The Top 5 Sources of Drama at Work

Welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. This week, I wanted to share part of a webinar I gave recently where I provided a brief overview of the top 5 sources of drama at work. Now, I know many of you have heard me talk about ego as the main source of drama at work, but did you know there are 4 other major contributors that I found in my research? I started to think once I had figured out how much time and energy we waste in drama at work, that if we could just identify the sources of drama at work, then I could look at what we're teaching you as leaders and as employees to see if what we're teaching you, the techniques, the strategies, the philosophy we're giving you on how to work together and how to lead others, is fueling drama or diffusing drama. And boy, did I hit the jackpot. The research really pulled out ego plus these 4 other major sources of drama. And I wanted you to all know about these because I'm getting lots of questions about what else is there beyond ego that we need to work on. So the magic here, folks, is that if we can understand these sources of drama and work to manage them first in ourselves, And then with our teams, there's really nothing that can stop you from producing great results and reaching your full potential. I hope you enjoy listening in. This is a really great one to share with your fellow coworkers, teams, leaders as an introduction to the reality-based leadership philosophy. Now, next week we'll be back with answering more of your Dear Cy letters. So keep those letters coming. We are getting some great ones and we had the team in to record and film And I know you're gonna love what's coming up for you. So enjoy learning about these sources of drama and have a great week. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sai Wakeman. A lot of people are like, Sai, how do you know this stuff? I'm a drama researcher. I started out life as a therapist. I'm absolutely fascinated with human behavior and the economics of it, what you're behaving and what mental process you're using and what result it's getting you, whether impact or reinforcement of your victim stance. I study how much drama there is in the workplace. So, um, in that drama piece, um, and It's important to understand the opportunity here because HR— I'm at so many conferences where it's like, we want to sit at the table, and they're like, well, if you want to be valued, add value. But in HR, we aren't always adding value, and sometimes we're fueling the drama, which is decreasing value. I found that the typical good performer spends 2.5 hours a day in drama. 2.5 hours a day resisting change, arguing with reality, venting either silently to themselves or to others, gossiping, scorekeeping, tattling, believing their own thinking, involved in stories rather than impacting reality, using very poor mental processes, and getting involved in unproductive behavior. 2.5 hours a day. If you do the math, that's 816 hours per headcount. Now, if you want somebody to pay attention to you in HR, you go tell them that we could recapture and upcycle 816 hours per headcount in this organization. And if you do the math around that with the comp and benefits, it can be millions of dollars. This was my discovery where it just blew my mind. People ask me often as a leader, Cy, how do you, you know, keep productivity high, budgets on target, and meet your numbers? And it wasn't that we had breakthrough ideas. It wasn't that we had better products or better pricing or better talent. It was— that my competitive advantage, my secret, was eliminating the drama and not allowing it, not fueling it. Now, when I talk to learning and development folks about this incredible waste in the workplace, I also let them know that over the last 10 years, it's grown from 2 hours a day to 2.5 hours a day. And that is concerning because over the last 10 years, we have invested more money, more courses, more time in leadership and employee development. We've invested more time and money in engagement. Everybody's working their tail off in order to improve our work, and yet the drama is increasing. Drama is increasing even though we train more. Engagement's not improving, it's staying relatively flat. There comes a time where we have to start saying, is what we're doing in HR helping or hurting? Can we honestly believe that drama is just a cost of doing business, that it's just If you get two employees together, there'll be conflict. No, if you get two unskilled employees together, there'll be unresolved conflict. We in HR are enabling this because we've come to accept things that we attribute to the people and circumstances that are simply symbols of lack of evolution in our people. And we even say things like, I hear it all the time. I'm going to bring my whole self to work. And what I say is, do not do that. Bring your most evolved self to work in high self, toggled up. It's your job as a professional to not bring your ego view of the world to work. It's your job to be fit for work, to know how to run your own toggle switch. And as leaders, we can help you with this. We can teach you mental processes and we can teach you tools that you'll think your way through things differently. Now, I get really impassioned about this. I even have spent the last 10 years figuring out the sources of drama and whether we're in HR helping or hurting. So the first source of drama, if you look at those 816 