#46 - Communicate Better at Work with Misha Glouberman, Author, Coach & Advisor

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o'. Carroll. My guest today is Misha Globerman, and we focus a lot on communications and in particular, how to have effective, difficult conversations. This is what Misha specializes and excels at as a coach of senior leaders and leadership teams. He helps companies solve their biggest problems by making sure that they're paying attention to both the brain centered analytics side of things and and the heart centered human side. There's a book of his thoughts called the Chairs are Where the People Go, which the New Yorker chose as one of its top books of the year and the LA Times Daily said should be required reading for Congress. As we all know, businesses are made of people. Misha states that 90% of business problems are created by human problems. Miscommunication, insecurity, wishful thinking, conflict avoidance. His work focuses on just that, the squishy human stuff in a way that drives concrete outcomes. I wanted to have Misha on the show because it's abundantly clear to me that the biggest challenges we face in our work and our lives are often focused on people problems. We talk so much about the three pronged approach to change and operations as people, process, and technology. But at the end of the day, we all know that the people prong is way harder to plan for and to succeed with than good processes and technology. This episode felt like a personal coaching session for me, and I had a lot of lessons learned which I hope that you find valuable as you listen along and hopefully learn alongside me. If you want to work with Misha, you can find out more about him by Googling Misha Globerman. He assures me that no matter how you spell it, he's the only Misha Globerman out there on the Internet. So Google will find him with that. Enjoy the show. All right, Misha, hello and welcome to the show.

Hello. Nice to be here.

Nice to have you. So we were recently introduced and I was very excited to get you on the podcast and talk to you about the work that you do because I know you focus on people problems. And as we chatted about generally, we in legal and we in operations, we talk about the three prongs of our work. People, process, and technology. And in recent years, you know, technology's gotten a lot better. It's gotten a lot easier to work with. Process can be something that we can make better people. The people challenges is always the hardest part, and that is your specialty. So talk to me kind of a little bit about what you do and how you think about people problems.

Yeah, I wish I could tell you that people had gotten substantially better in the past few years, but the trends are, the trends are slower, are slower there. Um, yeah. The stuff that I do is, I mean, my perception is that people tend to very often underestimate or underinvest in the people components of the problems that they have. So the conversation that I'll often have when I'm talking, I'll talk with leaders about things that are going on in their companies and we ask, you know, you describe some problem and you think, well, if you could solve the people component of that problem, if you could get that person and that person and that person to have the conversation, for instance, you know, would that solve it? And they say, oh yeah, yeah, that would. If we could do that, we could. But that's just impossible. It's, it's too hard to do. These people don't talk to each other, these people don't hear each other. But very often it's. The people components are huge. And then when I ask people how much, how much they invest in those different parts of it, it's usually very little. So in law, for instance, you'll look at the senior manager, management at a legal team and the amount of education they've gotten and how to. The technical stuff of law is. And going into it is years and years and years and years. And the amount of education they've gotten in say, how to collaborate well with each other is maybe like a three hour workshop that they took three years ago or something like.

Yeah, very little in law schools and practice.

The exciting thing for me is that there's big wins to be had there because the learning curves are so steep and there's sort of so many opportunities very often to make things just much better. If people get just a little bit better at talking about some important issues that they face that you can often really make pretty great improvements really quickly.

Yeah. It's funny, I was just, just had this conversation with my husband this morning as we're thinking about like you young people and people in different fields. People are not good at communicating these days and I worry about the next generation where they're just looking down at phones and texting and not even having face to face conversations anymore. Right.

The last generation not so great either.

Yeah.

So here's one, here's one of the number one. I'm going to, I'm going to push back a little bit. I would say one of the number one things, the very first thing that I work with people when I work with people on communication is that when you think about communication skills, the most important thing is to work on yourself. And one of the first mistakes that everybody makes in communication skills is to say, oh yeah, communication skills are really important for those other people. But I hear people in more senior roles say, right, the problem with communication is the younger people are bad at it. You've already lost the game. Like as long as your approach to communication is, the problem is that these other people are bad at communication, you've already lost. So I want to push back on that a little bit.

Yeah, no, that's.

I don't know that there are unique problems that are generational. I certainly grew up without those technologies. I don't also doubt that my perspective on it is skewed because I am someone who didn't grow up with those technologies.

Yeah. So when you say, you know, being a good communicator and stuff, it's so much of that listening.

Yeah. You know, I think that people, when it, when it comes to communication, I think that listening's a really big part of it. So when I first started helping people with this stuff, for the first few years that I taught this, I was like, wow, people need to get better at listening. And listening is this, it's complicated and it's rich and it means a lot and it means something other than just sitting and quietly waiting your turn to talk or things like that. And it means really being open to information. All that's really hard. And the more I look at how communication works and the more I look at what happens when people have tough conversations, what's astonishing is that when the stakes are high and things start to not go well, people don't listen. But people also don't say what needs to be said. So there's actually two parts of it. Part is about listening and listening with a real curiosity and listening with real open mindedness. So hearing what the other person has to say. But the other thing is speaking with, with transparency and candor and clarity. I think it's less obvious the ways in which people don't do that. But very often when we, when you look at those conversations that don't go well, both things aren't happening when people aren't listening and they're not really seeing what needs to be said either.

