Engagement Isn't a Happy Hour Problem: What Actually Drives Performance

Happy hour doesn't solve that. It doesn't solve for that. So that's almost where we're dealing with the communication gap. At that point, everyone's cup of tea anyways to go to those, especially on the software engineering world.

And I think that's something that honestly leaders can be aware of. Absolutely. Like support those social interactions. Those are so important.

But that's not really the solution to engagement or performance. However you want to tie those. So it's a great thing to have, but it is not the solution. Hi there and welcome to the Step up podcast.

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All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough. On with the show. Welcome everybody. Today we are here to talk about the relationship between engagement and performance.

And with me for this conversation is Seth Thomas, human resources leader at Claris Health in I'm gonna say Nash Vegas, Tennessee or Nashville. I've heard folks from Nashville call it Nash Vegas. It's a party. Thanks, K.

Yeah, Seth, I really appreciate it. I'm excited for this conversation. I try to get a mixture of voices on and so I'm under indexing to date with human resources leaders. So I'm really excited to have an HR guy here today and but before we get into our topic, I would love for you to introduce yourself to our listeners.

Tell us a little bit about your. Absolutely. I'm a bit of an odd one because I've been wanting to be an HR since like high school. We got to do a job shadow day at school.

One of my friend's buddies, one of his dads, I should say, was in HR consulting and so he specialized in mergers, things like that. But I just went hung out with him at the Office all day, liked it. They were doing personality tests and really like influencing business decisions with that, helping large scale organizations come together, change up strategies, go from there. So that set off my career, went to college, studied psychology and business, tried to make it work for me, and then came back to Nashville, went to MTSU for grad school.

So I got my master's in industrial organization psychology, which kind of hr, but like almost the scientific side of hr, the research side, that's what I love doing and help my career. So today I've been with Claire's Health for like five years, managing our employees, helping them grow, helping our company grow. How did you fight off your master's advisor's encouragement to get your PhD? Invariably I get.

So their program is a little different. There's this, okay, we're going to put you through the ringer here so you can go into the workforce tomorrow. They made us very marketable way. Yeah, that's awesome.

I asked because the first consultancy I worked for was heavily IO psychologists and my master's is in human resource development. So really adult education, training and development, instructional design. And my advisor, because I was working at my ninth house at the time and she was like, oh, pdi, that's the only place I know where you have to apologize for having only a master's degree. And she, that was always her.

Like every time she saw me she says this. But I, yeah, I, I love that your program was very heavily practitioner based. Let's get you into an organization doing. The work within the pro consulting group.

So we were getting real world. We were working with. This is during the program way it was the job going up there. We worked with a lot of local governments, some organizations as well, doing everything from job analysis, probably like the smallest level, job descriptions, performance reviews, things like that.

We were designing, implementing, running promotion systems, recruiting systems for them. What brought you to HR versus maybe the pull to. Yeah, I guess two things I'll go back to. Like me wanting to get into it at first.

The way the options of like, okay, I like helping people, maybe counseling's the way, but that's like a full PhD, tons of schooling to get there. And I do enjoy the schooling. Like, wait, I can make a difference in people's lives. Just being in HR consulting that got me started.

I really did enjoy it. I just really felt I was missing that piece of seeing it take effect really blossom, seeing managers, training the right way, leaders leading the right way. You can tell them all the right things to do and you hope they go do it. Being With a company, I really get to see it.

Keep the follow through there. The first part of my career being in consulting, that's the part I felt like I was missing. I felt like I was parachuting in to do just one quick thing and get out. And you never got to see the full life cycle or see it see it through to the end.

Exciting. I know. For any HR folks who are listening, this the topic of engagement, employee engagement engagement surveys. Right?

Probably. Who knows if it either excites you or gives you the heebie jeebies? I don't know. But I've always really enjoyed the topic and I, I when we were talking about what to talk about today, you seemed pretty excited about the idea of the relationship between engagement and performance.

So give me a little bit about your history with this here and what has made this a passion for you. I could spend longer than this podcast is going to take just talking about this, so I will try to keep it short. But this has always been a topic that's interested me doing consulting, doing engagement surveys. This is almost like I see businesses getting their ideas improving from within and I probably over the past several years have really been diving in and it's hard to separate the engagement score on the survey from what engagement truly is.