hours, what part of that is attributed to what? And if we know the root cause, how do we fix it? Ego behaviors— judging, venting, tattling, scorekeeping— is a key source of drama. And we feel this in HR. We have step-down meetings where we take your leader out and give you a private place to vent. We have anonymous surveys where without any accountability, you can just say whatever you want to say, and it doesn't have to be professional, it doesn't have to be accurate, it doesn't have to be helpful. It can just be your opinion. We encourage people to have open doors, and in those open doors, access amazing amounts of resources with unprocessed work where they bring in for the leader to process. And what we need to do here is to help people move beyond believing everything they think in their ego so that they have a more accurate view of the world. And there's many tools and techniques to do this, and, and we're going to give you a couple of those going forward. 23% of drama comes from lack of accountability, and we enable all the time accountability First of all, ego is when you're believing your own thinking and looking through your own lenses and ego. And when we don't insist people toggle up and use better mental processes, we enable that. Accountability— a lot of people ask me, how can I change this person or get them to do something different? And my answer is, as a therapist, you cannot. And if your goal is to change them, you're working on the wrong person. What you can do is stop enabling others. And we enable people in just the slightest way. Yeah. We put an asterisk by their name. We go, well, I mean, they're unfit for human consumption, but they're a total technical rock star. And if you had a project, you'd want them on your project. We enable people by our silence or by colluding with them or by doing for them what they could do for themselves. We enable people anytime we interfere with their view of reality. I had people who wouldn't clock in and would come to me and say, I'm sorry, I forgot to clock in. Can you do it for me? Now, I'm glad to help people who forget a couple times a year. But here was the problem. These people were being enabled. They were given bad information, so they're making bad choices. When they would get on to sign in on the computer and realize they hadn't clocked in, they go, oh my gosh, I need to clock in, but that would take me 2 minutes to go over and scan my badge. Instead, I'll just have Sy do it. Now, when Sy does it, it takes 10 minutes to do an exception report. If they had the information that when they made that decision, they cost the organization 10 minutes versus 2 minutes of costing themselves, they would have made a different decision. But what leaders do is we go, oh, no problem, let me do that for you. And we never introduce any data. We also don't let anyone experience natural consequences. When somebody says, hi, can you clock me in? Absolutely. Get your team to cover for you for 10 minutes. That's how long it takes me. We'll sit together and we'll get you clocked in. And while I'm in, I'll see if you have your Continuing education credits and if you've done your annual training, and we'll just take a good look at anything else you might be forgetting. It's a good one-on-one. Now, all of a sudden, people make different decisions. I didn't retaliate, I didn't punish. But when they think about, it'll take me a minute to go back and clock in, or my team will have to cover for 10 minutes and I'll have to make that ask to take care of my own business, I would rather just go back and clock in. And then once you run back to clock in 3 or 4 times, you're like, I really want to start remembering. It's getting out of the way of people's direct line of sight to reality and the natural consequences. So ego is how we distort our own view of reality. Enabling is how we as HR leaders distort other people's view of reality. And enabling is what's eroding accountability. Double messages erodes accountability. And so there's just a lot of fixes to that. Buy-in is a verb. And we at times are giving the double message that buy-in is something the organization needs to do for the individual. And the organization can only work with the willing. Buy-in is a verb. And a lot of people forget this. They think that buy-in's optional. And they have so many conditions on their buy-in. They're like, well, I'll buy in as long as we have plenty of staff and plenty of money and things don't change and change comes in At the pace I like it, and I have all the information and everything's transparent, and I'm not surprised, and there's no hypocrisy, and, um, we know the why. And I'm like, man, I can never meet those requests. And a lot of people believe there's this third option. And I started to see where drama happens. A lot of it is people withholding buy-in, distancing, and people pursuing, just like a dysfunctional marriage. So people are like, I'll buy in when you up the ante. And leaders are doing more than their fair share of trying to get people bought in. We rolled out a new strategy one year and I had someone who says, I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I don't think it's where we need to go. Now, they aren't part of the decision-making team on strategy. So I knew that they really didn't have that level of influence. But I'm always open. Is there something that we need to raise a flag on? So I said, oh my gosh, talk to me about your issues