“You have to build a relationship with someone, and you have to recognize that when you make a hiring decision, you’re changing the course of someone’s life, you’re impacting their family, their finances, their resume, all of that, so when you just have partly hire someone and you hire someone for a job that they’re not gonna be successful in for whatever millions of reasons that it could be, then you’re impacting their future, and I don’t think as leaders, we really understand how big of a deal it is when we hire someone and how we really are impacting or for future long-term.
-Jennifer Thornton
0:00:01.6 S1: Hi, and welcome to the How Not to Think Podcast. The podcast to get you thinking about your thinking and things like outdated stereotypes, binary thinking, and all that sort of stuff. I’m Dr. Howard Rankin, and I’m delighted to have with me today, Jennifer Thornton. She has special and expansive knowledge in the area of corporations and corporate development, particularly in relation to leadership engagement, hiring development, all those important things. She knows more about it than I do, so I’ll shut up and welcome, Jennifer. Welcome to the show.
0:00:43.3 S2: Thank you for having me. It’s gonna be a great conversation.
0:00:46.1 S1: I think. I think it will be. And as usual, I ask the guest just to get a little background for our listeners and viewers to how you got to be at this point in your life.
0:01:00.4 S2: So I grew up in the retail industry, and back when I was younger and I was thinking about getting my first job, I won’t necessarily date myself, but it was definitely before people were shopping on the internet, and I loved to hang out in the mall, so I wanted to work in the mall and dreams come true. I worked in the mall and little did I know… At that time, I was young, I love fashion, I love socializing. But what I didn’t know I was gonna learn is all about leadership, but I think what people don’t recognize is when you walk into your local mall, all of those managers are running multi-million dollar businesses, and they’re making hiring decisions and staffing decisions and handling HR issues. They’re motivating employees, they’re trying to think about who are my best people for what shift and why, and you walk in and you think they’re just selling jeans and t-shirts, but they really are running these multi-million dollar stores, and so that’s where I got my start in leading teams, and I progressed from there, and I worked in the operations side, many different levels and different jobs throughout the years.
0:02:10.8 S2: Then halfway through my traditional corporate career, I switched over and went over to the HR side of the business, and the reason I did that is that I never really got my results like most people, I wasn’t highly competitive, I didn’t wanna be number one just to be number one, I loved building teams and watching people see their goals come to life and the fun of having numbers and crushing those as a collective team, and so because I got my results through talent, I moved over to the HR side to start to specialize in that. And through that, I did many different things. But when I ended my traditional corporate career, I was a head of an international HR group, so I got to do really interesting things all around the world, and that looks fantastic on social media, looked very glamorous, but it was exhausting. But it was so much fun. I learned so much about myself, and just any time you get dropped off in a foreign country and you have to figure out how to work in it, you learn a lot about yourself, and… So after doing that for several years, I decided to go off on my own and again do what I love and really what I’m the best at, and stop doing things I’m not that great at.
0:03:25.3 S2: And what I love doing is helping people understand how to have incredible talent strategies, how to deploy talent, how to lead talent, and at the end of the day, making sure that that talent delivers on the business results, so that’s what we do today at 304 as we focus on talent strategy and leadership education.
0:03:42.9 S1: And 3 of coaching is your company, I wondered why, three or four, whether you came up with that at four minutes past the… You want afternoon. So.
0:03:54.9 S2: Yeah, so it was the craziest thing. I get a phone call, I’m still at my traditional job, I’d made a decision to go off on my own, I had a former executive I worked with, I knew I was going to. And so she calls me one day and she’s like, I need you to come in tomorrow and pitch to my CEO, we need to bring in an HR consultant, I want it to be you. And I was like, I don’t even have a name for my business yet, and she’s like, You better figure it out tonight, and I was like, Okay. And so that night I’m looking at a blank piece of paper, I have to have a name and find a logo in all of this, and 304 is a combination of dates, it’s always been my lucky number, and so I just went with my lucky number and you know what, it’s worked ever since there actually got that job, it was my first big client, and it’s been a lucky number since then…
0:04:43.0 S1: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, I think if it was something like that. So that’s great, I like the authenticity of that. Now, you obviously have a lot of expertise in a number of things, particularly the hiring process, and I was interested in that because one of the things that you seem to have challenged is the sort of conventional hiring process and questionnaires and personality question is… And you’re questioning whether that was really or the best way to assess somebody… Tell me a little bit more about your thinking on that, ’cause I think I’m gonna end up… Agree.