Right, right. I remember well. So when I was at Google, Google is really great about having a lot of professional development courses and classes you can take about skills like communication. And I was in a period where I had to deliver a lot of Tough feedback to one of my employees. And I took a course on how to have tough conversations. And one of the tips that I took away from that was, you know, after you've had your one on one or you've delivered some of this feedback, ask the other person to repeat back what, what they've heard from this conversation.

Right.

And I just remember being so surprised the first couple times where I was, I thought I was giving really tough feedback about what was not going well. And she said, well, you know, I heard I'm doing great, just keep doing the same things. I'm like, you know, are there two people in this room? And was I just talking to myself? Did you not hear? I learned so much about, you know, we often hear what we want to hear. And when you, like you said, if you're not saying what needs to be said and you know, you soft kind of talk around the conversation of, hey, you know, actually things, things are good, things are great, but there's this couple things, you know, and you're not delivering it in a direct way. So all she heard was things are good. And so that taught me, like, as we were having more one on ones and I continued using that tool, it really helped me be very concise and direct and clear about what I was trying to get across.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That's, that's a, that's a great example that it's, it's very easy, especially when you already have the story in your head to describe in a way that to you seems like it's clear, perfectly clear to the other person. But if they don't have that same story in their head, they might hear those same words and hear them a little differently. If you're not, as if you're not. If you don't take those extra efforts to be crystal clear, for sure.

Does that happened a lot in businesses and environments where there's teams and collaboration where we're all talking and we think we're all aligned and we're actually not?

Yeah, I think that's more the rule than the exception, I think, especially when things get, I mean, I think we have this. There's a couple of things, I think, just in terms of general communication, I think it's very hard for us to be empathetic to the other person's point of view. Just in terms of. It's hard for us to understand that the other person doesn't know what we know. When we say things, we sort of speak as if the other person knows the things already. And so Just even in low stakes communication, the possibility for things being misunderstood is really high. But even more importantly, when the stakes come at all high, we fall back into a lot of patterns that don't help out super well. When you ask people what they want to be like when they communicate, what they think they're like, when they're good. Almost everyone describes the same thing and what they say is, they say, oh, you know, when I'm really good at communication, I'm, you know, what I'm like is I'm really, really clear and I'm. And when there's conflict, I'm really interested in the other person's point of view. And I don't just think like that I'm right and they're wrong. I understand that if we see things differently, it's probably because both of us bring something to it. And it would serve me well to listen to them and to understand our point of view and to solve things together in the abstract. Everyone believes that that's the best way to communicate. And they're right. Like every single study, every, it's like, oh, right, that is what works. If you're on a team, the team functions well if people can be open minded and hear each other and do those. One of the things for me is that when I teach people to communicate, for a long time I thought I would teach people that, but it's actually useless to teach people that because everybody knows that. What people don't know is they don't rec. They don't know the degree to which people don't actually do that and they don't recognize it in themselves when they don't. The thing I would see again and again when I would teach classes is I would teach people, they say the importance of listening and everyone say, right, right, right, I get it, I get it. And then the person say, oh, but you know, I have this really important situation coming up here and clearly in that situation what I should do because it's so important is just persuade the other person that my point of view is correct. I'd be like, dude, like the entire thing we've been talking about is how like so in your most important conversations you should get it all wrong is what you're saying. I mean, I still make that mistake. I've been, I think about nothing but this and have thought. And yet when the stakes get high, we fall back into doing the very opposite of what we understand to be the best practices. So we understand that what we should do is think that if we disagree, it's because maybe you have something to say. But in fact, when the stakes get high, what I start to think is like, no, no, no, I'm right and I should persuade you that I'm right and you're wrong. And similarly, I think what I should do is be very transparent or really tell you what I'm up to. But in fact what happens when the stakes get high is what I do instead is I just try to make things go my way without telling you what I'm doing. So I become kind of manipulative or I become kind of pushy in ways where I'm typically also not actually very clear about what I'm doing. I'm trying to make things go my way without revealing my strategies or my preferences or my desires, things like that. And that's. Everyone does it.

Yeah. When you say it out loud like that, it's so obvious that everyone does it and we all see it in ourselves. How do we, how do we prevent ourselves from doing that?

There's a bunch of things we talked a little bit before the podcast and one of the things that I'm trying to remember is you had sort of concrete stuff within the work that you did and, and if we can think about sort of concrete examples in yourself. I, I feel like that we're using a lot of like abstract words and I wonder if we can use something concrete to sort of bring it down to earth for your listeners a little bit.