with this strategy. Is there some unconscious bias in it? Is it unethical? Does it adversely affect a certain population that's marginalized? Like, what are the legal, ethical, safety concerns about this strategy? And there weren't any. It was, I don't agree with it. My opinion is we should have asked everybody and we should have been able to influence and we should have been consulted and I would have told them to do something different. And I asked her later, I said, you know what, the strategy is set then. There's not any reason to opt out of it. What is your plan to get on board and come back by Monday joyfully all in on the strategy? And the person said, absolutely none. And I said, okay, well, on a scale of 1 to 10, what's your buy-in? They're like, I'm like a 3. I go, okay, maybe I started too high to be all in. What's your plan to come Come back to me with your plan on how you can move yourself from a 3 to a 6, how you're going to manage your own buy-in and willingness, because that's a verb. That's what you got to bring to the table. I can only work with the willing. They said, I'm not gonna. And I said, after many conversations, then what's your plan to transition out of the organization? And they're like, I'm not going anywhere. I love it here. I go, then what's your plan to get on board? I'm not gonna. And I had to have that conversation that isn't just about performance. It's about willingness to say, you know what? There isn't a third option. You either stay in joy or leave in peace, but there isn't a stay in hate and stay in critique and stay and resist. And many of us in HR and leadership have given people this third option, and we're paying the price for it. This isn't a dictatorship. This isn't not having dialogue about how we do it. It's about giving people veto power That reality hasn't given to them based on their position or what we're going through, or just many times the decision maker isn't even in our company. Change is still 13% of all drama. People's reaction to people resisting it, slowing it down, dragging along, complaining about it. We've been working on change since 1989. I'm not sure what other competency we've given people 30 years to get good at, but it's time to pull the plug on this. We say things like change is hard. It lets people step down from accountability. It feeds the ego that they're suffering. It lets them have a way out of buy-in. But the reality is, is change is not what's hard. Change is only hard for the unready. Your level of readiness determines how difficult change is for you. This is— About your skillset, your approach, your willingness, and what you have to bring to the table to agilely move through the world in a different way when things change. This is not about our circumstances. This is about our ability to successfully navigate current circumstances. And when people are suffering, I know the cause of their suffering. It is either their story that they're telling themselves, because reality is never that harsh. Or so that's their unedited poor mental process, or it's that they're trying to get, um, deal with a new reality with an old skillset, or they're trying to move through the world with a less than modern approach, or they have a lack of buy-in and willingness, all of which they can impact. And yet we collude with them and sympathize and reinforce their victim-minded belief that it's the change outside of us, the circumstances causing our pain. But our circumstances aren't the reasons we can't succeed. They're the reality in which we must succeed. Another piece that we're just fueling drama is our current approach to engagement. Engagement without accountability creates entitlement. And organizations have over-indexed on how can I create an environment for you to engage into? And we have not insisted that employees share that responsibility for making their own engagement, their own happiness, their own psychological safety, making it portable. See, I can engage and have impact in many more worlds if I am skilled and if I am working to move beyond my own triggers, if I'm moving through the world differently. Now, the book No Ego talks about all of these, gives you ways to fix it. There's about 10% we don't really worry about. It's kind of a junk category. But what I want you to walk away from this webinar feeling inspired about is that leaders' roles aren't to caretake others. They aren't about engaging others or making other people happier, inspiring others. Leaders' role, if we want to get scientific about it, which you can actually measure and quantify based on how much drama there is, a leader's role is to help people eliminate emotional waste by facilitating good mental processes. Drama is waste. It's emotional waste. When we have waste in the workplace, how do we get rid of it? We usually elect first to improve the process, to eliminate waste. If you have emotional waste, what do you do? Improve the mental process. When I got to be a leader, I found my main work was teaching people how their minds work and helping them use better mental processes. And those mental processes could be self-reflection— that's an easy one— or a tool that would help a group use a better process going forward. Other mental processes? Process improvement methodology, project management methodology, rapid cycle improvement. Anytime we bring a methodology, the scientific method is eliminating emotional waste by facilitating good mental process. What's