Ep 100: Special Reflection Episode

Speaker A: A listener production. I'm Margie Hartley, executive coach to senior leaders around the globe. And this is Fast Track. Welcome to our hundredth episode. I'm so excited to share with you something a little bit different and special today. We've put together some of the highlights from five of our guests from the last three years. Our listeners tell us that Fast Track is something for everyone. Whether you're looking for motivation before you go to work, seeking inspiration while you're at work, or looking for new ideas on your way home from work, there's an episode to help you with career hurdles and success. One of the most original ideas that we've heard of has been teams that get together every week and discuss the podcast or the organization that uses Fast Track in all their leadership programs. We're just so thrilled to be useful. A big thank you also to every single guest we've had on the show. They've helped motivate, inspire, and educate you and your teams around the biggest career success factors. The first of our five guests that I want to share with you is world renowned positive psychologist and Harvard professor Tal Ben Shahar. I spoke to him about his book Perfect. He and I discussed perfectionism, and the insights came thick and fast.

Speaker B: So adaptive perfectionism is about ambition. It's about being responsible. It's about hard work. It's about attention to details. This is adaptive perfectionism. By and large, maladaptive perfectionism is the fear of failure, the obsessive fear of failure that prevents us from taking action. It leads to avoidance rather than to coping. And it's this fear of failure that is harmful. It's harmful for business success. It's also harmful for relationships because we tend to be, uh, defensive, fearing, uh, criticism or disagreement. We reject.

Speaker A: Thank you for making Fast Tracks so

Speaker B: successful and potential, therefore, for growth. Now, the reason why it's so important to distinguish adaptive from maladaptive perfectionism is because very often we may say to ourselves, I don't want to be a perfectionist. But deep down, certainly on the subconscious, sometimes on the conscious level, we are reluctant to give up the perfectionist. And because we also know that it helped us get to where we are, that it also helps us be more successful. And if we're able to distinguish between the two and say, well, I want to still be responsible. Yeah, I want to still be, um, hard working and ambitious and pay attention to details. What I want to let go of is this obsession with failure, this fear of deviating from the straight and narrow. That's what I want to let go of, then we're in a much better position to keep the former and let go of the latter.

Speaker A: You wrote the Pursuit of perfect in 2009, and it's still a bestseller. Why are we so drawn to getting things right and pursuing perfect? What are the reasons for us wanting our lives to be perfect?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: So, you know, the reasons are, or some of the reasons are natural, evolutionary. We're rewarded for success. Uh, we pay a price for failure. So that's part of the reason. However, that doesn't account for the deep and harmful fear of failure. And that comes a great deal as a result of education. What we're often presented with, whether it's on magazine, uh, covers or fairy tales or partial pictures of role models, we. What we are provided with is perfection. Perfection in terms of how things look or feel or are experienced or are achieved. And we want that, too, because we see how that form of perfectionism is admired. Again, whether it's the magazine cover or whether it's the success of the great leader, and because we don't see the full picture or the real picture, we are, uh, misled to thinking that that is real, but that is possible, and therefore that is desirable. So we desire the perfect. We desire the flawless.

Speaker A: I really enjoyed that interview. A brilliant discussion with Tahl there. You can listen to the rest of the episode in our, uh, fast Track feed. When we wanted to talk about teamwork, there was no one better to speak to than John Eales, ex wallaby captain, successful business person and leadership specialist. John's skills and understanding about teamwork is exceptional. He spoke to me about the art of teamwork and the often elusive and precious success factors.

Speaker D: So, firstly, there has to be that common purpose. And these will sound really simple, basic things, but they are so important in the scheme of things. So knowing why they're together, what is the purpose of actually being there? What is this team trying to achieve? And then secondly, and there's a lot of other things that go into this mix, but I think it's incredibly important to actually know the people that you're with and get to know them as people before you get to know them as positions in the team.

Speaker A: Let's go back to that piece about purpose and why, if you're in a sporting team like the Wallabies, it seems pretty clear that you want to win the World Cup. Is that fair?

Speaker D: Yeah, that's very fair. It's pretty easy. The purpose is pretty easy.

Speaker A: So what happens in corporate life, does it come a bit more blurred in your experience?

Speaker D: Yeah, much more Difficult, Uh, because I think it's. The goals are not really as obvious necessarily. I mean, yes, there might be an EBITDA goal, there could be a number of employees goal, there could be sales goal, whatever it might be, but they're not generally rallying cries quite as much as winning a World cup might be. So I think in sport you've got this advantage because you know that there's a Premiership season, you know, you've got this amount of weeks before you play in the finals, and then there's, uh, the Grand Final, you know, there's four years between World Cups, so you know what you're aiming for, but it doesn't make the actual task of achieving that any easier.

Speaker A: Okay, so we'll come to that.

Speaker E: How?

Speaker A: In a minute. I'm really fascinated by how you delineate a purpose about why you come together. Uh, if you don't have such a compelling or obvious cause in front of you.

Speaker D: There's different aspects to this. Like, there's the goal and there's the purpose of what. Why are you there? And I think these days people are demanding that it's more important for organisations to actually explicitly say why they're there. And it has to be a grander goal than just achieving profit at the end of the day. Uh, and some organisations do it really well and others find it a bit harder. Um, I'm a director of Flight Centre Travel Group, and the purpose of Flight Centre Travel Group, one of the goals of the business is to open up the world for those who want to see it. So it's really clear people who come to Flight Centre, they love travel and they love facilitating those opportunities for the people that they're serving.

Speaker A: And so that makes it very easy to rally around. Doesn't it make it very easy then, to utilise that as the North Star, as some might call it?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a greater reason for turning up in the morning.

Speaker A: M We know that working in a team makes us more effective. The challenges are often around working styles and what different people like to achieve things in a different way. Do you think that's one of the reasons people find it difficult?

Speaker D: If you don't understand how people work best, well, then you're never going to be able to get the best out of them. And we all bring to the table different, uh, personalities, different life experiences, different. Different objectives. Short, uh, term, midterm, long term. So being able to work that out and say, okay, what's the best mix for this team? How are we going to turn different focuses that people have into that little bit of magic that makes it a team.

Speaker A: I never get sick of hearing John talk about teams. You can listen to the rest of John's episode on the Listener app. I want to share some of renowned Harvard professor Amy Edmondson's insights into psychological safety. Psychological safety took the world absolutely by storm in the last decade. And the research shows that there's an exponential rise in the interest of your work on psychological safety. So before we begin, what is your definition of psychological safety?

Speaker C: I'll define it as the belief that one can speak up without fear of humiliation or punishment in any way. So it's a felt sense of permission for candor.

Speaker A: Okay, so there's discussion about radical candor and feedback in the workplace and these concepts of being able to say anything you want to say and bringing your whole self to work. And I think sometimes some people become a bit confused by this idea of trust. Psychological safety, radical candor. What does it actually look and feel like in the workplace?

Speaker C: I think the best way to describe a, uh, psychologically safe work environment is one in which people are really focused on the work. They're talking about what matters. They're raising their ideas, they're raising their concerns, they're asking questions. And in a sense, they're able to be all in. They're focused, they're engaged, because they don't have one major part of their brain trying to size up what's okay and what isn't. They're not reading the tea leaves, they're not cautious, they're not tiptoeing before speaking with what's on their mind.

Speaker A: So in a meeting, for example, people would be able to say, instead of prefacing something with, oh, this might sound like a stupid question, I'm imagining in a psychological safe environment, that question or that preface wouldn't exist.

Speaker C: Absolutely. One would say, I have a question. And it's, you know what's even more worrisome than this might be a stupid question, but is just not asking at all. And I'm sure your listeners, I know I have, have been in situations at work where they have a question relevant to the work itself, but they think, uh, I might look stupid. Maybe I'm supposed to know that already. I'll just wait and see. Maybe someone will say something that will clue me. And that's a lot of wasted mental energy. And it's also potentially worse than that. It's potentially the moment passes, you end up doing your work without a, uh, full understanding of something that would have helped you do the work better.

Speaker A: Yeah. I find when I'm going into teams and working with teams that often people don't know what their teammates actually do for a job. They might be leading large teams. Uh, is this something you've experienced also?

Speaker C: Yes. And it's on the one hand it's crazy, right? I mean, this is work. Right. We need to know what, what each other is doing if we're going to coordinate and collaborate and do a great job.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: But on the other hand, it's human nature and it's human nature to be self protective. It's human nature to want to look good in the eyes of others, and especially when there's a hierarchy present.

Speaker A: What's the difference between an intact or formal team and this concept of teaming?

Speaker C: I like to think of it as a team. A team is a noun and teaming is a verb. So a team is defined as a bounded, reasonably stable group of people who are interdependent in achieving a shared goal. Uh, that's a team. It could be a sports team, could be a product development team. Smallish group, interdependent shared goal teaming M is collaborating and coordinating, often with different people at different times. Uh, it's the acts of coordinating, the act of collaborating rather than the entity. The reason the distinction matters is that more and more of the work today is not done in formal stable teams for several reasons. One, many people are on multiple teams at once. And some of those teams, they might be the core team member, they might be really working with those people and it feels like a real team over time. But other teams, they're just maybe the marketing expert who comes in for just a little portion of the work. And so they're teaming. And most of our historical advice on how to have great teams is predicated on the idea that that's a stable entity, that we can launch it, that we can get to know each other's strengths and weaknesses and then have a shared goal and we can sort of get to work together. But what if you're not on a stable team? What if you are working with different people at different times on multiple goals? We didn't have as much good advice for that kind of work. And unfortunately that kind of work is more and more prevalent.

Speaker A: That was five minutes of gold. Amy is brilliant. Well, we all know that in our work and home life we have to be able to have good, quality conversations so we can have quality relationships. And we know that quality relationships are essential for successful careers. So we went straight to the heart of it with Dr. Uh, Travis Kemp. Renowned organisational and coaching psychologist. We talked about being a leader and being a coach and quality conversations.

Speaker F: We've always known that when people come up with their own solutions that they're more committed to delivering on those solutions. We know that when they can generate their own solutions to problems, they, they're more likely to solve those problems. Basically, if we can support people to find their own way in life, they're probably gonna be better off than if they're told to do something. And so the application of um, what we know about humans in the coaching psychology space is very much about helping people and supporting people and teasing out of people their own solutions and their own motivations and commitments and then helping them to find ways of getting to where they wanna go.

Speaker A: Look, I know in my experience as a consultant that people have accused this style of leadership as really being quite long winded and taking a lot of time. So teasing out people's ideas and helping them think. What's your answer to the cynics who say that it's long winded?

Speaker F: Yeah, so I think that's a really good point because I've been hit by that a thousand times I think in my career. And so being a scientist I get intrigued about that perception and I like to run little experiments. So we've done numerous just anecdotal experiments now and I get my clients to do this just experiment with asking a question versus um, providing a direction. And sometimes that might take two or three questions to get to the same point that you feel you needed to get to in the first place. But by going through that process, the person's come up with their own solution and we time that and time how long it takes. And it at, at the very most it may take 30 to 40 seconds longer than if I get into a situation where I'm directing somebody and then having to explain why I'm directing them and justify the direction.

Speaker A: So the value we're losing 30 or 40 seconds, what are we gaining?

Speaker F: So I guess the benefit of that, the return on that 30 or 40 second investment. And look, this is a made up number. Sometimes it takes a M minute, let's say two minutes, whatever. But the return on that investment is the likelihood of that person actually going ahead delivering on what they say they want to do and meeting your needs in terms of what you need them to deliver on M just goes up, uh, astronomically. And the likelihood of me having to come back and restate what's required or performance, manage that person or ride them basically just dips markedly as well, so overall, the outcome is better for everybody.

Speaker A: So you're saying the outcome's better for everybody, not just the leader, but the person who is being led. So help me understand the psychology behind it. What's going on? If I'm being asked a question or being made to think, you said I'm more likely to commit to doing an action. But what's the mindset? What's the psychology behind that? For me, yeah, that's a really interesting

Speaker F: question, because people, um, and people don't like it when I say this, but people do whatever they want to do. They don't do as they're told. And if you beat them with a large stick or threaten them with some sort of punitive method, then they will comply with what you're asking them to do for as long as it takes for the stick to go away or for you to turn your back.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker F: And so if I'm in a situation where I'm constantly directing somebody who doesn't really want to go along with what I'm directing them to do, doesn't really see the point, isn't buying into the whole idea, then as soon as I'm not riding them, they will do what they want to do. They'll either go slow, they'll put it on the back burner, they will let it slide, they'll transfer responsibility to somebody else, they'll deny and basically behave badly to avoid having to deliver on it. And that's not because they're bad people. It's just because there's not a process of engaging with the activity and making it my own and understanding it, because there's been no space created for that. So the real challenge is, you know, how do I start to understand how humans work at a fundamental level, understand that they like to be self directed, they like to be self managing. They do like to have a sense of agency and a sense of ability to be able to influence their environment. We have technical terms for that. We call it a locus of control. You know, humans tend to want to, uh, have an internal locus of control, be proactive, feel like they can have an impact on the world. When I'm feeling that I'm much more likely to engage with you and I'm engaging with you at that level, I'm much more likely to be successful in terms of delivering on my objectives and my goals.

Speaker A: Travis did two episodes with us. They're really worth a listen. Finally, a little bit about jerks at work or work jerkery. And some of the best advice I've Heard in a long time from Dr. Tessa West, Associate professor of psychology at New York University.

Speaker E: What we tend to find is that people will avoid having conflict or negative social interactions at all costs. So even in situations where, say, you negotiate with someone and you're much better at the negotiation than them, even find out at the end that you won a negotiation, they're just not likely to actually give that kind of feedback. And so we go through life, you know, maybe misstepping, making mistakes, saying the wrong thing, and no one really ever tells us. And there's this huge mismatch between what people do and what's going on beneath the surface, under the skin, so to speak. So. So their heart rate and their blood pressure will be racing the whole time they're smiling and telling someone, you're lovely. You're wonderful. I love working with you. You're so smart and great. And people are just. They have a really hard time dealing with these difficult social issues, even if they're experiencing stress the entire time.

Speaker A: So is the, uh, jerk phenomenon really about lack of feedback, or is it something deeper than that?

Speaker E: I think it's a combination of lack of feedback cultures or contexts that really breed it. So not every workplace is jerk friendly. And I think some places kind of encourage work jerkery more than others. Um, and different kinds of work jerkery, really competitive places, will encourage kissing up and kicking down. It's actually the only way you can get ahead. Other places encourage things like free riding because the boss is too busy to pay attention. So workplaces have to be a fertile ground. And then if you have some of the trappings of a jerk and you kind of plant them in those environments, they have everything they need to thrive and to grow layer on top of that. We're a little bit clueless how other people see us. In fact, most of us don't really know what our reputations are at work. Um, we're very inaccurate at knowing what people think of us. So we're not getting the feedback, or if we are getting the feedback, we're not attending to it, so we're not correcting those bad behaviors. And what we find is that often these jerks are doing things that harm themselves just as much as they harm other people. And part of that is because they're not getting that feedback at work.

Speaker A: I love that episode. And Tessa completely nails how to deal with difficult people at work. So there's a taste of five fast track episodes with some of our brilliant guests. Just to give you a snapshot as we reflect on 100 episodes of the show. We'd love you to subscribe, like, rate and recommend the podcast to your colleagues and friends. Thank you for making Fast Track so successful. Fast Track was presented by me, Margie Hartley, producer Tina Mataloff, audio production by Nicky Sitch, executive producer Jennifer Goggin,

Speaker E: Listener.