Why Great Leaders Listen First with Joanne Merrick

Tim: 0:08

Welcome to Speaking with Confidence, a podcast dedicated to helping you unlock the power of effective public speaking. I’m Tim Newman, a recovering college professor turned communication coach, and I’m thrilled to guide you on your journey to becoming a powerful communicator. I want to thank each and every one of you for your support. It truly means the world to me. If you have questions or if you want something covered on the podcast, send me a message. Please visit timnewmanspeakscom to get your free ebook the Top 21 Challenges for Public Speakers and how to Overcome them. Today’s guest is Joanne Merrick. Joanne brings over 25 years of global experience in leadership development, having delivered transformative programs across 22 countries and five continents. As founder of the Leadership Recipe, she helps individuals and teams enhance communication, emotional intelligence and performance. Her background, spanning leadership roles at Deloitte, amazon and Juniper Networks, fuels her fresh neuroscience-driven approach. In her debut book, game On Is Management your Best Career Plate, she empowers professionals to make informed decisions about stepping into management roles. Joanne, welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you on today.

Joanne: 1:20

Thank you so much, Tim. It’s great to be here. When you say five continents and 22 countries, man, that’s a lot of frequent flyer points.

Tim: 1:29

It is, and you know, that’s where I really wanted to start with. I mean, you’ve lived in all parts of the world. How has that, you know, changed how you view communication and leadership, or has it changed?

Joanne: 1:45

change how you view communication and leadership, or has it changed? Oh, it totally has. My accent. For listeners that might be wondering by now, my accent is Australian, so I like to point that out. Otherwise they’re wondering what my accent is and they’re not really listening to anything I’m saying. Ask me how I know.

Joanne: 1:59

Yes, so I left Australia about 17 years ago and I moved to Hong Kong of all places. I lived there for three and a half years and that was a real transition for me, even though at that point I’d spent a lot of time training and traveling in and around Asia and all parts of Asia, from India, japan, china, thailand, you know, you name it. It was still, you know, a surprise for me. It was still a definite kind of culture shift from what I had been used to in Australia and then to move from Hong Kong to where I’m now, in the US. I’ve been here for about 13 years now.

Joanne: 2:38

Again, it’s a different culture. You know we speak the same language, but it’s a very different culture here in the US from what it is in Australia. And I think the biggest lesson for me in those moves has been how do I integrate myself into other cultures as quickly as I possibly can and to do that I find something in common with folks as quickly as I possibly can, and I also believe that the onus is on the communicator to be understood. It’s not me expecting them to understand me. My responsibility is absolutely to be understood and I truly believe that that’s important in the realm of management that I know we’re going to talk about today as well, but you know it’s about it’s my responsibility to get my message across, to have to be accountable for the impact that I’m having, and that’s been, I think, one of the biggest lessons from living in a couple of different countries.

Tim: 3:35

Yeah, and I’m glad you said that because you know, as we talked before we came online here, you know, knowing yourself and knowing how you communicate. You know first you have to know who you are. But it’s not about you, it’s about your audience and and knowing, knowing them and making sure that that that you’re doing what you can so that they can understand you and and kind of get where you’re coming from and and and we’re going to get a little bit more in depth into that, because you’re some really good work from a neuroscience perspective that I’m fascinated by, right. But one of your roles was with Amazon and you know, were you the person that was in charge of professional development for all of Amazon or for a specific division? Explain kind of what you did.

Joanne: 4:28

Sure, I was initially hired. I lived in California at the time, in San Jose. I was initially hired to look after learning and development for Lab 126, which is the devices function, for want of a better word. That’s the group that had when I, when I went there, they had just launched the alexa. Do you remember the, the tower alexa? And this was also the group that was responsible for the rollout um and creation of um, the kindle, which was also one of my favorite tools. I actually still have one of the if not the, I think it’s maybe the second edition kindle that ever came on the market Very proud of that ancient tool.

Joanne: 5:09

Now, I was always fascinated by the fact that you could get a whole book on one device or a number of books on one device. So I felt destined to go to that organization. I was very fortunate to work there for about three and a half years. It was about 12,500 people ultimately under my stewardship, around about 2,000 managers all up that we were educating all around the world. So that was a wonderful career move for me and a fantastic organization. Great experiences there.

Tim: 5:46

So what were some of your challenges in terms of training and development? You know, with a team that big again, based all around the world, what were some of the challenges that you faced and how did you overcome them, specifically from that communication and management leadership perspective, I think you really need to work with the business to find out what the business needs from a learning and leadership development perspective.