It's for me it's a measure of culture. Like it's what is this organization we're building? Where are we trying to go? So it's almost where those employee level goals should be getting to.

We have a revenue goals, all those are good. But how do we want to get our people to meet those goals? So I've really enjoyed digging in, learning more. How can we engage not just get a 70, an 80, a 90 on this survey, but truly engage from the top down and then the bottom up with that and then ultimately that leads us to performance.

So at some point we should have some alignment between what are engagement goals and whether our performance goals. How can we work both together? Our company goals, when I was at Buffalo Wild Wings, they were, I think they were either in the middle of or had just completed a study of engagement and they had just deployed engagement down to the restaurant level, which was getting as an hr like figuring out the red tape you need to get through to get permission to have hourly employees fill out an engagement survey.

And what are we paying them for? Is a whole, probably a whole podcast about time and attendance I think is the keywords for that. But they were looking at and tying engagement results to store results to sales, for example. And I remember there Was a lot of excitement around.

It was like we all know from the research on engagement that engagement leads to performance. So there was this holding of breath, crossing of fingers as we were getting the results. And it was like clear as day. Stores that had a highly engaged staff to make it simple sold more beer and chicken wings.

Right. Than those that didn't. Which if you think about from a restaurant perspective how amazing it is to have that data. Right.

Because you're right there with customers. For example, talk to me a little bit about healthcare and how this works in and maybe it would help to talk a little bit about what Claris Health does. I can tie that in. Yeah.

So we're a software organization in the healthcare space, specifically health insurance. But all of our employees are involved with developing the software or implementing the software or maintaining it. Basically. Okay, so we're engaging a remote workforce.

We're in 30 something states all over the country, which is no easy task. And really it comes down to that open and honest communication. So I mean I guess we get some of that through surveys, responses there. But really that ongoing communication is helpful too.

So not just one point in time, but each week, each day, each project, getting feedback, trying to improve incrementally with that, letting people's voices be heard and actioning on it. So tell me a little bit about when I think you, you had said you feel like you spend a fair amount of time talking with and coaching leaders around employee engagement and ultimately then performance. What are some of the things that either thematically or even you know, specifically if you want to get into any specific stories like what has been that pull for you to have those conversations.

About engagement, the biggest one or the biggest gap, I guess I see expectations are huge. Ultimately that's what it comes down to and we can build on it from there. You can have employees that feel like they're doing great. Maybe their managers, maybe they tell them or maybe they don't say anything and so the employee gets reinforced on that must be doing a good job.

I haven't heard. I'm not. It's receiving that feedback and not waiting for annual review. We went to quarterly reviews to help up those expectations, keeping it more real time.

But really it's the check ins, the one on ones, the emails after a successful or unsuccessful go live like hey, we missed this. How are we going to work on it? Getting better, setting goals. So I feel like the biggest miss in my experience delaying it so waiting too long for it to really affect change.

I forget what the actual term was back When I played baseball, it was like, you hear it, but guitar and stuff. 10,000 hours, 10,030 days of time. Like, it's practice, it's rehearsal. So employees need that.

Receiving feedback. Actually on it. Managers, though, it's practice giving that feedback that doesn't just come naturally. Yeah.

So taking five minutes a day, 30 minutes on a Friday, doing your whole team, like, here's my analysis of the week. I need this from you. Let's step it up here. Keep doing this.

It's reinforcing and closing the gaps where we're missing on. I like that. One of the first places you went, Ray, is we're talking about engagement, performance as feedback. Right.

Because it's unsurprisingly, every company that I've worked for, you know, and I'm talking more as an employee, not as necessarily a consultant to other organizations, but every company that I've worked for. Every survey, invariably employees say we're not getting enough feedback or not enough timely feedback. And. Or we want more feedback.

And yet, so we. So one could say that we know we're never giving enough feedback, and employees want feedback. And yet managers can be really nervous about providing feedback. And let's also be honest, not every feedback conversation is great.