that look like in the real world? Well, one good mental process is something like, what would great look like? Because here's what happens the next time that nurse is in a room frustrated. She's gonna go, oh my gosh, I gotta go find Wakeman. I'm gonna complain to her about this. Well, wait a minute. She'll just ask me what would great look like. I think I'll just stay and be great. Good mental process. Poor mental process, go vent. That just begets more venting. Better mental process, self-reflection gets me accessing most of my intelligence. I probably have, using all of my intelligence, some better ideas of how I can impact The world. Now, I'm a big fan on just memorizing a few questions and teaching your people simple questions. In fact, my favorite question that I start everybody out in onboarding with is on the back of their badge. I have the question, how can I help? There for ready reference. And when they come to me tattling and venting and scorekeeping, I go, timeout. And the way I call a timeout is I call them up to greatness by making some aspirational statement. I go, Whoa. I am thrilled you're in my office sharing your love and concern about our colleagues in IT. From what you're telling me, the conversion didn't go as planned. See, the way we call people to greatness is just repeating back to them what they're saying but removing all the drama, the adjectives, the story, so that they can just center in on here's the reality. And then I follow with, what did you do to help? And most people We'll say things like, I'm coming to you. And I let them know that's not that helpful. What did they do to help? What they're doing coming to me is forming a drama triangle, but that's not helpful. What did you do to help? And a lot of times when they've said nothing yet, I go, great, it's simple. Bring your question. Who were you mad at? Karen? Awesome. Let's go find her. Karen, Tammy is just in my office sharing love and concern about how the conversion went. Sounds like your team had a tough time this weekend. She has a question for you. Go ahead, Tammy. How can I help? Karen had answers. We need to get really clear that judging behavior is anti-team behavior and that teamwork isn't about liking each other or feeling comfortable with each other. In today's moving world, we aren't ever going to be able to like who we work with all the time or feel comfortable. We may never even see them again. We may have never met them. I've written entire books with editors I've never met. They live in a whole different country and time zone. But we've got to get clear that judging is not a good mental process and that helping always toggles us up because you can't judge and help at the same time. It's an instant toggle switch. And we've got to insist that people use this and we've got to role model people using this, but we've got to clean up our own world first. Now, by now you're probably picking up on the fact that your ego's just not your amigo. And I've said venting's the eagle's way of avoiding self-reflection. And I want us in HR to look at how often we give people the opportunity to vent. Our one-on-ones, our employee relations, our surveys. And venting is telling people the story from a victim perspective rather than stating facts with a willingness to have impact. It's not that I don't want to hear what you would like to see differently, but I need you to do it from a place where you're toggled up and into high accountability. And that's why with All of the surveys and other things we do, we infuse an accountability metric in that so that if you're coming from a low toggle-down, low accountable place, we don't use your data until you can clean it up because it's not accurate, it's corrupted. And one of the things in what we'll send out to you in the links is something called engaged action planning, where we will help you Infuse accountability into that whole process. But if you're letting people vent, you need to understand that venting is not sharing feelings. Venting is a behavior. Sharing feelings usually takes about one sentence. I'm frustrated with Alex. Venting is everything that comes after that. He does this crap on purpose. And back when we merged in 1982 and he got a different title, it's been, he thinks he's better than I— All that stuff you made up. You're frustrated with Alex. It's so simple. You're frustrated. Would you like to stay frustrated? No. Okay. 2 strategies. The Dalai Lama says if you're suffering and it can be fixed, fix it. And if it can't be fixed, let it go. You'll never suffer. So you don't wanna be frustrated. You don't wanna suffer. Let's try letting it go. Can you let it go? Can he just have screwed up? Can you have tolerance, mercy, and grace? Well, he shouldn't get away with it. Okay, we don't wanna let it go. Then what can you do to impact? Well, I could put a reminder on his calendar every month of when I need it. Perfect. That sounds like a great way to have impact. Doesn't sound like it'd be easy to forget then. They knew what great looked like and they, they knew it. But here's what happens with the ego. It goes, yeah, but I shouldn't have to. And I'm like, dang it, you were almost great. Because the ego puts all these conditions on how far we should have to go and what our fair share looks like. And it's It's all about more venting. Venting is what we do to keep the feeling alive and to stay stuck. I don't wanna fix it. I don't wanna let it go. I wanna