Yeah, I mean one of the big things that I think folks are challenged with is implementing like new software across, across the organization. So what we sell is contracts lifecycle management software. It's, it's used by the legal team. We often talk to legal team operations folks who are leading the project. But because of the nature of contracting, of course it is not just legal that uses this. You've got to get sales bought in and finance bought in and HR and IT and procurement. So it's very cross functional and we're change agents as our job. And so the communication in bringing people around and making them feel heard is really important. But of course everyone reacts with the, well, what's in it for me? This isn't the software that I wanted. You're changing my processes. So there, there is friction. You've got to bring people around and influence and that's I think, one very big meaty problem that a lot of our listeners can relate to.

Right. So you have a new software you're trying to implement across the organization and the problem is that people have all these objections to it. Yeah, they have concerns about it. And then what happens? What do you, what do folks do? What do folks in your role do?

I mean, it's. It's about gaining trust and going around to each stakeholder. We often tell folks, you know, start with a group that is willing and interested in trying something new and making them successful. So piloting with the small group, land and expand sort of thing. Some of the tips that I do is go to the other teams, ask them what's working well, what could be better, not necessarily ask them what they want and listen and then sort of offer. Be able to offer back a solution that maybe they can get their hands on and see for themselves is not the end of the world. It's a lot about, I mean, kind of to your point, bringing people around. And so when there is that tension and now when you say it like that, I think we do have a tendency to try to convince people. I know you, you know, you like the way you currently do things. I like the software that you pick, but I'm going to tell you why the one that I picked is the right one and I'm going to shove it, shove it down your throat. And the rest of the team, how does that go?

What happened?

I think this is the reason why this charter, this charge, this project is so challenging for folks because you can't please everyone all the time. And I'm hoping, Misha, that in this conversation you tell us the secrets to success on this, because it is really hard.

True. Yeah. And I think. And one of the things that. One of the problems that are challenges that you guys face, I'm guessing, is like, you guys are the experts, so you know that this is a good package. You know all the reasons why this software is good software, you know, all that kind of stuff. And sometimes expertise can be an obstacle to good listening, to curiosity. Right. Because if you're like, well, I.

So true.

One of the biggest obstacles to curiosity is like, if I know I'm right and you're wrong, I've again, I've kind of lost the game in conversation. When you're an expert, it's even harder to suspend that. The thing I really want to emphasize is that curiosity doesn't mean pretending that experts don't exist or that expertise doesn't exist or that some people know more than other people. You can be the smartest person in the room and know that you're the smartest person in the room and be understood to be the smartest person in the room, but and still be curious about what other people think for all kinds of. But very often when you are the expert, when you are the expert, you sort of think, well, you know, these people are just, they're just being Neanderthals or they're being backwards or they're being selfish or something like that. And once again, once you think that, you're not going to get good outcomes in the conversation because people will know, like no one likes to be, you know, I don't like it. I don't like when people treat me like I'm backwards and wrong. And I. And when they do, I tend to push back and I tend to not listen to the things they have to say.

Definitely.

So figuring out how to do that is, is part of a challenge. I have a couple of questions for you. In that case, when the new software is coming out, do these guys get to choose whether to use it or not? How does the decision get made?

Well, that's part of the challenge. You know, there's going to be software that one team likes better. Let's just say there's an rfp. Let's just say we looked at five vendors. Well, the sales team might like one, the procurement team might like another. The legal team might like a third. And if legal is leading the charge, they ultimately, and like you said, they might be the expert. Because we've been in this world, we've looked around for a long time, we know the differences, we know what's successful across the organization.

Right, so the legal team chooses ultimately.

Yes. Well, at least, you know, let's just say in this example they do.

This is like the 62nd version on how to communicate well. And by the way, I think any decent book on communication that you read, and there's many, many frameworks that are all amazing, but I think all of them in some ways are different ways of operationalizing the same basic theory. And it's something like that. There's sort of three values you want to bring to communication. One of them is you want to be curious. And that means you want to be open to the idea that the other person has some knowledge that might be useful for you. You're open to the idea that maybe your story isn't the entire whole truth. The open to the idea that you, you might be wrong about some things. Even if you're the smartest person in the room, there still might be learning for you to do. That's curiosity. So the first value is curiosity. The second thing is you want to be transparent, which means you want to really say all the thing the important things that need to be said. You're not keeping secrets, you're not being manipulative, you're not. And you're not trying to solve the problem on your own. So you're sort of being, you're, you're being curious, you're being transparent, what's going on and you're being compassionate, which means you sort of understand that the other, if the other person has, you know, just like you, the other person has desires, has belief, has priorities, all those kinds of things, that they're also a person. And you're being all these things, you're being curious, transparent and compassionate in the interest of making the conversation be as collaborative as it can be. So you're kind of trying to solve the problem together. That's the idea. One place where things often go awry, and I'm not sure if it's the case here, is that sometimes there's not a lot of transparency about what the decision making process is. So that's one place I often see things go wrong. So you have a bunch of people to get input on a decision, but at no point do you actually say, hey, you want to be super transparent about what the decision process is. Say hey, listen, I'm your manager, I'm getting your input. But just so you know, at the end of it, I'm making the decision myself. This is my decision to make. So one of the things that I wonder about in the story that you're talking about here is what's is getting some clarity about what's the actual decision making process, who actually troubles the tool? Is there unclarity about that? Is that clear? I don't know.