Joanne: 6:10

You know you need to get, you need to build relationships with leadership within that organization. They need to know what value you might add to their respective functions or their respective businesses within the broader business. And then, of course, you need to deliver. Tim, like anything else. Right, it’s like this is what I believe I can do and this is what I’m going. This is what I want to do, this is what I’m planning to do. Get their buy-in every step of the way, and I think, initially, building those relationships with the leadership and then delivering on what you say you’re going to do is a really important element. It was really important to my success anyway.

Tim: 6:52

You know buying is so important. Like you said, I was at a conference last week and we were just having kind of a roundtable talk and I talked about how I accomplished something you know a number of years ago, which you know some places are doing, some places aren’t. And the question was how? How did I do that? And I got into the the nuts and bolts of it and halfway through I said, first off, we have to stop because I missed the most important step we have to have the buy-in, because it doesn’t work if we don’t have the buy-in. If I didn’t have everybody on the team buying into this, it wasn’t going to work. And sometimes buy-in happens right away and sometimes it takes a little bit of time Once you show that what you’re doing and what you’re talking about is actually going to work. Sometimes that’s how buy-in happens. But if you don’t have buy-in, it doesn’t matter how good your idea is or how beneficial that change is going to be, it’s not going to work.

Joanne: 7:54

Absolutely, and I think there’s a real opportunity to be innovative around what you can deliver, like by speaking and engaging and getting the buy-in of other folks, and an example of that was there was a particular area of the business that had principal engineers. These are people that have got at least one PhD, maybe many more. They’ve worked really hard throughout their career. They’re crazy. You know smart people and you know they work with a lot of other. You know teams of individuals, whether they’re reporting directly to them or that they just have influence over. You know they’re not part of the formal structure, and one thing the business was noticing was that these people were great managers and leaders, but they felt that they needed to come up with all of the solutions themselves. They felt that they needed to come up with all of the ideas because they were often literally the smartest person in the room, you know. So what their leadership wanted to do was have me train them in how to bring about innovative thought in others.

Joanne: 9:13

So we had a program we called Coaching for Development, which we were rolling out internally across the organization. So what I did was, rather than deliver that program, I tweaked it up a little bit, added a few components and called the program Coaching for the Development of Ideas, and we ran that across the principal network and it was a fantastic way to train really, really smart people to have better conversations, to be more kind of inclusive, to be more curious about what their teams brought to the table the ideas their teams brought to the table and for them ultimately to not really feel like they had to come up with all the solutions themselves. In fact, they realized at the end of it all that they could actually get better solutions from engaging and interacting with their teams. So it was a win-win for everyone. But that was an example of a program that required a little bit of innovation, lots of conversation and collaboration with the leadership and was really about solving a real business problem.

Tim: 10:17

And and you giving up control or and I’m not, I don’t even know that control is right. We’re giving up that, that, the whole idea that everything rests on your shoulders and if you don’t have the solution, then it’s going to fall apart. That’s a tough obstacle to overcome, especially for those people that are that smart or generally the type A personalities that are generally the ones that have you know, have always had, you know, the ideas, have always been able to communicate their ideas, and that’s one of the reasons why they get into those positions. And now you’re asking them to give up some of that. That’s a big ask.

Joanne: 10:59

Yeah, absolutely. It’s not easy, but they need to see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that it’s not a train coming in the opposite direction. They need to see the benefit in the collaboration, the communication, the engagement, the influence, the bringing about of ideas in other people for the betterment of themselves and, obviously, their functions and the business. So it’s a personal journey that they need to go through as well and that’s why we would often run programs that went over, you know, maybe a two, three day period Not all day, obviously, but two or three days. We’ve still got to get our jobs done, but it was an engaging experience for them that they engaged in together with their leaders, and that, I think, is another important component of building learning to give feedback appropriately or how to communicate or how to, you know, set visions or how to set goals or whatever.

Joanne: 12:11

They’ve done it before. They’ve attended training maybe before in their careers. But to be involved in those kinds of programs with their teams has this powerful, really engaging element to it, powerful, really engaging element to it, and it’s a win-win for their teams and it’s also a win-win for the leaders, because they get to see their teams function under a completely different light and they’re all learning the same thing right. They start singing from the same hymn book, so to speak, and they create a language. They communicate in a way that just becomes ultimately more efficient and more effective, because they’ve all been part of the same experience.

Tim: 12:48

Right and it builds trust.

Tim: 12:50

It builds trust that you know trust from the leadership to the team that shows that they trust them to do what they need to do and that they’re going to have the ownership or the buy-in and entrust the team with the leaders, that if something doesn’t work, it’s not going to blow up in their face. They’re working through these issues and problems together. Success comes together and it really does take the entire team to take it to the next level. That’s incredible, you know, and we talk about communication most of the time. You know from us speaking right, but there are so many other aspects of good communication that’s critical, such as listening and nonverbal, facial expressions, body language, etc. What have you noticed in your career that people could use some help on in terms of good communication and what have you noticed from people that do it really well?

