Suzy, live from New York City. Can we all hear that?

I'm doing well, Bryan. I'm doing well.

I can hear that, yes.

Nice. It's like replaying. I'm freaking out. We're in a parallel universe.

Yeah, seriously.

I've never seen that before. This is Google for you.

What will be awesome is if it's just like an infinite loop.

We'll be co-hosting Suzy live from New York City. If anybody has a second window open, we should probably close it. I'm freaking out, we're in a parallel universe.

Yeah, seriously.

That is hilarious.

Shawn, do you happen to have a second window open?

I'm— no?

This will be awesome if there's infinite loops.

There. Hey,

it

stopped. I had Firefox open, but I did not have anything Google.

I love it. That was awesome. I felt like—

That was bizarre, guys.

I'm glad that you guys confirmed you could hear it, or this would have been Bryan Goes to See the Doctor Day. So was I hearing myself, or did you hear it here too? Okay, so really excited to be here. So glad we fixed that. And we are excited to be here with Shawn. I want to introduce Shawn. He's a good friend of ours, and he's part of a futurist program that we do with IBM. And then also, you know, we've known Shawn— Shawn, how long have we known each other? For longer than maybe almost over between a year and 2 years, I'm sure.

I think it's closer to 2, yeah.

Okay, and then Shawn, now the real exciting thing on top of being the CEO and founder of Switch and Shift, and an Inc. top leadership speaker and a columnist and all kinds of great things. You just wrote and launched your first book, and I know how exciting that can be, and I wanted to congratulate you first off.

Thank you.

And second, that's what we're here to talk about is your book, The Optimistic Workplace, and talk about how to humanize the work environment. Something that we're all very passionate about, and so we want to talk to you about it. But otherwise, give everybody just kind of a quick understanding as to who Shawn is.

Who is Shawn? He's in constant inquiry about who he is. But today the answer sounds something like this. So I am a passionate person around helping our workplaces become— get ready for the applause— Yes, yes, it is definitely a thing that we both have such passion for. But, you know, I think what I find really interesting about this is we spend a lot of time at work, so why not make it something that's a positive contribution to people's lives? And so we spend time working with organizations, helping them figure out how do they make this thing called work something that is a positive contribution to people's lives, as well as, you know, businesses exist to be successful and make a profit. So how do they do that in a way that helps them be successful?

I love it, man. And so that's no small feat, even though you just put it very simply in roughly less than a paragraph. I know that's not easy. And so that's probably why Part of the reason why I know you wrote a book about it, because it's not just as easy as that. I want to go through with you that, and then on the second half of this, as everyone knows unless you're new to H2H Chat, you can use the hashtag #H2HChat on Twitter, and there's a good, great, awesome, better than awesome community there that is chatting back and forth on this. Suzy is trying to— she's doing her typical multitask thing, and she's both chatting with you guys and with us, but she'll be your conduit. If you want to ask some questions, feel free to, and then she's going to pose those in the second half here. Definitely keep your questions coming in. Let's stump the guest. How about that? No, I'm kidding. Let's not stump the guest. That wouldn't be cool.

I'll be nice, I promise. Throw me the best questions.

I just wanted to give him a hard time. Let's definitely bring in some great questions. I know you guys will have some. JS is already throwing out his questions. I love JS. JS Gilbert is always full of great questions. So, Shival John is on here too. So here is my first question, is just what got you thinking about writing this book? You could have written any book. Why this book?

So the main reason is There's just so much unsatisfying, dismal figures around how crappy the workplace is right now. I just read the other day that 65% of people in the workplace would rather a new boss than getting a promotion. Towers Watson did some research showing that less than 50% employees believed that their senior managers were interested in their well-being. And then we, we take these figures and we compare them up against, you know, the, the low engagement numbers that are, you know, global, that have been that way for a decade. I just figured, you know, there's got to be a way to help managers shift the conversation. And so I wanted to do that, is write a book that helps them You know, take action instead of having to wait for someone to help them.

I love that. When you say take action, what do you mean?

So the book, when I wrote it, I intended in my mind that I wrote it for those who are in the middle of the organization. So a lot of times when we read leadership books, they're really good about explaining why something is important, and I wanted to write a book that says, okay, here's why it's important, but Here's what you can do. So, you know, to take action around creating workplace optimism, making that really tangible as opposed to this ethereal academic kind of conversation that often, you know, we writers like to spend time in.