And let's put two sides on that. Not every piece of feedback is delivered well, and not every piece of feedback is received well either. So how have you been working with leaders around helping them understand both the importance of kind of getting into the repetition, but also I think what most leaders get nervous about is feedback not being received well. And I don't know always necessarily where that comes from.

I think there's a mixture of I've received crappy feedback, crappy, poorly delivered feedback in the past. And so it's either a fear of feedback not being received well, or actually having had the experience of feedback not being received well and feeling nervous about reliving that experience. Wow. That has to factor in because that's going through our minds.

I think there's a part of us, too, that maybe this is personal for me. I try to work through it each day, but, like, not offending, hurting someone's feelings, that being nice, it's almost taking, like, emotional intelligence too far. Like, we need to be a little critical. Stern, if your dog isn't doing the right thing and chewing up the couch, we need to correct the behavior.

And so it's separating that like you're doing your employees a disservice by not pointing out poor behavior and setting the right example. Here's how it should look, I found success with my leaders, sort of getting them to realize that we're not. We're not scolding, we're not punishing, we're trying to improve. So if we need to think of it like, let's set a goal around this improvement, that's almost a positive twist on.

I don't want to say corrective action, but improving a behavior, it's just reframing what it is I have found to really help. I guess, like the psychology of it, giving this bad poor advice or. Yeah. What's interesting is for me personally, positive feedback and constructive feedback have always felt fairly motivating to me, even if it stung, right?

Like, I want to perform better, I want to earn a high rating. Therefore, depending on your company, whether that means a better chance at a higher merit increase during the performance cycle or a bonus or whatever, even tough feedback conversations, I've appreciated in the end. And what's interesting is when I went from consulting into hr, I. I felt like when I was in consulting, almost every leadership program, not even necessarily one that I was involved in, like, always taught feedback at every level.

And I walked into my very first HR gig was Buffalo Wild Wings. And when I got there, I almost. I felt like stripping feedback out of our leadership programs because in my head I was just like, gosh, if these guys don't know how to give feedback at this. We're talking region managers here.

They've been shift leaders. I can't think of what we would call it, but like a department. Whether they're a service manager or a kitchen manager to assistant GM to GM to now they're region managers. Like, they have had to give so much feedback, especially when we think of huge chunk of the US Population.

Their first job is in food service. So you're giving lots of feedback to people. This is their first job, everyone. So you are giving people feedback on.

The story is getting a little long. I apologize. But giving feedback to people on just like showing up on time, showing up with a clean uniform, right? Like you are giving feedback all the time in a restaurant.

In my head I was like, feel like I'm talking down to these folks by continuing to teach feedback. And then after some time in HR and really being in hr, it dawned on me and I hazard to say how long it took for it to dawn on me, but I was like, and yet everybody will say I'm not getting enough feedback or it's not being well delivered. And gosh, if we didn't need to be teaching feedback right, these Things would be different. Yeah, right.

These lagging metrics would be different. So perhaps the leading metric of teaching it is a little more important than I was. Yeah, Giving space for everybody. I shouldn't say everybody.

Not always that, but Gallup, big leader in like surveys. I forget the stat, but I think it's over 75% backing. You like want the feedback. But we also have that tendency when you receive feedback, especially when it's tied to our pay bonuses, things like that, it's an attack.

It feels like an attack. So it's all. There's a part of it that's how you deliver it too. Gearing it more towards helping.

Gearing it more towards. If we link it back, if we have a universal focus on engagement, like how are we engaging? Some of that's how we provide the feedback, which in turn is how we receive it. So maybe it's starting with the end goal.

Like, hey, just one process is down, our numbers are down and it's in your department. How are we going to get those back up? Here's what's not working. What ideas do you have?

It's part of. It has to be collective. I was actually just in a. We have a wonderful training team here.

They were doing a training today on crucial feedback, crucially timed feedback, something like that. And it was like sharing the pool, sharing the pool of knowledge. So here's what I'm seeing, here's where I'm trying to get us. Let's talk this out.

Like how. What knowledge do you have that we could get to the shared solution? So it doesn't always just have to be super critical. You're not doing it.

We all have our unique skills, our unique abilities. How can we use those to get there? And especially in the software space too, right? Because there's the sort of.

This. A lot of things are project based, right. You're bringing in cross functional teams to swarm the development of a capability of some kind or a whole new app of some kind, or a feature within an app of some kind. And so you're pulling, I don't know, five to 20 people together across a company.

Way more people than that on this issue. There's always something to learn. Even if it went well, there's always something to learn from. Hey, let's actually sit down and talk about what went well, what didn't.

What are we learning from here? But before I want to dive into the distributed workforce and maybe the software world a bit with you in a moment because I think it's hard to talk about Engagement without talking about engagement surveys. But I want to, I want to keep somewhat steering clear of that. Right.

Because engagement surveys measure a lot of things and a lot of times I think companies are looking for a measure of employer of choice kind of metrics. Are we the sort of company that. That people would recommend other people apply? Are people would recommend people to apply to?

Are some kind of barometer on are people planning to stay? Right. What is the sentiment at this organization if people are miserable and looking to leave or not neutral to happy enough. To 50 question ENPSR.

But when you look at performance, right. When you look at what drives performance often, which I think is why we've spent so much time today already talking about feedback. Right. Is it a lot of it comes back to the manager, their direct manager and how their manager is doing.

Oftentimes the companies I've worked for, you can look at the manager like. Because usually there's some buckets that engage in survey will end up measuring and one bucket is usually manager performance essentially. And that usually correlates to positive or negative like measures on everything else. Right.

If the manager scores are great, the employer, evp, employer of choice kind of metrics look great. Right. You hope that you can tie the overall manager metric to actual performance metrics. Right.

Revenue metrics or time to deployment or whatever that might be or error rates or things like that. What else do you see when you think about. Because I think people can look at employee engagement just say are we having enough potlucks? Are we having enough happy hours?

Which what's interesting is great companies with high engagement do tend to do those things, but they're not. I think people talk about this in Silicon Valley a lot, right. Using an example, it's like having a beer fridge and a food truck for free will not make the other things that are maybe going poorly when it comes to how we're managing our individuals, those things aren't going to bump it up. They tend to be features, not those specifically, but things like that like happy hours and having fun.

Right. Tend to be features where engagement is already high because management evaluates things, things are in place. Yeah, I just would love to get your thoughts on that. I'm gonna back everything you were saying.

I think those are great attraction, but not necessarily retention tools. Obviously I do this with our company. I help do happy hours, coffee chats, virtual events. Because we're virtual, they're fun.

We've got our core group that goes to most of them. We have a good time. That's not changing the Day to day frustrations in their work that they're facing the things that they're struggling to log off at 5pm because now there's this one or two other tasks that still need to get done. Happy hour doesn't stop that.

It doesn't solve for that. So that's almost where we're dealing with a communication gap at that point. This is good but what are we missing? What's actually going to get you home, allow you to attend this thing if you wanted to.

Not everyone's cup of tea anyways to go to those especially on the software engineering world. And I think that's something that honestly leaders can be aware of. Absolutely. Like support those social interactions.

Those are so important. You need that to have an organization, to have the culture. Definitely been hard post Covid more companies going remote or the hybrid. You don't always see your co workers face to face.

You live in different states so there's definitely value but that's not really the solution to engagement or performance. However you want to tie those. So it's a great thing to have but it is not the solution. Honestly having the conversations around those would be more impactful.

I think what resonated for me and light bulb for me with as you were talking there is as much as we try to measure these things organizationally and in order to have scale, in order to be able to say how do we help a leader understand the levers that they can pull from a. From a scalability perspective. But ultimately in the end engagement's very personal for most people. Right.

And oftentimes probably the best leaders who have the most highly engaged teams therefore hopefully best performance metrics coming out. Take the time to understand what is it that each person wants or needs that will help them feel most engaged, willing to show up and give their. I think we often talk in the engagement space that give that discretionary effort. Right.

So go above and beyond, so to speak. I'd love to hear about some. I heard a sigh there. So each of us a good sigh.

Trying to tie it all back together though. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say that the opposite of engagement is burnout, but that's really like part of that opposite side.

So a manager can absolutely help with the burnout piece. Some of it's just listening to employees stepping in, having their backs. Those are all great things. Raising the concerns as well.

Something that I often see missed. Oftentimes managers are promoted because they're the most effective tenure wise. They know the most, they're the most Effective, they're the strongest. Doesn't necessarily mean you're the best manager.

How often do you see people trained manager level of I'm trained on how to engage my team. Even leadership courses, leadership trainings. I don't feel like that's a core topic. Maybe that's something that's missing and we can get there one day.

That's where I see a big gap too. You know how to do the job. Sometimes it's easier to just do it instead of your employees. That's not building that trust, engagement.

You need to be cultivating their strengths, finding your replacement, like get somebody that could backfill you and continue to grow that way. Maybe again, maybe it's more me, but I think everybody has that intrinsic value of you want to be learning something new, learn a new topic, growing a skill, something like that. That's where the manager's job comes in. It's growing that, helping them learn, sharing the knowledge that you have, that made you great.

That's how you're engaging your team. And in turn they're going to be doing better, their performance will be higher. They're going to be pushing you to grow as well. It'd be great if all teams could have team members pushing you to grow into that next level.

Yeah, yeah. I want to talk a little bit about both kind of the distributed virtual workforce, but also I think in my experience the software engineering, software development world is pretty unique as well in terms of. If you took a step back, it's probably not that unique. But in terms of you see the dynamic of inter, like cross functional work at very sort of minute levels in software development space.

Right. Because you've got, I'm not going to do it enough service at all. But you've got folks on the business side who are saying, here's what we're trying to do or sell or what our customers want and need. You have folks trying to translate between that and prioritize what needs to get built in what order and trying to translate that over to the engineering side.

But then there's the interconnections of this thing's got to plug into that thing. So we got to engage that team. And then you've got QA resources. Right.

Those who need to actually sit down and say in a test environment, is this thing what these all kinds of people have had their hands on, is it going to do. Does it repeatedly do what it is that they were supposed to be building it to do before we then push to deployment and even then things don't always go right. And so in my limited experience in the software space, there's so many interpersonal dynamics at play. Right.

Even before you kind of even talk about management and how is management coming in to help both with individual performance and engagement, but also help mediate cross functional tension and things like that. I'd love to hear just what some of your thoughts or experiences have been because I think in my, my again my limited knowledge in the software space, your peers and how they're being managed and whether or not your manager and their dynamic is working has as much to do with my engagement almost sometimes more than my direct manager.

My direct manager relationship that has been such a. A challenge. You're spot on. Your manager is often not the person that you're working with.

Sometimes five days of the week, 30 days of the month. Right. They manage almost the HR task, performance reviews, things like that, but they're not the ones sitting next to you when you're building a solution for a client, a module, a feature. So there is communication again, there's so much more communication that has to happen.

That manager has to be also connecting with the leader of the Scrum team. Hey, anything I need to know. Like they're keeping track of all these different projects and therefore their employees performance that way. But it's not easy, especially at the executive level.

I was reading something today about this as well. Like the. I forget the name of the principal, but the thing where you see something and you don't always say, you don't always raise it, you don't always address it because you assume that's not my lane, that's not my team, somebody else is going to do it and it just perpetuates the problem. Two months later, that employee is still doing the wrong thing, not doing the right thing.

The managers not addressed it because they didn't know. We have so many tools these days. Speedy communication back and forth, a quick teams message, message. There's performance systems that are out there that let you do that as well.

So figuring out ways to document my life is document, document, document. If all of our leaders could also do that, it would help everybody. It's really not a waste of time. If anything, it's the most valuable use of time.

A book I really like, I think it's called Getting stuff Done. Getting things done. Getting things done. Yep.

David Allen. Yeah. Love that book. It really changed the way I do work.

One of the concepts that stuck with me. I think about it a lot. It takes two minutes or less. Go ahead and get that off the to do list, take two minutes or more.

Let's write it down, get to it when we have time. That message to a manager, to another team leader, that's going to fall in that two minute category. You'll find those two minutes elsewhere. It's worth the time to just take the quick note down, shoot it along.

How have you dealt with some of the cross protecting the innocent? