314 - Beyond Diversity: Embracing the Full Spectrum of Human Experience in Leadership with Minette Norman Consulting's Minette Norman

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Minette Norman, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are a former tech exec. You had huge responsibilities for a while, and then you got smart and got out and became a leadership consultant. And your website now is minettenorman.com. And I'm really looking forward to talking to you because we have a lot in common and share a lot of common interests. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to it too, Doug.

Let's start, Minette, with a little bit about your backstory. I think you got into tech early on, and there weren't a lot of women in tech in those days, and I imagine there were some stories to tell.

I did get involved quite early on. I didn't expect to get into tech. My background was actually in the liberal arts, but I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and I ended up getting my start at Adobe in 1980. 1989. So this is early Silicon Valley days.

Wow.

And my first job, I was a technical writer and I wrote the Photoshop 1.0 tutorial. So that's, it's really like the pioneering days of, of—

So were you in Utah where Adobe was founded or were you—

No, no.

In Silicon Valley.

Mountain View, California at the time. Okay. That was their headquarter.

Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny that you say there were not many women in tech. True. But honestly, I don't think that the percentages were that different in 1989, '90 than they are today. It's certainly an engineering. It was always a small percentage.

So yeah, I saw that you graduated from Tufts. Is that right?

That's right. I went to Tufts and I studied drama and French and wanted to be an actor and realized just how hard that was and got into— used my French degree for a while. I was in New York City. I worked for the French Trade Commission when they were introducing computers for the first time. And that's when I actually realized, oh, I'm quick study. I like this. I'm good at helping people understand it. That's, that was what led me to Silicon Valley and to technical writing because I was good at taking the technical and making it simple and accessible. And that's what good technical writers do.

You just, and I, you rose through the ranks in Adobe, right? You were there for quite a while.

No, it wasn't Adobe where I stayed. So I, I was Adobe for maybe 2, 3 years. I worked on Photoshop and Illustrator and then I decided I was really young and I was like, oh, what else can I do? And so I hopped around to 5 different tech companies in 10 years. So Adobe, EFI, a startup that didn't make it called Chaos Tools. Then I went to Symantec. Then in 1999, I went to Autodesk. And that's the one you're thinking of. I ended up staying at Autodesk for 20 years when I thought, oh, I'll stay here a couple years, but I ended up there rising through the ranks. So starting as an individual contributor, getting into management, and then taking on bigger and bigger roles until my final role, which I had for about 5 years, I was VP of engineering with about 25— well, I guess I had 1,000 people on my org chart and another 2,500 that I had to work with and influence. So that was that big job.

That's amazing. And not the traditional track, right? Coming from a law degree and learning by doing, not the MBA from Stanford or Berkeley or whatever. And good for you. So I'm curious, let's talk about what you did that for 20 years. And then when did you move into the business that you're in now, basically writing and consulting and speaking?

I left the industry in late 2019 and I started my business right during the pandemic shutdown in 2020.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think I just want to touch on what you said, totally non-traditional background for leading engineering, but having been in engineering before I got that role for about 25 years. So even though I wasn't coding, I was working with engineers. I was pretty technical without being hands-on coding. And I think what got me there was that I had led other departments in the company and I had led them through big changes. So at one point I took on localization, which is getting everything ready for international markets. And I had to completely rethink how that department operated and how we worked with others in the company. And that's where I got more well-known within the company. That's where the executives got to see me in action. And that's why I had the opportunity to even apply to be VP of Engineering.

Wow. That sounds like it was a big job.

It was a big job. And I know we had a little conversation before we started recording, but one thing that I will say about that job. So, when I took the job, the SVP who put me in the position, and he actually made me do a 90-day trial to see if I was a fit and had to win over all the engineering leaders in the company who at the time were all men. So, basically winning over the engineers. I got the job. But what he told me is, we are at this point, we were a 30-year-old company. We were going from desktop software to cloud-based computing. We needed to modernize our tech stack and how we worked. And it was the how we worked that I got particularly interested in because I had great people who could handle the technology challenges. They all were in my organization. They could work with the engineering leaders. What I was trying to do was change the culture and change the behavior. And change how people work together because there was almost no collaboration.

Wow.

And we were reinventing the wheel all over the company. It was like, why can't we actually collaborate?

It sounds like I'm just, I don't know, have you studied Ronald Heifetz's work, Adaptive Leadership? Have you ever run a course?