0:05:22.8 S2: I always love when someone says they’re gonna agree before I even speak… How great is that? When I look at hiring, when we hire someone, it falls a lot at the time, whether we’re not happy as a person who hired it or that employee is not happy, or something breaks down in between… And I always love when I get the phone call that says, I have this team of people and they don’t know what they’re doing, and if they’re not doing everything on. They’re all mad. And my first question, as soon as they calm down and tell me all these problems, I always say, What about your leadership made this possible, because we chose those people to be on our team, and so something we’re doing isn’t… Right, so first I get leadership to recognize that anyone on their team that isn’t the right fit or wasn’t a successful… They made that decision, not the employee, so that they can start to really take ownership in that development. The next thing that is, I think, different than traditional, what we’re taught is we’re taught, Oh, if you need someone, you go hire someone and you look at traits…
0:06:28.3 S2: All the stuff we’re told. But I always say to people, before you ever think about who you need to hire, you have to think about what you want them to do, and oftentimes, we throw payroll at our problems, and so we see a team that’s overwhelmed and overworked, and so we think, Well, we’ll just hire someone and then it’ll be fine, and then we hire someone and it’s still out of control, but what we don’t stop and say is, Why is this team struggling? Is it, do they have the tools and resources? Do they need that they need… Do they have the leadership education or the training? Are we asking them to do work that’s mismatched? There is 100 questions we could ask ourselves before we ever decide if we’re going to hire someone, and if we are going to hire someone and say We’re gonna spend 60000 on someone, What if we said, Let’s look at this and spend 60000 on up scaling our team, so they’re more productive and doing the work around removing road blocks, and then you have an incredibly productive team that money pays off a year after year, which I think is so good, when you stop and think about how do you spend those dollars…
0:07:42.2 S2: Yeah.
0:07:43.1 S1: Yeah, reminds me of a discussion that I frequently have about education where the teacher explains something and the kid… Or caps, don’t get it, I don’t understand it. And the teacher says, You’re stupid. Why don’t you eat is actually the teacher’s job to explain… So if a kid doesn’t understand it, but in large… It’s probably your fault, right?
0:08:08.0 S2: Absolutely, yes. Yeah, and you think about that mind switch between, I get to go to sleep at bed and I did nothing wrong, and I’m gonna blame it on that other person, well, soon as you know, you start to go into blame, you’ve given up your control in that situation, and you set some someone else up for continuous failure, and I just love your approach of allowing that educator to take responsibility because then they have control and changing the outcome.
0:08:36.5 S1: Absolutely, absolutely, and of course, depending on what stage you are in the process where they were talking about, it came to Garden or elementary school or a major corporation, somebody not taking ownership is not gonna go down well with the team… Right, always blaming us. And why don’t…
0:09:00.0 S2: And there are some people that are really good at that. Some people that stay in position for quite some time through the blame of others, and that’s another great leadership skill that I think executives have to possess, and that’s asking the right questions when things go wrong, because they really need to start to understand what was the root cause not the outcome, not the lost revenue, not the Lost client, but what led up to that so that we can… We can impact that so that that doesn’t happen in the future, is.
