Dr. Lauren Tucker Recap: Why Your Employees Hate You

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Welcome back to Lead On Purpose. In our last episode, we had the amazing Dr. Lauren Tucker. She's the founder and CEO of Let's do what Matters and it's all around inclusion management. Dr. Tucker is an entrepreneur with a history of leadership and activism in race, ethnicity and gender. She shared some incredible insights into management and DEI. Dr. Tucker always talks about what the current talent out there is looking for and why they might or might not actually hate their boss. The episode was a real eye opener and I wanted just for a moment, share some of the key takeaways. So whether you've listened to it or not, I wanted to just kind of distill some of those key takeaways and I hope that you can apply them to your own life, your own leadership, and if you're fortunate enough to lead a team, some of this will be really, really powerful. The one takeaway that really stood out was this. We should be measuring excellence. I'll repeat that. We should be measuring excellence. It's so interesting. Always when I'm running my high performance leadership program, whether that's for a corporate or whether that's our public once a year program that we run, I always say this. I believe that perfectionists have no standards. Yes, I say that. And the response I get is always a little bit, wow, I'm a perfectionist, James, and you're telling me I have no standards? Well, yes, I am. And what I mean by that is perfection is not measurable. You and I might look at the Sydney Opera House or Big Ben in London or a skyscraper like the Rockefeller center and say, you know what, they are excellent. And we could agree they are excellent structures, but we might not all agree that they are perfect. Right. So when you aim for perfection, you're aiming for something that's not measurable. Therefore it's not a standard. So I do firmly agree with Dr. Tucker that we should be measuring excellence. What are you measuring right now?

I will encourage you right now, please, only measure what matters. Let me go deeper than that. Only measure what truly matters. Now, I guess the question is there, how do we figure out what truly matters? Well, if that's your organization, that's the needle moving tasks. Needle moving endeavors, behaviors, phone calls, whatever it might be, personally, that might be measuring your sleep, measuring what you eat or don't eat, measuring the depth of your relationship, connections, but only measure what matters. When you start to measure everything, you end up measuring nothing. Because you spend so much time measuring that you don't get to be. We are human beings, not human doings. So just to re highlight that, Dr. Tucker said we should be measuring excellence. And another thing she said was excellence is the great equalizer. No matter what skin color, background, age, stage, ethnicity, we are excellence is the great equalizer. How you show up and deliver that is how we measure excellence. By no other means should it ever be measured. Now here's another big takeaway. Diversity without inclusion just hurts everybody. So diversity without inclusion just hurts everybody. We've got to be inclusive. We can't just include one gender or one ethnicity and think, hey, we're ticking the diversity box. We've got to be inclusive, giving everybody that opportunity to be included in the conversation, be included on the journey, be included in the reach and that striving for excellence. What are you doing to include others around you? Are you inclusive or are you exclusive? What's one thing you could do today to be more inclusive? So be diverse, but also be inclusive. Now my feeling around when she says diversity without inclusion just hurts everybody. I get that because when someone is different for whatever reason and they are excluded, of course it's hurtful for them. And then when they withdraw, they don't engage. Everybody else gets hurt because we don't get that richness, that different viewpoint. Having people around the table who are different is so critically important.

She also mentioned something that was very interesting. She firmly believes there is no such thing as talent abundance. So she feels like there's not this never ending list of abundant applicants for a role or for your team. So you really have to search for them and when you find them, there'll be a small number of them that are specifically excellent at the role you want them for. You've got to nurture them, you've got to help them, support them, value them, love them, challenge them. And I think that's a very interesting one because often we think, oh, whatever, they're not a good fit for the team, goodbye, there'll be plenty more fish in the sea. But actually, when it comes to talent excellence, Dr. Tucker says that's not an abundant thing. So I want to leave that with you, get you to think about that and how that sits with you. She said today's employees are looking for competency, fairness and transparency, proactive succession planning, and they want to minimize nepotism. What does that all mean? Well, to me I summarize that and say they want to be treated fairly. Okay, it's not everyone being treated the same, but fairly. We want to have fair treatment, fair Opportunities, a fair crack at the whip. And isn't that fair? Of course. That's all we all want for ourselves, for our family members, for our teams. We want to have a fair crack. And when it's unjust or unfair, that's where we start to see this divisiveness. And a big thing that Dr. Tucker talked about was communication transparency. Right? She said that communication transparency is the best way to develop trust. Trust is the foundation of any relationship, whether that's professional or personal. But if you don't have trust, then you can't get to that second step in that relationship, which is respect. You can't respect someone until you trust them, and you can't trust someone until you know them. So how do we get to know these people? How do we get to know the people that we love, the people that we work with, the people that we manage, the people that we lead, that we rub shoulders with? Well, we've got to communicate with them. That's how we get to know them. Communication, transparency. So being clear, being open, not holding back, but giving everyone a clear picture by communicating in a short, sharp, succinct, clear way. So what are you doing right now in your communication? Are you transparent? Or maybe you're translucent or maybe you're very muddy with your communication. If there's one thing I learned from Dr. Tucker is that communication transparency should be one of those things that we measure in our personal and our professional lives. So I'm going to leave that with you. And I'm excited, very, very excited about our next guest. And at this point, I want to also remind you, if you're listening to this live or within a week or two of it going live, then our big event, High Performance Leadership 2023, is just around the corner. We're literally about to open the door. So if you're interested in that, people who are on our wait list will get access. There are only 80 tickets available. I know we'll sell it pretty quick. So if you want access to that, head over to jjlochlin.com and you'll see in our events space, you can express interest to add yourself to that expression of interest waitlist. And for those that are coming back again this year, that we're there in 2022. I look forward to seeing you. We've got some incredible special guests lined up, but hey, for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.