341 - Driving Sustainable Change through Motivational Interviewing with Jeff Wetherhold

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Myriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I am on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is Jeff Weatherholt, and we speak about change from a different perspective, the perspective of conversations we shall have and why change processes often fail because we are ignoring, dismissing, neglecting the air quotes soft part of it. So tune in to learn about motivational interviewing and how to help organizations for lasting change. And don't forget to scroll down to the show notes to find out more about Jeff and to subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you for listening. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Myriam.

Yeah, I had to rush to push the record button because we, we already got into a conversation and I didn't want the audience to miss out on that.

I should know better than to start that before we've hit record, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

No worries. I still fall into the trap after, what, 340 episodes?

Wow, 340.

Yeah, you might be 341. Yes. So, and we're here today to talk about a different approach to change. And I always start with the same question. So before we dive into the nitty-gritty parts, I always start with, do you call yourself a facilitator? And if yes, since when?

Yeah, I do call myself a facilitator. And I think if, if I'm thinking about since when, I have to start with the fact that speaking and facilitating was my greatest fear in the world. This is the thing that terrified me more than anything for, I guess, the majority of my life, the slight majority of my life at this point. But I also knew that I wanted to be better at it. Right? Something that I couldn't quite articulate at the time made me want to sort of walk into that fear and get comfortable. with that fear. And I still have trouble articulating it, though I value it a lot. And I was fortunate I had a job— this was back when, before I worked on my own— with really strong benefits for personal and professional development to encourage you to continue learning in your role. And I began using those to improve in my speaking and facilitation, and that began to make me confident that this was something I could do. And I could start saying, this is a A skill set that I use, I can identify as a facilitator. But also going out on my own, which was about 8 years ago that I began to, to work on my own, really allowed me to fully inhabit that role. I lost all of the buffers, I guess, that an organizational affiliation might provide. And in learning to work without those, I lost what was left of my fear.

Mm-hmm.

So It made me comfortable with facilitating in a lot of different arenas and to a depth that I might not have achieved otherwise, and also made me realize that for me at least, facilitation is a much bigger and broader skill set than just what happens in a workshop.

Yes, amen. And was that— so the desire, or the fear on the one hand, and the desire to get better at it, Was it coming from being shy or not having the articulation, but the desire to create what?

Well, I think some of it certainly comes from shyness or introversion. I think it's easy to assume that people who facilitate are naturally extroverted. And that we often learn when we talk to people who are very good at facilitation, that's not the case. I needed what facilitation would give me. I valued what I had to learn from others. And in doing work to help others lead and create change in their organizations, their teams, their communities, I knew that I needed things that only facilitation would help me tap into. I could not bring the expertise I needed. I needed to source it from others in the room.

Hmm.

So, it wasn't just like a compulsion to be less shy or less introverted. I suppose there was also this clear need that I felt. And on some level, I recognized if I'm going to do this work well and authentically, I'm going to have to get very comfortable with this.

Yeah. So what I hear is the need to, to make an impact that goes— is beyond yourself.

Yes.

And for that, the skill of tapping into air quotes Buzzword alarm, collective wisdom.

Yeah, that, that, that for me is the overarching motivation in my work, though, is to help people lead and create change that is bigger than themselves. And to do that, we need to recognize that, yes, there are resources, knowledge, you can call it collective wisdom, whatever we like in the room that we can't bring, but that we need.

And before We hit the record button, we had this conversation about think to speak and speak to think. And I admitted that I'm one of those persons who can be very annoying actually in workshops because I need to speak to think. I only make sense of what I'm actually thinking when I speak it out loud. And so from what I hear in your introduction, you're rather a think-to-speaker.

Mm-hmm. I am, and I think many of us are. So one of the— well, the discipline that's foundational to a lot of the work that I do around conversations to create change and relational approaches to change is motivational interviewing. We refer to that as MI. And one of the foundational beliefs of MI is that we learn what we think as we hear ourselves speak.

Hmm.

And I love this because it reminds us that We don't all have fixed attitudes toward change. It's very easy when we're approaching change to think that others have fixed attitudes and it's our job to convince them, to persuade them, to push them. And MI reminds us that no, that is not the case, that our attitudes toward change are complex and they vary over time. And that each of us learns what we think when we have the opportunity to hear ourselves speak. So I think many, if not all of us, benefit from that time to process verbally. I also want to acknowledge, you know, as a facilitator in a workshop, perhaps that can be a challenging moment in which to do that. I recognize that, you know, something that has deep benefit to you as a facilitator may carry risks when it comes to the participants if you speak too much. And so that's something that we all have to balance, right?

Mm-hmm.

To what degree Is it safe, for lack of a better word, to think out loud and to work through this on my own? And when do I, as a facilitator, have to check that impulse for the sake of the participants who I need to learn from, and I need to learn from one another?

Yeah, very interesting, because the underlying assumption is that when we speak to think, that we speak backwards too much. Well, because it can go into the blabbering. I agree.

Yes.

And it doesn't have to.

Yeah. I would never want to tell someone else what is too much. But anyone who's trained as a facilitator will recognize that there are moments in a room where they feel as if they're speaking too much, and they feel that for good reasons that have benefited from the training and skills that they've acquired. So there is such a thing as speaking too much.

Yeah.

When you're in a room as a facilitator, I, I don't want to be the person to tell someone else what that is ever. I trust their judgment as facilitators in the same way that I have to trust my own, which is sometimes harder to know where that line is.

Yeah.

And where to, where to pause and make space.

Yeah. And it depends on the group and the dynamics. I think where it becomes dangerous is if we have rather silent groups with a lack of energy, and then as a facilitator we try to create more energy by speaking more, speaking faster or louder, and then it becomes hard work. As opposed to maybe some groups, they lack the spark, and then the facilitator can bring an anecdote or some, some positive energy that would enlighten the Light the group.

Yeah. I have benefited immensely from being very comfortable with silence in my facilitation. And I have had others comment on this. This isn't just a strength I recognize in myself. I had someone who I was working with on a project recently tell me, I don't know how you do that. I wanted to run screaming through a brick wall. How do you just stand there and leave that space? And of course, I feel for them. When they share that. I understand that feeling. That's where I started in, in my work as well, a long time ago. But I think it's really important to not be afraid of silence and to understand that we as facilitators can learn from that, that the people in the room can learn from that, that often some of the people in the room, they need time to process. We're not all quick processors and we need time to reflect. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I have gotten a lot out of leaving room for silence to a sometimes uncomfortable extent. That discomfort can be productive.