Joanne: 13:56

I think the people that do it really well.

Joanne: 13:58

There’s a congruence between what they’re saying, what their faces are expressing, what their bodies are showing.

Joanne: 14:06

At the same time, there’s this congruence between those elements that enables the person that they’re communicating with to kind of feel at ease, to feel comfortable, to feel valued, to really feel the trust as you mentioned before, and kind of they’re literally more capable of opening up and engaging and having a better conversation.

Joanne: 14:30

The biggest challenge that I’ve found with a lot of leaders, especially new managers, they’re not as self-aware, potentially, around what is going on with their body physically while they’re having conversations with other people. And you know the classic example is when you’re sitting across from someone and you’re kind of face-to-face to them but their body is sideways or you know they’re looking out the window half the time rather than looking at you, or they’ve got their arms folded in front of their chest kind of in, kind of like a self-protection, you know kind of mode. I have encouraged leaders to, as uncomfortable as they might be in the moment, right, they might feel like closing down, having a facing a different direction from the person that they’re talking to. They may feel like they want to do that but they can’t because their main aim is to communicate effectively and to have the other person feel comfortable in engaging and communicating with them. So they need to do whatever they can do, especially as it relates to their own body language, to enable that increased level of comfort in the person that they’re communicating with, and it’s hard for some people.

Tim: 15:51

I see that, and how much do you think that that transfers over to you know the younger professionals and how they learn how to communicate in terms of you know when they move up into those types of positions or when they have to have tough conversations or that okay, so you know when they move up into those types of positions, or when they have to have tough conversations or that okay, so you know, I’ve been in this type of scenario five times, and four of those times this is how the person who was in that role acted. So that’s probably, you know, my go-to as well.

Joanne: 16:23

Yeah, I think it starts with self-awareness and being curious around the impact that you’re having on other people, and I’m a huge advocate of 360 assessments, especially for managers and new managers, as they’re starting to learn a trade and it is a learnable trade to be a great manager. It’s not something that necessarily comes naturally to everyone, but it is something that can be learned, and the impact that managers have on other people can be is a significant element of the role, and you can have a fantastic impact on other people, but you can also have a horrible impact on other people as well. So, if you’re choosing to become a manager, you need to be open to learning about what it is you’re doing well in your role, what’s working about your communication style, but also what’s not going well and maybe what’s not working in your communication style and then adjust it and be open to adjusting it, you know.

Tim: 17:27

And I love the idea of the 360 evaluations. You know the Myers-Briggs, the Discus. You know those types of assessments as well Because you know you as a team member can learn how you know your coworker or your manager or leader thinks same with you, and then you can kind of mold your interactions to get the best out of them from that perspective.

Joanne: 17:56

Absolutely. And in communicating with others myself, I’ve also kind of made a lot of assumptions that what I’m saying is actually what’s being heard Right, and then they might reflect back to me what I said in an active listening kind of sequence, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, right. So they actively listen and they do that really well and they do reflect what I said, but they don’t necessarily reflect what I meant, right. So that means that I’ve absolutely miscommunicated. You know, there’s an equation out there for the engineers that might be listening that your intent of what you communicate, or what you want to communicate, needs to equal your impact. And if it’s not, then there’s something wrong with how you’re communicating it and it’s up to you to do something about fixing that and being open to people’s feedback, being open to understanding that what you say is not necessarily how it might be interpreted by other people, and adjusting that along the way is the way that we learn.

Tim: 19:02

Yeah, and it kind of makes me think and I’ve said this a number of times I don’t think, especially from the younger professional perspective. They spend enough time thinking about who they are as individuals. Right you know what their values are, how they think, how they come to make decisions, what they like, what they don’t like, et cetera, especially from a professional perspective. And that really does inform how they communicate as well, because if they don’t know, it comes back to the idea of being self-aware or the idea of emotional intelligence.

Joanne: 19:43

Right, absolutely, and it’s been. If they want to be a manager, I believe the onus is on them to be more curious than ever about what impact they’re having on other people, because managers, just in the very nature of the role, have a responsibility to do that because of the significant impact they have on other people, right.

Tim: 20:08

And is this where the whole idea of the idea of neuroscience comes into play and understanding how we react to those types of situations react to those types of situations.