And there might be lack of clarity at some points or it may be clear, but like you said, it's not communicated because there's sort of a fear that like, well, I don't want to. I feel bad that I'm making the decision. And you know, folks have chimed in that they're not on board. Right?

Yeah, I feel, I feel bad is, is often one of the leaders leading in one leading blocks to transparency. Like it feels hard to say something and so in the near term it's easier to not say it. In the long term, it gets you in worlds of trouble. Yeah, you sort of say it is my, this is really my decision. It feels bad to say, even if you guys disagree, I'm going to make the decision this way anyhow. So I don't say that out loud. And now what happens is in three months from now when you make the decision and it contradicts other people's input. They get angry and they're angrier than had you told them that up front.

That's so interesting. So I'll give you another example of this exact same story where someone just told me she's the decision maker ultimately, but she's got all these stakeholders and she's, you know, she's gotten all their opinions, she's made them feel heard, but not everyone agrees. And ultimately there's one team that wants something else and there's. There's something that she wants. And she. And I said, well, at the end of the day, it's your choice, right? And she said, yes, absolutely. I said, so what's the problem? She goes, well, I wanna, you know, I don't. I feel bad. The whole I feel bad thing.

Sure.

And so what she did is she put out like a survey to all these people who tested it and got feedback. And she said, well, I can, I can report back that the survey came up with the same response that I did. And so now I can justify it. So saying that that was a collective choice, even though I'm making the decision based on totally different things. So what's your. Yeah, how do you respond to that?

It's not the example of not being transparent. Yeah, that's an example. And, and it might be the case that in the near term that strategy works for her in that particular instance. My suspicion is, though, that even in that case, it won't. People are usually pretty good at sniffing out when things are fake. The kind of thing that happens in that story is the people who are in the group that disagree, they know that she's gone. I mean, I know I don't know that specific thing, but the thing that happens often in cases like that, people understand that what you're doing is gunning to have things go your way. And then they understand that what you're doing is trying to collect data to support your point of view, even if the reasons are different. And they get it. And very often everyone understands that what, that's what's going on. And no one says it. And that's what makes teams and organizations work badly.

Yes. And so there's that lack of trust then. Is that what happens long term is you lose trust and you lose the.

Collaboration, you lose all kinds of things. Yeah, you lose trust, and then with trust, you lose the ability to collaborate, you lose the ability to share information. And if you think about it, almost any, any problem in an organization of any complexity, the Information required to solve the problem doesn't never resides inside of the head of one person. It resides inside of the heads of multiple people in different parts of the organization, different parts of the team. The only way to solve the problem is to put all the puzzle pieces on the table together, but the puzzle pieces are inside everyone's head. The more that you have people just trying to make things go their way on their own, the more you're not really going to be able to solve the puzzle because you have that mistrust. Because people aren't going to say what their concerns are. People aren't going to be able to say what their issues are. They're not going to be open with each other.

Right.

So that would be a good example of the thing that she did, would be an example of trying to control the outcome but not being transparent about what you're doing. And that's what people usually, again, what they do when they stakes at highs, they just try to make things go their way without actually saying what they.

And does the other, the other way backfire, though. So let's just play this out and say, you know, she said, hey, I know you want the opposite. I know the, the other software is better for your team, but I ultimately get to decide and I've made my choice and it's not what you want. Does that then create even more friction? And you know, why did you even ask me what I wanted?

And why did you're. Transparency is really important. So first of all, even there, there's opportunities for curiosity and opportunities for collaboration. So one thing, one thing is to say, even if even at that point in it, you can say, hey, listen, here's the thing, we've gone through it. You say, why do you think she didn't say this to him? To them, I think it's the.

I feel bad. I want them to feel heard and I feel, I, you know, I want them to feel like I considered their opinion.

So here's the trick to transparency. Say those very things. So very often in transparency, people, it's a lot of say, listen, I want to talk to you guys. I've made this, I want to make clear it's my decision. I understand that this decision isn't the decision that you guys wanted. And I, and I feel bad about that and I worry that you guys aren't going to feel hurt and I want you. And one thing that I'd like to do is explain why I made this decision, which is another part of transparency, being clear about, you know, being clear about how decisions get made. And then another thing you can do too is say, look, given that we are doing this, are there things that we can do to make it less difficult for you? Because the decisions made, the decision that we're making, this tool is made. That said, I feel bad and I understand that you guys might not feel heard now or one of those things that we can do to make this decision feel less hard to. Less. Less difficult for you.

When you say that, it sounds so nice and so clear and so collaborative and so obvious. Why is that so hard for us?