Yes. And I think it signals trust to the group. So what I love is the silence before the very first person in a workshop speaks. And sometimes this can be uncomfortably long, but the moment one person breaks the silence who is not the facilitator, the group knows that, oh, it's their space, and we trust that they will speak.

Yeah, and I have had many of these moments where at the end of a long silence I may go to speak and I see someone gesture, I see someone's mouth start to move, and I realize that I spoke in the second before they did. This happens to me far more often than any statistician would predict, right? Like, it's— this happens to me often enough to know that there is a virtue to recognizing that impulse in myself to jump in and to pressing the pause button for a little bit because often whatever I'm feeling in the room about contributing Someone else's as well, and their contribution will be more valuable than mine.

Yeah, I would like to get back to something that you said before we went on the silent tangent about the motivational interviewing and the different perspective of change that we— if I recall correctly, that we assume that everyone has a set assumption or mindset around change. And this might not be true. And I would like, before we go into the details, hear from you. When you say change, what do you refer to so that we know what we are talking about?

Yeah. So my training and background is predominantly in change management and continuous improvement or process improvement. It is in how we create change in groups and organizations. In a structured and intentional and measurable way. These are disciplines that I have learned an immense amount from and that I value greatly. I have also learned that the way that this work is conducted often focuses on part of the work and neglects another that is very important. We focus on what I often talk about as the technical parts of change, how we plan for it, Mm-hmm. How we assign roles, how we measure its results, how we understand whether or not we're on track, the mechanisms by which we work with one another. But we don't think as much about the relational side of it or the conversational side of it. How do we talk to one another about change? How do we engage with one another? When I first went out on my own and started working directly with clients, these were the questions that I started to get where I recognized I need to have better answers for you than I have.

Hmm.

My training has not equipped me to be as helpful to you as I want to be. And that led me to learn more about a range of disciplines that I felt like might be helpful to help people have better conversations with one another about change. Motivational interviewing is the one that I have learned the most from and benefited the most from, and that is now foundational to the work I do around conversations to create change.

And thank you. So we're talking about organizational change.

Um, that is often the arena in which I work, but I will say it tends to bleed over very quickly into how people create change in other parts of their lives, particularly in their communities. I work with organizations and how they engage one another, but also how they engage their clients. In some cases, that can be how they engage groups in their communities. And I will often have the experience of having learners make a connection to things in their personal lives. And while I don't consciously set out to train people on how to help others change in their personal lives, I don't discourage people from using the skills to help them in those conversations if they're using them Responsibly. I think many, if not all, of the people who I know who do this work expertly, including people who've done it for longer than I have, they all find some way to make connections to their own personal lives and benefit from it. And so, yes, a lot of my work is focused on organizations and teams, but that, that seeps out into clients and communities, and then often into the more personal realm for learners.

I see a huge tension alarm because my, where my brain goes is, hmm, the, back to what you said about the fixed mindset and assumptions that especially when we make changes in our personal lives, um, how, how it's made difficult because of assumptions of others or the context. For instance, I stopped drinking alcohol in the beginning of the year. And suddenly a lot of dynamics with friends and family changes.

Oh my, yes.

Because I'm not the same person at a party anymore. Maybe that's an assumption, right? So how to create the conditions for the change and maybe the conversations around that change.

Yeah.

And also how does it affect, and maybe there is then the parallel back to organizations, To what extent does the environment very often support air quotes negative behavior just because it's comfortable and they don't want to engage in the change because it reminds them of their own patterns and behavior?

Yeah, I think it's— I appreciate that you connected that back because it's a nice reminder that the systems and the structures within which we work with one another They're essential to making change successful in groups and to helping it be sustainable over time. If we only focus on those systems, I think we miss a lot of what we need to do this work well. But saying that something is only part of the solution is not saying that it's not important, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, when I talk about the more traditional ways in which we teach change, As being only part of the solution, I mean that. They're an essential part of the solution. They are necessary and insufficient. We need other skills, which, in my experience, very few people have, and we teach despairingly infrequently.

So, what do you mean by that? If we break it down.

When we talk to people about how to lead change in their teams, their organizations, their communities, we often talk to them about how to plan for it and structure it. But we never talk to them about how to speak to it and how to have a conversation in an evidence-driven way to help someone else move toward change that you can't make for them. And that, for me, is pretty close to a working definition that I provide in trainings on motivational interviewing. How can we help people move toward change that we can't make for them? And implicit in that is, They need to value that change in order to do so.

So the image that comes to my mind is that we can— there's a saying in German, I don't know whether it translates to English, that we can only bring the horse to the waterhole, but we cannot force it to drink.

That translates directly to English. We also use that, yes.

Great. So what I hear is in change processes, very often we bring everyone to the waterhole, right? So we paved the way and we put on all the signs so that all the horses find the waterhole, and then they stand there and they don't want to drink. And then if I understand you correctly, it's the conversations that need to happen so that they feel open, willing, ready to actually embrace the change and to drink.

Yeah. It's easy to lead people to believe that they can plan their way out of change. And I think many people who practice this work, knowingly or not, leave learners with that conclusion, that the right plan or model will unlock successful change. If I just have the right model, the right deck, it's going to happen for my organization. This is false hope.

That's an illusion of control.

It is an illusion of control. I agree with you 100%. But it's grounded in real anxiety about making change work.

Hmm.

And we see this in the statistics on how organizations do in terms of implementing large-scale change. So, there's a great paper published in Harvard Business Review just last year with the results from an initial survey conducted in 2013 that 88% of change management projects in organizations fail to produce any lasting results. 88%. They repeated that 10 years later in 2023, 88% still failed to produce lasting results.

Question. Do they fail to produce lasting results because the— there can be 2 reasons for that. One is that the change process failed, so they couldn't get the people on board and they had to stop the project. So for instance, introducing an ERP system or SAP, one of those. So it fails because, okay, let's not do that. People don't use it. Or it can fail because after a certain while, the direction they planned for is obsolete and they have to change the change because everything moves so fast.

