Empathy and Trust: Navigating Leadership Challenges with Adam Malone

Hey everybody wendy sellers here the hr lady thanks for coming back to our podcast we have with us today he's been missing a little bit for a while there but my co-host jc oh it's it's always such a pleasure to be found how you've been right all right you've been flying all over the country you've been talking everywhere what you've been up to this is probably why my throat is shot right now you know i have been speaking at some conferences here and there and i have a lot more coming up.

So been on in and out of airports and just, you know, having a great time, rolled out another new program, HR Like a Real Boss, which is a mentorship and training program. So more on that maybe in another episode once I get my ducks in a row. Hey, JC, we have an amazing guest here with us today. We have Adam Maloney here from Tennessee.

I love Tennessee. I wonder how the weather is there. We'll have to ask him that in a moment. Speaking of, are you in New York with snow.

Oh, me? Yeah. Yeah. It snowed a little bit on the drive-in this morning.

It was not good. Oh my goodness. But it's gorgeous outside right now. I think it's got to be at least like 38 or 40 degrees right now.

That's almost half a hundred. Yeah. No, this is very good. You know, good things.

Whoa. No, thank you. You can have that. Although I may regret that being in Florida and it might be 90 tomorrow.

So in like July or August, I might have to come up to see you. It's so hot. It's like you're in hell. I know.

Hey, let's get back to our guest at hand here. He is known as the trust expert from Tennessee who helps weave the fabric of trust and ops teams. And he's actually known as the tenacious operator. Welcome, Adam.

Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me. Hey, I saw in your LinkedIn profile that it literally says you're a leadership consultant who actually led a global team of 4,000.

Whoa, that's a lot. Tell us about that and how you got to where you are now. Well, that was a joy. That was a blessing kind of leading that team.

Where I got to where I am now kind of goes back to the beginnings of getting that team. About eight years ago, I was asked to move into operations, into supply chain. And the company I was at had just formed a relationship with Apple. And to say the least, we were frenemies is probably the best, like the most congenial way to put it.

And so that really, I would say, began both my work in the operations world. So I spent seven years leading global supply chain teams after that. And then also really set the stage and planted the seeds for the discussions and work I do on trust. And how do you move trust forward even when, you know, maybe it is absent or maybe you're like in a position of distrust?

Yeah, I said JC just sent me over a message like, hey, balancing a budget for an operations manager is like riding a bike, except the bike is on fire and you're in the middle of a tornado. Is that pretty much how that felt like? Maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. You're in the middle of a tornado and someone's throwing things at you, asking why you're not handling them. Oh, man. Hey, you know, I see also that you really like to talk about empathy and trust, which thank you, because I talk about empathy almost every single day.

You know, why do so many leaders, in your opinion, struggle with consistency in the soft skills of empathy and trust, especially when they're under pressure? Yeah, well, actually, I think that's one of the ways to talk about it is when we make pronouncements about the sorts of leaders we want to be, we make those, you know, decisions in the light of day when the sun is shining and, you know, the birds are singing and, you know, this is the leader I want to be. And then, you know, when the adrenaline hits and you've got, you know, somebody with a C in their title, you know, calling you and you've got a client or a customer who's pissed, like in those moments, that's the, you know, that's the dark of midnight and everything's on fire.

And often I find that those concepts of empathy and authenticity and trust, they start to crumble when the adrenaline hits. And it takes a real focused effort to plan for how you're going to be empathetic and authentic and inspire trust in those moments. And I think too often, we make the plans when everything is nice and rosy. And we don't spend enough time really like doing the visualization work.

I know that sounds cheesy to some people. But doing the visualization work to actually think, how am I going to feel in my bones when I actually have to do this? Because it's like, you're not in the same state of mind. So how do you bridge those?

Well, 86% of business executives believe that they are highly trusted by their employees. Only 60% of employees report that they highly trust their employer. And that indicates a huge perception gap. Yeah, 26% perception gap there.

And that's totally, I see that all the time as a, you know, as a management HR consultant where leaders, I shouldn't even say leaders, people who think they're leaders are like, yeah, yeah, my employees totally trust me. And then if I do a confidential and anonymous employee survey, it comes out as like, well, not necessarily. Maybe I trust my direct supervisor, but nobody above them. What are your thoughts on that, Adam?

Yeah, I think there's definitely, well, one of those surveys are always kind of problematic because you can't ask enough detail to actually get the answer because the survey would be too long. And so, you know, you struggle sometimes to get at the root. And I think that that gap that we're talking about. By the way, that 86%, I think is from a Gallup poll.

But there's been a couple other polls that have been done that actually show that perception difference to be more like 40 to 60%. Yeah, I love that. It's, yeah, it's actually quite large. And one of the humorous things about it is when you do a longitudinal study of the people who say that trust is important to them.

That everyone believes they are more than average trustworthy, if that makes sense. Which is like fundamentally not possible. We can't all be more than average trustworthy. Like we're not all above average.

That's not how averages work. Everyone's a five. Everyone's at the top. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. But I think a lot of that gap is related to like signs of dysfunction that people don't handle well. And I think, you know, we were probably going to talk about that. But one of those is conflict and that people misunderstand understand what conflict means in an environment.

And one thing I work with a lot of my partners with is to embrace that healthy conflict is actually one of the strongest signs of a trusting environment. And one of the big indicators I look for when I go into an organization is if they believe that they are conflict-free, it's a huge red flag that they've got really big trust issues because no one's willing to call the baby ugly or talk about the hard thing and everyone just kind of goes along to get along. Yeah. And you'll often find that in orgs where.

The project regouts are always green, but they miss the deadline. It's like a way you can start to sense that. Because no one's willing to say we're off track or we're going to miss our deliverables. And then, you know, it's two days before launch and it's like, oh, no, we're going to have to push it because of the surprise.

Right. Kind of when you scratch the surface, you realize like, well, yeah, but we've known that was going to be an issue for months in some pocket of the project team. but it wasn't acceptable for anyone to raise their hand and call it out. Right, right, right, exactly.

And, you know, getting back to the concept of conflict, it's not a bad thing. It's how you handle it, you know, and it's really about teaching people, not just managers, but good old regular people how to handle conflict too, through different communication strategies. I myself use a lot of personality traits, personality styles trainings, just so we can see that even though we communicate differently, doesn't mean that we're in disagreement. We're just saying it differently, different manners.

I wanted to talk, you mentioned the word dysfunction and I hear that you like to diagnose and fix dysfunctional teams. So tell our listeners, you know, what are the common signs of dysfunction that you see in so-called leadership teams and what tends to be the root cause? Yeah, so I mentioned one of them. That's a great indicator of dysfunction is when there's no conflict.

A second is when there is little to no feedback up or down and and everyone kind of realizes that but never does anything about it and a third sign of of dysfunction is when no one's willing to raise their hand to do more yet there's always more to do and and you you haven't built a culture that inspires people to feel comfortable enough. To kind of put themselves out there and do that. Not surprisingly, in my way of thinking, since I focus on trust, a lot of this comes down to, is there a fabric of trust that's kind of underlying all of our work together?

One example of how that plays out is if we want our best employees and team members to try hard things where they may fail, they have to be really comfortable that if they fail, they'll still be rewarded and not penalized for doing the hard thing. Otherwise, you force the people who have the ability to take the choice assignments, the best people in the org, they gravitate towards taking things where they will be highly successful, as opposed to at a risk of failure. And so when your organization gets into that, that's where you start seeing like a lack of growth professionally and personally that then ultimately ends you up in a place of like no product development.

We don't come up with new ideas. We keep coming up with the same thing over and over again. And really like things getting stale. You're sparking a lot in my mind over here.

And I do have a stat for everyone, but just real quick, if I could riff on that. When we think about that root cause analysis and isolating what the true cause of these systematic breakdowns are, a lot of this comes in and that really is a hard path to follow. It's hard. And whoever it may be, or those teams may be, they truly need an umbrella of trust to operate in, to build the effective relationships, to shed light on the issue, to then work towards solving what those problems are.

That's me, soapbox, two cents back in my hole here with a statistic for you. Addressing dysfunction within teams is crucial for organizational success. Investing in soft skills training has been shown to yield significant benefits. For instance, a study by MIT Sloan demonstrated a remarkable 250% return on investment from a 12-month soft skills training program in five factories, leading to increased productivity and improved employee attendance.

Back to you. It's stalker, right? We train people and they magically approve. Now, I do want to just say, because there are so many options out there from reading a book to being part of groups or actually do an online training or go to conferences, is please make sure that you choose, if you are the HR person or the training development person that has the authority to choose which training programs, soft skills training you go to, make sure it's about content and not just credits.

I see so, oh, so many trainings that are just about getting credits to keep up your Sherman HRCI credits, but people aren't really paying attention. They're like, yeah, yeah, I did it. I'm like, oh, great. You have a degree or a certification that doesn't mean a darn thing because you're not really investing in it.

So think twice when you're forcing your employees to do soft skills trainings, that they're really not going to do it in that manner. Choose a different manner. What are your thoughts on that, Adam? Well, I love soft skills.

I hate that we call them soft skills. I was just going to say that too. It gives me such an ick factor. Yeah, yeah.

And if you're like me, which sounds like we have no similarities, part of why I get so frustrated when people call them soft skills is that they're extremely difficult to develop. And so one, it just seems like a misnomer, first off. But second, I think it really undersells their importance Because what I see is that with every level of leadership or growth someone goes through, their value increases exponentially, but only in relation to how their communication and soft skills can function.

I love it. The lower you are in an org, the more your, quote, quote, hard skills are valued and important because that's literally what you're doing day to day. But every time you move up the ladder in management and leadership effort, the communication and soft skills sides of that really does, you know, increase sometimes by a factor of 10 as to how much of that is your job. And, you know, earlier you asked me about when I was leading that big team, you know, I went from leading no one, like leading myself, to leading 4,000 people.

And over that time, my job went from I'm a huge individual contributor to 90% of my job is to communicate information. Other to other people what our strategy and our values and where we want to focus is and if you don't make that bridge appropriately that's how you end up with you know lots of executives and and high-level leaders who have great thoughts and have great background but because they can't communicate in a compelling way their team feels like they never really get off the ground and just get kind of stuck.

And so I wish we could do a rebrand on soft skills. I would love that. And I would probably start, we hinted at earlier, with empathy, partly because people confuse empathy with emotion. And I think that's a real, that's really sad for empathy that we kind of think about it in the wrong way and make it this.

Soft, passive thing that leads, you know, strong personalities to ignore because like, well, that's not who I am. Yeah, yeah. I 100% agree with you. And let's go ahead and rebrand that and call them, I don't know, people skills.

That'd be fine. I'm good with that. Even just communication skills or human skills, anything but hard skills or soft skills. That does not make sense whatsoever.

Extremely sharp, abrasive, strong skills. Let's go the other way. Yeah. No, let's not go the other way.

JC has a future in branding. Yeah, right. Hey, Adam. So I want to talk about leadership at home and work.

I hear that you are a father of five. So what parenting lessons have you discovered that directly impacted your leadership style? So, some background. A father of five, three of those are adopted.

And we study trauma a good bit in our family because of those adoptions. And I think my thinking and learning about trauma to help serve my children really, in a surprising way, informed my leadership styles. Because I think it's a sad thing to admit, but we should admit to ourselves that lots of our employees deal with some sort of workforce trauma, leader trauma, where someone has done them wrong in the past and that that really impacts their effectiveness going forward. And just like with our children, we have to show them grace and help them work through whatever those issues are.

The exact same thing happens with our teams. And you see that when you've got a manager on your team who's constantly in CYA mode and always looking to CC everyone on the email and all these things. That's not because they're a bad person and they want to be ineffective. It does make them ineffective frequently, but that is because someone hurt them in their past and someone held them accountable for something that wasn't their fault and that they couldn't control.

And so now the only way they know how to deal with that is to do something like, oh, I CC my boss on every single email. Right. And I think seeing those behaviors and identifying them as a trauma response, that if we want to get them to a better place, we have to invest in understanding them and understanding where they're coming from. And we can't just say like, hey, you don't have to CC me on everything.

Well, like that doesn't respond to what caused them pain. And so we have to help them work through that if we really want them to overcome that workplace sort of trauma and lead them to somewhere that's better than where they've been before. You really shine a light on something that rung true for me in a very particular situation. You know, the employee in that instance with the CCing, it may not even be that they experienced trauma in the past.

It could be that they're going through it right now. And maybe there's a level of micromanaging there that needs to be unpacked for whoever they're reporting to that you may be oblivious to because it's stuck within that frozen middle somewhere. I don't know. What do you think, Adam?

Yeah, no, I agree. And the topic of empowerment is one that I deal with a bit. I think there's a huge problem with leaders believing that they empower their teams, but really, they are delegators. And the difference between delegating and empowering is delegating is when I identify an issue, and then JC, I tell you the tasks to go work on.

As opposed to empowering, which is me giving you an issue and saying, JC, will you come back and tell me how you think we should address this? No, the difference is when I delegate, I tell you when to give me an update. When I empower, you tell me when you're going to get an update. Right, exactly.

And in that, I see so many leaders, because they were told they need to empower, but they don't actually know what it is, they kind of stick with micromanaging because they think delegating is the same thing. And both skills are important and micromanagement is okay sometimes, but we need to help people understand when is empowerment appropriate, when is delegation appropriate, and how do we train people to kind of up-level their skills as a leader from delegator to empowerer, but also as a follower to someone who needs to be delegated to and someone who can be empowered.

You have to train both sides of that partnership to really get to where you want to go. Yeah, absolutely. I got to buy his book. I got to buy his book.

That's all I know. I don't know. I love it. Thank you so much.

Hey, everybody. We have on our show today, Adam Malone, leadership consultant and trust expert known as the Tenacious Operator. Hey, Adam, where can listeners connect with you? The easiest way for leaders in the U.

S. To connect in North America is to text operator to shortcode 33777. That's operator to 33777. 8777.

And that'll get on my newsletter list and I'll get your contact info and we can stay in touch that way. Awesome. And everybody will also have his LinkedIn profile on the podcast notes. We hope this information has been helpful.

I truly enjoyed having you on. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Take care. Especially by your graceful tiny hands.

It's so good to see you. You're a little precious dove, you. You're hilarious.