I have not.

Okay. It sounds like you had an adaptive challenge, leadership challenge, and you applied, you probably just organically applied adaptive leadership principles. So the difference between an adaptive challenge and a technical challenge is the technical challenge is you give an engineer a problem and say, here, you gotta code this and figure it out. And that's a technical challenge. They know how to do it, they figure it out, and it's really easy. An adaptive challenge is what you're describing, where you've got conflicting values and beliefs, you've got lack of collaboration, you've got people siloed. And these are much deeper behavioral problems that require a completely different kind of leadership than you would get from a, for example, an engineering lead who would be just managing coders, for example. And that's a very different problems to solve than what you described. How'd you go about figuring it out and solving the problem?

It was multi-step and it was multi-year. Obviously, it's not something you change a culture easily, a 30-year-old culture. First, it was like identifying the problems, getting to know— for me, it's always about the people. It's about who is leading these efforts. So, for me, it was getting to know all the engineering leaders in the company. They had different product groups that they were leading. And so, I created this council basically of all the engineering leaders. We got together, we got to know each other. We got to know what is this group known for? What are we really good at? Because I think once people understand, oh, there are pockets of expertise that maybe I could tap into and vice versa. And then we started thinking about how can we work together? How can we get everything, for example, into a common code repository? How might we contribute to one another's code instead of reinventing the wheel? And it took time, but it was really about getting to know the leaders, get— letting them get to know each other, establishing trust, establishing an environment where we could speak the truth, psychological safety, and not just posture and try to maintain our reputations, but actually say, "We're dealing with a challenge here.

Is there someone who could perhaps help us with that?" So I would guess that it was your responsibility to create this psychologically safe environment where that could happen. How do you go about doing that, especially with male engineers who are probably highly skeptical of this sort of thing?

Yeah. Interestingly enough, what I would say is that there were the skeptics, but there were also the people. And in fact, when I did that 90-day trial, people said to me, we need change. We can't just keep doing things the way we always have. So there was some receptivity to, we need to do something differently, but we aren't quite sure what that is or how it all works. So I think there was an openness. And in fact, when I was hired, the SVP said, basically, we need someone who can lead change. So there was an acknowledgement that it's not status quo. And then I think it was just, for me, establishing psychological safety is just Just showing up and saying, look, not one of us, including me, has all the answers. That's the first place. Here I was, I had a huge responsibility, and I did not pretend to come in with directives and say, we must do this, we must do this. We have suggestions about what we need to do. I don't know how to do it, and I can't do it alone. And so asking for help, asking for people to really tell the truth, and it takes time. It's not like people love to say, this is a safe environment, say anything. People don't believe that until they have evidence that it really is safe. And there will be no retribution. There will be no negative ramifications if I say, this is ridiculous, I can't do it, I need some help, or ask for help, ask for a question, challenge someone else. We have to see that it works in order to believe it. So that's what I just kept plugging away at is having these conversations and making sure no one was embarrassed or marginalized or interrupted or, and that everyone had a chance to speak. I also, I do that a lot as I make sure there's turn-taking because I want to hear all the voices and I want to acknowledge that everyone has something important to contribute. And there were people who never spoke in those meetings until I said, "You know what? I really want to hear from you, Tony, or Ashok, or whoever these quiet people are." And then gradually over time, they started to contribute.

You get your most wisdom from your introverts.

You totally— that was the biggest lesson I learned. I feel really lucky that I learned that early in my management career. I had someone incredibly introverted and just a genius. I started to realize, oh, it's going to take a totally different style of interaction, of leadership, to bring out his wisdom and his genius and let him contribute.

Yeah, that— I think that's, I think that's the sign of really great leadership, is recognizing that your introverts are your power structure, and they don't— unless you help them talk, they're not going to talk. And then the extroverts, the ones who can't shut up, up and got— love to hear themselves talk. You gotta shut them down.

Exactly.

Nicely. But you gotta do it gracefully. But you really gotta create space for people to feel comfortable expressing themselves and make sure that other people in the room are not gonna put 'em down saying, that's the stupidest dumbass thing I've ever heard. You— that has to stop. Period.

Exactly. And some of it is also very subtle. So yeah, there's the person who says, that's just stupid. That's never gonna work.

Right.