Yeah.

Which would be a very different reason for that fail.

Yeah. There are a lot of reasons that change can be unsuccessful. Fortunately, we have really good data on what people say they need. So there is a research organization here in the US called Prosci. They also accredit change management practitioners. I'm a Prosci accredited change management practitioner. But they do wonderful research around organizational change. And they have really rich surveys on what the most common obstacles to change are for employees and managers. So when employees talk about their obstacles, they talk— the first thing they say is a lack of awareness of the reason for change.

Hmm.

Why are we doing this? They talk about changes in their roles, fear, lack of support from leadership or trust in leadership. They talk about a lack of inclusion. When managers respond to this survey, the first thing they say is organizational culture.

Hmm.

But then they go straight to a lack of awareness and knowledge about the change. They're not sure why it's happening often. They say lack of buy-in, misalignment of goals and incentives, a lack of confidence in the ability to manage the people side of change. So, when we hear those, right, awareness, fear, Support, trust, inclusion, culture, buy-in, managing the people side. These are not exclusively, but largely relational obstacles. These are conversational obstacles. And I'm a big believer that if that's what people are telling us, we owe them relational solutions and the skills to meet those needs.

And before we go into the details on how you do that, I would be curious, what do you think is the reason why the awareness for the reason of the change, the big why, why is that missing? Because one would think that it's the easiest management saying, okay, we need an ERP system because XYZ, and then everyone at least understands.

What is the famous, I think it's a George Bernard Shaw quote, that the greatest The greatest problem that we have in communication is the illusion that it's actually happened. I just butchered that quote, but I hope that's the gist of it. You're right. This is the most fundamental thing that we have to do. And when we look at best practices around how to support others in change, it is the first thing, the first need that we need to meet for them. We know from all of the evidence out there, if people don't understand why we're doing it, It doesn't matter what else we do to support them. That need is primary. And yet we do often fall short. So, in some ways, that's very humbling that we feel like we're communicating this clearly and we're not. In other ways, I also see this as an attainable goal and perhaps even low-hanging fruit for a lot of organizations. This is an area Where there are skills to help you communicate this more clearly and engage with people to understand what are the obstacles to receiving that or processing that or making that meaningful. Because you're right, I think many of the organizations that have that issue are surprised. This, this is still a need? I thought we did this already.

Mm-hmm.

When in fact, often that's not the case. And both employees and managers call that out as one of the 2 most common reasons that they're unable to contribute to change.

And this might be the segue into the deeper conversation now about your work. What I— so one reason what I know after your explanation is that another illusion, just because we said it in the meeting or just because someone was present in a meeting doesn't mean that they listened. Just because we sent the email doesn't mean that someone read it. And I think so much of the communication in large organization happens via emails or all-hands, where then people either don't read the email or they're on their phones. Everyone gets too much information in the first place. And what I hear a lot from employees, corporate staff members, is that there's so much need for another meeting. Another training, another conversation. So, if you say that the change process needs the conversation more than the logistics, how do you make time for these conversations? And how can you actually convince organizations that this is well-invested time?

And this is one of the biggest struggles in my work. To be transparent, because there is a time commitment involved in learning to have these conversations differently. I can call out the time commitment that's already being made to have these conversations unsuccessfully.

Hmm.

I need to be able to put my finger on a pain point or a problem that is deeply felt in an organization if I'm going to be successful in engaging them in this work. And often, that is conversations that they feel they have had repeatedly And unsuccessfully. Conversations they're dreading, things that they do not want to do when they get out of bed in the morning. I can't have that conversation with that person again. Situations where people who, for good reasons due to their position, feel as if they should have quite a bit of control, feel very little. And that's a tough thing to admit. That's a need. And if we look at the amount of time that goes into having these conversations unsuccessfully, what that takes away from your own work and productivity as a leader or a manager, that's immense. We can also talk about the impact that unsuccessful change has on organizations. And we know it increases employee turnover. It reduces the productivity of those who don't leave the organization. We know it makes it less likely that those employees will engage in future change efforts.

Yeah.

So, we have data to substantiate that. But in order to get there, in order to get people to really tune into that value proposition, I find that it needs to be felt on a personal level. And I need to understand where are you spending your time right now where you know it's not being spent well and you need a better solution. It never fails that there is a conversation, that there is a group that someone's struggling to engage where they would love to have a better way to do it. And that, that for me is sort of the point of entry into why it is worth spending some time learning how to do this differently, to avoid spending quite a bit of time doing this the same way that has not worked for you repeatedly.

The image that now comes up for me is when you pull a little string from someone's pullover and then suddenly you have a naked person in front of you, right? So—

That's a very, that's a compelling image.

Yeah. Because the, okay, I think everyone can recall this. Oh yeah, we have to have these conversations, but that group, let's start with someone else. And then we kind of, we are biased or we select all the groups who are easy to get on board. And then we suddenly get so busy that we forget those with whom we should have the conversation. But the reason why we don't have the conversation with them is most probably not the change or the topic, but everything that has happened before.

And if we're not having conversations with them, we're not planning for change effectively. A sound plan for change that meets the needs of those you can already speak to well is not a sound plan for change. Whatever you need to engage those audiences who are hard to engage, perhaps they're your staff, perhaps they're your clients, perhaps—

So, how do you plan for a conversation about change with a group that you feel uncomfortable with having this conversation?

Well, from a planning perspective for a team or organization, I don't ever want to be heard as someone who's saying plans aren't important. Plans are important, but we should let go of them lightly and be willing to adapt them. I have, in 20-plus years of doing this work, never worked on an organizational change that went according to plan.

Hasn't happened.

And I don't think the next one's going to be the first one, friend. It's not the way the work goes. That doesn't mean plans aren't important. Plans are our baseline. They're our hypothesis. They're how we learn where we were mistaken and how to do this better. And there are always places to learn. So, I don't want to negate the value of a plan. But we do have to right-size our expectations of what a plan or a model can do. And as for having these conversations, leaders, managers, As far down as you're willing to go, they deserve to have the skills to have these conversations well. We have decades of evidence for how to have better conversations to help people move toward change on their own terms. And most people who I work with, not only are they not using it, they aren't even aware it exists.