Well, that is true, huh? And spending time at, you know, when lots of things are coming at you, as either a writer or in just general in work is hard enough. Yeah. How do you prioritize your time? How do you make everyone happy? And then how do you, you know, build something that, you know, gets results and combine all that into also work-life balance and have time on your hands to actually breathe and be with your, you know, friends or your spouse or your kids and do all these things. Man, what pressure we have. And so are you kind of focused on— is this the humanity side that you're talking about?

Yeah, yeah, although I wouldn't say that I believe in work-life balance as much as I believe in work-life mix. Balance assumes that something's gonna have to give and you're gonna lose out in an area, and I just don't think that's— I don't think that's a game worth playing, quite frankly. So really it's how do you marry both your personal your professional worlds so that they're both fulfilling and not one is constantly being sacrificed because of the other demands.

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point. So let's jump into the— I want to walk through the sequence of the book. Obviously we won't give the whole thing away. We can't. I mean, it's just too much. for us to even cover in an hour. But, you know, it's interesting how you start out with the future of the workplace. It goes so well with the topic of what you and we have been talking about for the last couple of years with IBM. Right. And the future of working. And so why don't we start there with not what do we have now, but how do you see things changing?

Yeah. So I'd like to shift the conversation for managers to think a little bit beyond culture, because culture is such a massive topic, and start thinking about what they can control more. And what we know from experience and research is that a manager has more influence over the climate of a workplace. So let me talk a little bit about what that is. So culture is how things get done around an organization. Climate is what it feels like to work somewhere. And Gallup— excuse me, not Gallup— Hay Group did some research that shows that the leader can affect the way it feels more than any other influence, more than the CEO, more than benefits, more than just the money, for example. It's how a leader shows up. So I think the future of the workplace includes leaders addressing on a more local level how to make work more meaningful and fulfilling instead of waiting for a massive initiative to come out from HR or from senior management saying, we're going to improve employee engagement. It's not working. It hasn't worked for 10 years. It's really an individual fight, if you will. It's me as a leader with my team helping them find greater fulfillment, meaning, purpose in their work than waiting for HR to roll out some training program. So I think that's definitely part of the future.

Awesome. So future is H2H. It sounds like it's going back to one-to-one.

That's right.

It's building less of a— well, it is a community, but it's not a— I guess the best way to put it is an email blast. You're not blasting the message to everyone. You're actually delivering and engaging one-to-one with each person and customizing a solution, even in the thousands. I mean, even with companies that are massive all the way down to 10-people companies, right? Is that kind of what you're saying?

Yep, yep. We— one of the things that we talk a lot with our clients around is creating pockets of excellence. And a pocket of excellence is despite what might be going around in the bigger picture, you can create this great oasis where great things get done despite what might be going on around you.

Mm-hmm.

And that is greatly influenced by what you're talking about, Bryan, that relational, that relationship that the leader has with each employee. And, you know, it's not worrying about how do I have this big bang effect. It's how do I make a more localized impact with my team and/or my department, right? You know, we're working with a CIO who's really working on this right now. It doesn't have to be this all-or-nothing game.

You talk in chapter 3 about— and I'm halfway through the book, by the way, and I'm enjoying it. I can't wait to finish it. I just unfortunately got done with a long flight, and I was like, oh my God, I've got to read this, but I needed to take some time to migrate on the time zone. Yeah. Anyway, I'm right around chapter 6. It all starts with purpose. What I really thought was interesting was the power of contagious emotions. I'd love for you to tell everyone about contagious emotions. I'm glad you backed that with emotions, not that there's so many— when you say contagious, oh my God. Talk to us about Contagious emotions.

Yeah, so contagious emotions can be both positive or negative. And so if you're trying to create optimism, obviously you're wanting to spread the positive. And this is based on some research that has been done around showing that if I am helping Brian with, say, a project that he's working on and he's really struggling with something and it's something I could help him with, When other people see that we're helping each other, that becomes contagious. So, you know, emotions like joy and, dare I say it, the L word, love, right, you know, in the workplace.

What?

I know. It's, it's— I love you guys.

And you just used it as an example.

We're big fans of the sound effects.