Joanne: 20:34

I think neuroscience came about for me back in 2010 or 2011. I was introduced to the concept of neuroscience and neuroscience as it relates to leadership and management, and what I loved about it when I first started to hear of it was that a lot of what I’d been teaching by this point, you know, for 10 or 15 years was now backed by science. You know I’d been teaching philosophies and approaches by really respected individuals like Stephen Covey and Ken Blanchard, and you know many others that had a significant impact on the leadership and management development realm. Now the science was there to back it up, and what I felt my obligation was, now that I had been introduced to this, was to make the science available to managers and leaders to help them be better managers and leaders, and it resonated really well with the, especially with the engineering platform that I was working with you know at at the time and, tim, I can give you an example, if you like when I was one of the. Neuroscience tells us that autonomy, or having a sense of autonomy, is really important for the human brain. I mean, you can imagine yourself right when you feel like you’re in control, when you feel like you have choices in front of you, you feel better, right, you know, you feel like you’re valued, you feel like you’re engaging better with others. You feel like you’re in more control. And one of the lectures that I was partaking in when I was getting interested and certified in the topic was through the Middlesex University. We were having a conversation on autonomy and its impact on the human brain, and one of the gentlemen in the class told us a story about his son, and the story goes that he had been partaking in all of these training programs himself. So I knew the importance of autonomy. Autonomy for me was having a sense of choice, having a sense of control over a situation.

Joanne: 22:43

He got home one night from work and his four-year-old son was playing on the staircase in their home, and he greeted his son when he got home and then he went to his kitchen and started helping his wife with dinner. It was time to eat dinner, so he called out to his son to you know, come to the dinner table to eat his dinner. The son was having so much fun on the staircase that he said no, dad, I’m not doing that, I want to eat my dinner here on the stairs. Well, it was part. You know we’ve all been there, right.

Joanne: 23:15

So the father part of you know their traditional values was to eat dinner at the dinner table. So the fact that his son didn’t want to do that was kind of unacceptable. So he could have taken this kind of authoritarian power you know, control kind of approach to things. But he decided not to do that, given what he had learned. So he said to his son okay, you must eat your dinner at the dinner table, right? So he was setting expectations, very clear expectations up front. And he said but I tell you what, tonight you don’t have to sit at your normal seat at the dinner table, you can sit wherever you like. You pick the chair, you sit there, no problems. The son was interested, why? Because even over such a simple scenario of eating dinner at the dinner table, the son all of a sudden had a choice as to where he was going to sit and a sense of control over himself and the situation that he’d found himself in. But the father didn’t stop there. He was really smart. He then said okay, not only can you choose where you sit, but you can choose where daddy sits at the dinner table. Tonight you can choose where mommy sits at the dinner table. Tonight that kid was at that dinner table so quickly. Why? Because he had some control over his parents, that you know over such a simple scenario.

Joanne: 24:33

So how do you translate that into a management scenario? I think there’s a lot of managers out there that just like to tell their employees what to do, tell them what to do, how to do it, when to do it. When, as we were kind of talking about before, if managers go to their team and say, hey, how might you start this particular task, or what might be your next couple of steps, or what ideas are you coming up with as to how we might solve for this problem? Right, the minute you start asking those kinds of questions and engaging with your employees, being curious and open to what they’ve got to say, yeah, automatically, not only may you come up with better ideas than you might have anticipated in the first place, but you’re also get you’ve also got a team of people now with you completely on board, because they’re more.

Joanne: 25:25

They’ve got that autonomy right you know, feeling micromanaged and the impact that it has on the human brain with you completely on board because they’ve got that autonomy Right. You know, feeling micromanaged and the impact that it has on the human brain is just terrible and maybe we can all relate to scenarios like that where we feel or have been micromanaged, and how bad that can be.

Tim: 25:41

Yeah, for me, micromanagement, that’s instant infuriation. I mean instant, I mean it doesn’t take long at all. You know, and I look at it from a perspective of you know, we’ve been hired to, we’ve been hired for a reason, you know, give us that opportunity to do what we do, obviously under some constraints, you know. Maybe there’s time limits, maybe there’s budget limits there’s, you know, within those, you know confines, but allow us to do it the way that we want to do it and be productive from that perspective, you know it’s, and just get out of their way.

Tim: 26:26

Exactly.

Joanne: 26:26

Just let them be successful. Let them do what they, what you’ve hired them to do, right? I find it a refreshing approach. To be honest, tim, it doesn’t happen as often as I would like it to, to be honest, but when people start asking me questions and get curious about what I think you know it just I just open up. I just think it’s really refreshing.

Tim: 26:47

But I think it’s kind of changing a little bit, at least from what I see. You know, because I’m somebody that asks a lot of questions, you know, in whatever scenario that I’m in, really to kind of to clarify it, you know to to to see what’s going on for me, to start thinking about whatever issue it is, and I’m somebody that that allows people to just to to do you figure out the way that that works best for you. You know what, what’s your timeframe? So if I say you know we need to have this done by by Thursday at noon and it’s Tuesday, you know, show me how you’re going to get it done, or or, or do it, and if you don’t get it done, then we’ll sit down and have a conversation.

