Finding Brave 318 - How Organizations Need to Change Their Narrative in Challenging Times

Hello everyone.

This is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created the show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life, to rise up, speak up, and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts, and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of finding brave, and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful, and meaningful life, business, and career.

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. Kathy Caprino here. Wow, I, I'm so over-the-top excited about our guest today. We were just talking for about an hour before I pressed record and my head is exploding. Floating, and yours will too, in a good way. We have Matthew Pollard here. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Wow, I, you know, you've— you're so inspiring and you're so very generous and helpful. I'm thrilled to have you on Finding Brave. Thank you for being here.

Oh, Kathy, it's always my pleasure, and you know, I love, you know, collaborating with people that make it their mission to change organizations and the people inside it. So I'm honored to be here.

Oh, thank you, my dear. I want to tell you a little bit about Matthew, but we are the focus of today, and it's going to morph, and we're going to just, you know, I always have it like you're over for dinner, Matthew, and I'm going to ask you what I need to understand. Woo! Keep the arms down, Kathy. We're going to talk about how organizations can change the narrative in challenging times, and that's, that's such an interesting topic, and we're going to dig in. Let me tell you a little bit about Matthew. Matthew is known as the rapid growth guy and also a storytelling expert. You're going to hear what that means. And is responsible for 5 multimillion-dollar business success stories. Plus, you've been featured in Forbes as the real deal. Global Gurus lists you as top 30 sales professionals. It goes on and on, and we'll, we'll have the bio there. But can you, Matthew, you just listed some of the companies you work with, uh, you know, household names. Can you share it for us? Can you?

Yeah, absolutely. And I I have to say, as a kid that grew up in Australia with the reading speed of a 6th grader, I never imagined speaking and working with a lot of organizations like this. But one of the first companies that ever hired me in America was Oracle. I since went on to do Microsoft and Intel events. I spoke to the global sales team and marketing team for Intel. But then also, I've worked with everything from Visa card to Marriott Hotel, and actually just did a great event for Resort World. So everything in hospitality, HVAC, Finance, I spoke at Million Dollar Roundtable, but predominantly a lot of what I, a lot of what I do really focuses on storytelling because I feel that a lot of people, especially when it comes to sales, they struggle with explaining their value in a way that doesn't come across as pitchy.

But even internally in organizations, a lot of times, especially if you've got like a merger or an acquisition, and like what is the organizational story at that point, or once there's been a mass layoff, or even in challenging times like this, Senior leaders often want to get up on stage and talk about how much money people are going to make and why they're making the decisions and how it's going to be better for everybody else, but rather than the actual narrative of why people should feel excited to work for them. And I think that especially in today's era, people can choose to work anywhere.

And I know that people feel like they, they might struggle to get a new job in these challenging times, but the truth is that there are still lots of jobs out there. And the fact is that the people that usually, they're after a layoff could get a job in another place and know that there are opportunities.

So as leaders, we need to inspire people to not just be extrinsically motivated, but intrinsically motivated. And that's a lot to do with the organizational narrative that we share. But also if there's been a layoff, making them feel safe, if there's been an acquisition, making them feel safe, because if people are in their reptilian brain, terrified of losing their job. They're not making the right decisions.

They're not as creative as they should be in their spare time.

They're not thinking about how to make your organization more money or keep that team member that hasn't been as motivated lately from leaving. They're focused on what happens if they get laid off. So we have to make sure that the narrative inside our organization is always strong.

And even if we have to have a layoff, be it to, or change positions, we make sure that everybody is excited about moving forward.

Because as, at the end of the day, if as an organization we don't create momentum, then there'll be another layoff and then another layoff.

And that's the last thing that we want. In these uncertain times, we absolutely need to inspire everyone internally. We need to inspire everyone externally.

And there's no better way to do that than with storytelling.

All right. I got a million questions. Here we go. You are all over, you know, all over the world speaking and you do a lot of kickoffs for sales launches, sales, you know, innovative sales experiences. But I gotta ask you this. Do you work with the organization prior to it and help them identify the narrative, or are you talking about the importance of— I mean, correct me, and I know you will, you're not shy about that.

You're on the right track, so continue.