So what are the skills? What does it include? To have these conversations?

Sure. So motivational interviewing is foundational to my approach here. And, you know, just as a little bit of background on that approach, MI was developed 40-some years ago at this point in mental health and recovery settings to help professionals engage with their clients, to help them make changes in their lives that obviously those professionals could not make for them, to make changes in line with their own intrinsic motivation.

This was in the healthcare system, if I understand correctly.

Healthcare and recovery. Yes, mental health and recovery, which now we think of as, of course, that's part of the healthcare system. 40-some years ago, perhaps not everyone felt that way. One interesting thing has happened in the time since. We have built up an amazing body of evidence for how motivational interviewing works. And we've learned that it's effective far beyond those settings. Some people still hear it and they think, oh, this is something you use with patients, or this is something you use in mental health settings. We know this can be helpful in organizational change and implementation, but also in fields as diverse as dentistry and pastoral care and athletics coaching. It's, it's astounding to me.

Mm-hmm.

We've got 2,500+ randomized clinical trials confirming the effectiveness of this work. Across this amazing range of fields. And we aren't using it reliably. And the reason for that is that we still often talk about it and teach it as if it's being done for those professionals in mental health and recovery settings. It needs to be done differently to reach different audiences.

Mm-hmm.

But you asked about the skills. I had to give a little background. So I appreciate you giving me the time and space to do that. You asked about the skills. And when we think about the skills of MI, we break those down into skills for listening and skills for speaking. Now, I'm a big believer that these benefit from one another. Sometimes people come to me and say, can you make me a better listener? Who doesn't want that? And the answer is, I hope so. I've been trained in how to do that. But the way in which you speak is going to help you listen differently, and the way in which you listen is going to help you speak differently. So I really don't encourage people to just say, I'm going to do this first and get expert at it, and then go do that. When we think about skills for listening, motivational interviewing tells us that we are all ambivalent about change. We have reasons we're willing to consider change, and we have reasons that we're inclined to not consider it. And those reasons coexist over time. They're in flux, in balance. That balance may change. This is completely opposed to the notion that we all have fixed attitudes. Or that we need to convince others to see things our way. So when we create change, it's not because we've, we've gotten to some moment of conversion where someone has said, everything I thought before was wrong. I believe what you have to say now. Sometimes I think people want these moments in their heads. I've never seen one in the wild, and I hope I never do. Change happens when we either turn up the volume on someone's existing reasons to consider change, or we turn down the volume on their reasons not to. And there are many ways to do that. If they're not willing to engage around some of those, we can move to others. So, it opens up opportunities for leaders and managers instead of feeling like I have to convince everyone or I can't get this done. There are many paths forward to helping strengthen their reasons to change or weaken their reasons Not to. We refer to this in MI as change and sustain talk. That's our jargon for this, right? Change talk is any language in their words, the recipient's words, in favor of change. And sustain talk, any language in their words in favor of the status quo. So we need to learn to listen for those. And we will hear both in any conversation. Often we'll hear both in the same sentence.

Hmm.

I should make this a priority, but I've got too much else going on right now. They're both there. So we need to learn to listen for those. And our goal is to amplify change talk while acknowledging but not amplifying sustain talk. We can't just ignore it, right?

If we ignore the reasons that people have not to change, they feel dismissed and they withdraw.

Yeah, they may, they may just repeat them, in which case we've amplified them. We've encouraged them to talk about the things that aren't going to help them move toward it.

By trying to shut them up.

Yeah. Yeah, or just not being attentive. They may, they may shut off. They may feel like, well, you haven't heard me. You're not interested in what makes this hard for me. And then we've made the work much harder. So that's how we think about listening, is how we hear, change, and sustain talk. Those are the raw ingredients that we work with. But then there are skills for speaking, and sometimes we use this acronym OARS, like in a boat.

Mm-hmm.

OARSes, we double pluralize it just to be funny. We talk about open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries, and sharing information with consent as the core skills. Open-ended questions aren't going to be a new concept to most people listening to this, I hope. But I will say that often, as with many things, we think about open-ended questions as a binary. They're either open or closed, when in reality this is a spectrum. A question can be more open or more closed.

Mm-hmm.

Not every question we ask needs to be 100% open, but more open questions help. We tend to over-affirm in these conversations and use a lot of affirmation that drowns out the message or the engagement that we are trying to attain. So we want to limit those affirmations but make them specific.

Mm-hmm.

Good job doesn't do nearly as much as, you put a lot of effort into engaging The client in that meeting. Reflections and summaries are how we offer back what we've heard from others. And this is the first skill often that I teach learners for how to engage in better conversations around change. In MI, we help people work toward a place where they are offering 3 reflections for every question that they ask. Relying too much on questions makes it harder. To help people move toward change. Now, I was trained as an evaluator and an educator. I was trained as someone— I was trained to be convinced that if I asked the right question, I would get what I needed. This was hard for me. The first time someone put me in a room with a trained patient actor and said, you've got 8 minutes and 3 questions, I thought, I'm exposed. I'm done. I don't think I can do this. But it's an incredibly important skill to get comfortable with reflection. And how we offer back what we've heard. That strengthens someone's agency in change. It also forces us to listen in ways that we may not have before. So if you've ever had the sensation that you were— you should be listening, but you were thinking about what you were going to say next, which I do all the time. I used to beat myself up over that. And now I think that's just part of being a human being.

Yeah.

I can't make that go away, but I can short-circuit it. If I'm the kind of person who's responding with what I've heard, now I have to listen. There's a structural constraint in place to encourage me to listen. And the last skill that we talk about is sharing information with consent. And we do that with a framework called Ask, Offer, Ask, where we'll ask a question to understand if someone's willing to receive information or listening, and then provide it, and then return power to them with another question. How do you feel about that?

Mm-hmm. Hmm.

How does that fit in with what you know? So when we talked earlier about why information isn't received or whether or not someone's listening, the easiest way to understand is to ask them and to confirm that with them. I know that's a lot in sort of one, one answer, but those are the core skills for speaking that we focus on. And those, together with the skills for listening for Change and Sustain Talks, those are our building blocks.