Tim: 27:37

Okay, what? What were your steps? How can I help you better to? You know to to meet those expectations. You know to to get to where you need to be, but allowing people to, especially, you know, younger professionals today. You know when I say instant aggravation or infuriation from being micromanaged, from my experience they’re the same way. They may not know how to do something, but give them an opportunity to kind of think it through. Give them an opportunity to try different ways to come up with solving the solution, whatever it is that they’re working on, and then, if that doesn’t work, sit down and help guide them and mentor them from that perspective.

Joanne: 28:23

Yeah, I think it’s situational too. You know, like when you’ve got a new hire coming to the organization, you may not necessarily immediately sit down and say, hey, so how do you think you should do this? You know you might need to give those kinds of people a little bit more guidance, but you know, or if you have had someone who’s reporting to you and has been for quite some time, the last thing you’re going to do is micromanage them, because that’s just going to put you both offside at the end of the day. So it is situational, but that’s part of being a great manager. I call it the manager antennae.

Joanne: 28:58

Oh yeah, you know you’ve got your antenna out there and you’re a little bit more aware of what’s going on with you and the impact and what you’re doing to engage with other people and you need to be adaptable and flexible in your style to enable them to thrive and get the most out of them in their employment right. So it’s a very different perspective from that of, like an individual contributor who all they really need to do is worry about themselves, what they’re doing, what they’ve got to do, what projects they’re working on. You know how they might go about engaging or completing those, Whereas when you’re a manager, it’s just like not about you anymore, Right, like, not about you anymore. It’s about getting the most out of other people, about getting results and outcomes, sometimes in ways that or in situations where the people that are reporting to you don’t want to do the work or even want to be engaged in the project.

Joanne: 30:02

So there’s a lot of complexity to being a great manager that I feel a lot of people don’t give due consideration to before jumping in to the role, and I think it’s important for folks individual contributors that are thinking about doing so to really be curious about the role and what the full end-to-end components of the role are.

Tim: 30:29

Yeah, I don’t know how realistic this is, but I always think it’s our job as leaders and mentors to help and train the ones that aren’t managers how to be managers before they even get there. This is the process. These are the things. Bring them into some relevant conversations. Let’s just take budgeting, for example. If you’ve never had to deal with a complex budget, bring them in and say, okay, here’s the deal, here’s the big picture. These are the things I’m thinking about over here. These, this is what has to be done over here, and we need to bring in this much revenue or we need to cut this much from the budget. These are the things that we’re thinking about. What, how would you go about doing that? Or what are you thinking from from your position, and understand that it’s not always going to work out in our favor.

Tim: 31:28

You know, it may not work out for me this time, but if it’s what’s best for the team, if it’s what’s best for the organization, that is what it is, and we may get what we want next time. But bring them in and teach them some of those things that have to be thought about in terms of making those decisions.

Joanne: 31:45

Right yeah, things that have to be thought about in terms of making those decisions. Right yeah, you might’ve heard of the 70-20-10 rule. That’s out there, tim, around adult education is that 70% of what we learn is actually on the job, engaging in what we do, 20% from coaches or mentors or other significant people in our lives and, much to my chagrin as an educator, only 10% of what we learn is in the classroom. However, that 10% is a really important component, because you learn in a management program what you need to do, how you need to do it, as a realistic timeframe or realistic experience as the trainers can provide for you, and then you go out to the world and, and you know, you engage in that. I call it like you have a toolkit of management skills and you need to draw on that toolkit at any given time under any given circumstance.

Joanne: 32:42

So there’s a number of things that folks need to learn, but I do wonder, tim you might relate to this as well that whatever happened to our apprenticeship culture? You know plumbers, electricians. You know we would not let an electrician into our home unless they were fully certified, right Right, they could just do too much damage. So, or a plumber, or you know whatever else for that matter, but I think the way that they learn is possibly one of the best ways that adults do learn. You know, like to your point, where you do do a form of apprenticeship or you get insight or time with your manager, where they engage with you on the management element or management component, the pure management component of their role, and budgeting is a great example.

Tim: 33:29

Yeah, yeah, you know, coming from the education industry, you know where I spent the majority of my career. You know there is no training whatsoever for people that number one, that are professors. Number two, that go from being a professor into administration. So you know, most of us weren’t ever taught how to teach. But we’re teaching. Most of us, you know, as we go from being faculty into administration, have never managed anything outside of our own self. And now we’re in charge. First off, we’re in charge of teaching students it’s kind of kind of important and then we’re in charge of of managing faculty members and budgets and and all these types of things, with no idea how to do it and we’re just expected to do well and we wonder why some of the issues we have, yeah, we haven’t Make it up as we go along, right.