Right. So you can talk to the entire sales team about why the narrative of what they're doing in the product is so important. But if the leaders don't know what the culture and the organization's amazing story is, what do you do with that? So do you work with them in advance? Can I ask?

I mean, a lot of times I have to. Sometimes people don't want me to, and then we end up doing it afterwards because a lot of times people don't know the problems that they have until they see things slightly differently.

And it's really interesting.

I worked with a an organization, they were one of the leading tech companies in the AI and petroleum space, and their biggest issue was actually around attracting talent.

And, you know, they'd be like, well, you know, I really appreciate the job offer, and if I don't get a job with Intel, Apple, Microsoft, then I will probably accept yours.

Oh boy.

And so they just didn't get the— they weren't getting the key talent that they wanted.

And what was interesting is this organization probably had one of the best corporate cultures I've ever seen. And I just loved my, I mean, I felt welcome as an external contractor coming in and being a speaker.

I felt like I was part of the family and it just felt like a really great atmosphere, but it just wasn't communicated well. So what happened is we ended up creating once a month, they used to have a collective call just around the sales team. And what we did is we started getting one person inside the organization that loved working for the organization, to tell their story for why. And then by the end of the year, you'd have a person getting up at the sales kickoff, telling their story for why they loved working for the organization. It was the best of the 12 that they'd selected. And then all of a sudden you had a YouTube channel that the HR manager could say, "Hey, look, I know that you're thinking about working for us or another organization. Let me tell you this example of why our corporate culture makes it worthwhile considering us." And the next thing you know, they were watching the YouTube videos and why would they not want to work at an organization that had the culture that they were looking for, where they could also make great money.

And I mean, some of these stories were amazing. I mean, one person had cancer and they, they helped them get back on their feet. They, the, every, the, the staff all got involved in their life to help out. They made sure that she could come back on her own terms in a way that was helpful.

Things that you don't see in the tech world these days. It was, it was amazing. And these stories started getting shared, and of course, as a result of that, engagement scores of the people in the organization went up.

As a result of this, their HR and recruitment success absolutely went through the roof.

So you'll see a lot of times that people know that they have a great culture, but they don't know how to articulate it.

They— I see, and a lot of times I see big events, corporate events that say, we're going to have a national conference. And I'm like, okay, what's the core message that you want people to walk away with? Oh, we're doing these exciting things, this is what we're doing.

And I'm like, okay, think about a person Do they actually care that the share price goes up? Maybe if they've got stock options, but that's an extrinsic thing. Do they actually care if they're going to make more money? Absolutely. But really, they want to feel intrinsically motivated too. So who are we helping?

What difference are we making?

What are we challenging?

And how do we build that into a narrative that a CEO can talk about from stage that gets everyone go, oh my gosh, I'm ecstatic to be here?

And then how do we blend in our culture and our care for our staff into this one narrative that a CEO can apply? And then when you go to a conference, we've all been to them, we go to all these different events and everybody gives us a lecture with all these jargon elements to it and we walk out going, oh my gosh, I just—

what did I learn here? My head works.

And that's why the biggest issue with conferences, you've got this forgetting curve of everybody Like I walk out a week later, I remember the 10th, and then 2 weeks later, I remember not 1%, and then after that, nothing.

And the truth is most people don't apply anything.

So from a conference perspective, being strategic and saying upfront, what are the 3 or 4 narratives that we want people to walk away with? How do we connect everything to that? And then how do we use a story in each one of the things we're trying to teach so that in each conference, the person, in each one of these breakout sessions or main events, they tell a story at the very beginning, and then we attach all the detail to that story because people remember up to 22 times more, more information when embedded into a story. So because of that, you can actually anchor to these stories so people actually walk away remembering more. But then by reducing the narratives that you're sharing, which I know when you want to try and teach them everything is hard, but if we reduce it, they'll actually remember more of it when they leave. And I don't think the goal is that you tell them everything they need to know. I think the goal is a month later that they remember some of it and apply all of it. And if that's the goal, then you need to change the organizational narrative so they care to learn and care to change. And then you need to make sure that the information is consumable in a way that they get the best success. Like in a lot of the events that I do, I'll actually invite somebody up on stage.