0:09:31.5 S1: Really understanding the dynamic and the process is moving well beyond egos and personal stuff… Right, Rich. Hopefully it’s changing is bad. For a long while, I wasn’t that it was, the leader is right. Lee’s not gonna accept any idea, and unless things… It says, all that side of stuff, and I see that one of the things that we will get to talk about is the seven deadly sins of leadership, I suspect that might be one of them, is not accepting ownership of responsibility…
0:10:08.0 S2: Absolutely, it is, yes.
0:10:11.4 S1: I’m not just go back to the hiring process again, ’cause I think… I’m fascinated by this. Yeah, a lot of times people think, Well, this is the sort of job we want me in general, and these are probably the characteristics we on… I will assess people on this and we’re a chat to them and we might combine some informal impression with formal impression. I can see that not working terribly well. I think a lot of assessments are overrated, I suspect things a way… A lot of assessments are overrated, some of them can be faked, you don’t have to be a genius to work out what the question typically is asking you to do, so just… I agree, there’s a limit, not that it’s completely useless, it might be a little guy to go a post, but should not depend on that.
0:11:13.6 S2: And a lot of organizations use assessments, it’s very common to use them. I always say make sure they’re EEOC compliant. If you’re in the US, there are… To a Supreme Court case, it gives the guidelines and I meet people using things and I’m like, Oh okay, that’s not C-compliant, please don’t… But if you decide to use an assessment and there are a handful that have really strong validation studies, anywhere from Audie base to a full day psychoanalytic, there’s everything in between, obviously there’s reasons why you would use one or another, but to some of the most popular ones definitely do not have the validation. I always tell people, if you’re gonna use one as for the validation report, as for the taxonomy report, a great organization would be more than happy to show off their research, but if they don’t wanna show off their research, there’s a reason why… And it has to be part of the conversation. And really designing your hiring process is incredibly important, and I don’t think we put enough time into that, we just say, Well, you first talk to the recruiter, then you talk to the HR person and you talk the hiring manager and someone signs off on you, and I just think that that’s such a 20th century way to look at it.
0:12:34.4 S2: You have to build a relationship with someone, and you have to recognize that when you make a hiring decision, you’re changing the course of someone’s life, you’re impacting their family, their finances, their resume, all of that, so when you just have partly hire someone and you hire someone for a job that they’re not gonna be successful in for whatever millions of reasons that it could be, then you’re impacting their future, and I don’t think as leaders, we really understand how big of a deal it is when we hire someone and how we really are impacting or for future long-term?
0:13:10.6 S1: Yeah, absolutely. Something was maybe relevant here is a question that I ask all my clients who were in education, whether that was first grade or a college. I asked him this question, What’s your favorite subject? And very often, they got the same answer and it wasn’t a subject, and it wasn’t recessed, and I’ve asked some very high people in education about this and they didn’t get it, but the answer is the subject… Top of my favorite teacher. Oh, yes. Right. And so that speaks to the connection… Our connection between two people is critical. It’s not about I, it’s not an extra thing. It’s critical, it’s critical in how people want their motivation, their function, everything, and so that is, I would think it’s a very important part of the hiring and team process way.
0:14:20.6 S2: Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because I was thinking, Well, what was my favorite subject? And it was history, and I remember the exact teacher, she had taught college, moved to a small town where I grew up and then had to teach high school, so here we have a college level professor in high school, and she not only taught us what she was supposed to, right. But she taught us how to think about history in a different way, in a more elevated way, and how history can be a predictor in just all of those things. Right, and you’re right. I remember everything about her, and that’s why I fell in love with history, which I still love today.
0:14:57.3 S1: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned history because I studied that as a junior and senior in my prediction education, and there were two history teachers, one was the guy I had, which was really produced all the dates, and when was this battle? When was that? And the other guy sounds a bit more like your teacher, I really wasn’t interested in that, but he wanted to take you back and what it would be feel to be like in 1776 or 1840. That’s history. What I was learning was just regurgitation, you know… Yeah, I’m glad you had a teacher that gave you that because it’s phenomenal, but… But that’s what happens when you can really relate and engage with people, you… Not just your motivation or your productivity, your full process just gets elevated.