There's also, and the stuff that I experienced was often more what you might call a microaggression, but those are equal. I hate the word, the term micro, because they're just as damaging as someone— you say something and someone just rolls their eyes or just does that sit back in the chair, ugh. And you're like, oh, they do not want to hear what I have to say. And I think that's in some ways more insidious than someone saying, that's ridiculous, because they don't even have the honesty to say, I totally disagree with you.

So the way I control that is I have ground rules, group ground rules. And one of the ground rules is is we're gonna be respectful. Tone of voice, words we choose, and body language.

Body language. Yep.

Gonna be respectful to everybody. And then when people violate it, which they always do, then it's a question of, so what's your commitment to ground rule number 5 being respectful to everybody right now? So you never really call it out. What you do is ask for a recommitment.

I love that. I love that.

And that's how, that's the methodology that I use in those situations. So, so now you're, now since 2019, you're in your own business. What kind of work are you doing today?

I am primarily doing talks and workshops with organizations on inclusive leadership, inclusive meetings. So it's like what you're talking about, the ground rules and psychological safety. And sometimes I do longer engagements with organizations, like where I'll spend a year with an organization who really wants to go deep. But I would say that the majority of my work is keynotes and workshops, which I'd love to do. I'd love to. Spark some new behavior and thought.

Inclusion is a dirty word right now, I guess.

Oh, what a week. We're recording this the week that the federal government has banned the DEI program and, and, you know, ended the anti-discrimination practices.

And we're going to watch, we're going to watch that all blow up. It's beyond stupid and it's going to blow up, and then we'll come back and pick up the pieces and start over again.

I know. And I think that what's really interesting is you see the organizations that are recommitting to DEI. There's an article I read about that this week, whether it's Costco or Microsoft or Apple, et cetera, the list is long. It was funny, the day that the announcement came out, I think that was Tuesday, Wednesday, about shutting down these programs. I had a 7:00 AM workshop on inclusive leadership for a tech company that just keeps recommitting to this. And every time they bring on new leaders, they say, let's put them through this inclusive leadership training. So I agree. I think there's gonna be rebranding, but the ability to work together as human beings, you can call it what you want, but it is not going away.

That's right., right? And our population is gonna be, as much as some people in this country would like to go back to Northern Europeans as the dominant people in the country, that's just not gonna happen. Yeah.

Look at the population, right?

Exactly. And so we better learn how to get along with each other and listen. I call it listening others into existence.

Yes.

So how do you go about listening to people in a way that they feel validated and heard? And that to me is the is the kind of the secret sauce of everything.

Um, yeah, I agree with you.

We're going to see, we're going to see some, I don't know, we're here in California. I think we're protected. Maybe we have a big, we have a big desert to the east of us and a big ocean to the west of us. Who can bother us, right?

I know. It's funny, I wrote this book that came out in 2023, which is entitled The Boldly Inclusive Leader. And in some ways I later regretted the title because I think it puts itself into that DEI niche. But really what it is, it's a leadership book. It's a book about modern leadership. How do you lead teams in ways that everyone can be successful and everyone can do their best work? And it's eating away at me that people now have said, oh, it's DEI, let's not touch that.

Exactly. It reminds me, my second book was, it was what I, which I co-authored with my colleague John Bogart called Sex, Politics and Religion at the Office: The New Competitive Advantage. This is back in 2007, 2008.

Oh, wow.

We were writing about this and the book never went anywhere. But, uh, it's, you know, it's just a critical, it's a critical problem. And if leaders don't know how to deal with diversity, all you've got is chaos and conflict.

Exactly. Exactly. And I also think that one of, one of the things that's happened in recent years is that when we talk about diversity, people have thought about it very narrowly as we're talking about race, maybe gender, but we're talking about race and maybe we're talking about gender, but the vast diversity of human beings and we forget all the other aspects of diversity. I mean, like, what are we trying to shut down here? Diversity of thought?

I know. It is, it's mind-boggling. We'll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out.

Yeah. And I'm not backing down, by the way. I'm not running away from the cat.

I think we've got 2 years of chaos and then the Republicans will get booted out of Congress and then we'll be at a stalemate for 2 years and then we'll see what happens after that. But 2 years, it's gonna be pretty chaotic. So I'm curious about what gets you up in the morning today after this long career and gets you excited to do things.