And if it's a sales team, I'll invite the salesperson up on stage and they'll tell a story, which is much more like a humble brag about how they got this customer and now they're getting— they're working with them all the time, which is great for their KPIs.

And I often realize they're selling to a real person. That person's terrified of losing their job. They're worried about another innovation that doesn't go well and they look bad and they end up working weekends to fix it. So you need to help them understand that you're on board with them and you held their hand through the whole way and you got them to this great outcome. And you help them understand maybe that person got to a promotion at the end. If you're inviting up a senior leader, you might be talking about the fact that retention was poor and— sorry, they were hiring to fix the retention issue. They might be talking about their culture and their culture, they might say, oh, we support people, we do this. No, break it down to an individual, one person, and give that example of how you actually change their lives. I worked with an HVAC company that was trying to improve retention, and they talked about this one person that they hired that didn't have the qualifications, and they all took it in turns picking up and dropping that person off for an entire month until he got his paycheck so that he could eventually go and buy a car. And how he bought this beater and it kept breaking down and people kept going to pick him up and helping him out. And for the first 6 months, this person that couldn't afford to even get a car loan, they helped him. And now he's still working there 30 years later and now trains all these other people. It takes— it is his personal responsibility to pay it forward.

Like, wouldn't you want, if you were thinking about a job, to work for that organization?

So learning how to articulate that story has, you know, massively helped their ability to get new people to believe that they can learn these skills and know that they want to come for a lifetime job.

All right. Can I ask you something here? All of it makes incredible sense. I'm interested in— because you're very successful in delivering these trainings. Does that amazing story that you just shared, does that emerge in your process of bringing some people on stage and they're, they're going to say what they love and you're going to reframe it to bring out the heart of why that matters for whatever constituents they're— do you do that? You're gifted at it, or are you Identifying that before you stand on stage in front of the company, in front of the sales teams or whoever. I'm interested because if you can do it on the fly, what a gift. It's almost like improv— improvisational acting.

So yeah, I'm able to do it on the fly, but what you've got to understand is when I do it on the fly, it's less perfect than it could be, right? And the important thing that I help people understand is it's about the iteration.

And that comes to my, my point. Most people like, well, how can I tell stories on the fly that are constantly inspiring people? I'm like, why are we doing them on the fly? Why are we not planning and preparing?

So if I had to think about creating a story, uh, actually let me give you a good example.

If I was to think about a lot of organizations have a, a point in time where they start to notice that a a large majority of certain people at a certain age start to leave an organization, and it usually is a catalyst event, right? So Gallup has a poll that asks whether or not you have a best friend that works at the organization. And it was interesting, I worked with an insurance company that was talking to, to Gallup, and there was one staff member that took real offense from that question. Like, what business of that is yours?

And he didn't understand why He got so offended and he went away and he reflected on it.

And this was actually just after my storytelling presentation.

This was just once I, once I started to realize how influential and important stories were across the entire organization.

So what was interesting is he went away and reflected and realized that he did used to have really great, if not best friends, that worked for the organization. He worked there for nearly 2 decades.

But a lot of those people had started to leave over the last few years, and there were lots of new people coming in. And he kept talking about that he wanted to mentor people, but he never did. And I think one of the biggest hurdles right now—

it's funny, I do a presentation called Channel Your Superpower, which is helping people realize they want to be mentors, and there's other people that say they want to be mentored, but the mentors aren't actually doing any mentoring, and the mentorees are actually far more passive and scared to speak out loud.

And it's about getting them all to agree collectively to hold each other accountable. But what's really interesting is this one guy kept talking about mentorship but never actually did it and felt himself disconnected from everyone. And he realized it was because he used to go to dinners with everybody, he used to go to events, and he realized he made a real effort in that 20 years ago when he started working in the business. But now it— 20 years had passed and he, he lost all of those friends. So all he did was started paying an interest in certain younger people and saying that he would like to mentor them.

He'd start inviting a whole bunch of people over for dinner or ask the, you know, whether or not he could take everybody out for a cocktail evening where there could be some ideas shared to help inspire some of the younger people.