0:15:55.3 S2: Yeah, and it expands your mind map, our world is our experiences, and that’s how big your mind map is, and it can’t be any bigger than your experiences, but when you think about exposing yourself to history, you can expand your mind map in such a different way, even from… One of my favorite thing to read is historic fiction, I love history fiction, I love him, and I love reading about strong women and historic fiction and what they’ve been through, and I think about myself and I think about their decisions and how that… How would I handle some of the things that are in the book? But I think it’s one of the best ways to really expand your mind map is through understanding history and putting yourself in those situations and really help to find context and the importance of context and…
0:16:45.5 S1: Excellent. So yeah, so your own… You’ve created a hiring assessment process that is different from what we’ve been talking about, which is about really trying to understand exactly what it is you need, and how are you gonna get that… Correct.
0:17:08.4 S2: Yeah, and you know when I think about the hiring process, it’s unique for every company, there’s never one-size-fits-all, but the pieces in it that we often forget is having that potential person meet with their co-workers because that’s who they’re gonna be working with, they’re gonna be a huge part of that person’s success, and so if you have one person and they have three business partners, what those three business partners have lunch with that person, and let them get to know them, and let the person who’s interviewing with your organization decide if they wanna work with you because that’s kind of it. This is a two-way relationship, it… We’re dating through this. It’s not just, I thank you and you have to come with me no matter what. And I think that’s so important when you start to think then on day one, when that person shows up, they know someone, they have some context, and so they’re gonna reduce that fear in their mind of, I gotta meet so many people… The already know people. I think the other thing is giving people small, very small projects to learn how they seek to have them come back and present that, and when I worked in Europe, that was so common, but it is not common in the United States.
0:18:19.8 S2: And I think it’s a big miss, and I think that’s where I fell in love with that process, and I often work with clients and we talk about that, and it’s made everyone so much more comfortable in the decision on both sides because they shared in a conversation around work, so there’s all different things you can put in it that I think create a conversation versus an interview.
0:18:43.4 S1: Yeah, I really like that. I really like back… So you’re actually saying you would recommend giving an applicant a task to do, and then they come back and discuss how they did it, how they approached it… Yeah, I really like that. I would be very effective.
0:19:00.3 S2: Yeah, I did it recently with a client, they had a really important hire to make and they hired the wrong person for the same position multiple times, and so it was like we were all on pins and needles, like We’ve got to get this right, and we had that person, one of the things that the previous people in that position has struggled with is managing the P and L, and so we put together a monk P and L, we threw some very obvious odd things, and we said, Here’s a P and L, look at it we have three questions, tell us what comes to your mind and be prepared, we’ll talk about it, and they hit everything, and then we had figured out how they were thinking about it, he was like, Well, this is like this… Each of the questions I’d wanna know. And so the CEO and this person got to engage in a conversation about finance to see how that works, right, ’cause they’re gonna have to have a lot of those collisions, and the CEO felt so comfortable, the candidate… This was a big move for him, he wasn’t looking for a job, you had to move cities, but because they engage in that conversation, they both were so comfortable, that offer was made, it was accepted, and that person’s enroll right now doing incredibly well.
0:20:10.2 S2: But it was how it happens, it happens through conversations, it.
0:20:14.9 S1: Seems so all this doesn’t he… Let’s try out a little bit of work and see how well we work together, I say seems so obvious, but… Yeah, brilliant. Really, that’s exactly what you wanna know. You wanna see this person doing what they’re gonna be doing and relating to them in that way… Yeah. Total to sense.
0:20:37.3 S2: Yeah, and I think the other thing too is it reduces fear because before he even worked for the organization, he has had the opportunity to tell the CEO his opinion about something, and when you think about fear in the workplace, I always say a leader’s number one job is the reduction of fear that’s really your only job, ’cause nothing can happen if we’re not reducing fear, and so they started their relationship through conversation around the truth, and that’s really impactful when you start your relationship that way. So I think there’s a lot of kind of fingers that come off that project that are really helpful.
0:21:13.5 S1: And I saw you do have some training on that, getting rid of the fear… Right. Time, tell us a little bit about that.
0:21:21.1 S2: Yeah, yeah, so I had the most incredible opportunity to work for a woman named Judith Laci, and she spent 40 years studying the neuroscience of conversations in the workplace, and how did that impact results and how did that impact relationships? And it was such a gift to be able to study underneath her, she has since passed, and I feel like one of my missions in life is to carry her work on ’cause she changed my life, she really changed how I thought about leadership and how I thought about people… And what I want people to always recognize is what we know about the brain is only about 20 to 25 years since we’ve really been able to study the brain, but yet we were taught to lead in these best practice leadership styles that came out of the Industrial Revolution, the 70s and 60s and 40, it came out of a whole different world, so not only is it a different world today, we also know all this stuff about the brain, and so we’ve got to lead in a different way because how we were leading was breaking down, 2020 broke it in half. If there was any cracks, it definitely broke in half, but then how do we start to lead in the 21st century, and I think it’s through the understanding of the neuroscience of the brain, how to reduce fear, and that your language has a direct impact on someone’s chemicals and then how do they respond and obviously produce your results…
0:22:51.1 S1: Absolutely good time to me, for me to plug a bot that I just brought up a power to the Adam effective communication. It’s the second condition. I wrote the book quite some time ago, the reason that I wrote it initially was here was as a practicing psychologist and coach and all that stuff, and no one had ever presented or had… I haven’t taken a course on communication and made no sense to me, and so I started really researching and then put it into a book. And it’s critical. It’s really, really critical. It’s so obvious, but most people aren’t trained in that, they’re not trying to think about that in an appropriate way, and how can you not do that if you really wanna maximize performance…
0:23:43.3 S2: I know, and again, it kinda goes back to that original thing I said when that executive calls me and they’re all open arms, my first question always is, is what have you done to create this atmosphere where this is how people perform, and oftentimes, one of the most common things I hear is my team doesn’t make their own decisions, my team can’t come up with new ideas, and if I’m on vacation, nothing gets done, and there’s a reason why you’ve created an environment where maybe perfection is the only thing, aloud, therefore, don’t do any work, because if you mess up, then you’re in trouble, so I gotta wait for you to tell me exactly what color pen to use so that I’m… Perfect. And so, of course, people aren’t gonna make their own decisions, I mean they’re just not to… Or every time someone brings a new idea to you, you’re like, No, no, that’s wrong, well, guess what, they’re gonna stop bringing ideas to you, they’re gonna want to not be told they’re wrong, it’s so amazing how our language really create behaviors in our team.
0:24:44.5 S1: Yeah, and one of the golden rules, I think, of communication is if you want somebody to communicate with you in any setting, you’ve gotta create the right communication environment, and that right environment is respect. Yes, yeah, authenticity. I mean, if somebody thinks, Well, if I’m gonna present this are gonna make a fool of me or they’re gonna laugh, or they’re gonna reject me, or they’re not gonna tell you, you don’t need to be a psycho analyst to war Battersby most people have been through to that maybe in their families. I’m not gonna tell my mom anything on my dad ’cause you’re just screaming me, so I won’t tell him anything, which then becomes the way in which you communicate or done… Through the rest of your life. So it’s so fundamental, but it’s so widespread, it’s so encompassing, and I think those are the things that you are addressing in the work that you’re doing with leaders, with groups, and that is critical.