Yeah.

For any successful conversation about change. They need to be arranged differently for different kinds of conversations. It is not one size fits all, particularly when you're a leader or a manager. But those building blocks are always helpful and always appropriate and are things that I find any learner who's receptive to this can integrate with skills they're already using.

I love that. Thank you. And I think there's so— these skills are so important in Any conversation I think a leader or a person has with one another. So it's a good reminder. And I'm wondering, A, who will have these conversations? Because I assume that there will be group conversations as well if it's a larger organization. And then what do you do with the The content, because it's one thing, what I have experienced, it's one thing to help everyone to feel heard so that they get on board of the change. And it can quickly then create expectations of, you heard me, so now you have to help me get what I want.

Mm-hmm.

Or you heard me and now what, are you just manipulating me? So, how do you manage expectations and get possible toxicity out of it?

Yeah. It is a basic need in any organizational setting to feel that when you've been asked to give feedback, that it's being taken seriously and that it's valued. That, of course, is different from being acted on. And one of the responsibilities of a leader or manager is to make hard decisions about what feedback we can act on And what we can't. And to do that with information that may or may not be shared among all the staff. Those are hard decisions. And yet I often see leaders ask for feedback and then react to those hard decisions by disengaging from it, by just not sharing anything. And it is essential to give people insight into how their feedback has been used. It doesn't mean every phrase of it. Where you've taken feedback and it's changed what you're doing, how has it done so? And to do that repeatedly, because, you know, to your point from earlier, not everybody's going to be listening in every conversation. So any opportunity to reinforce the connection between feedback that you've asked for and something that you've done is important. And I think an opportunity that we waste at our own peril as leaders and managers. There will always be some people who will be upset that their feedback wasn't the feedback that was taken seriously. In the same way that when we talk about change, when you have decisions or autonomy or agency to offer people, there will always be people who want different autonomy or decisions or agency than what you have to offer. That's challenging. And I want to acknowledge that really clearly. And yet the most common reaction to these situations is to just not offer it at all.

Hmm.

It's to not share back what you've used when it comes to information that you've solicited, or to not offer agency or autonomy if you're afraid it might not be the agency or autonomy that they want. And when we do this, we're making every conversation that we have the hardest version of itself. I don't want to negate the fact that the hard versions of these conversations exist. And that as leaders and managers, you're going to have to manage those and I can help you manage those. That's challenging. But when we make every conversation that hard, we make this work impossible. And I meet far too many leaders and managers who are in that place where they feel as if the work in front of them is impossible, it is unattainable. And part of the reason for that is that out of fear or a lack of knowledge or skills or comfort using those that they have made every one of those conversations the hardest version of itself.

What does it mean? So, what would be the hard version and the easy version if you put them beside each other?

Well, a hard version when you're talking about receiving feedback is somebody who sees that you've taken feedback and used it, And who is upset that it's not theirs? Great. You've taken feedback. You've heard someone. You haven't heard me. In a change, a hard version may be, you've helped. I get it. I have some choice around how I execute on this organizational priority. I think the priority is stupid, and I don't want to execute on it. These happen.

Yeah.

But this is not the majority of conversations we have. The easier versions Are people who just want to know, are you actually listening? Are you doing anything with all this stuff that we dump in a survey or tell you in exercises at the end of a workshop? Or in the context of a change, do you care that I want some self-determination and freedom in my job?

Right.

We can go all the way back to self-determination theory decades ago. This is a core need for anyone to make change. We all need to know that we have some level of autonomy or self-determination. In order to be part of change and to make changes in our lives.

So what I hear is expectation management is a big one. So when going in these conversations, also to say, OK, so here to listen, to learn, and not everything that I will hear will be implemented.

That's right.

And I will get back to you at some point.

Well, I mean, the clearer you can make that expectation, the better, right? We're going to reconvene in a month. And share what we've gotten back and how that's going to influence our next steps.

And then you— who shall have these conversations? Because to come back to one of the resistors, or one of the very general replies is, you want us to make this priority, and I already don't have enough time to do all my work. So I can imagine that if I have the conversation about the change process with you as an external change manager, then it's very easy for you to say, oh, I hear you, and you can have a conversation, you must have a conversation with your manager to see how to distribute workload. If I have the conversation with my manager, then they have to make a decision about the workload.

That's right. That's right. So ideally, in an organizational setting, this starts with executive leadership. It doesn't always work that way for me, but ideally, they're the first to buy in to understanding how they can have more evidence-driven and effective conversations about change with the people who report to them.

Mm-hmm.

But it can't stop there. I mean, one of the clear risks of any change in a group setting is that the people at the top feel responsible for pulling all of the weight of that change. And it happens a lot. So, we have to reach down to that next level of leaders, at least, if not beyond that. And that varies from organization to organization, depending on their size and structure, to help them understand, how do I engage around this in an intentional and evidence-driven way? How do I help other people move toward change on their own terms instead of trying to Dictate all of those terms myself. It has to be from the people who are either in the roles to make those decisions or who are trusted in those organizations. I think it's best when it starts at the top. That doesn't always happen. I've certainly been in organizations where executive leadership weren't able to make time for this, but the level of leadership under them were.

Hmm.

And at times, that can be persuasive to executive leadership for why it may be worth Making the time for this. So top-down would be great, but we don't— none of us work in a world of ideals all of the time, right?

And I can imagine. So usually, and I think I read a study about that, maybe I make it up, but I will say it anyway, that at the top leadership, very often people would rather have a red personality. So the getting things done, being very persuasive, target-oriented, as opposed to relational, the more, the green one in the DiSC kind of framework. And then I can see how it might actually be strategic to delegate these conversations. So if the leadership team knows that, okay, we've been promoted because of our technical skills, Mm-hmm. we know that we need the change, we have decided on the change, but we might not be the one who can have these motivational interviews in a way and form that they feel authentic and caring.

Yeah, I think that's right. There can be different expectations when it's not someone who's your direct supervisor. I also think there's a risk in this of— or in any of— back up. We'll redo that answer. I think there's a risk in any skill of this nature that we look at it and that we regard it as a nice-to-have.

Hmm.

