S2E30: Five Reasons You Have Drama at Work, an Exclusive Workhuman Chat

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Cy Wakeman. Many of you know I'm a drama researcher. I research how much drama there is in the workplace. Now, we've considered drama as a price of doing business, just a cost of doing business. We accept that this leak out of our bottom line. Just because for years we've said, oh, if you get people together, oh my gosh, we're gonna have personality conflicts. Okay, they're not personality conflicts. They are judging of one another, their righteous ego behavior. Oh my gosh, you're just always gonna have, you know, a lot of storming and before you ever get to norming. And I heard all of these things as I came into the workplace as a leader. And with my research background, I started to see where we had come to adopt some wisdom that we never questioned. And I started to question that. One of the first things I found out is the average person spends 2.5 hours a day in drama. You guys measure performance. These are good performers in drama, walking around going, I'll perform, but with a grudge. This is sick and wrong, and I wasn't consulted, and I will save you this one last time. But holy cow, you guys better give me hazard pay. And— Oh my God, it's awesome. Right? And so what if you could perform just wonderfully? And people have a lot of things we believe, like work is hard, we must suffer. And so I started to use both my research and therapy background to say, you guys, what if suffering is optional? What if there's 2 ways to go through your day, joy or misery, your choice? And as I started to really define drama, I came to understand that drama is actually just emotional waste. You can move energy to results and great relationships and wonderful experiences, or you can move energy away from that. There's just— energy is very binary. It's going towards something or away from something. So what if drama is energy, mental energy, that's going away from results, or it's making results more difficult? Once I defined drama as emotional waste, it opened up a whole world to us because we know how to get rid of waste. In the workplace, not life science waste, that's red container stuff, but we know how to get rid of waste in the workplace. How do you get rid of waste in the workplace? We now have 20 years of business discipline, 30 years process improvement. How do you get rid of drama, which is emotional waste? Not just using a better process, more improved process, but a better mental process. And what I found out when I came into the workplace as a leader is most of my colleagues, most of my bosses, most A lot of my team had not learned healthy mental processes, and they were using really sloppy ways of mentally approaching work. And they were doing really sinful things like believing everything they think. Somebody walks by them, and all we know for sure is that potentially someone walked by. Potential no hello. The quantum physicists would tell us nobody even just walked by. They're a projection of your molecular emotion. They don't even exist, right? But if you use a poor mental process, somebody walks by, you go, oh, I know what this is about. Ever since she got that promotion, she thinks she's all that and a bag of chips. Can't talk to little people, the people that brought her to the dance. Once we make a decision to believe our own thinking without question, we feel we have proof she's rude. And once I believe that she's rude, I treat her rudely. And then how she responds rudely, I go, see, I'm right about stuff I make up. And we continue to get reinforcement for our poor mental processes because they feed the ego. They have us seeing insults where there isn't any. And the ego, when you're seeing the world through the ego, and most people don't understand how the ego plays them at work. When you're seeing the world through the ego, your data's corrupted. You're using the least intelligent part of you. Humans are the only ones that have egos. We're the only species We're very proud of this, and we overuse it. It's like the only part of our brain that really differentiates us. So I started to think about what if we could recapture, upcycle, conserve 2.5 hours per day per headcount? So John and I were just talking comp. Take your headcount, multiply salary and benefits by 816 hours a year per person. You want to see at the table? Imagine going to your CEO and going, I can upcycle 816 hours per headcount, and put it back into joy at work, results, engagement, experience. So I saw that as what I would call a terramazing opportunity— terrifying and amazing. And I thought, here's a piece of waste. We are spending millions to get seconds of waste out of our manufacturing lines. What if we looked at the people component and we were able to move people out of this waste? It would be such an opportunity. So I started to look at our Our current leadership philosophy, traditionally what we're teaching people. And we teach people like, your job is to inspire others, your job is to motivate others. As a therapist, when I first sat in leadership training, I said, you guys, this isn't evidence-based. Evidence about motivation— you can't motivate another. Motivation is a choice. Inspire. The Latin root of inspiration means to breathe. If I'm a leader and my job is to breathe for others, This sounds expensive and unsustainable. Right? And so I started to look at what we traditionally teach leaders, and I started to bump up against it with some real research. And I moved away from what you see in some of the other vendor halls at other conferences, and I just said, let's see if what we're teaching is true, if it would actually work, and if it's connected to the evidence in human behavior and behavioral economics and all those places. So I found 5 areas you need to transform. That's 2 and a half hours Of drama, about 32% of it comes from ego behaviors: venting, judging, gossiping, scorekeeping, tattling, tattling, venting, venting. To modernize leadership, we need to insist on shared accountability for what you bring to the table. Everybody's like, I— my opinion should count, and we should have anonymous things, ways I can put, you know, information out there. And even if I'm just upset about the parking, I should be able to email the CEO and use a couple thousand dollars worth of his or her time to complain about my parking. I'm not interested in parking. I know we freed it up for the patients, but I'm pretty inconvenienced. And I found that there's so many ways in HR that we feed the ego. We have step-downs. The leader gets taken out and we have anonymous meetings with their people. And I started to preach self-regulation. Your opinion should count, but you need to add value. And so we encourage things like open doors, which I thought sounded boundaryless. I did this study, the average open door meeting— hey, do you have a minute?— lasts 45 minutes in length. The typical conversation is tattling, scorekeeping, speculating, things that never happened, things that never would happen. Story. Typical conclusion is, please don't do anything, I just wanted you to know. Now, I want my door to be open, but we're gonna share accountability. Don't bring me unprocessed work that you dump on my table. He who processes it will take action. Hey, Cy, do you have a minute? Yes. Do you have an SBAR? It's a template for self-reflection. You need to fill out S. What's the situation? One sentence or less. Don't write a story. Write a sentence that will be reflective. What's the relevant background? We don't work for the History Channel. I don't wanna know your ages. I want you to bring the relevant background. What's your assessment? What's your critical thinking? And what are your recommendations, plural? Because if you say, here's what we have to do, you're not being a great consultant internally. You're telling me your preference and your righteousness and your judgment. What are multiple things we could do to move forward? So we started to just help people understand venting. People don't need time to vent. Venting is a behavior. It's dysfunctional. A feeling takes one sentence or less. Feelings we express to release them. Venting is the— what we use to keep a hold of feelings so that they never never die, so that we can always be the victim. And I started just separating those things out and help people understand how to loosen people's grip on their ego with this magical thing called self-reflection. Even to the point now, we teach people at the table when they're about to give their opinion to self-reflect one moment. Is what I'm about to say gonna add clarity or chaos? Mm-hmm. Is this my preference, or will this actually help us move it forward? Is this my opinion about stopping the action, or is this my expertise to tell you how we could do what the organization requires. We're starting to put shared accountability on the employees. And when people say, I want to bring my whole self to work, I tell them, please do not do that. I want you to bring your most evolved self to work. I want your diversity, but I want your most evolved self. I want you toggle-switched up in high self, operating for the good of our organization and the people we serve. Second source of drama, accountability. We are out preaching accountability. Very few people understand it. We think it can be taught as a skill set. It's a mindset. It's not a skill set. It's another place. Self-reflection is, is the foundation for accountability because venting is the ego's way of avoiding accountability. And it's the ego's way of avoiding self-reflection. So when you vent, you are not self-reflecting. The world is your problem. You can't succeed because of your circumstances. You're the victim. When you self-reflection, it moves you to a different part of your brain, right? That simple act is the ultimate drama diffuser. Moves you to a simple part of your brain, and that's where accountability begins. But the number one question I get asked— we teach wonderful courses on harboring accountability— is, how can I make this person do this? Now, the first assumption is faulty, that your problem is another person. Okay. Second, you can't make other people do things unless you really want to have hardcore performance management, sticks and carrots and stuff. But you can stop enabling people. And I teach leaders to stop enabling people because there's 2 ways that my view of reality gets corrupted. My own ego, where I see myself as the victim and not the insult. And all of you enabling me so I never meet my reality head on. What's that look like? I worked in healthcare. You need to clock in, in the olden days, on floor 2. We worked on floor 3. People would race past floor 2, go to floor 3. They'd go, crap, I forgot to badge in. In healthcare, you have to badge in. Everything goes under your badge, right? They go, crap, I forgot to badge in. I need to run back down and do that. That would take me like 2 minutes. Oh, I'm gonna find Wakeman, my manager. Sy, will you badge me in? Now, typical managers are like, absolutely, I'm here to serve. I said that. I said, absolutely. And just so you're very clear, In your decision-making and have good data. Me badging you in is an exception report. It takes 10 minutes. So go to your team, get covered for 10 minutes, apologize to them, ask for their coverage, and come with me and we'll get you badged in. And while you're sitting in that chair, you haven't done your fire training, so watch this video so I can sign you off on that, because I'm in your file and I'm just seeing all the other things we need to catch you up on. Now, the next time You go to make a decision, you have better data. I didn't badge in. Crap, it'll take me 2 minutes. I'll just have Wakeman. That'll take me 10. I'll just run down and badge in. Now, do you know what happens to your memory when you start having to run yourself back down and badge in a lot? Mm-hmm. You go, I am not going to forget to do that anymore. Now, this isn't punitive, but accountability doesn't get hardwired in organizations because of that. So we've taken a whole different approach to accountability. The third source of drama is people have come to believe that buy-in is something the organization needs to do for them. They've forgotten buy-in's a verb. I can only work with the willing. You don't come in willing, game over. No, really, how are you gonna buy me in? And people will commit, but conditionally. I am all in as long as we always have enough people, and I'm consulted, and priorities don't change, and change is slowed down, and I never go uninformed, and I get consulted, and we have great IT, And the leaders are never hypocritical, and we don't ever, like— You need people that I'm like, are you committed? I'm all in. Awesome. You get we probably will never have a working day in North Carolina? It's called reality. Given that, I'm in. You get we're chronically underfunded? Uh-huh. It's called work, right? That— see, there are people that understand the value they add doesn't happen in perfect circumstances. Why would we need humans? Just Amazon.com that thing. The only value humans add is in imperfect circumstances. We're the risk mitigation patrol. And so it's really helping people understand there's no third option. Sorry, I don't necessarily agree with the strategy. Oh my gosh, let's talk. Did we have an unconscious bias? Does it somehow alienate certain populations? Is it offensive? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? Is it not in alignment? Oh, it's not. No, I just, I don't like it. I think we should have gone the other direction. Okay, thank you for that. So what is your plan to get joyfully on board, come into work Monday and just be like all in joyfully? Well, Saya, I'm just— I'm not gonna do that. No, really, like on a scale of 1 to 5. I'm only like a 2. What's your plan? Let's just— let's go slower. A 3 by Monday. Like, how do we just— it's called motivational interviewing if you're a therapist. Like, I know you can't quit drinking all at once. What if we just didn't drink Scotch? Like, let's just— Sorry, I'm not gonna get on board. Oh my goodness, then what's your plan to transition off my team? I love it here, I'm staying. Oh, thank goodness, I'd love your skill set. Then what's your plan to get on board? Well, I'm not gonna. Oh my gosh, you think there's a third option? That you can stay and hate, you can stay and resist, you can stay and sabotage, you can stay and remind us every year how great it was 5 years ago. There's not a third option. And that's where I started to really show what the resources research that your variance in your processes, you keep improving processes, your variance is in your buy-in and accountability levels, not your processes anymore. We've gotten good processes. And until we deal with the human variance where people are just partially bought in, we aren't ever going to achieve the amazing potential we can. Third, this whole way we approach change is disastrous. It will create complete chaos. Change management, you're taught, leaders, change needs to be least disruptive to the people. Copy. Coddle the people, slow it down, communicate. I went to a change management course a long time ago. It was lovely. We filled the walls up with flip charts on how we leaders could be great at leading our teams through change. And you know it all. What is the why? And overcommunicate, and superuser training, and go-live support, and snacks in the break room, and t-shirts, and— right? I wasn't even being snarky, you guys. After 2 and a half days— after 2 and a half days, I'm like, okay, I'm in. I'm a leader. I'll do all of these things. I believe in shared accountability. ability as a therapist. So what do the employees need to do? I don't know. And the silence hit the room. And the conclusion was like, well, employees need to like wait for it, resist it, get in drama around it, like critique it when it comes, be mad at you for it. And I was like, oh my goodness. So I came up with a whole different change model. Right now in change management, we work to keep change least disruptive to the people. Our job is to make change least disruptive to our customers and our patients. Our job as leaders is to deliver ready, willing, and able people. And so I started hitting the change myth. How many of you told people change is hard? It's not true. What's more true is change is only hard for the unready. If Alex and I have you as our employer, and you give us the brand new smartphones that we need to use to do our jobs, I stay technically savvy. He's had the same flip phone since high school. Change is not hard equally for us. If change were what's hard, it'd be equally hard for both of us. I get my new phone. I've never skipped an upgrade. It takes me 5 minutes. I go to the cloud, get my stuff. I know how to keep professional and personal separate, and I put it out there, and I'm online in 5 minutes. Maybe it's a day or two to learn how to use my cool new phone and some of the features. Flip phone boy is curled up in a fetal position, asking if you're gonna have superuser training, can he get a scribe to run his phone for him? for a few. And then we say change is hard, but change is not equally hard. If change was what was hard, it would at least be equally experienced by us, but change is hard for the unready. And we tell people like, you need time to grieve. Of course. That was Kübler-Ross's work, and she worked with dying patients in hospice. I'm just switching out your software. Like, I need time to grieve. Like, how attached were you? And here's an idea, don't get attached this time. Fine, I won't learn it. No, get fluent, but not attached, right? And so we really have to change the way we talk about change. And I'm not here to just disrupt. My team prides ourselves on using our research to figure out where we need to modernize leadership, and then we offer you the ideas and the solutions. The last thing that is really wrong, and I'm gonna talk about tomorrow, is this whole engagement philosophy. Engagement surveys are now giving people the opportunity to vent in the form of a survey. Mm-hmm. And so we have completely changed engagement. We've added in accountability. If you were taking one of our surveys, we ask you engagement questions and we ask locus of control psych questions that, unbeknownst to you, test your accountability levels. And then we give you the feedback sorted by accountability level so you can turn up the volume on your best people and turn down the volume on your victims. Because why should every vote count the same, Vicki Victim and Debbie Driver? We have— we differentiate. Differentiate everywhere. When we comp, when we hire, the only place we don't differentiate, you guys, is on this whole everyone's opinion should count. And I'll talk more about that tomorrow, but we've really got to revolutionize all of the avenues out there where we're trying to get everybody's voices heard. I would just be very careful because accountability without— or I'm sorry, engagement without accountability leads to entitlement. And I'm not sure if you've noticed the trends. So with that, I want to turn it over. Anita, I probably more than my time, but I'm excited about the future of leadership. And it's all about leaders' role in helping move people to higher levels of consciousness so that we can work with all of our intelligence rather than just our ego, which is mostly what we're plugging and playing at work. So thank you. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama and entitlement And transform your world place. I'm Cy Wakeman. Thank you.