0:25:42.8 S2: Yeah, and it’s so simple. The things that we say that we don’t even recognize, one of the things that I talk a lot about to have a growth mindset and to be a leader that has growth-minded teams, I always say as a team, what could go right? Because we’re always like, Alright, we’ve got this plan, what could go wrong? Alright, well, let’s just turn the fear about one and then let’s try to make sure nothing goes wrong, but what if we said, what could be possible? And what could go right? Alright, this could go right now. What do we have to do to make sure that goes… Right, and that’s just a simple language change, but it changes the mind or… I always… Other one is like, what else could be true ’cause you… To process information, we create these stories, and because we’re fear-based animals, we create fearful stories, I’m like, If you’re gonna make up a story and you don’t know the truth, at least make up one that’s purposeful and serves you… Make up a good one.
0:26:44.5 S1: Absolutely, and we asked, artists wanted a good story to a destructive one. You absolutely, absolutely. And nothing you… We all have, and you obviously have as I have high pivotal moments in the career… In your career, I really highlight something and that this… What we’re talking about now, I happened to me when I was still in London, I was doing therapy and I was doing a couple’s counseling with this couple, and the woman’s complained about her husband was he never said he didn’t really open up, and that’s true. He got sat there and really didn’t say anything about the fourth session, he finally got the courage, and I would say, Well, blah, blah, blah, herniated, you think like, where did that come from? Me, and he stood up and said… And that’s why I never say anything, Sumpter.
0:27:34.5 S2: Perfect. Waterless. Yeah, and that is what happens all of the time, we train people how to respond to us, they’re responding to us before the way that we have, and over time, we build those neuro-pathways that when you enter the room as an executive, you have history, there’s been stories told about you, you’ve engaged with people, and whatever they think is what likely will happen is how their body is starting to chemically respond and you can… I always do love to, when I start working on the executive through conversation intelligence and starting to work on this or like, Okay, so I just need to go in and tell them to trust me, I’m like, yeah, that didn’t really work. Either this is a process, but they just think they can go and tell them, oh.
0:28:30.5 S1: Yeah, that’s right. After he has not trusting in that, gonna work right. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And you’re right, people train, others have to react to them, to take them… If people have not about the thant City, then I’m not gonna open up and gonna felt very inhibit in the battle sense of things in their interactions, and that’s gonna impact every aspect of that relationship and that performance, and that’s what you’re walking on… It seems to me.
0:29:08.0 S2: Working on… Yeah, trying to change the way we feel about work one conversation at a time, because it really does impact the way we live our life, it impacts communities, and when you think about how you make someone feel in the workplace that goes home with them, it doesn’t just check at the door. And so if you’ve treated someone poorly during the day and they go home and have dinner with our family, they’re not as connected, they’re not as excited, and then their family is gonna feel that and then the kid goes and does their homework and they’re bomb because Mom was cranky because she’d had a bad day, all of these things that happen to build better communities, we have to build better work environments, ’cause we spend a lot of time at work and… It’s part of it, we are ecosystems, we are not these columns of things that do not touch, and the leaders play a very important role role to the ecosystems of families.
0:30:12.3 S1: And there’s so much work on employee engagement, and when employee engagement is good, productivity is where bearable is way better. And employee engagement here isn’t just a bonus or a day or anything like that. It’s exactly what we’re talking about, what you do. Yeah, authentic connection, where now I care about this company, I care about the other employees, I care what’s it… Can you value up? Right.
0:30:46.6 S2: Yeah, and when we are in a place where we filled valued and that perfectionism isn’t required and our fear is reduced, then our prefrontal cortex is all opened up and firing, and so that we’re getting that good stuff or getting the innovation, and you cannot have innovation without being comfortable with failure because they are like left and right, light and dark, and so when you create these environments, failure is not allowed, then you need to accept the fact that there’ll be no decisions or innovation either. And that’s a big piece that I don’t think people understand how closely connected those two things are…
0:31:29.6 S1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have a friend who had a family business at our parts, maybe write a book, we look together at it, and he was very, very sensitive to his alias employees needs and would go out of his way to reinforce them and… Just some amazing things. And he’d get letters from family members, banking, and one time he gave somebody who did something really well, his family a week in this beautiful house, and math has been here, and the grandmother who was dying of cancer, roaming said this was the most special week. Thank you. I mean, gosh, if you’re doing stuff like that for people.
0:32:17.8 S2: What are they not gonna do for you… Right, exactly. And I think so often that we… We’re trying to protect ourselves as the executive or the owner, especially if it’s a family-owned or individual-owned business, it’s all about, I’m the boss and you guys are my employees, and I’m protecting… Protecting, and every time you build a protection brick in that wall, your team is less likely gonna deliver, and often times I have to tell founders, this was surgery, not theirs, and so you have to share in the dream or they’re never gonna help you deliver it. Right.
0:32:56.0 S1: If people don’t see their role in the dream, they don’t see the pups of it, if it’s just going to work on… Get it. It’ll be whatever the next better paying job or whatever they’re on… Right.
0:33:10.9 S2: Yeah. And especially if that person is living this lavish lifestyle and not helping out others or making people feel or poorly about themselves, but yet they have this amazing big lifestyle, again, no one’s gonna want to help you build this lavish lifestyle on their back…
0:33:33.8 S1: Right, and I’ve been in a related, but if you’re first in in the morning and last out at night… That helps, right? Yeah.
0:33:41.2 S2: And if you share the reward or when things aren’t going well, the first instinct is protect the team versus yourself. We recently had a big storm here in Texas, and one of my clients, she let the entire team have the week off because of issues and didn’t make them take vacation, and I know it cost her a ton of money. And she said it was the right thing to do, and I’ll get that money back on the back side… And she’s absolutely.
0:34:14.7 S1: Right. Yes, she is.
0:34:16.3 S2: Absolutely, right. And I had other clients that didn’t respond that way, they were tracking PTO by the second, and now these people won’t be able to take a vacation this year, so they’re gonna be as… It’ll, there’s more than one way to make a dollar, and not always is it by trying to save it and keep it away from your team…
0:34:37.1 S1: Yeah, absolutely, and your team on your team, and they’re part of it too, and if they don’t feel that that’s either something you’ve done where they’re in the wrong spot… Right, absolutely. And you work together as a team, that’s in a… When you do, that’s an amazing connection that you have, and certainly that helps the brain process is a sense of bonding, the mirror neurons and all that stuff, that connection is invaluable in… You can get a price on that, I don’t think.
0:35:11.9 S2: No, you can’t. You cannot put a price on it, and you never know when it will come back and always give more than you expect in return, and when you treat your employees that way, your business will always be successful.
0:35:25.8 S1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do some work with an interesting guy who’s a philanthropist, humanist, humanitarian, he shows up where the arcades or what have you, and pass free gas to people are stuck on the highway. And they say, Oh, thank you, thank you so much. And he says, No, thank you, I love doing this. You’re doing something for me as much as I’m doing something for you, and… That’s amazing. Really? Yeah, that’s awesome. Do you feel that leaders are getting this now, because this is… As you said, the last 20 years, we’ve learned a lot more about how the brain works, how performance works. Do you think leaders today, again, or are they still… Some of them still stuck in a certain 20th century in the boss mentality.
0:36:21.9 S2: I think there is a wide spectrum, and there are quite a few on both ends, and I think that the reason why that happens is no one ever wakes up one day and says, You know, I just love being a great leader and I’m just gonna hire a bunch of people and we’re just gonna do some great work together. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but it’s gonna be great. No one does that. Everyone has an idea for a product, a service, a widget, something, and then they’re forced to create a team to make that come true. And so I think that is why oftentimes we struggle with leadership is it’s not what we woke up to do that day, we woke up for our widget or our service, and so… It’s the necessity, right. And I think that so many people have been able to attach success to an old way of leading, and instead of saying, Hey, maybe since my entire team all of a sudden is revolting, maybe it’s me, and maybe I have something to learn, but instead they just continue to blind because they cannot detach themselves from previous success and understand what future success might look like, and I think those who struggle at the end of the day, that’s their biggest issue is they have…
0:37:40.3 S2: They’re so ingrained into their past success that they can’t see a change in the future… Yes.