And all of a sudden, he started liking working for his organization again, and he realized that this was an unconscious thing for him. He hadn't actually thought about leaving, but he realized that he was going too soon And that's why he got aggravated.

So what we did, and this is what I like to help organizations understand, if you have every individual discover this for themselves approach, then you're going to have lots of stories. They're all going to be imperfect. They're all going to be on the fly. But if you create what I call a story playbook, an organization-wide story playbook, then what you do is you say, okay, and by the way, this organization, this insurance company, has actually done this now.

We notice that when somebody gets to this age and they've got certain friction points, like they've noticed 3 or 4 peers that have left then we make sure somebody imparts this story on them so that they then see that they need to start networking and being more involved in the organization because they're going to feel more disconnected. That alone has skyrocketed their attention on that level of staff member that they need to keep that organizational IP in-house, that working capital that they spent decades training and now are benefiting from. So if you think about an organization, you can say we want to teach our organ— all our staff to tell stories like Matthew Pollard does and to be able to do it on the fly. But that's not as good as saying, here are some strategic objectives we have, let's create a couple of really great stories, and then let's make sure that our senior leaders know them so they can impart the exact right story with the exact right wording as needed, but know that that story will land and not be imperfect every time we do it.

Wow.

And there's so much to say about this. But also, as you and I were talking earlier, there's many stories we can tell about ourselves. We have to determine what is the lever that is going to be most impactful for the organizations we're supporting. So there could be 20 fascinating stories that would be unearthed talking to employees. But obviously, we want to move needles forward for them. So we have to be selective. I want you to comment in a minute. The second thing is, do you find that most of the people that you consult for and speak for, they are— they understand how important data is? For instance, your point that it was unearthed that at a certain age these people are leaving. So then they dug— am I understanding it— then they dug in to say, what are the What are the factors that are impacting that? That's data that you're looking at. So is part of your work that you are looking at engagement data, retention, promotion? You're looking at people data as well, or they are and they're coming with their stories, or how does that work?

Yeah, so I think that, and this has been a lot to do with my evolution into this, because when I started, I, I mean, in theory, I was a door-to-door sales rep that went from having no business being in sales to the number one in the largest sales and marketing company in the southern hemisphere. Then I started my own businesses. When I came into speaking, it was predominantly to teach storytelling to corporations from a sales kickoff perspective, and I do a ton of sales kickoffs.

But what was really interesting is I was like, why are you not selling internally? Why are you not selling to hire new staff? And what I realized is from a corporate perspective, they weren't selling in, in all these different places.

For price increase management, they weren't selling to their, you know, to their current customers.

When you talk about staff retention, when you talk about motivating to team members or creating a mindset of innovation, how do you monitor those things? And with a sales team, it's very easy to monitor data points. And what I realized is in the rest of the business, they weren't monitoring data points. A lot of times they didn't know things. They only knew like engagement scores, and it was, it was really kind of tangential, tangential that they actually came up with it at all. So what I found was by getting people to say Okay, before I speak at this event, let's now take a step back and say, what are we actually trying to achieve?

Oh, we're trying to, we're trying to achieve a customer appreciation or an organizational appreciation. We want people to know that we care about them.

I'm like, then hire a juggler. Like, don't hire me to go and speak. Like, get somebody that'll keep them entertained right now. Of course I can be entertaining, but so is Star Wars. Like, you don't need a speaker to show that level of present— of appreciation. So let's take a step back and say, if you could move the needle on one thing in your organization, what would it be? And if you had one major challenge, what would it be? And a lot of times, and it blows me away, senior leaders don't know the answer to that question.

And the biggest issue, and I think we all suffer from imposter syndrome a little bit, I think the number—

I actually had a really good speaker friend of mine, who privately would ask the president of a company, how long do you think it is before people would realize, before people realize that you actually don't know what you're doing? And the answer was always a laugh and then a response of, gosh, hopefully a little while longer. And that was how he like developed the real rapport with people.

And I was like, I'm not going to ask that question.