It's one of my favorite things about Hangouts actually. But no, I think it's, you know, when you are intentionally doing good to help another person, people see that and that's what they start to learn is this is how we do things around here. And so that's how these emotions become contagious. People want to be part of something that is good, right?

Yeah, and so, but there's also contagious bad emotions, I would imagine. If you have good ones, then, you know, you have joy and surprise, but you also have sadness and anger. And so what happens when contagious goes— contagial, is that a word? It

is viral.

Suzy has me making up words now.

It's

my impact.

Yes, yes, Suzy, you caused this pressure for performance.

Do it now!

Yeah, so you know what's interesting about that question, Bryan, is there's a book out From a guy named Todd Kashdan, who— the book is called The Upside to Your Dark Side. And what his argument is, and I think this gets at what you're asking, is emotions like anger, right?

Yeah.

Actually can lead to something positive if it's channeled appropriately. But in unoptimistic environments, when anger is left to kind of Yeah. Then it's, it's not positive. But when, if you're angry with something and I sit down and say, hey, let's talk about this. What's, what's, what's driving this? What's the trigger? What, what good can you do because of this anger? Then that helps to lead more towards that positive contagious emotion. Yeah. But we can't discount it because then we're, then we're just basically burying our head in the sands and that's no good.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. So, are the— is it pretty straightforward to work through emotion?

Oh, of course. We're human beings, right? We come with a manual that says, do this and this and this. Yeah, I wish it was straightforward. I think it's complicated. We're messy people, right? And oftentimes we're irrational. So I think no, it's not as straightforward as we'd like it to be. But I think what's interesting about labeling something positive or leveraging your dark side, by labeling them it helps you address what's going on and make sense of things, right?

Yep, that's right. So, and then let's keep going and I want to talk now about the You talk about the value-based leadership and how to lead through, you know, the difference between vision, mission, and values. Maybe you can dive into that a little bit.

So this is maybe a slightly different take on that conversation where, you know, there's a saying and I'm not sure who said it, but it's If you don't know what you stand for, you'll fall for anything. And the belief here is that as a leader, you need to know what your personal values are. You need to know what you stand for. Because a lot of us don't know what our personal values are. We intuitively know them. But to actually know what you stand for and then define that value really helps to shift the way that you show up as a leader. And the idea came from a company that is featured in the book called Luck Companies. And Luck Companies actually has built a whole foundation on values-based leadership where they, every employee goes through workshops that say, you need to know what you stand for. What are your values? And how does that influence the way that you lead people, whether you are a manager or not? So it's not so much relying on the triteness of values that often become part of the corporate environment, but really personally internalizing them and saying, what do I value and how does that manifest in the work that I do?

What are your values? Do you mind sharing?

I don't mind. So purpose and meaning are my top 2. Stimulation, you know, is— that probably sounds pretty weird, so I probably should use a different word. Growth.

He said stimulation.

I think I'm turning red.

This is about being human in the workplace. We're here with Sean Murphy. I can't even say the word again.

Talking

about stimulation.

Oh, it's getting hot in here.

So you were talking about your values.

Yeah. So purpose, meaning, growth, curiosity— those are my top values. And I use them to be able to guide projects that I participate in. I use it to evaluate what my goals are for the year. I use my values to assess, you know, is my leadership in line with what I say is important to me? And, you know, it's, it's, I think any, if there's a key message around creating optimism, it's this: you gotta know what you stand for. You do the personal work. Because you have amazing influence on people, but do you know what kind of influence you have? And I think a way to know that is to know what your values are.

Interesting. What— so just before we move into the next segment, which is around your chapter 10, which is about trust. I want to— let's define how you get to defining your values. What's the best way to— besides doing— I'm sure you could go through a whole workshop and actually do this, but what's kind of maybe some key elements out of that?

So if you want to take a shortcut to get to it, there's a really cool tool called Igniter. So if you Google Igniter and Luck Companies, you'll be taken to their site, and it's an automated tool that helps you define your values. OK. I think if you're less interested in that, you want to start looking at what were some highlights in your life, right? What's the common theme about those events that make them highlights for you? I think another thing is When you're performing your best, what are you doing to be able to perform at your best levels? Those are some key questions that help you know what it is that you stand for, what your values are.