Tim: 34:28

It’s. You know it’s bizarre. So you know, unless you have some innate skills of being able to analyze things, being able to manage people, you can have some of that, but you still need to learn, you still need to understand. You know human behavior. You still need to learn how to accomplish things, how to get that buy-in, how to manage budget, what the priorities are, you know what the president’s priorities may not be, what your priorities are and being able to communicate those types of things and I think across the board and obviously those types of things happen in private business as well that you know.

Tim: 35:10

Most of the time, the managers are people that have done their job really well. They’re just promoted, yeah, and with no training or no skills, and we wonder why there’s such you know turmoil.

Joanne: 35:23

Yeah, you know, and it’s a completely different skill set.

Joanne: 35:26

Yes turmoil, yeah, and it’s a completely different skill set. I would hope that there are some things that individual contributors can do in order to start growing and developing management and leadership skills while they’re individual contributors. First of all, there’s a number, If a lot of great companies offer fantastic training programs for them. That’s great, but also there’s a number of institutes out there, such as Harvard, that have online courses that are free. You know they’re a Udemy program. I mean, I’m not associated or affiliated with any of these, but I have found some fantastic free online programs that at least start opening the door to helping individual contributors understand what the skills are that they need to develop and then start putting them into practice, whether it’s if it’s in the working environment fantastic, you know, but a lot of people don’t feel comfortable using or practicing some of those skills in the work environment.

Joanne: 36:21

So start practicing them at home. You know, facilitate, for example, facilitate a conversation with your family over an important topic.

Tim: 36:28

Like dinner.

Joanne: 36:30

Like dinner, right? Yeah, Start doing you know things like that Engaging your team, Organizing events or functions, Getting people together, Getting feedback from them on how you’re communicating, have them watch your body language, for example, when you’re communicating things you know. Engage with a safe community of folks in developing these skills so that when and if you do become a manager, you’re so much more practiced Right and you know, when you become a manager, you still need to practice. I think the old adage, Tim, is amateurs practice to get things right, but professionals they still practice, and that’s to keep from getting things wrong. Exactly, Exactly. And this also lends itself to the neuroscience of things too. We’re developing neural networks every single second of every single day, and those neural networks need to be created, recreated and recreated over time and refreshed over time, in order for them to become just a part of who we are.

Tim: 37:37

You know, and that’s such an important point, I mentioned that I was at a conference last week and what I talked about. One of the things I talked about was, you know, being a recovering college professor, so I don’t have the interaction with people that I used to. The majority of my interaction is like this, and I said I I really miss that, that actual human, face-to-face interaction, sitting down with somebody, shaking somebody’s hand, you know being in a room with a group of people to be able to have a discussion, where you know these types of discussions are great, but there’s to me, there’s, there’s, there’s really something different and special about you know being in the same room with somebody and having those types of conversations, and if we don’t do that on a regular basis, what does that do to our our, our, our levels of of communication?

Tim: 38:31

I mean, it’s, it’s it’s so much different. It’s so much different having, you know, let’s just say we had 10 people in here. Having a conversation in here is very different than having a conversation with 10 people in a room.

Joanne: 38:43

Absolutely no, it really is. And it’s so important for potential managers to want to be in and around and engage with people, because that’s the nature of the job, that’s what you do and you know, I completely get it there are some people that feel less comfortable in that realm and some people that feel more comfortable, but again, it’s a learnable skill. So it’s important, you know, for potential managers to know that you’ll need to be in front of people, you’ll need to have difficult conversations from time to time. You’ll need to think outside yourself.

Joanne: 39:26

One of the opportunities that I think a lot of managers don’t necessarily realize up front is that they, more than anyone else on the planet, I believe, have the opportunity to unleash potential, particularly untapped potential, in their direct reports, and I think that that is possibly one of the most legacy-giving opportunities that any manager might have, because they can potentially bring about the very best in the people that work for them, when those people didn’t realize that they had that very best in them in the first place. And that is so, so exciting. And, on the neuroscience front of things, there’s a big impact on the human brain when we’re interacting and engaging with someone else who we know really believes in us, right. You know there’s a lot of research here. You know you might even relate to it yourself. Yes, when you are working with someone that you know holds you in high regard or in high esteem or truly values what you bring to the table, you’re actually more inclined to do a better job. Yes, Absolutely.

Joanne: 40:43

And what a fantastic thing for a manager to be able to do for one human to be able to do to another human to another human.

Tim: 40:51

Yeah, and that’s something from my perspective as an educator I had to keep top of mind. I didn’t want to let a student think that I didn’t think that they could do something Right. Because, whether I thought they could or not, that really affects, like you said, how they viewed themselves, how much effort they were going to put into it and how they viewed actually moving forward.

Joanne: 41:23

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve done many things that I never thought I could ever possibly do, but someone else believed in me enough to believe that I could do it, and you know what I did. Someone else believed in me enough to believe that I could do it, and you know what I did. And I just think, for me, those individuals are amongst the most amazing human beings walking this planet, and I will be forever thankful to them because they saw something in me that I didn’t, at least initially. I surprised myself, maybe I surprised them, I don’t know, but whatever happened, it worked.