0:37:46.5 S1: And certainly, if you look at communication in society generally, we’ve been going the wrong way or the forecasters, right. Become very egocentric and assassin and bullying and all of that stuff, which I suspect has impacted the culture, so that also might be one reason why there are some leaders who think the way to lead is by yelling and screaming, and… I personally know the Bataan.
0:38:27.3 S2: It works for a short time, and I know crisis… And that’s crisis management. The buildings on fire, get out, don’t ask questions, do what I said, and that works only in high crisis, but what happens is, we have a crisis and we lead that way, then all of a sudden we get in this habit of constantly crisis management and as things start to deteriorate, we try to get even more direct, more yelling, and so we’re creating the spiral downward through our actions, but yeah, crisis management works about 1% of the time, and it only works if it’s a crisis… Only the buildings on fire.
0:39:07.1 S1: Yeah, that try. Some people might think it’s on five and it really has Manafort on fire, but for everyone, is Sastry do a lot of work with teams too, because we talked about communication and expectation, and of course, when you get a few people together, then that multiple potentially multiplies the problem I… Absolutely. Atwater.
0:39:35.4 S2: Of work. Do you train teams? How do you do that? Yeah, so when you’re working with teams, we use a lot of the same principles, but the nice thing about working with teams is you’ve got a group of people collectively trying new skills and new competencies, and they start to help each other with that, and I always think that’s just incredible, because if you’re one person and trying to change how you talk to your team and you’re doing all of this, you’re kind of this one person lifting this huge boulder, but when there’s a team… And that’s why we do a lot of leadership academies in group, so the team helps all the boats rise or now they just keep… That accountability to gather. And I think also when I look at modern leadership, the days of being an employee that expects your boss to manage the team, and that no one can do anything unless the manager is there, no… You have to learn how to manage as a group, and you have to learn how to self-manage collectively because of the pressures and the intensity of our work environment today, you can’t expect the boss to do it all, especially when you think about a CEO, I’ll talk to Vice President and executives, and they’re like, Well, the CEO hasn’t gotten us all together in six months, and I was like, I don’t think that’s a CEO’S job, I think at your level, you guys should be collectively managing the future of the organization, and so when we do teamwork, it’s a lot about the team coming together and understanding that they are as important, if not more important, in how they self-lead is the bosses, on how they lead them.
0:41:21.4 S1: I mean, the uses and down running the packaging department… No crazy how that works is a alone makes thanking.
0:41:32.3 S2: His Amazon Bandyopadhyay.
0:41:39.8 S1: So we reach this point, I’m gonna ask a question and you come back the second time and talk to us about the seven deadly sins of leadership, because we’ve just kind of entered at it, but we haven’t gone into it.
0:41:54.5 S2: Tool. I would love to do that, and it’s all about the addiction to being right, and talk about how that addiction starts to play with the 7 deadly sins. It’s a fun conversation.
0:42:05.5 S1: Well, we’ll set aside a time shortly to do that in the meantime, tell people about where they can reach you… We have that in the show notes, but again, people, sometimes I read the show.
0:42:19.6 S2: As we are at 304Coaching.com, and you can also connect with me directly on LinkedIn at Jen Thornton ACC, and we can continue the conversation there.
0:42:31.6 S1: Excellent, well, again, thank you so much. Definitely one, you had to come back and we will have a second conversation about the seven deadly sins of leadership, which I’m sure you will be able to enlighten us very significantly about, is people have their own views too. But it’s been great having you on the show. I really, really appreciate it. And it’s been awesome.
0:42:56.5 S2: Thank you for having me. I could sit and talk with you all day.
0:43:00.2 S1: I think that’s right, I’m in the wrong business. Okay, so wait for the second one, ’cause it’s gonna be just as good folks and until then, stay well, keep out of trouble and remember to think about your thinko.