Great. So I'm bookmarking the site because I want to figure this out. This is awesome. That was an excellent tip. So we'll have to tweet that out. Thank you so much. Definitely everyone out there, keep the questions coming. This is good stuff. If you guys have— you want to do a deep dive for the next 30 minutes, we're going to start taking questions about 10 minutes from now. And if you have questions, or more questions I should say, because there's some good stuff coming in, please throw it out on #H2Hchat so that Suzy can go ahead and reflect those questions from you, making you famous on H2Hchat by seeing saying your name alongside your question to the Sean Murphy. So here we go. Let's talk about trust. Okay. So actually, the name of the chapter is called Next Comes Trust: Creating Community, which is ironic because Susan just launched a great blog today on community. It's the first part of a series. Recommend everyone check that out. So shout out for that. But community is big, and so how do you build community, and through that I'm sure trust is a part of that?

Go. So I broke it down by creating a simple equation, and it's called Equation for Community, and it's collaboration plus connection. When you bring those 2 together Those help you create community. Collaboration, in order— and I make the distinction that collaboration and cooperation are not the same. Cooperation is really this whole, you know, Bryan, you have a need, I have a need, but we don't have a shared purpose, but we're just coming together to be able to help each other with our needs. Yeah. That's cooperation. If you want community, you need something more than that. You need collaboration. And collaboration is, hey, we have a shared outcome that we're working to, and we also work together to be able to help accomplish that. And in order for that to happen, trust is key. Trust is the foundation for any community to thrive. So there's collaboration and then connection. And connection is, you know, as human beings, we actually We are wired for connection. It's actually— there's in our— what neuroscientists are showing us, are telling us these days is we have what's called this default network, and the default network is, you know, when we aren't— when we're just sitting and not necessarily thinking about what we're doing, our brains By default start thinking about the relationships in our lives. So it's, it's, it's an important part to our day-to-day interactions. So connection is around how do we help bring people together to be able to find commonalities within, amongst each other, so that we can actually work easier side by side. So that's when you bring those 2 together, it helps to create this sense of community, which is really, you know, it's anything. It's a group, it's your team, it's a large part of the organization. You know, it's how you define it. It's online, it's virtual, there's an H2H community. But those 2 ingredients are key in order for community to emerge.

And you, I mean, you start off by saying Let's see here. Oh, I just lost it. And by the way, you definitely have— human is a massive part of this book. It is on every page that you have here. You talk about the limitations of cooperation. Yeah. And I'd love to hear more about that. What holds— what is the biggest thing that holds us back from creating community and building real sense of community?

Yeah, so there was some— there's a lot of research right now that talks about this neuropeptide called oxytocin. And so oxytocin— so I'm going to geek out on all of you for a second. So this is your science lesson for the day. So here we go. So oxytocin is a neuropeptide in the brain that is released to create a bond between people. And it's what actually drives a mom to pick up its crying baby. Okay? So this limitation of cooperation is an oxy— excuse me. So oxytocin, what it does then is it strengthens the connection that people have. And that helps improve the collaboration that people have. So when we work together, the limitations of cooperation— there isn't this necessary, this bond that develops. It's really just a transaction.

Right.

And business is full of transactions, but if you really want to have community, you've got to be able to move past the transaction And, and when you interact with people physically, they— there's still research showing that virtual interactions still don't generate this oxytocin. But as a leader, when you bring people together, spend time actually helping people connect. I'll throw out another tip for you guys. So if you Google Hope Lab, H-O-P-E L-A-B, and type in check-in, it's going to take you to Hope Labs website, and it'll take you to a page where you can download what they call check-in cards. And these check-in cards are designed to, when you start a meeting, to, to help build that connection and that collaboration between members of your team. And that helps with the oxytocin release. So a little bit of science in terms of what helps relationships be strong is oxytocin.

Wow.

There you go.

Huh, that was definitely very scientific. You warned us though. I did.

Love it.

And I just Googled that, so now I am bookmarking another thing. This is great. What else can we have him show us? So before I pass the baton over to Suzy here, let me ask you about one of the final things you talk about in optimism, because you cover optimism as one of the biggest traits, I think one of the biggest areas of building a culture, cultivating optimism, building that, planning for it. Yeah. How do you build and plan for optimism? That sounds like you just have to get everyone drunk and then maybe everybody would be optimistic, or on a lot of coffee. But there's a better way, I'm sure. So can you help us, like, how do you build optimism?