I don't know why it really is. I'm glad that it sounds that way to you. And very often it. So let me take it one step at a time. I think that the more important thing to me is to understand that you can do that. And I think one of the tricks there very often is literally people will just talk to me about a problem. And like 90% of I do a lot of coaching of helping the senior leaders communicate better, helping teams function better, helping them and they make progress fast. And very often a lot of my job is super easy. It literally consists of saying to someone after they've talked to me for five minutes, could you just say those exact same things to the person that we're talking about? You know, say, I don't, I don't want to. I don't want to talk to them because I'm afraid that if I say this to them, they're going to feel not heard. Say, great. Can you say, I'm afraid if I say j going to feel not hurt. This is a really hard decision for me to make. Can you say to them, this is a really hard decision for me to make. Can I'm, you know, can you just say those. And very often it's like, you don't even have to say. You don't have to change the words. You could often say the exact same word.

So interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then the thing I think going back is that's at that early. And then I think earlier on when you ask the question of like, well, why did you even get our feedback, our input? That's again, where transparency is important early on. So early on, when you're asking people for input, you want to be super clear, you want to be transparent, you want to be curious about what they think and transparent about the nature of the input. So you say, you might want to save. For instance, sometimes you might say, hey, we're going to make. Here's this, you know, we're choosing a new software system that we're implementing across the organization. What we want to do is we want to get everybody's input. Before we go ahead, I want to make really clear that when we go that the decision is ultimately going to be my decision to make. I really want your input on that decision, but I'm going to be one making that decision. In the end, if you're worried that the software is not going to please anyone, which you probably are, you could say that up front. You say. I also want to say up front. You know, my experience with these things is that very often that software doesn't please any everyone. So I'm feeling kind of, you know, I'm feeling nervous about that because another thing people can be transparent about is their feelings. Yeah, but, you know, so I'm so. But at the same time, I feel like to make the best decision, what we really want is to get everybody's input as quick as we can. So what we want is for you to be as candid as with your input as possible. And at the same time, I want to be clear to you that like, there's. There's no way we're going to get to meet everybody's requirements and everybody's desires. And so at the end of this, I'm going to make a choice that might be a tough choice. And I want to say that up front.

Again, sounds so obvious. Sounds so clear. Yeah, that's really helpful guidance to, to keep in mind. Just really say the truth. And I was thinking about what you said earlier about, you know, the experts and how that sometimes makes it hard to make curious. And I can definitely relate to that. When you're working with a new team or something brand new, and you go in very genuinely just asking a ton of questions like, help me understand, how does this work? How does that work? And when you know too much, it. You almost forget to ask those things and you're more in the telling, telling, selling mode. And how do we sort of pivot ourselves to, even though we are an expert, to still be curious and listen?

I guess there's a bunch of things. I mean, some of these things happen with practice, Some of them happen with intention. If you have habits that, you know, you fall into, you can watch out for that. Like you can say, you know, a thing that I'll often do for, like. So, for instance, if you're in a situation where you know that you need to listen more. One thing that I'll often do is when people are preparing for a conversation, people's natural inclination is to prepare all the things that they want to say. But the thing that I would encourage you in some cases at least, is there are certain things you want to prepare that you want to say, especially if there are things that are tough to say that you or you might avoid, you want to write those down. But maybe even more importantly in that sort of situation is prepare the things that you want to ask, the things you want to find out. So you're not so much preparing your talking points as you are preparing your listening points.

Great idea.

And the. And in most cases, it's also the things that are difficult to say or that are difficult to ask are the ones that are most important to write down to make sure you don't skip them over. Because it's really easy to. When you say, why don't we do this? I think one answer is that a lot of these things are things that are a little bit hard to do in the short term. It's hard to say the tough thing. It's hard to ask the tough questions. Question. And so as humans, we really like to delay our suffering. Like we think anything we can do. So even the tiniest amount of suffering, you know, the two minutes that it would take to say the difficult thing, which will save you, like, six months of suffering. Your, your, you know, our monkey brains are still like, no, don't do it hard. So one way to do that is to get it out of yourself, to externalize it, to write it down on paper, to say, I'm going to say to them, I'm going to make this decision. And I understand at the end of the day the decision might be unpopular. Say that. Write it down so you don't skip it over. Similarly, think of the questions you want to ask that are tough to ask. Very often the questions asked that are tough to ask are, what problems do you see with this plan? How do you feel about this? How do you, you know, when you go to the team and say, hey, listen, we've made this choice, my sense is you guys aren't going to like this. Is that right?

Yeah.

Tell me, what is it about? Am I right? Because you might even be wrong, but they might think, yeah, we really hate this, and then say, great, you know, I'm really sorry to hear that. I feel bad about it. It would probably help us solve the problem. If I get a sen why you're unhappy about it, can you tell me? And then listen, and that's hard. But taking the time to do that sort of listening and to Write those things down. One way to do it is to prep the things you want to ask and the things you want to say, especially things that are going to be hard.