But the truth is that a lot of CEOs have got, and presidents of companies have got so much going on and they're focused on that next initiative. And then they hate the head of HR is trying to piece together a lot of things. So what usually I find happens is they're constantly looking at data points, trying to make a decision on what the number one problem is. And what I do is I say, looking at those data points, remembering that all those data points are real people, what do you think the underlying emotional reason is for this data point? And once you understand the emotional underlying reason for the data point, you can then— you can say, well, what is a reason for why that's not true? And then how can we tell a story that shows that that's not true? Because stories short-circuit the logical mind, speak directly to the emotional mind, which is the part of the mind that's making the 'I want to leave' decision or 'I'm too scared to speak up' decision. So you need a story of someone that, you know, was willing to speak up and then got promoted. And even though it was a bad idea perhaps and it didn't work out, they were appreciated. Because the sad fact is that often bad ideas lead to good ideas eventually. And because somebody comes up with a bad idea the first time, they then get hammered for it, and then they're too scared to bring up another idea the next time. So how do we create that spirit of entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship? So you've got to be really strategic about what your tolerance for risk is if you're trying to look at innovation, or what your real excitement is around creating an organizational culture and whether or not you can back that up. And then what is the example of that? And then just help create a single story that speaks directly to that emotional fabric of why someone's leaving, that convinces them that they shouldn't leave. They need to take an action that puts them in the driver's seat, that if they take this action, then they won't want to leave. They'll be happy that they stayed. So it is strategic, but it takes pre-thinking of not what are our KPIs and how do we speak to that KPI, but let's not teach our HR to keep— to retain people. Let's think about what's different about us, what the emotional fabric of this person is, and how how we get them to think differently through one story that we can then impart on every leader to make sure that that story is told. And then next month we'll focus on the next objective. So yes, it should be strategic and there should only be a handful of stories and you should never focus on more than one every month, every quarter ideally. Too much. Think about the Titanic that you're trying to move. The number of times I see sales kickoff events or big organizational events and they spend 8 months trying to operationalize something and never get traction. So keep it super simple, super granular, and apply it. Show people how to apply it quickly, and then make sure that it's applied within that first few weeks by keeping it simple so that they can actually take action right away.

Oh, Matthew, this is just brilliant. So question for you, um, you know, having been a corporate VP, then a therapist, and then coaching, training, speaking, podcasting, My guess, but you tell me, correct me, when, when you're asking them, okay, there's this data point that at this point people are leaving, or whatever it is, um, when you ask them, what do you think is the emotional underpinning of that? I'm guessing 99.8% of people, leaders, even HR people, don't know the answer to that because we're not We're not researching emotion. So how do they find out? And we're talking right to you all who are mid to high level seniors, mid to high level leaders, emerging leaders, anyone who cares to move their, the needle forward in their organization in numbers of critical ways. Yeah. If you, do you actually ask that question? What is the emotional lever that's— and, and I'm guessing nobody knows the answer. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Do you know what's really interesting? It's actually—

you're right in the fact that nobody knows the answer, but the truth is that most people try to think logically what the answer could be.

And once you remind someone that the people that are on the stats are actually real people, yeah, then you can say—

and the introverts that are listening are probably much better at this because introverts have a natural ability to empathize.

Extroverts This is something that you can develop through coaching. But the thing is that if you lean into it, you can say, if I was them and I did this every day, what's changed recently and how would that make me feel?

Or what's been happening for a long period of time and at what point does enough become enough?

Now, so you can—

in a lot of ways, I actually find that we can get to the answer quickly by putting ourselves in the shoes of that person and imagining and then asking ourselves what we, what we would feel.

And very easily we could do that. And I'll sit down with somebody that has the exact same job and then start asking them questions, and I find out they're also not happy. And then I start to ask why, what's going on. And then I ask, well, how does that make you feel? And I'm like the first person that's ever asked.

I guess a therapist, um, you would be asking how people feel all the time. I feel that as executives And as business owners, we try, even in storytelling, we're usually so matter of fact, we don't talk about emotion at all.

And the best stories, like think about the story of how anyone met their spouse. The first time you told it, it was a little bulky.

Certain things didn't work out.

You didn't land as well. I won't tell that next time. And then there were certain elements you're like, oh, I'll embolden on that because maybe I'll embellish. People really enjoyed it. Over time, it becomes a theatrical masterpiece. But the truth is that a lot of the theatrical piece is the emotional element. Yet we don't understand it in our business lives.

We're so matter of fact. So understand you're talking to real people.

Interview some of the people that are still in that job. Do exit interviews and ask them when they tell you why they left, how that made them feel, how that was impacting them in their personal lives. Ask better questions. Call some of the people that just left and apologize that you let them down. Nobody knows how to take that, which means they'll then answer all your questions honestly. And it takes no time at all. I mean, two phone calls, two conversations, and you'll know the answer. And then you can start looking for stories, or you can make a change If it's true and the reason for them leaving was something that currently is an issue, you can then make a change and then create a story about somebody that left that got you thinking what you were doing incorrectly, which is why you've made this change. What organizational staff member is going to be sad to hear an executive or a senior leader cared so much about someone leaving that they called them to find out what happened and changed it to make sure nobody still there has to experience that as a problem.

Well, I want to highlight something. For this to happen, number one, you need bravery. Number two, you need empathy. Number three, you can't be afraid. I mean, you know, even I talk to a lot of people coming and going from organizations, and, you know, the word on the street is when you're doing your exit interview, don't be honest. Doesn't behoove you to be honest. And I think similarly, when people are in the interview process and the hiring manager or the recruiter declines you, it doesn't behoove them to say why, unfortunately. What you're talking about is, is being human, is being empathic, is being— is stepping out of a box of we're afraid. You know, I mean, a lot of people would hear what you're saying and say, I don't ever want to admit we did something wrong. And that's why these people left. So I really applaud you. You're talking about humanity here. You're talking about courage. You're talking about empathy. But do you ever get pushback that, no, what you're saying is just too, too far on the edge that we would admit we did something wrong culturally? Tell me what, what you experience. It's there.

So what's really interesting is that if you go and— because you don't know what you've done is wrong, and you also don't know what you did that they think— they might— you as an organization, the really—

the reason why you're calling is you don't know what you did wrong, otherwise you wouldn't call.

So you're not calling to apologize for something, you're calling to apologize because you must have done something, right? That's a very different statement.

Like, when you call and say, I'm sorry, our culture is terrible, and that's why you left, well, then you don't need to call in the first place because, you know, work on fixing your culture and then tell a story about what you're doing to shift it.

But if you don't know, then you pick up the phone with an assumption. And again, you're 100% right, it takes bravery to be human, but my gosh, it disarms people like that.

Like, when you call someone and say, look, I wanted to reach out, like, Kathy, I hope you don't mind me reaching out to you. I know it's been about a month since you left our organization, but the truth is that since you—

I haven't been able to let go the fact that you left because I feel for you to have left, I must have let you down in some way, shape, or form.

You're the manager of me in this case. You're the manager.

Exactly. And I just want to let— I just want to find out what I missed because there's a whole bunch of people that are still here and I want to make sure I don't let them down in the same way. 'But also, I want to apologize because if it was something that I missed, I want to let you know that, you know, that's the last thing I would have wanted to do for you.

I care about every single person.

And so if I could— if we could just take a step back for a second, and I'm, you know, this isn't going to affect your, you know, whether I recommend you or not for other jobs. This is just me about understanding, one human to another, what could I have done better to make your work environment better?' And then they'll just give you an honest answer. And because of the way you've come in, in a human way, they will respond in a human way. That doesn't mean you need to accept it. You can respond with, wow, thank you so much for sharing that. That's given me a lot to think about. Would you mind if I ask this question? And by doing that, you're really doing it in a human way, but you're not admitting to any crimes. You're not, you know, assuming guilt. You don't need to say it's not true for them. That's what they're sharing. This is the true experience for me, whether you accept it or not. We can go away and reflect on that, and then you can decide whether you want to act. And if it's concurrent with a lot of people that you're doing exit interviews, then you now have a really good understanding that maybe something needs to change, or you're willing to accept that many people leave because they just don't get the way you work.

I would suggest not going to the latter side, but that's your call.

But if you don't understand, you can't even make the choice. So yes, it is about being human. But the truth is, being human gets you better answers than being a robot. And that's one of the things, especially with all the AI technology that's coming out right now, I think we have in our advantage.