Yeah, so let me just share 3 actions that a leader can take to cultivate optimism. There are more, but, you know, I don't want to bore you. So the first is probably the least sexy, and that is create clarity. You know, clarity is key in the workplace. If I don't understand what it is that I'm doing or why I'm doing it, I'm going to be confused. I'm going to be frustrated. I'm going to be potentially angry. And those aren't necessarily resolved. And those don't help create optimism. So clarity around know what the goals are. As a leader, help your people know what their goals are. Help them know how they contribute to the bigger picture. The other is prioritization. You know, I've done work in organizations where everything is a top priority.

Mm-hmm.

Well, when everything's a top priority, nothing is a priority. And when everything's a top priority, then it becomes fire drill, and that becomes very stressful. So really help people know what's important. The other piece around creating clarity is providing feedback. You know, in a lot of the organizations that I studied for the book, one of the things that they are intentionally doing is Having those difficult conversations when people aren't doing their best work. You know, in optimistic climates, they have high expectations of performance. Well, the only way you can perform at high levels is if you're clear on what it is you're doing and why you're doing it. Right? So that's one thing. The other is what we've been talking about, which is reinforce relatedness. Create this sense of community within your team. You know, use those check-in cards that I mentioned. Spend time out on the floor. The leaders that I studied are rarely in their office, not because they're in meetings all the time, which a lot of them are, but they're also out on the floor talking with employees, learning what they can do to help support them so that they could be successful. But I think probably the, the next biggest thing is to really Lean in on your leadership. Know what you stand for. Know what skills are necessary to help you be more of a stronger leader. And then also develop skills to help people do their best work. Right? So there's, there's the skills that I need for me to be good. And then there are the skills to help other people be good. So those are probably 3 areas that a leader can focus on. Create clarity, reinforce relatedness, and lean in on leadership.

I love it. Well, I have plenty more questions, but I'm going to pass the baton here over to the one who calls herself Susie. Actually, I think her parents called her that first. And she'll take over. I may chime in here, and I'm going to monitor the tweet chat from here on out. Otherwise, thank you so much, Shawn. I'll be here, so have some fun here with the crowd. Keep the questions coming, everybody out there on H2H Chat. Suzy, he is all yours.

Yes, absolutely loving this conversation today, Shawn. It is totally melding with what I would definitely call at this point, what I love is our H2H chat community and I always use that word carefully. That's just great. So anyway, yeah, please echoing that, please keep those questions flowing, you guys. We already have a great lineup. So diving right into it, let's begin since you just mentioned the kind of on the floor concept, right? Yeah. Coming out and doing that. So we have a great question from Christy who says, what are other ways to help build community, particularly when you're not in the same physical location?

Yeah, that's a great question. So our team at Switch and Shift is 100% virtual. So what we do is we use a tool called Zoom, Z-O-O-M, and Zoom is what we use to hold our meetings. So we hold all of our meetings Excuse me, it's a video meeting tool. So we hold all of our meetings using Zoom so we can actually see each other, right? The other thing that we do is we use Slack. Slack is pretty popular. And Slack, we use it to communicate outside of email, but we also use it to have fun with each other. So for example, in Slack, if you're a user of Slack, If you do /gliffy, it sends out a silly gliffy of whatever you're asking to send out. So if you want to say celebration, you do /gliffy celebration, and it sends a GIF of people celebrating. So we, we spend time connecting with each other outside of just work-related topics. Hmm. I also have one-on-ones with every single person on the team. And part of my interest as a leader is to know what, what do you want to get out of the time that you're with us, right? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a believer that they're going to be with us forever. So how do we help them get the most while they're with us so that they're better prepared for whatever that next thing is? And those, those are some, I think, zero-cost, because you can get Zoom for free. I don't know about Slack.

Yeah, I think at this point there's definitely a free version. I know there wasn't initially, but yeah.

But it's low cost, right?

Exactly, yes.

It's not expensive, but for virtual teams you really have to make the effort to connect with people on a personal level as well as a professional level.