Yeah, I definitely relate to that. Delaying the tough conversation, which is, you know, the example that I gave you in giving the tough feedback, why I wasn't being that clear was because I was coloring it with, you know, compliments in the front. So before I got into the, the tough. And I, and I've gotten a lot better at that now. I'm very good at having those tough feedback conversations. Another kind of real life example that's come up a lot recently, and I'm sure you've talked to folks about this, is the idea, you know, from after the pandemic, the remote work and now getting people back into the office. And the reason that, you know, or maybe even moving from, okay, we had a bigger space, not everyone's in the office every day. We're gonna move to a smaller space. So you don't have a assigned desk anymore. We're now moving to hoteling desks. We experienced that at Google. We had to move to, you know, from lawyers from where their, their space and their desk is very precious. And that's how they moved up their ladder. Now you don't have a space for your things and conveying, you know, it's really important to come into the office because young attorneys need to be trained, we need to mentor, we need to be, you know, in person. And even as the, the partner or the older, more tenured attorney, you have to model the behavior for others to be able to see you and learn and learn from. So while you're trying to give flexibility and keep people happy because they want to stay at home, but you want to draw them into the office, there's. There's this friction. And I think we're not maybe communicating that well about the why. And we're bringing in like free food and popcorn and like happy hour.

Yeah.

Tell me your thoughts on kind of that.

Free food and popcorn Happy hour is exactly an example of the sort of thing where instead of being transparent communicator, what you're trying to do is control other people's behavior. So that distinction is really important. Right. To sort of. Well, I know what, I know what I want you to do, and I'm going to try to make you do it with like free popcorn, which again, we're on the other side of that. It feels manipulative. Right. Like if I'm like, there's so many memes on The Internet about, like, the pizza party at the office and how to get the pizza party instead of the thing that you want. And then the idea that people want to come into the office, that people need to come in the office, that, to me, is a real example of, like, being overly certain that I'm right and you're wrong. Like, if I think you need to get into your. I need you. I think you need to come into the office to get your work done, and you don't think you need to get into the office to get your work done. To me, as a human, from the outside, I'm like, I don't know. I mean, that seems like a big, open question. Now, the thing I do know is I know that I might know that you need mentorship, and I might be worried that you're not going to get the kind of learning that you would get if you didn't see other people in action. I might also feel uncomfortable that it just makes me feel better having you around. Like. Like some of that stuff, too, is like, you can name some of those things too. Right? Like, I think for a lot of people, like, as an example, I think a lot of people think that the reason that their bosses want them to come into work is just because their bosses don't trust them and want to monitor them. And that's.

That might be the case sometimes, too.

Right. And so if that's the case, like, the possibility that then needs to be named, because that's an example, again of transparency. If I'm thinking, oh, you just want me to come into work because you don't trust me, then the thing I need to say, or you might need to say is say, you know, my worry is that if I tell you I need you to, I don't want you working from home, you might think that the reason is that I don't trust you. But if it's not the case, you say, I wonder if that's part of it. I might say, yeah, that is part of say, well, I want you to know that's really not the case. It's my concern is less that I don't trust you and more that I'm concerned that you're not going to get access to the kind of mentoring that you. Now, the other thing that we do is once you get those things on the table, what it starts to let you do is if you start to be transparent about the motivation. So instead of trying to make the person come into the office, basically, now you're working against each other. You're trying to make them come in, they're trying to not come in. And now you're working cross purposes.

Right.

What you could do instead is say, hey, this is negotiation language, interests and positions. We can sort of say, what are your interests here? Let's think about what our interests are and see if we can come up with a solution together that addresses your interest. So why is it important to you to work from home? Well, I want to have some flexibility. I like to, I like to reduce my commute time. I want to feel trusted, and I don't feel trusted if I say, great, here's why it's important. Let me tell you why it's important for you to come in. I want you to have access to this kind of mentorship. I don't know what the interests are. You can make them up, but once you put out those interests, my suspicion is you can start to craft a solution that's better than saying you have to come in for the mandatory pizza party. Right. So you can say like, well, you know, these parts of your work you could do at home and these parts. But, you know, we want to make sure. But we want you to come in at least for this certain amount of time. So an example would be if you're, if, if the main reason you're trying to do that is access to mentorship and you make people come into the office on a day when none of the senior people are there, you've now just implemented a rule that just hurts everybody, right?

Yeah.

So you. That. And that's the kind of thing that could happen, Right. So the thing you might want to do is say, well, let's figure out ways where you can come in. And when you do come in, you maximize the opportunity for that kind of training. I mean, I'm making it up. But once you, once you know what the actual goals are, if you're talking openly about it, you can solve the problems together as opposed to if you're just like, unilaterally trying to control the other person, where you're going to end up getting a lot of pushback. And you're also going to end up doing things that don't actually meet your goals. Like you're going to make them come in on days when there's actually no use to them coming in for you.

Yeah, so that's a really good point, too. So, you know, if you are being totally transparent and truthful and you end up thinking, well, no, I, I really just want people to come in. So it feels like we're Connecting with each other. And there's some buzz about the office and we've got this rent that we're paying and we need to make use of it. Then maybe you start to question the why are we actually making people come in?