Sometimes we use this term that I really don't like, soft skills, which goes all the way back to the US military, as I understand it, and whether or not skills that someone's required to use involve machinery. How this is still applicable in our daily work and comes up as often as it does boggles my mind. But that's my tangent. It's easy to think of this as a nice-to-have. I know people would prefer to be engaged this way. I know it's the right thing to do, but I don't have time. It is not just a nice-to-have. This is how work gets done without putting it all on you as a leader or a manager. So, there's this phenomenon in behavioral psychology known as the overjustification effect. Have you ever heard of this?

Mm-mm.

Well, it makes this distinction, which I think, I hope all of us are familiar with, between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Motivation that's ours or motivation that's from outside of us. And what we know is that extrinsic motivation diminishes intrinsic motivation.

Hmm.

So, when someone has intrinsic motivation to make a change and we try to replace it with extrinsic motivation, first and foremost, we've just replaced a renewable resource with a finite one that we have to supply. We could have gotten it for free from them. Now, we have to supply it on repeat. We've replaced a resource that we know is more likely to build habits. Intrinsic motivation is more likely to help us build habits in our work with one that is less likely to build habits. We know that the value of extrinsic motivation diminishes over time in many cases. So, not only do we have to supply it, we're going to have to supply even more of it.

Yeah.

Keep this person motivated. What we've done is we've taken a finite resource that we'll need to generate even more of over time, and it's less likely to build habits, and replaced a renewable resource that can help people get there on their own. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the way in which we get change done in organizations where we can't do all of the work ourselves.

2 things come to my mind. One, the relevance of so-called change agents, so the people who are intrinsically motivated to do stuff. And an example of— so the example of the theory you just explained is the team member who always brings cake on Friday to the team and everyone loves it. And then the organization thinks, oh, this team is has such a great team spirit, you will pay people to bring cake on Fridays. And then maybe more people will then bake cake on Fridays, but this person who has done it for all these years, she will stop because it's a conflict of values.

Yes.

To suddenly have this monetary incentive because then she will be, I'm not doing it for the money and I don't want to be seen as the person who does it for the money, so I stop. And then those who continue after a year, they went, oh, actually, it's not worth the money. So they stop. And then that's what you said, that you need more and more extrinsic motivation, more and more money to keep them baking cake. Stupid example, but yeah.

That's a great example. And it sounds small, but that is exactly how this plays out when it comes to larger changes in an organization. We try to overwrite intrinsic motivation with extrinsic. And in the process, we make immense amount of work for ourselves as leaders and managers. We make it less likely that people will change. We make this work unattainable. When if we were willing to listen differently, respond differently, let go of some of the control we perceive that we have, but in reality we don't.

Hmm.

And empower or evoke what exists in others, to contribute to that change. That's how organizations and teams make this work. That's how large-scale change happens.

And something else comes to my mind that you mentioned in our exploration call about the skill set and the mindset that usually— and I think now I understand what you meant then. I'll try to rephrase it, and then you let me know. So, if I remember correctly, what you said is that most change projects want to first change the mindset of the people and then train them on the skillset. So if we stay with the example of an ERP system, we need you all to buy into this change and then we'll train you how to use the ERP. Whereas when we want to create intrinsic motivation, because it's more sustainable, we first need them to train them on the skillset. If we know how to use it, we might enjoy it, and then our mindset will change automatically.

Yeah. I, I think about this distinction between mindset and skills when I think about how I train or facilitate sessions with clients who are looking to learn them. And what I often find is— and this isn't specific to change management, this is something that I see often in a variety of professional learning settings is that we come in and we think, I'm going to change your core beliefs about this. I'm going to change your mindset, and then I'm going to teach you skills. I was trained in adult learning and professional education. That's what my graduate education is in. This flies in the face of everything that I was ever taught. about adult learning, right? That we teach applicable content, interleave it, and reinforce it over time and make this real for people. It also comes across as, for lack of a better word, and this may be a little severe, it's incredibly arrogant.

Mm-hmm.

To walk into a room of leaders, often in my case, who have decades of experience and say, I'm going to change your mindset and core beliefs in a half day or a day or maybe whatever time I have, doesn't matter. As if they've never considered this thoughtfully, as if they're not leaders for a reason. We miss opportunities to build on their existing mindset. When we do that, or worse, we send the message that their mindset is wrong.

Hmm.

And that's a great way to encourage people to tune out very quickly in the learning process. So others differ with me on this, and I That's not just okay, that's great. I continue to learn from them. When I go in to train a group in how to have better conversations about change or anything else for that matter, I'm not trying to change your mindset. I am trying to change your behavior.

Mm-hmm.

I'm trying to teach you skills that you can use and come back to me and tell me, hey, this helped and here's how, or this was confusing, but I feel like maybe I could get something out of it. Because I truly believe that if I can get you to change your behavior, your mindset will follow. If I can teach you skills to help you have better conversations, to hear differently, to speak differently, to not have to wake up dreading that same conversation you feel like you've had 5 times and just cannot have a 6th time. If I teach you skills that help with that, and if they work, if they're helpful to you, Your mindset will follow. And the mindset change that comes from you receiving value from this is going to be far more durable than any mindset change that I felt like I could enforce on you in the course of a training.

Yeah, which makes total sense. And it's almost comic to think that we could change mindsets.

And I mean, I, I'm in a lot of— go ahead, I'm sorry.

And then I still wonder how subtle all of that is, because now I'm, I'm just wondering, okay, when I, when I train on having difficult conversations, for instance, then it's all about the stories we tell ourselves. And, um, are we, are we actually thinking about the stories that the other person tells themselves? So this change of focus to actually think of the other person as another human being was fierce and is a mindset shift.

It is. And there are values underneath of every change that I do think it's important to start from and focus on, right? I need you to value before I train you in a skill that the other person's perspective is essential to having an effective conversation. That to me is much more granular and specific and actionable than trying to change someone's whole mindset. Because I can still say, okay, we have a day together or half day together. Let's say we have a half day together. At the end of that half day, here's what you're going to be able to do differently as a result of that value. I don't want you to have to look down the road and see the potential for impact from this work. months, weeks, even days down the road. You should be able to go out and do something different today. And that should help you. Is it going to solve all of your problems? No. Can it help? Absolutely. Can we build on it to help you solve more and more of them? Absolutely.