I love the work that I do because I get to interact with people in, it's usually leadership teams. I'm generally invited in to work with leadership teams in large and small organizations in different industries. But what gets me excited is just seeing a spark that someone is taking. And I try to be very practical. It's not pie in the sky. What can I do in my next meeting, in my next encounter? Someone takes away one idea that they can implement. And I always ask people like, what are you gonna try? I've given you a bunch of things. What are you gonna try? What are you gonna commit to trying? And then when I hear people say like, I've already recognized that I'm doing something that's not helpful and I'm going to work on this, like that gets me up in the morning. That gives me so much hope and energy and optimism. And I don't think it's like toxic positivity. I think it's really, people do want to be better. They want to be better leaders. They want to really have engaged teams and thriving teams and innovative teams, and they're not quite sure how. And so I feel like I'm helping in large and small ways, and that gets me up in the morning.

Yeah, service to others.

Yeah. And I have to say, right now, as I start this new year, I have some client engagements, but my calendar is far from booked. And I fear that some of that is because people are waiting and seeing about the whole DEI thing. So one of the things that I do when I don't have a busy workday is I do a lot of volunteering in the community because I Just what you said. I need to be of service. I need to be kind. I need to be helping others. And yeah, I do a lot of work with the elder population in Marin where I live and just, I gotta be of service.

Yeah. And that's, I was on a call earlier today and somebody asked me, what's your big win of the day? And I said, I feel so much gratitude for how many people I get to serve every day in one way or another. And I'm a, I founded with my, a colleague, a project we call Prison of Peace, and it started in 2010 training life inmates in maximum security prisons starting here in California, how to stop prison violence. Wow. And we started in the largest, most violent women's prison in the world in 2010. And then that prison was converted to a men's prison in 2013, and we reluctantly went into the prison again. But I just got a letter from one of my very early students who was in prison for life. He murdered 4 family members when he was 14 years old. And the abuse that he suffered was unbelievable. But he, this was in Merced County, which is a kind of a law west of the Pecos County here in California. And, but he wrote me a letter the other day and just to summarize, he just graduated from Fresno State University while in prison, summa cum laude. Wow. And the, they had a ceremony where the president of the university and 40 professors came and they did a commencement thing inside prison. And he's been accepted into a master's degree program down at Cal State Dominguez Hills. And they've just gotta figure out the funding for it. And he's going to work on a liberal arts master's degree.

And that's incredible.

It's amazing. So the cert— that's why the service work is so important, because we get to touch lives in ways that we could never imagine.

Exactly. And I agree with you. I hear from people in unexpected ways of just how my work, whether it's my work as a consultant or an author or as a volunteer, any of those things have touched their lives. I'm like, that— I feel like that's why we're here.

That's right. Exactly. I wanna pivot to listening. This is called Listening with Leaders because I do teach. Yes. I teach emotional listening. And I'm curious, you obviously developed a very fine-tuned skill of listening, and I'm curious about how you did that because we're not born listeners. It's something that we're either taught or we have to learn. And I'm curious about what your journey was.

I think that's, I haven't really reflected on it. I teach listening a lot in my work too, because I think it's such a, it's a critical piece of psychological safety and inclusion.

It's foundational.

Exactly. It's foundational. So that's, it's often where I start is like listening. Listening to understand. So I think where I started getting to be a good listener, honestly, was in my education as an actor. One of the things that you do when you act is you have to listen to the people you're acting with.

Right.

And you, especially doing stage acting, you never know what might happen. Someone's gonna forget their line, something weird's gonna happen. So you have to listen to what's going on and you have to respond. So I think I got good listening skills even in acting. But then as a manager, I think it was really when I started managing people and I just realized like, oh, management is not like one size fits all, right? Everyone is so different. So I would have these one-on-one meetings. It was when I was managing technical writers. That was my first management job. And I would just in one-on-ones listen to what was going on. And I somehow committed to really listening. I needed to get to know my staff. I needed to understand what they were struggling with and what they needed. And I think those like one-on-one conversations really just got me to pay attention and to what you do is listen beyond the words, listen to the emotions, listen to what's not being said. And so I feel lucky enough that I honed those skills fairly early on and I just kept using them. And then I would also be able to point out when we're not listening to each other in a group and encourage my staff members to listen to one another. And yeah, I think that the acting training and then just committing to getting to know people, that's how listening it is the way to do that.

Yeah. And I think you point out astutely that psychological safety is based on the ability to listen and not jump in and criticize or judge or become reactive.

Exactly.

To stop and think and really understand what somebody else is saying from their perspective, not from your perspective, not from you. Cut your filters off and listen to what they're really saying, not what you think they're saying or what you hope they're saying, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

In fact, in the psychological safety work that I do and in the book that I co-wrote on that topic, we start with just basically asking people for their perspectives. And then the second thing is listening. How do we listen? How do we listen to understand? How do we not interrupt? How do we not prepare our response? And then how do we not become reactive? How do we pause and just manage that defensiveness that happens when—

So in the workshop work you do in the consulting and speaking work, are you talking on these subjects?

Yes. Yes.

And how, when you go in, so let's say you're going to go in and do a workshop workshop on psychological safety, and you're going to have a listening component. I'm curious about how you teach that and get people to understand the importance of it.

I usually, I use exercises a lot because you, I think as you know, this is like, we can talk about it all we want, but until you viscerally get it in your body and your heart. So one of the, one of the things I do in both my inclusion workshops and in my psychological safety workshops is I make sure we have breakouts, whether it's in person or in a breakout room online. Where people have a real conversation with someone and I give them a prompt. And the prompt might be, talk about a time when you did not feel heard, seen, or respected. That's a really juicy prompt.

That's a good one.

And then the other person's job is just to listen. And they have a time boxing around it. So it's 3 minutes per person. So for 3 minutes, your job is to tell your story and the other person's job is to listen, not to think about what you're gonna say next, right? But to truly understand. And then we switch roles. And honestly, I've done I've done this with hundreds of people now, and, uh, there's only one, I'll tell you the, what happened one time, but every, say 99 out of 100 of those people, everyone comes back and just goes, wow. And it's a great one on a couple of levels. It's a great one on a listening level, understand what it means to truly listen and hear and see the other person. And because of that prompt, it's also a great experience for understanding empathy and what other people have been through that you might not have ever experienced in your life. Life.

That's right.

And the only time it ever backfired, which is quite fascinating, was I was doing it with a global team and there were two men from South Asia. They were from India. And they came back from the breakout room before anyone else. And I said, what's going on? That was a really quick conversation. And they said, we've never experienced not being heard, seen, or respected, either one of us. And I just, I sat there for a moment and I said, that's curious. And I felt like they were just not comfortable sharing. So I said, how about if I share a story? And so I shared a story and they truly listened. And then they were like, wow, that's never happened to us. And we need to do better actually, because probably other women have had that experience. So that's how I massaged that one when it didn't work. But honestly, every other group I've worked with, even people who seem skeptical going into the exercise have had something useful. Yeah.

I love that prompt. I'm gonna steal it from you.

It's not from me, by the way. Do you know the online site called Liberating Structure?

No, I've never heard of it.

Oh, it's fabulous. It's liberatingstructures, probably dot org, maybe, maybe dot com. But anyway, they have several facilitation techniques for various things you want to achieve, whether it's brainstorming or solving difficult problems. And that one is specifically about empathetic listening.

Oh, cool.

Really cool.

Yeah. There, when you were talking about, about this, it reminds me of a phrase that we, we never rise to the level of our knowledge. We always fail to the level of our training.

Ooh, yes.

You can steal that one too.

I'll steal that one. That's a good one.

But think about it. People can read my book, De-Escalate: How to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less, my 4th book. And, but until you start getting trained in it, it's not that easy to, it's simple, but it's counterintuitive and counter-normative. And it's not quite as black and white as you might think. So it takes training. Training. And, and listening takes training. You have to learn how to listen.

Yeah.

And it's rare that people really get good formal training in listening skills.

Yeah, it's true. It's true.

This has been great. One more, one more question for you, Manette. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I'll tell you this. I just laughed because I suddenly thought of something that no one knows except those students back in New York in 1983. So when I first got out of school, I was a French teacher for a couple years at a private school. And because I was fresh out of school, they gave me everything that no one else wanted, and I was a sex ed teacher for a year.

In French?

No, in English, for 7th grade boys. 7th grade sex ed.

That had to be really—

I was 23 years old. What an experience that was. So, wow, not many people know that about me.

Oh, that's really cool. And then I got to tell you, I really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be with us.

I've enjoyed it too. I feel like we could talk all day, Doug, but thank you for this. Absolutely.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast. Doug Noll, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next Show.