Yeah, and you could also make that. You could also have them come in for reasons. Like if, for instance, the reason you want them to come in is you feel that there's a kind of social connection that comes from people coming in. Like, say that's the reason. Then what you could do is you could get together like once a week for two hours and do something really social. You know, like people come into the office for 10 hours, you know, for 10 hours, and they spend 15 minutes of those 10 hours socializing. But those 15 minutes really matter. Then what you could do is you could do it a mandatory two hour thing once a week for people to come in and you'd get to know each other and do something interesting, people to know each other. Then you get your 15 minutes a day of socializing without objecting everybody to 45 minutes a day of commuting or whatever it is, you know. Yeah, you can solve for the problem you're trying to solve as opposed to just sort of pushing for your solution against the other person's pushback.

Yeah, this is all so helpful. This is, this is really great. I feel like I'm getting my own coaching session live on this podcast. Okay.

So now.

I do think that the thing that's most useful for me and things like this is if you have something real that you're trying to figure out, then I can help you with that. And my suspicion is that for your listeners, that's more helpful than us sort of speaking in abstractions. You know, if these are real challenges that you work on, that's really helpful. That's good.

So I have another one. And this, this was real life for me in my past, but I also hear it all the time in other legal departments and in law firms, which is committees, committees to solve problems or to work on things. And you end up having, you know, I hate to pick on lawyers, but it is usually a committee of lawyers. And that's because they all have different specialties and skill sets that they're being brought together to, let's say, prepare for a regulatory issue or solve, you know, I don't know, let's say, like building culture and bringing people back to work or whatever it is. Right. So you bring some smart people together and you give them the idea that they're on this Committee often not clearly defined who the decision maker is or what the goal is or what the outcome is. But it's like you guys work, work on this, work on culture or work on, you know, whatever de dei, and what happens is they just talk and talk and go over time and nothing happens. I've had some success in changing that. But I'm just curious, is that something you see a lot of like we're collaborating, we've created a committee and then no outcome happens.

I think the problem that almost all organizations have is there's like an overemphasis on the appearance of work and like there's too much on effort and not enough on outcome. So it's like, yeah, we made a committee, we wrote a report, we got together, we had some meetings, we made, we created this document. I mean it's, it's sort of almost the definition of bureaucracy. Is that what we value is the fact that committees exist and meetings were held and documents were produced and things like that. And when I work, I do a lot of work. I mean I do think running a group of. More than anything, with a group of more than three or four people, you need someone to be facilitating the conversation. And that's different from sharing. It means you need someone who actually who's thinking about things like there has to be a person whose job it is to think about what are we trying to do here? Are we on task, what's our time? All those kinds of things you need to set with the group or with some decision making body, it might be handed down or it can be the group doing it together. You need to know things like how are we making this? How are we making decisions? Is really important. All kind consensus is great, Top down decision is great. There's lots of great ways to make decisions. But you need to know, okay, and then, and then also with, with meetings, like with meetings, I mean every meeting should have what's the purpose of this meeting? What's the outcome of this meeting? So an outcome would be things like we are making a decision about whether to go ahead with X, Y and Z. Or we are developing a policy on this or we are, you shouldn't, you should be able to know afterwards whether or not you succeeded in doing the thing that you tried to do. And with many meetings they don't. The goal can't be have a meeting, the goal is to make a decision or to come up with a plan for how we're going to do this or something like that. And having criteria of success. How are we Going to. If you're trying to, I don't know if you're trying to do.

Long term DEI work, how are we going to know if our long term DEI work is successful? What are the metrics according to which that work is successful? Have those be clearer. Then we can check and see if we're hitting those metrics.

In the committees that I've seen run in the way that I described earlier, there is often no facilitator, decision maker, decision making framework. Maybe there's a clear goal, but that's why they just end up going in circles and talking. So what would be recommended here? Is it for you as that one participant to just take that role or do you then to your earlier coaching say, hey, it seems like there's no decision maker here. Yeah, I'm happy to fill that role. Unless somebody else wants to or. Yeah, yeah.

So the way to be transparent. So one thing I think one, one real example of a lack of transparency that happens in lots and lots of organizations all the time is you have a meeting, you have 12 people sitting in a room all thinking, oh my God, this is a horrible waste of time.

Yes.

Transparency is when you're thinking, when you're, when there's a voice in your head that's screaming something and you're not saying it out loud, that's a sign of a transparency failure. So I think so the way to be transparent and curious and collaborative about that is to say, hey guys, here's. I'm kind of finding that these meetings don't feel really productive and to be honest, they kind of feel like a waste of time for me. I'm curious if it feels that way to other people too. And if so, I wonder if there's things we can do about it, what people think.

Yeah.

And part of it is very often you don't have to come with a solution. So this sort of say I will step up and do this is you've already rushed to the solution a little bit. You might say. One possibility is, you know, I've done a bunch of facilitation work. One possibility is I could be the facilitator. I'm open to other solutions too. What do people think? How might we, how might we make. If other people find these meetings useless, what are some things we might do to make them not be useless in future?

How about one on ones? Those of us who are managers have countless one on ones and same with, you know, and then we'll have one with, with the, our, our own managers. I feel like they're just a waste of time and that not, not much gets accomplished and your whole day is gone because you've had one on ones all day.

Why do you do them?

Yeah, well, I, I feel like we do them because, you know, HR and everybody else tells us to, and that's what you need to do as a good manager. But I have, I have never liked them, to be honest.

What do you dislike about them?

There's no agenda. It's like touching base.

What if you had an agenda?

What would be the agenda that we need to talk about? You know, what's the goal? There's nothing that we need to check in on on a weekly basis. And if there is, I hope that we're doing that in real time already.

Do you ask the, do you ask your reports what agenda might have.

So here's the questions. We have these one on ones. And I'm curious if you're finding them useful. So that's curious. Again, you might be a curse and transparent. So I say, yeah, we have these one on ones. I have some concerns. I'm not really sure I'm finding them terribly useful. I'm curious if you're. I'm curious if you are. And if they're not, then the question is, I wonder what we can do about it. And there's a couple. I mean, to me, broadly, there's a couple of things, which is either to make them. Find ways to make them more useful because it seems to me that they're. How often do you have them?

Either once a week or every other week. And just to fill in. So I have, I have asked that on several occasions. And even if there's nothing to talk about, people will always tell me, well, we can always hop on for five minutes and say hello and cancel if there's nothing to talk about. But I like having this touch point with you because, I mean, I think that's human nature. You want to be close to your manager, know what's happening and all that.

That doesn't sound useless. Is that, does that feel useless to you?

No. And that's. Well, no, I think that's kind of the nice part.

But that doesn't feel like it's a work meeting. You know, it's like we're just saying hello and catching up on your life. And then.

So here's a really important thing that I want to get at is like, this doesn't feel like work because all that's doing is. All that's happening here is that we're connecting as humans.

Yes, yes.

So here's what I want to emphasize. You can't work with people if you don't connect with them as humans.

Yeah.

Is what I want to suggest. I don't know if that sounds right to you.

It does. And that's something that's really important to remember. And, you know, I'm talking out of two sides here, because sometimes when we're talking about in office time and someone says to me, gosh, I didn't get any work done today. All I did was catch up with people. And I'm like, that is work. That is the human connection. And that's why you collaborate well. But, yeah, so I totally get that. And then, you know.

Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. So giving yourself the advice that you would give to someone else I think is helpful. So it's not like if I say you give to someone else, just say, hey, remember that human connection is important. And one of the things that's really important to Rembrandt organizations is that they're made of people. They're made of humans. And humans are not cogs and machines. And one of the ways in which organizations fail is to operate under the illusion that humans are. And that's an illusion. Right. Like an organization that.

Operates under a false understanding of reality is an organization that's not going to function well. And so imagining that humans are like machines isn't practical. It's wishful thinking. You don't want to run your organization on wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is to imagine that people can just get work done all day without the requirement of interpersonal connection. But what actually makes. But people are actually humans and especially important. I think working organizations are made up of the relationships between people. One of the things that always sticks in my head a lot is that in the military they would look at people who performed heroic acts, people who are heroes and military heroes. And the military imagines that people do heroic acts because they love their country or because they love the their service branch or because they care about freedom or whatever. But it turns out that when they ask people why they do heroic acts, they do them for their buddies. People do heroic acts because they feel such incredibly close clinship with the other people they are fighting with, and they do them to save the people who are around them, who they care about. And if you think about how we actually function with organizations, I think for most of us, it's that we don't really care about the large organization. We want to be nice to Sally in accounting or to our teammate or to those kinds of things. So those. Those interpersonal relationships are actually what hold organizations together. I think that to reduce. People have loyalty in organizations, it's loyalty to the. The people with whom they have those personal relationships. And having those relationships is really important. And also even for building trust, for building goodwill, building all those things. In my team, when we have meetings, we understand that part of our time is to talk about what happened on the weekend and how you're doing and how you're feeling today, because we can't work together if we don't know each other. And we take. You don't take all your time for that, but you take some time.

Yeah, that's great advice. And as I think back, trying to make major changes in a large organization, and people ask me how you do get those teams to cooperate, and oftentimes I'm like, there's no way Sally could say no to me. We're, you know, we're buds. And that's. Like you said, it's work. It's so important to build those trust and relationships because she. She could never not respond to my email because it's me. Like, how could you have. That would be so rude. We're friends.

Yeah. And then. And then sort of in the middle of the spectrum, if you're just some functional stranger, she won't respond as quickly. And then even worse, if you're the person who represents some department which she perceives as the enemy, she will sort of reply grudgingly and minimally and those kinds of things. And so those relationships matter enormously.

Yeah. This has been so helpful, Misha, again, I feel like I learned so much real practical tactical tools that I can take back into my. To my daily life. So thank you. Thank you. It's been really valuable.

Real pleasure to talk to you.

Yeah. To everyone who's been listening, thanks for tuning in, and I hope you took something away as well. Until next time.