So if you want to stay a senior leader and you want to make sure that you're always at the edge, you better introduce more humanity into what you do.

And then communicating stories that have humanity in them is the best way for us to stay. Middle management jobs where you're just being a robot, guess what? Robots will take over. Middle managers that want to be human will get promoted because the truth is that we could all deal with a little bit more humanity in our life.

And the truth is people follow people that care and genuinely know how to articulate it. Some people, they'll follow even if they're not actually human, they just know how to articulate it. And that's why it's so important that we learn to do that well.

I love it. And I don't want to always have the last word, but that story reminded me 'Um, somebody, a manager of mine, did this. Was there anything I could have done better?' About 15 years after an event, um, you know, after I left. And I will say, all of what you talk about, which really resonates with me, is finding brave. It's closing our power and confidence gaps. It's because for me to ask you, let's say you left my company, I'd really like to understand if you could be honest. It would, it would mean the world to me if you could share what could we have done differently, what could I have, or sometimes it's nothing to do with what I did, you know, but you have to be— your ego better be pretty well intact. And sometimes we'll get this question but the person isn't ready to hear it. So what I love about everything you're sharing is for these things to happen, everyone involved has to stretch. They have to stretch to look at the humanity side that they're not— they have to admit we could do better. I remember one very large sports organization was going to have me speak And we were all excited, and two women said, we're afraid people are going to get up and quit. And, and I said, tell me what that means. What, what, what is going on in your culture? And they admitted it, it was terribly difficult for a certain group of people. So You know, that was a hard decision for me because I didn't want to dumb down my talk. Yeah. But we left it that I think there's some work to do if we're talking about inspiring, empowering content that's going to make 3/4 of the company— not, no, what was it? 30% maybe get up and leave. Tell me what you think about that. Have you ever had that? And then I'm going to let you go, but it's so fascinating. Have you ever had anybody express fear that, ooh, That's, that's to get to that story is digging into something that makes us nervous. Anyone ever say that?

I mean, it's really interesting because I mean, I get questions all the time when I'm like, I'm going to invite somebody up. They're like, can we pick that person for you?

I'm like, why would you do that? Well, what if nobody gets up?

I'm like, well, what if they say something terrible?

Yeah.

And I'm like, well, the whole idea of authentic experiences is you're inviting someone up and you want that person to fit to be chosen at random.

Like sometimes I'll say, look, if you want to give me a backup name, give me a backup name, I'll put it in my pocket.

And if no one gets up, don't give them any context, just say, are they willing to volunteer for an exercise? Because then it's still authentic, we're not preparing everything in advance.

Love it.

But I mean, I've probably done maybe 1% of the time nobody gets up. And then I'll say, you know, um, you know, because I'll ask some questions in front of it. What about you who put their hand up?

Would you like to get up? No? Okay.

And it comes across You know, you could worry, oh, that's really awkward. No, that's really authentic, right? And if somebody doesn't get up, then what's the strength of that? You've got an organization of 20,000 people or 2,000 or 200 that are sitting in a room and no one's willing to get up.

I think that's your data point.

Culture that, that creates, right? Now, I worked at it— I'm not going to mention the name of the company for obvious reasons, but one of the biggest challenges that a lot of, especially highly technical stuff like finance or technology or even HVAC, actually, funnily enough, right now, the biggest issue that they have is a lot of their staff are aging out. So they actually are bringing in new people, but they can't get as many new people as the people that are aging out. And the problem that they have is every senior leader is like, oh, I really want to mentor, but the younger people, they're just apathetic. And so they really need to shock the younger people into taking action in more of a leader role, and they need to push the senior leadership or the senior salespeople or the senior managers into helping mentor and pushing them out of their comfort zone. But yet there's this apathy. If you're not willing to take risk to get somebody to start to build momentum, then your organization is just going to fade. And yes, hopefully— I mean, a lot of the reason for why people say that certain organizations aren't succeeding these days is because people are so focused on cost reduction or so focused on streamlining The innovation, creativity, and helping really utilize your people for those ideas—