Hmm.

So I do think it's important to center on values and for that to be a collaborative process early on in a training like this. And perhaps You know, a good example of one in your case would be to value someone else's perspective, that that's an essential component.

So it wouldn't— you wouldn't consider this as a mindset?

It, to me, is much more granular. I mean, I know that some people may not value this distinction as much as I do, and that's okay. But aligning on values for me, actionable values, and then reflecting on those over the course of a training is very different From coming in and saying, I'm going to change the way you approach communication. If that's a message that learners receive, I find I'm going to miss.

Yeah.

Even if they tune in, it doesn't tend to last, right? It feels good in the room, right? I've been in a lot of these sessions where the training sort of stops at the level of platitudes, and that doesn't make those platitudes right or wrong. And then you leave, and a few days later, You have to wonder, where did it go? What did it change? What do I do with it? It felt so good at the time. It felt so right at the time. It was very easy to nod and agree with this. But what do I do with it? I'm a big believer my responsibility as a facilitator and a trainer is to help you answer that question. If I send you out of the room feeling good without any idea for what you can go do with it, I didn't do my job. I can do better.

Yeah. And then I think it's, um, very often leaving a workshop and feeling a little bit uncomfortable is actually more sustainable and more helpful because we're like, I had these moments where I learned something new, and then I walk out and I look at everything that I've done so far. I'm like, oops.

Yeah. And there's a balance of discomfort there, right? There's productive discomfort and then there's unproductive discomfort. And That's also a very individual judgment based on your knowledge of the group. So I don't, I don't have anything to teach anyone around that other than the importance of that distinction, which you likely already know. But I've, I've had learners where I have taught them some of these skills, and at the end of it, they're like— I mean, I've had people break out in tears on trainings and say, every conversation I've been having, I've been making this worse. I am part of the problem.

Mm-hmm.

And that's a miss. For me, like, that's, that's someone who is likely demotivated. I mean, we can build on that and help get them back to a healthier place, but that's, that's too severe.

Mm-hmm.

I don't want to take people to a place where they have to think of themselves that way. And it does happen. And it's a sign for me that we have to sort of correct back and say, no, you haven't been doing everything wrong. But there are things you can do better. And it's really clear in that comment, you see potential in this. You already know how you want to use this with staff, right? Let's get forward-facing.

Yeah. And at the same time, I think if someone has the ability to self-reflect and to have the awareness so quickly and to access their emotions in a way that they break out in tears and admit it in front of you, I think that Hell yeah, they have the ability to make it better.

Yes.

To walk out to their team and say, hey, I realize I've been part of the problem.

Yeah. And what a great way to model for the people who you're trying to help change. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that one of the core skills and the first skill that I often teach for speaking in MMI is reflection, how we reflect back the language that we've heard. And there are a few objections that I hear to this pretty often, but one of them is, I might be wrong. I might reflect something and it might not be what they thought they said. It might not be true.

Great opportunity for the other person to clarify.

It is a great other— yes. And it is a great opportunity for you as a facilitator to model, I'm wrong too. And I can own that and work through that and align with you. What a great way to model what we hope to see out of them.

Yeah, and I think it says so much about the culture. So are we allowed to be wrong? And to what extent are we— is our status reduced if we're making small mistakes?

Mm-hmm.

And also, how do we reflect back? I think there is a— you can reflect back as invitation for alignment. Okay, here's what I understand with humility. And, um, you can reflect back as, okay, let's summarize what has been said to proceed, where the second one might, um, sound more like arrogance maybe. And I am knowing and understanding.

Yeah.

And then it, and then of course it's scary because then if the room says actually no, And it has happened to me. I was facilitating a group of highly intelligent engineers and they were discussing internal processes and I tried to paraphrase and they looked at me like, no, let us explain how this really works. Thank you. Do you all agree to that? Okay, so we have alignment.

Yeah.

I don't need to understand your engineering processes. You need So then it was also a moment for them to bond.

Yeah.

And align over something, to explain it to me so that they explain it to each other.

They've bonded. You've modeled what you want to see from them. You've let go of incorrect beliefs that would have polluted the rest of that conversation. Now they won't. All of those good things came out of a willingness to be wrong and to have an uncomfortable moment as a facilitator. Yeah. And you talked a bit about the different kinds of reflection. I think it's important to acknowledge this isn't just repeating what people say. In MI, we coach people around— that is part of it, simple reflections. Particularly if you've got a talker, if they give you an answer and it's actually 8 answers and you just want to focus on one of them, a simple reflection can be helpful. We can also reflect the meaning that we feel like they've shared.

Hmm.

We can continue what they're likely to say next if we feel like they cut themselves off. We can reflect their emotions, how they're feeling, their values, what's important to them. Or when we get good at listening for change and sustain talk, we can reflect their ambivalence. We can reflect both in the same statement. Introduce attention to them for them to react to.

I love that. Thank you for making this distinction.

Yeah. So all of these are things that we can use. And there's no, like, cut-and-dry right or wrong moment to use any of these. This is a set of tools and skills that anyone who's trained in this Mm-hmm. Can use their judgment to use well in conversations. But when we talk about asking fewer questions, these are the things that we want to offer back, right? So if somebody tells me they're really unhappy with a session I did, I could ask them, why don't you like it? I'm not going to learn a lot from it, right? I could reflect any number of things. You aren't getting enough out of this. That's their meaning, I think. You're frustrated by what you've heard so far. It's their emotion. You aren't happy with your experience and you expected something from this. That's both sides of ambivalence. Change and sustain talk. Any of those things is going to engage them on a deeper level than a simple question might and place power with them to tell me if I'm right or wrong and to expound on that.

And this circles back to the beginning of our conversation of the importance of silence. Because This reflection becomes more powerful than a question only if we then pause and hold the silence for the other person to respond to it.

You are so right. When I teach people this skill, often they'll start by reflecting. They'll reflect paragraphs. Sometimes they'll chase them with a question and spoil the whole thing, right? But even when they do that, there is gold in there. There are always very crisp and clear reflections in there. My job is not to tell them, you did it wrong, here's how to do it right. It's to help them see there's something really valuable in there. What you need is not what I have to give you. It's the confidence to focus on what's most important and helpful there and let go of the rest and say less.