Tim: 41:58

So that really kind of goes to one of the pieces in your book that really kind of resonated with me. We talked about the most important skills for being a manager Communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence and the whole idea of innovation and leadership and as I was reading and thinking about it, I don’t know that you could have one if you don’t have the others.

Joanne: 42:26

Right, they definitely overlap in quite significant ways, I agree.

Tim: 42:43

Getting back to what we started with, the whole idea that it’s about the people, it’s about the relationships, it’s about the relationships, it’s about knowing them and making sure that there’s that connection, finding that commonality and building that relationship. That is, to me, that’s the real battle, because unless you’re an architect, unless you’re a surgeon, unless you’re an architect, unless you’re a surgeon, a rocket scientist, what we do is it’s about building connections, building relationships, and once you do that, everything else takes care of itself.

Joanne: 43:28

Yeah, I think one thing that’s fascinating for me about the role of a manager is most of us, at some point in our lives, have a manager. Yes, at some point All of us have parents too. I believe our parents are often our first managers in life, and they’re the ones that we learn a lot from and ultimately kind of enable us to become who we are, and I believe managers have the opportunity and have as significant impact in some respects as parents do.

Tim: 44:05

You know, when you look at the functions of management, they’re doing all of it, whether we realize it or not. Now, once you become a grandparent, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. You just get to have fun.

Joanne: 44:18

That’s right, and have extra sugar. It’s all ice cream and candy, exactly.

Tim: 44:22

Exactly.

Joanne: 44:24

I can absolutely relate to that as well. I think people, maybe I would hope that people start taking the role of a manager in a much more serious light and that it’s actually eventually given the kudos and the credence if that’s the right word to to be a very, to be understood as a very significant role in in someone’s life and for people to take to make a much more conscious decision to become a manager, knowing all of the complexities you know, many of which we’ve touched on today that go into the role and do so before they dive in.

Tim: 45:04

Yes, so you don’t wake up one day and not have any idea what’s going on and you have your whole team breathing down your neck because you’re micromanaging somebody.

Joanne: 45:17

Exactly, and it’s so easy for good people to find themselves in situations where they might be labeled as bad managers, and I don’t want that to happen to any of your listeners today, tim. I believe that we’re all good people out there, but I do think that sometimes, good people find themselves in challenging situations and they struggle out of them, and particularly as it relates to a management role, they struggle out of them in ways that can potentially be detrimental to other people.

Tim: 45:51

Yes.

Joanne: 45:51

So I don’t want that to happen to any of your listeners, and obviously that’s why I wrote the book.

Tim: 46:01

Well, your book again. I talked about this before we came online here. I think it’s a perfect tool for people who are in this position to go through and actually use it to get better now. Yes, it’s not something where you read the whole thing and then two weeks later you start working on things. You can pick up pretty much anywhere in your book, read that chapter and start improving. I mean, there’s steps in there to help people improve. You know today, from the time you read the book.

Joanne: 46:44

I structured the book so that you know you can read the whole thing, of course, but at the end of each chapter there’s a reader’s quest. So this is where the game on element right. We don’t have chapters, we have quests. So even if folks just read the quests, they would get a general summary of everything that was mentioned throughout the chapter.

Joanne: 47:06

And I think one of the main elements of the book is the assessment that I created. That helps folks assess against what I’ve identified as the key management skills. You know where they’re at now so that they can start to identify where their strengths are now and also you know areas that they might want to work on. The book is definitely the what of management, tim. It’s not the how, because that would be 10 books, if not more, but it will give some folks some definite insight into the role and, as a result of that too, on my website which I know we’ll talk about later, but I created an assessment that folks can go on and do an online assessment around that content that they can also get other people to assess their capabilities, as it relates to those key management skills as well, in a 360 kind of format, like we talked about before and you know my hope is from that in you know, they’ll get an idea of where they’re at now and what they need to do moving forward to become even better.

Tim: 48:07

Yeah, and I think the whole idea of the 360 assessment is critical for learning, because we can we as individuals can fill out what we think we are. But again, if that’s not how we’re coming across, if that’s not how we’re being viewed, that’s not how we’re being perceived, then it doesn’t really matter. We’re not. We could be working on all the wrong things.

Joanne: 48:29

Absolutely, and that’s where I think managers need to continuously it’s like as a lifelong learning journey continuously be curious about how what they’re doing is perceived. You know, other people’s perceptions, whether we agree with them or not, are real. Yes, and the only way that we change another person’s perception of us is to change our behavior. And we can’t change our behavior until we know what other people’s perceptions are Exactly. It’s important to get there. You know and that’s again the neuroscience of it, tim that you know other people are always looking at us and our behavior by kind of interpreting or predicting who and what we are, and they’re constantly looking to be proven correct.