because we're laying them off, they're not willing to provide them anymore—

is missing. The thing that I would also say is if you're not willing to challenge the status quo, you have no right being in leadership. You have— all you're doing is making sure that the ship still sails safely as long as there's no troublesome waters. But we are in troublesome waters. The economy is changing, people feel uncertain, AI is coming, and you can absolutely hide under your desk and hope nobody notices, or you can decide to sit at your chair and say, how can I assume responsibility for all of this? Because if it isn't my fault, there's nothing I can do to fix it. In which case, what strategic initiatives can we employ to understand what's happening at a foundational level if our issue is retention, or if our issue is attracting the best talent, or if our issue is making a salesperson effective much quicker? And then what is one initiative we can employ in each one? And what, what is one story we can share about the fact that we're doing this to motivate and inspire everyone to help and get involved? People love feeling part of something, but if you make it feel risky, if you don't empower them, and if you don't motivate and inspire them towards it, then of course they're always going to choose the status quo. As leaders though, if we're choosing it too, then our organization is lucky to survive. And some of us have products or services and we're in big corporations that will survive no matter what. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be striving and to make them thrive. And I think that a lot of organizational staff, we just live month to month, quarter to quarter, and we live in this world of hopefully no one notices me this month. And that's the last thing that every organization— you don't want every staff member working for you to feel that way. Everybody wants to believe in something, but the truth is that if you're a leader that is shying away from asking these tough questions, you're making it harder for them to believe in you. And it doesn't—

as a, as a senior leader, if you just provide just a few stories that people can hang their hat on and learn to tell well, that share motivation, that share what we're working on and make them feel like they're part of something that they can use in the sales world. A story playbook is powerful right across an organization.

But as a senior leader, it's far more than just storytelling.

You as an organization owe it to everybody to get everybody to take risks and to challenge the status quo, especially in today's economy.

Otherwise, it will rock you.

Oh, Matthew, on that note, I find this so inspiring. I'm so thrilled that you are doing this work. And, you know, I don't think anyone would believe you're an introvert in the way how passionate you are. Not that introverts are not passionate, don't get me wrong. But, you know, you have such a body of work on The Introvert's Edge as well, and your, your story of the beginning of your career is fascinating. So where do people soak up everything you have? Where do we send them, Matthew? It's so great.

I think they should check out our other interviews together on your podcast.

You got it. Those will be linked.

Talk about all of those. But no, I mean, you can definitely go to matthewpollardspeaker.com and check out my work there. The Introvert's Edge, especially, you know, if you're trying to network internally inside your organization, you know, helping your career trajectory, The Introvert's Edge to Networking. You can download the first chapter at theintrovertsedgetonetworking.com.

And if you're in sales, check out theintrovertsedge.com.

I think that for a lot of people, and it's funny, like I talk about, I talk about storytelling because I believe that especially for introverts, you're one story away from being able to communicate your value really well. If you're in sales, one story away from being able to sell the product or service really well. If you're going into an interview, conveying one story about what you're passionate about inside helping an organization achieve rather than your resume is going to make a massive difference. And, and that's why I focus on, you know, storytelling so much. But, you know, I, I think for a lot of people that are listening, you know, looking at what I offer on YouTube to learn how to tell stories more effectively might be very helpful as well.

But we will link to that, Matthew.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, go ahead, go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that if people have specific questions about the applicability, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'd be more than happy to— if you send me an audio message, which by the way you should know you can do on an Android or an iPhone these days, I'd be delighted to send you an audio back.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Matthew. I'm so inspired. So much rich information. All right, Matthew said it, I didn't have to. If you— but I do after every interview— if you don't have a question, I think we're not doing our jobs because there's There's so much richness and nuance. So reach out to Matthew. He invited you to do it, do it. And to me, of course, if you'd like, I hope you find this helpful. I hope no matter where you are in an organization or your own business or running your own entrepreneurial effort, um, there's so much here to learn from. And I hope you feel inspired. Thank you again, Matthew. Come back again.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Oh, so great. All right, everybody. Hope you found this very helpful, and I'm wishing you a wonderful two Finding Brave weeks, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

Thanks so much for joining us today, and please don't forget to check out findingbrave.org for more programs, resources, and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding Brave.