So what would you say, just kind of as a follow-up to that, right? What would you say though in terms of the balance of keeping your talent? Because obviously, how do you in that place, you're at the same time empowering them to really think about what's best for them, but at the same time, how are you making sure that you are retaining them? Because obviously I'm sure you have an interest in doing that.

Yeah, I don't want to lose anybody that's on our team. So we spend a lot of time talking about people's strengths. And by strengths, what I mean by that is not what you're good at, but what energizes you. So I intentionally spend time making sure— Mark Babbitt, my business partner— we make sure that the work that they're doing aligns with their strengths so that people actually feel this sense of fulfillment because they're doing things that energize them. Another thing that we do is we spend some time making sure that people are working on projects that they find that stretch them, but also help them with what they want to accomplish. So we're constantly having in our one-on-ones, you know, making sure that we know what is it that you want to do. That's going to energize you.

Right, right, right, right. I love that. So then this actually relates into one of JS Gilbert— shout out always— one of his great questions here. So he says, can a business promote a mentality to employees to love what they do as opposed to them doing what they think they will love? Does that make sense? I like that turn of phrase.

So is it— I think— let me just repeat what I think I heard you say. So the difference between doing what someone loves versus, I think Susie loves this, so I'm going to work with Susie on this.

Yeah, yeah.

So there isn't any rocket science around this. It goes back to basic human needs. And that is, how do we have these relationships? How do we build relationships so that people actually tell you as a leader what they want, what's important to them, what their goals are? You know, I'll share another example to help illustrate the point. One of the companies in the book is BambooHR. They're a group, they're a startup in Utah. And they have what they call the anti-workaholic policy. And the anti-workaholic policy is designed to help employees spend time doing things that are interesting to them outside of work, as well as— because the belief is if they have time for things outside of work, they're going to be more— they're going to perform better. Right. So I think it's, it's taking this whole person perspective versus this you're an employee perspective and getting to know what is important to them as a whole person as opposed to this is who you are as an employee. And that takes just having conversations with your employees in one-on-ones. I'm a big fan of one-on-ones. Gotta have them. You gotta know what's on people's mind, what they're up to that's exciting them, what they're concerned about. If you don't do that, you're not going to be able to have a solid relationship.

I love that. I have another question here from a company called PayCompliment, and I think this relates. So when you're talking about developing relationships, I mean, I work in a small business I know, you know, Switch and Shift is small, right? So you can go and develop those individual relationships. So Pay Complement says, what professional development does mid-management, right? Because I'm assuming you scale it up, you're talking about some mid-management stuff, right? So what professional development do they need to be competent, to be able to create/sustain optimism? How do you scale it, basically?

Yeah, good question. So I think part of it is doing the personal work, like knowing your personal values. The other part is in the book I outline, I think it's like 13 different skills that are important to optimism. So it's assessing yourself and I wrote the book, I'll just say this real quick, I wrote the book to include work— like there are workbooks in the book. And so there's a way to be able to assess real quickly, you know, with paper and pencil. It's low-tech. But assess with paper and pencil what skills are strengths of yours and what skills are drainers of yours. And with a strengths philosophy, focus on the skills that are strengths that help you focus on building this optimism. I'm not a big fan or a believer that it is, that we should wait for the organization to say, here's the sanctioned training program for building optimism. Right. I think, you know, there's, we can't wait anymore. So do the the exercises in the book, spend time on Igniter to get to know yourself better with your values. I think those are probably some good places to start.

So then what— so kind of going through that, right, Kelly Hoffman has a great question. She says, what can we do when negative contagious emotion has run rampant? for too long. How do we reverse that climate? And what I'd like to put to you is, let's think about this in terms of leadership, someone in the workplace, right? So we don't have leaders—

Hold on, Suzy, can you hear that? Or Shawn?

Yeah.

Yeah, hold on, Suzy, there's, um, you just sounded like a futuristic robot. Say one more word for us, let me see if it's

Testing.

There we go. Okay, you're on.

Did you hear my question, Shawn? Do you want me to repeat?

I think I got the gist of it, which is basically what do I do when negativity has been allowed to basically run rampant?

Yeah, and I'd like to think about it on both ends. Both if you're at a, you know, if you're working for a company and you're feeling this, right? But then the leadership end as well. So let's think about that.

You might have to clarify what you mean by the leadership end when we get there. So I'm going to go back to what I mentioned earlier around pockets of excellence. So when you think about an environment where negativity has been allowed to just consume the climate, as a leader, As a leader, you can only control the team that you have influence over. Right? So what I like to say is, start by sitting down with, with team members that you can trust, who will give it to you straight, and say, look, you know, I know things are kind of crappy around here, and I want to do something about it. What's— what are you experiencing right now? And, you know, do you have any suggestions around what I should start focusing on? You know, by inviting people into the conversation, you actually start to help build that community that we talked about, right? Because, you know, if you know it as a leader that things aren't good, you can be guaranteed that everybody else is talking about it around the water cooler going, oh my God, this place is driving me crazy, right?

Right. Yeah.

My boss is texting me at 8 o'clock at night. Can't he get a clue that I have a life?

Right.

You know, there— we just kind of get used to how things are, and so we have to start figuring— we have to put into place counteraction measures to start shifting it. And you can't change the whole organization. You've got to start, create that pocket of excellence So that it becomes contagious, so that they can go, so that other people outside of your pocket can go, what is Suzy doing? Suzy's got this cool team. They seem actually kind of happy. What's going on over there?

Gasp!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is a place to start, is to have the conversation Be transparent, and but also recognize that you may be part of the problem, and by not doing anything, right? And, you know, we've waited way too long for senior management to swoop in and save the day.

Right.

And not to say that they won't or can't, I think they are typically distracted with other issues. And it becomes a matter of importance at the— right where the work is done in the middle layer of the organization.

Lila, I think that answered both my questions, or both angles there. So I love that, and I love the concept of just moving forward and establishing those relationships at every level. So moving— so one thing you talk about is a work player versus a team player. Can you elaborate on that? What's the difference there?

Yeah, so a work player is really just into what's in it for them at work, right? It's like, yeah, what do you need me to do? A team player is like, what can we do to help us as a team achieve what we've been asked to do? So it's just really a matter of focus. between what the— am I focusing on myself or am I focusing on what's important for the team?

I like that. I like that. So how would an organization take people from the work, right, the work focus into the team focus without making them feel like, okay, now you have to work all the time? Right, because that's a little bit of the fear, right? It's like, okay, how do I do that?

Yeah, it's a good question. And I would say that there are probably many different answers depending on the team. But an underlying belief in workplace optimism is that the team is more important than any one individual. And that actually is pretty counterintuitive to what we believe in America. Where a lot of us are, what can I do to get ahead in my career? As opposed to, what do I need to do to support the team's goals? So I think to create the shift from a work player to a team player is to start defining those goals. And so I go back to what I said earlier. Remember, create clarity. Right. Well, to create clarity, you have to have goals. A lot of organizations where we do work, there aren't team goals. They're just, they plug in, do their 8+ hours, and they don't really know what they're doing it for other than a paycheck.

Right.

And so that becomes transactional. So you want to be able to create team goals, you know, start Looking for, where do I as a leader reinforce what I call the rugged individual? How am I supporting this? You know, there are some things you can't do anything about, like the way you compensate people. That's likely outside of your control.

Mm-hmm.

But within the team, where do you place your interests on supporting the team? It's by placing goals. One of the companies that's in the book is Menlo Innovations.

Mm-hmm.

And they actually have their employees partner. So for example, this week, Suzy, it's you and me and we're working on a project together. Next week it's you and Bryan and you're working on a project together. So by partnering together, you start to take away this belief that, you know, the individual is more important than the team. And start reinforcing the team is more important than any one individual.

I like that. That's an interesting structure. I have a question from our mutual friend Joanne Corley, who I'm so excited was able to join us today. She wants to know, she has a great question, when does the need for being positive, when do you think the need for becoming positive will become a requirement? required leadership competency? So predict the future.

Predict the future.

Yes.

Yeah, you know what's interesting about that question is in these organizations that I studied, it's already a requirement that they actually look for it in the hiring process. But if I were to say when does it catch on and become something that's more prevalent in organizations, I have to be a realist here and say it's probably some time down the road. Right. Because some of the things that, you know, 10 years, if, you know, that's the first number that comes to mind, because some of the things that we write about that I write about challenge some conventional wisdom that is pretty commonly held in a lot of organizations today. And it takes, it's going to take some