Mm-hmm.

Teaching people to speak less and get comfortable with silence is part of this. When they see Oh, I wasn't doing this wrong. I was drowning out what I was doing right. That's a much more productive insight and one that I have much more success getting people to act on and improve with.

And it's so interesting because I think it has a direct impact on authority in a positive sense, where if we can be concise with one reflection, help someone feel seen, heard, or valued, It's a sign of authority, whereas when we don't believe in ourselves, and then we make out of this one statement an entire paragraph, and then we blabber at the end, and we forget about the full stop, and then maybe at the end, our voice rises a bit so that it sounds like a question.

Yes.

Just to invite the other person to share.

Yes.

Then we lost all the authority.

And then what do I do with that? What they're certain of is that you're not very certain of yourself. That's the easiest thing to take away from that. This is also part of what happens with affirmations, where sometimes I'll see people approach difficult conversations. Well, I know that you're trying and you're so valuable to this team, and it's been a hard quarter on this project. But what I took away from that is you're nervous about this conversation.

Yes.

You're uncertain about how to approach it. What's not clear to me is what you want from me, and it's likely to get lost in that. So, you know, I don't want to encourage people to never affirm what they see, but treat it like spice in a recipe. Use it judiciously and specifically in ways that will be meaningful to that person. When we over-rely on it, we drown out what we're trying to communicate.

Reminds me of the bullshit sandwich. Maybe we, we try to hide the— yes, the critical feedback and lots of affirmations that are just there to comfort our own nervousness.

That's exactly right. And people know that for what it is.

Yeah.

And they'll recognize a different conversation when they're having it.

Yeah, yeah. What remains your facilitation challenge?

Oh, I have to pick one? Right now, the one that is top of mind for me— well, first of all, one of the things I love about facilitation is it's always challenging. I think it will always be challenging. I don't ever think I'll be so expert at this that there's not a challenge that I'm not in some way, like, self-conscious or bothered by. And that, that's reassuring to me. I get to learn for as long as I keep doing this.

That's a privilege. Mm-hmm.

But the one that's on my mind right now, even though it may feel a little small, I do a lot of virtual facilitation, reproducing the kind of learning that comes from small groups in a room virtually. I have not found a great substitute for that moment in a room where you break people out into small groups and you take a step back and you look across the room and you read their body language and their engagement with one another. And you instantly have a sense for how is this landing?

Hmm.

Is this something that people are taking and running with in their own ways? Or not so much. That's a hard thing to do virtually. So, you know, there are ways to do it that I found better than others, but I— when I have to do this virtually, and it's important to get people into small groups, particularly to practice or role-play in these kinds of conversations, and practice is essential to learning this, I wish I'd found a better analog for that moment.

Mm-hmm.

In the room where you can take the step back and observe everyone working in their groups.

Interesting. This could become an entire conversation. To what extent it's actually important. Do we need to know?

That's a reasonable question. That could be something that I feel like I need that I don't.

Because I also work mostly online. So the good thing on Zoom is you can see whether people speak. So you can see whether their microphone is moving or not. So I do observe that, whether there is, whether they're speaking and whether there's only one person speaking. But then the moment they come back and you can sense, do they want to speak immediately? Did they have a valuable conversation? And then, because very often also we, we don't know. And I think to the nervousness then to overinterpret, misinterpret, to think maybe a group is rather silent and then to step in to start explaining. again, although they just needed the moment. I think I do like the veil of ignorance. Ah, um, in the online space, because I'm— do I need to know?

Yeah. So perhaps my number one facilitation challenge is that I need to become more comfortable with that veil of ignorance. That could very well be the case. Yeah.

Thank you for sharing that, and apologies for challenging it.

I don't, I don't feel challenged. I feel enriched. I think that was really helpful to hear. And We always run the risk of our challenges being things that are a little different from how we frame them to ourselves. This is part of why these kinds of conversations and relationships are so valuable.

Yeah. Thank you. Last question. We have 2 minutes left. What would be your advice to your younger self?

To be more honest about what I didn't know. I think I worked in a lot of environments where it didn't feel safe to me to acknowledge what I didn't know. And where it took me longer to learn things that ended up being very valuable to me because I didn't feel able to be honest about what I didn't know. That confidence to be wrong or ignorant, I suppose, it's an easy thing to sort of wave off. But to me, it's a very important kind of confidence.

Mm-hmm.

And relatedly, I would tell myself to trust my discomfort.

Mm-hmm.

And explore it. I can look back on a lot of moments in my career where something made me uncomfortable or uneasy, or where I heard someone's problem and responded to it, but I wasn't sure why. And in hindsight, many of them turned out to be really important and informative. I just didn't know why at the time. So to trust that reaction, to trust that discomfort, And be willing to just sit with it and learn from it. I think it would have made my 20s a lot easier.

Yeah, that it's data. It's our body who tells us that something is off and we have to pay attention to.

And in the absence of having ways at the time, I think, to recognize that and process that, that were constructive, Sometimes that meant moving toward ways that were destructive for myself. And I'm grateful to, I think, have moved past that. But I certainly wish I could help my younger self have done that earlier.

Thank you. And what comes to my mind is how many— and you might know this better than I do from your work— how many leaders still in this unhealthy behavior of your 20s, that discomfort and then numbing that, or the, the fear of admitting not to know, although asking the question would open so many things on so many levels.

Yeah, it is a privilege to help them get there. And I truly believe that anyone who I walk in the room with can get there. That is, maybe that's a little takeaway at the end of this episode is that, you know, The first precondition for having a successful conversation about change is believing that the other person can change. And I have to believe that when I walk into a room, that every learner in that room, virtual or physical, can change. And if you don't believe they can change, you're not a bad person. We've all reached that point with others, whether we're comfortable admitting it or not. You are the wrong person to help them change.

Love that.

They can change.

And we cannot force them to change.

I can help.

Yeah.

And that is enough.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

Myriam, thank you. This conversation has been a joy. I really, I really appreciate it and value it.

Yeah, me too. We covered a lot of ground and a lot of layers. Thank you.

We certainly did.

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