Tim: 49:19

Yes.

Joanne: 49:20

So even if we do change something about our behavior, just changing it once or twice is not going to change another person’s perspective of us. It’s something that we need to integrate into who we are and our behavior every single time in order for them to go oh wow, maybe joanne has changed. She’s now.

Tim: 49:39

She’s now doing this and she’s not doing that yeah, and, and, and, with and, and, with that 360. You know, today most people aren’t willing to just come out and say what, what’s on their mind about how you’re doing things, how you’re treating them. It gives them a little bit of freedom to be honest, without feeling like they’re. If we’re in this court attacking somebody or putting somebody down. This is truly how I see you coming across, without the guilt of saying you’re doing it wrong, right.

Joanne: 50:17

But I also and I also think it’s an important trait for managers to continually be going out there, whether it’s with a 360 or not, and being curious around their behavior and the impact that it has. And I find that, you know, I myself, when I have a team reporting to me, often on our one-on-ones I would say hey, how’s my management style working for you, what are you liking about it and what might I do differently, moving forward, in order for us to have, you know, a more productive, better? You know, you fill in the blank kind of relationship, and nine times out of 10, initially Tim they’re like no, it’s great. It the blank kind of relationship, and nine times out of 10 initially Tim they’re like no, it’s great, it’s fantastic, excellent. You know, just keep it going, it’s like okay, well, if I keep asking the question and you know and this is you know maybe I’ll get more information. And I think people will tend to open up if managers have that perspective when they’re asking these kinds of questions and then when they are given information that they maybe don’t like or weren’t expecting or that might come across as a little bit of a criticism, don’t take it personally, just be appreciative of that feedback because now they can act on it. You know, now they know about it. I think people often feel well, there’s a research into this as well that people actually prefer the negative feedback to the positive feedback. Sometimes, you know, I use a ratio of one to three. So for every piece of every three pieces of positive, reinforcement or positive feedback, I usually give one negative or one constructive, Because I think doing and communicating that way with my team creates a balance.

Joanne: 51:55

You know, they know where they stand, they know fundamentally, I know that they’re doing a great job and here’s a couple of other areas or areas that I think that they can improve on, and delivering feedback in that way just comes across as a lot more authentic, you know, a lot more real. And honestly, tim, nine times out of 10, when I give someone some feedback that might come across as negative feedback or criticism, you know they will often turn to me and say oh, wow, I’m so, so glad that you told me that. Thank you. You know I wasn’t aware of the impact that I was having. Now I know it, I can change it and I can, you know, be better, do better, you know, whatever. So, but it’s all in how you give the feedback, and that’s where you know how to give feedback effectively. Training is is super important for folks as well, because you want to leave people feeling like you’re, that you truly care about their growth and development. Yeah, not that you’re trying to criticize them not that you’re trying to criticize them.

Tim: 52:56

For me, when I was much younger, that was definitely an area that I needed help and improvement on because I’m generally pretty direct and so I laugh because that was definitely an area that I was told almost immediately I had to improve on.

Joanne: 53:17

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve come across people in the past that have said, well, that’s just how I am, I’m direct, kind of deal with it. And as a manager, you have some authority there, you have some power associated with your position. So for just to go out and say, well, deal with it, that’s just me, you know. For my mind, that’s just not enough. You know, managers have an obligation to do more in that respect and to make their communication and how they’re coming across much better, in a way that engages folks and builds people up rather than tear people down.

Tim: 53:57

Exactly Well, joanne. Thank you so much for your time today. Where can people buy your book and where can they find you to work with you?

Joanne: 54:07

Oh, thank you. Well, they can find my website, which is theleadershiprecipecom. That’s where they can also get access to that assessment that I talked about early, and they can get my book from there as well. But I am on Amazon and the title is Game On Is Management your Best Career Play? And I truly hope that folks enjoy the book, that they get a lot out of it and that it enables them to create the best possible legacy that they might and be the best possible managers that they can be.

Tim: 54:39

Well, again, I think the book is a tremendous tool and I’m sure that you know those that buy it and go through it will get a ton out of it and get better from that perspective. But I really enjoyed the conversation.

Joanne: 54:54

Me too.

Tim: 54:56

I can’t wait till we can connect again and again. Thanks so much for your time.

Joanne: 55:00

My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Tim: 55:04

Be sure to visit speakingwithconfidencepodcastcom to get your free e-book Top 21 Challenges for Public Speakers and how to Overcome them. You can also register for the Formula for Public Speaking course. Always remember your voice has a power to change the world. We’ll talk to you next time, take care.