vent. That is saying I want to stay stuck. Now, when you're giving these methods for self-reflection, it cultivates what you're looking for, which is accountability. What's my part in this mess? Self-reflection is the place where you can lead to ownership, personal accountability. And accountability really is death to the ego. And in our research, we have found that self-reflection is the ultimate drama diffuser. If you believe your boss is bullying you or your boss is a micromanager, let's take that one. If I believe my boss is a micromanager, I'm focused on changing him. But if I self-reflect, I can realize by asking the question, what do I know for sure, that my boss is someone who just prefers more detail than I like to give. He just prefers more detail. Bam, drama diffused. Right. So, so much of this is really the key. And the questions we use for self-reflection are a great start. And what I would tell you is when we measure accountability in the organization and we measure self-reflection, they're correlated. When we measure venting and accountability, they're not correlated. And in fact, all the opportunities in HR we're giving people to vent Is actually negating or killing accountability. I'm absolutely convinced that anonymity, except in the most gross violations where we need to have an anonymous place for people to call, is destroying accountability. So these are some questions, good mental processes. What can I do to help? What does great look like, right? The one I love the most, where you can start to have the most impact, is the question, what do I know for sure? And this one helps people start to identify how often they're getting played by their ego. When I start to believe everything I think, I believe suffering's mandatory because if you lived in this world, you would be suffering too. Someone cut me off in traffic. Well, if they did that to you, you would be suffering. My suffering's not optional. Everybody would suffer in these circumstances. But if I get down to what do I know for sure, I realize that he simply moved into my lane, giving me less distance and space than I prefer. And that's when I realized that that suffering was self-imposed from my story, not my reality. See, when we're in low self, we're full of story and assignment of motive and justification and assumption. And we're, we're really justifying and seeing the world through our ego. But what we find out when we start to edit our stories— another tool that will be in your toolkit— when we start to edit our stories, All the things you're upset about fall away. How can you be upset and flipping people off about someone who simply moved into your lane with less distance than you prefer? You didn't crash. Nothing happened. You just didn't have the space you prefer. Is flipping somebody off really the most appropriate response to someone crowding your space with no negative consequence? See, when we start to inquire, these things fall away. One of my most famous moments I talk about a lot when I was doing my drama research and I was teaching people how to use these questions is I realized in a minute how quickly I can believe everything I think. I was on a beautiful hike with some incredible leaders. The view was spectacular. I'm on top of the mountain and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I'm in heaven. This is what I was born for. I can't believe they pay me to do this job. I would do it for free. I turned to walk away, and up on the path there's something squiggly. I love this job. I can't believe they paid me to do it became I can't. They don't pay me enough to do this job. With a single thought, when I saw squiggly snake, my entire reality changed. But you get my reality didn't change, but my reality changed. I started to hyperventilate. I have major organ systems shutting down. I now see my death before my eyes. This is how it ends. So I get spit by a venomous snake. We're 3 hours by helicopter from the nearest medical center. That's how I die. And I'm like panicked. I gotta come up with a plan and I can't access all of my intelligence. All I can access is my most primitive intelligence. A John Wayne movie I saw when I was little. It's all I remember. He got bit by a snake, took out his pocket knife, cut an X in his hand, sucked his blood, spit it out, saved his life. That's— I am trained as a medical first responder, and that's all I can remember because I'm toggled down. But I'm ready. I have my hand on my pocket knife. I'm ready to cut an X in my ankle and suck my own ankle until I play that out and realize I can't reach my ankle. I'm probably gonna die. And I'm grasping. I'm panicked. I wonder if the guy from Google will suck my ankle in an emergency. Like, I'm burning calories, burning calories. I get up to the snake and it is a rope off someone's saddlebag. Now you tell me what caused my panic, my concern, my stress, my calorie consumption— that all-concerning rope or my thinking, my believing my thinking and jumping in with all feet without inquiry, without asking myself, What do I know for sure? I just jumped in with my story. So it was my story, not my reality, that caused my stress. And I would tell you, every day in your people's world, it is their story, not their reality, that causes them stress. This one question, what do I know for sure, can change everything without changing anything. This is the No Ego Podcast. Where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman.