In this episode of the No Ego Podcast, host Sy Wakeman answers two listener questions. The first concerns an HR team facing an office relocation and employee anxiety about seating and office assignments. Wakeman advises leaders to shift focus from personal preferences to managing the energy of their teams, emphasizing the development of flexibility, comfort‑independence, and ego‑reduction. He suggests using the move as a diagnostic tool to assess employee readiness and to cultivate competencies such as adaptability, tolerance for discomfort, and self‑reliance. The second question deals with a team that becomes stressed when a colleague makes a mistake. Wakeman introduces a reality‑based framework—"What do I know for sure?"—to help individuals separate facts from ego‑driven narratives, thereby reducing stress, improving interactions with patients, and enhancing overall safety culture. He illustrates how ego‑fuelled assumptions amplify stress and negatively affect patient experience, and he outlines steps to re‑anchor thinking on observable facts, take constructive action, and model calm, self‑reflective behavior. Throughout, the episode stresses that managing energy and curbing ego are essential for both everyday operations and larger organizational changes.
Questions this episode answers
Use the "What do I know for sure?" framework: identify the factual event (e.g., information missing), separate it from ego‑driven interpretations, ask what resources are available, and choose a constructive action. Model calm, self‑reflective behavior, and re‑anchor the team on facts rather than blame, thereby reducing stress and improving collaboration.
Chapters
This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Sy Wakeman. So I have Concerned HR in Omaha sent me a question. We are moving into a new space within the year, and there's a lot of turmoil on where people will be sitting, what kind of desk they'll have, who gets what office. And their question is, how can we help the employees shift their focus to the exciting new opportunities instead of the negatives of changing from the norm. You leaders need to help people shift their focus and manage the energy. I often say that leaders don't manage people as much as they manage the energy of people, and we need to manage energy away from why we can't and why we shouldn't have to and why it's not my preference to what are we trying to create and how can you step up and skillfully move in that direction. How can you deliver. So as a leader, you're just always moving from don't focus here, focus there. And that's really the answer to this question. I want you to focus on managing energy away from what I prefer to what will help us deliver what the business needs. And you can do this in a whole lot of ways. When people come up to you and go, well, I just am worried about where I'm going to sit, just say, you know what, don't want you to focus there. I want you to focus on how we arrange ourselves to best deliver on the business. Well, I don't like and heard that they got this. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Not a place to focus. That's about your personal comfort and preference. We don't make decisions based on that. We make decisions on what we need the business to deliver and how to organize ourselves in the best way possible to make it happen. Something like a move is a great assessment for where your team is in terms of their own ego, in terms of fighting for their own preference over the potential of what we could create for the company. And so I want you to focus not on how do we change reality and get things situated for your comfort, but how we can grow you so that you can bring your own comfort to whatever place you end up. Like, how do you make your comfort portable and dependent on yourself? So this is the perfect time to say, you know, we have this upcoming move. The temptation is to focus on how to get the office you want and the place you want where you feel comfortable, but I as a leader am going to help you get more skillful and less dependent on your circumstances because I want you to be able to wander the world freely without being dependent on where your desk happens to be this day. So this is the opportunity to tell your people, I need you to grow and develop in your flexibility, your openness, your ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, your, your grace, your support, your tolerance, your ability to let go. You have a year to develop your people to a place that they are unfazed by where they sit, who has an office, any of those details. This is important, folks, because I think it was Mark Twain that said, comparison is the source of all discontent. Tattling, scorekeeping, that's all work of the ego. Move beyond ego, which is stop, what can you do to help? Stop, what do you know for sure? Well, if they get this office, this means that we've determined they'll have this office. This means that that's a story you add. Suffering is optional. Why would you go there? Keep calling people back to be accountable to the truth. Now, the ability to move your offices without being drama is basically kind of a core job requirement, don't you think? If you can't move with a year's notice and without drama, how do we think that you're capable of taking our business where it needs to go into the future? Like, you're failing the small stuff, and I was about to trust you with the big stuff. And you know what? All of this is ego moves. Where I sit, what window I have, who's more important, what it means, where I'm comfortable, that is all ego. And preference shouldn't trump potential. I worked with a group. They were getting ready to move, and everybody was saying things like, moving is so hard. And I wasn't sure about that. So I did this cool research where I looked at and tested the readiness of individuals for the move. What's readiness? Did they use intra-office messaging or did they need a door where they could only have verbal conversation and talk loudly on the phone? Were they low drama or did they need a door that would close so that they could talk poorly about other people? Were they technologically savvy? I tested all this readiness. And basically in their own personal lives, how up to date were they? They moved and then at 3 and 6 months I surveyed Their perception of how hard the move was. And guess what, folks? The move was hard, but only for the unready. The people that scored less in capability, skill set readiness were the ones that found the move so hard. So unfortunately, concerned in HR, this move is revealing to you how coddled your people have been, how you have let ego and preference forego potential. This isn't about engagement because you're not offering them horrid places to work. You're offering them brand new, fabulous offices. So I need you to up the game. And don't you dare coddle the people. Don't you dare let them skip this upgrade. They need to develop the competencies necessary where they can move and bring their own comfort with them. So your assignment is to focus on their development. so that they can get good at creating their own comfort for themselves wherever they are, that they can grow beyond this need for everything stacked in their favor, it's going to be awesome because their future is going to be better. Because through this experience, you've mined it for learning and they're going to be able to move into the future not dependent on having the same desk equal to someone else like they've always had. You're going to free them up from the past. So they can move boldly into the future.
My team gets very stressed at work when someone else makes a mistake that affects them. How can I reduce their suffering and get them helping instead of judging?
I want to help you have a format for this and really think through on the individual, and then we'll think through on the macro, basically how you can help people through their suffering. A tool I use a lot is this: What do I know for sure? And edit our own thinking. And here's how it happens. An event happens. Let's say I pull up the electronic medical record and there's information missing. It's probably an event that happens many times a day. Now, my reality is that there's information missing. That's all I really know for sure. If I were reality-based, if I were questioning my thinking, I might feel a little stressed. I'm like, oh, they do this on. Purpose, but they go, nope. What do I know for sure? There's information missing. What could I do next that would help? I would work with the patient to fill in the information and quickly get them admitted. What would that look like? It would be like, oh, there's information missing. What resources do I have? My employer gives me a keyboard for free. There's a patient in front of me who's conscious and English-speaking. I want to do it in a way that adds value, so I might act in high self. I might say, I'm thrilled that you have chosen us for medical care. You're going to love it here. We have such a great team. We all work off this one medical record. And so I want to make sure while I have you and we're starting this relationship that I get as much accurate information into this record so that my whole team— and by the way, you're going to love them, they're fantastic— they are working on the same page I am. So I've got a couple of things to ask. We're going to start with the easy stuff. What's your address? And The patient might say, well, we already put that in. Instead of saying, I know, but admissions didn't enter it, I say, you know what, one thing that happens here is we're going to ask you a lot for like your name and your birthdate, and it's the way we really ensure that we have zero errors. And so let's just make sure we got it in, and I'll ask you some other questions. And I've told the patient, good job coming here, you can trust us. I've explained our quality efforts and They're gonna not give the next person a hassle because they ask them again for their name and birthdate. I've done so much good in that moment. I stepped up. I'm toggle-switched up. But when I studied how people react to a mistake in the medical record, because we put some in some mock situations and then watched people respond, it didn't go that way. People pulled up the medical record and they saw information missing. And that got them thinking. Their ego just jumped in, came calling hard. I'm surrounded by idiots. I have to do everything around here. This is no way to run an organization. I'm the only one committed to quality. Nobody else even cares about this stuff. I now am going to be completely behind, and I've got to do all the work for everybody. This place would fall down if it weren't for me. And once I believe all that thinking, I'm toggle switched down. How am I feeling? Because this is a chain reaction. It's a cycle. I'm feeling stressed. I hate my job. It's so frustrating. But what caused my stress and frustration? Information missing? That happens every day. That doesn't have the power to stress me out. See, it's believing my thinking. And once I'm feeling stressed, do you suppose that comes out in my actions towards my patients? Absolutely. They tell us it does on the patient experience Survey. So I look at that and I'm thinking, this is ridiculous. My body language—I'm like rolling my eyes. I'm sighing. I'm like, oh! And I start interrogating the patient. Didn't you come through centralized registration? Didn't they call you last night to set this up? What is going on? And now the patient's scared to death. You're like, well. And the patient said, no, no. They called me. Well, I don't know if they put it into the new system. I don't know what happened. But it's a new system. Data kind of comes and goes. And you're just bleeding all over this patient. And now this patient, what you've taught them is, do not trust us. Make sure you double-check us. Like, we are not a team. Like, you have made sure that they're frightened. And then you know what? That affects our results. It comes out in their experience. It comes out in our engagement and culture of safety. Surveys, but we think that what caused all of that was the event. Of course, our patients aren't satisfied; there's information missing. Of course, we're unsafe, and we need to respond to the culture of safety because there's information missing. But see, there is this very important component that could have determined whether that was a poor patient experience or not, and that is whether or not someone believes their own thinking, whether they're toggled down or up, whether they're self-reflecting. Or letting the ego play them. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman.
