MBA1773 Guest Teacher – Michael Solomon – How To Optimize Yourself & Team

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Today's guest teacher, Michael Solomon, is the author of the newly released book Game Changer. He's also the co founder of 10X Management, the world's first tech talent agency. Some of the companies we work with are American Express, Google, hsbc, Verizon, Yelp, and so much more. And he's here today to help you optimize yourself and your team. I'm going to pass it on to Michael now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, you're in good hands. Take it away, Michael.

Hi everyone out there in podcast land. This is Michael Solomon and I am thrilled to be joining you. Today. We're going to be doing some lessons on optimizing yourself and helping to optimize those that you manage. With that said, let's get down to business. I love self improvement. I am a self improvement junkie. And clearly, since you're listening to this, we probably have that in common. For all of us to improve and grow, we need feedback. We need it more than anything else. It's the fastest route to improving and optimizing ourselves. For those of us who are managers of other people, it also means we need to give it and we need to get it. And we call this phenomenon the double hat world. Often in a given day, a given week, even sometimes in a given hour, you need to switch hats between getting and soliciting feedback for yourself and giving feedback to those in your charge. If you're at the top of your food chain in your organization, then you might need to find someone else to play this role for you. It's really important that you have somebody who's going to give you that feedback. If your manager or boss is not able to provide it, you may need to seek it from somebody else. What do these people look like? Well, ideally, it could be somebody in your organization who is adjacent to you or above you. It may not even be your direct boss. The criteria of these people is that they have some objectivity and they have some skin in the game. This could also be a coach, a mentor, a rabbi, a priest, a therapist, although they're not out in the world seeing your work in practice. So that may not be the ideal person for this, but there are unique relationships that exist among all of these entities. So what do we say when we mean objectivity? Number one, they need to be able to observe you in your work life, or at least in your life, because this is all of these Skills apply to both work and other areas. They need to not have a predisposed point of view about you. A spouse can play this role, but they're often carrying baggage that might get in the way of giving you the feedback that you need to get because they have their own agenda. We want people who are really able to see you for who you are now. We also want people who have skin in the game. We want people who win when you win and lose when you lose. One of the other important criteria for these people is that they can give you the hard feedback. There are a lot of people in the world who are lovely, but when it comes time to saying the hard things, they shy away. I personally like my feedback on 11. I don't need flowery surroundings. I need to know where are the places that I can improve. And I'm eager for the feedback as directly and in some cases harshly as is needed. It also has to be somebody from whom you can hear the feedback. If it's somebody who you have a very conflicted relationship with, that may be a blocker before you even listen to what they have to say. The main thing we need from this person is the ability to help you see what you can't see for yourself. This hearkens to a concept called Johari's window. In this concept there are four panes of a window and all people have them. The first pane is that which you know about yourself, which everybody knows about you. The second is that which you know about yourself, which no one else knows about you. The third is those things that no one knows about you and you don't know about yourself. And then the most important one for our conversation is that which other people know about you, that you do not know about yourself. You are looking for someone who can give you insight into those behaviors and those actions that you don't necessarily see for yourself. Now, how do you get this feedback? Well, most of us have a performance review once or twice a year and think that that's adequate. I would posit that that is woefully inadequate because we are performing our tasks, our jobs, our role in life and at work on an ongoing basis and the feedback needs to be as free flowing as possible. It's really important as you do this that you're not doing it to alleviate insecurity and you're not looking for positive validation. That is nice to get, but it's not going to help you improve in the same ways that getting constructive, meaningful feedback about your deficiencies will. By this I mean if you ask somebody, did I do that? Well, you've now asked a very leading question, and unless they're very bold, they're just going to say yes. I think a better question might be, was there anything I could have done better? How might I have improved? What would you suggest for the next time I do this? These are the kinds of questions that lead to answers that are actionable and useful for optimizing. Now, one of the challenges in getting feedback is, is how you approach it and receive it. If you do that with genuine curiosity, you're creating an environment where people are happy to give it to you and more and more comfortable to do so. If you do it with defensiveness, people are going to not continue to give it. They're going to run for the hills. And you're also not really getting the benefit of it because if your whole position is, no, no, no, I didn't do that, then you're not actually getting the benefit of the feedback. It's super important to approach the feedback you're given with curiosity. Hmm, I didn't realize that I did that. Oh, that's really interesting. That curiosity is really what allows you to see the feedback and see the guidance as areas for improvement. Let's flip this over and switch from getting feedback to giving feedback. Think of this as paying it forward. Think of this as your opportunity to help other people with which you interact with every day continue to improve and benefit themselves in their lives. If you don't feel that benevolent, well, that would be a bummer. But let's say you don't feel that benevolent. Think about the fact that the better your team does, the better you do, and it's really in your self interest. And this goes right back to the whole skin in the game idea we started with at the beginning. You have skin in the game for your team. So once we acknowledge and accept this, then we can see that giving feedback in the most productive and healthy way is going to benefit us and benefit other human beings. So let's start out by approaching this with kindness and humanity. It's very easy when you see a team member who's having a problem or failing at a task to quickly throw criticism and feedback at them in not the most productive way. Especially when we get scared, those are the moments that we behave the worst. If we feel that they're going to blow a big presentation that's very important to our success, we might lash out in all of the worst ways. So first thing is stop, take a deep breath, evaluate the situation, and realize that in all likelihood, you and that person want the same outcome and they need your help to achieve it for you and for the team. The other thing to note is, just as you need and will benefit from frequent feedback, the same remains true for your team. It needs to happen on a regular basis and often in real time. That doesn't mean in the middle of the meeting where they made a mistake, but shortly thereafter. Now, this is one of the most important points when we talk about giving feedback. We all know the term constructive criticism. It's really important when we offer people feedback that we do it constructively. And what that means is prescriptively, if they've done something in a way that wasn't productive or helpful, explain to them how it could be done differently. And if you happen to be in a situation where you don't know how they should have done it differently, at the very least, explain what the outcome you were after was and let them figure out how to get there. But ultimately, if you tell someone they did something wrong without any benefit of how to do it better, you've really just made them feel bad and you're actually working against them and your own self interest. There's tons of data and science out there that speaks to the fact that negative feedback or constructive feedback needs to be balanced with positive feedback. The recommendation from the people who have studied this is that you give five pieces of positive feedback for each piece of negative feedback. That may seem excessive or really hard to do, but that's what the science showed. At the very least, if you aim for that and fall short, you will certainly be giving more positive than negative feedback, which is good for the member of your team. It's good for their ego and it's better for their performance, which is really what you're after. Now, I want to come full circle to a topic that we've gotten into a little earlier, which is how you approach the feedback. Every once in a while you're going to run into somebody, no matter how well you give the feedback, is going to deny, disclaim, lie, or do anything they can to say that they didn't have anything to do with the outcome. These people have something that we call the sabotage impulse. Unfortunately, when you really run into somebody with this, there is not much that can be done to improve it. When you really learn and find that you're dealing with somebody who wants to take zero responsibility for their role in things, it's pretty important to get them out of the picture as quickly as possible. These are people who are not coachable These are people who are not willing to listen and are not interested in doing better. And the real problem with that is it can bring down a project, a company, a culture, and it's really hard to have them on your team. As a final point, how you communicate with your team and how you're communicated to is so important. And we do so much now in writing that we forget when we proffer feedback in a particular way, how it's received. One of the techniques that we're very proud of in our organization that helps to solve this problem is when someone is providing written feedback, we require that they read it out loud to another member of the team before it gets sent. And we require that they do that in two ways. First, they read it with the tone that they intended, and then they read it as though they were really angry. And if the person they're reading it to can hear it as that really angry way, even though the words expressed otherwise, then we know they need to keep writing until they get clarity, until their tone and their intent is really clear. Sometimes that's as simple as saying, I hope. I hope my tone in this email is clear. I was intending to provide some constructive feedback and let you know that you were a valued member of the team. At the same time, an email that starts or ends with something like that is much less likely to be misconstrued and offers a lot more room for being received the way it was intended. It's been a real pleasure sharing some of this with you today. I sincerely hope some or all of it was useful if you liked what you heard here. We've got a book coming out on September 22nd on HarperCollins called Game Changer. And we have a book website that has some quizzes which will help you evaluate how you're doing on some of these things, as well as our own podcasts. And that's game changerthebook.com as a final note, if you had questions or if you want to be in touch, my email address is michael10xmanagement.com and I'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much and I'll see you out there.

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Great lesson by Michael Solomon. Don't forget to check out his work over@10x management.com if you head on over there, you can also grab his book Game Changer. I want to touch on a few things that Michael mentioned in his lesson that are very important that I have really learned to implement in my own businesses. One of the things I was very weak at is remembering to give my team members feedback. I was so busy just run the business, doing things, doing the marketing, being the face of the business and I didn't spend enough time going back and forth with my team members and give them feedback that could be helpful. This is why I now must do one on ones. I have these scheduled throughout the year where I sit down with my team members with a quick call where they can give me feedback and I can do the same. I also on a monthly basis try to check in offline, whether on Slack or on Basecamp or whatever app you use to communicate via chat with your team. Where I just check in on them, how are they doing? How's their family, how's work going? What's their biggest challenge, what's their struggling? Where I just check in on them, where I just ask them how they're doing, how their family's doing, how is the project they're working on progressing, what are their challenges? The other thing I want to touch on is that you're responsible for getting feedback on your work, on your decisions, on your actions. You can't expect people just to give you feedback. You have to elicit feedback, whether that's with your mentor or your coach or your own teammates. This is why it's really helpful to be part of a mastermind group, whether that's a paid or free mastermind group that you've organized. Having a group of people that you can count on to give you regular feedback is important. You need to have this. You need to keep yourself honest. You need to know that you have weaknesses and you just shore them up as much as you can or you don't have any blind spots. And also just to get some outside perspective on what you're doing. Sometimes when you're working and you get your head down, you don't really get that perspective. Sometimes we know our industry, our market, our product too well that we don't really relate to our customers anymore. So getting that feedback from outside is super, super helpful. Thanks so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love it, you hear hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a beat. So you get all your episodes automatically downloaded to your device. We're on every podcast app. So whatever podcast app you're on, just hit subscribe. Whether it's Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Apple Podcast or Himalaya, we're on every app. Hit subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you have trouble remembering asking for feedback and giving feedback, put it in the calendar. Make an event in your calendar to remind yourself I have to do this. If it's not on the calendar, it's not going to happen. That's just the bottom line. So I need to make sure that anything I have to do is in my calendar so I'm reminded and I make time for it to get done. Otherwise, it just doesn't get done if I don't carve out the time. If I don't make it a priority by putting it in the calendar, I'm dreaming if I think it's going to happen just because I know I have to do it. Thanks again for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where we discuss why money solves all your problems and how to get it. Don't miss that one. I'll check you then. Until then, take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.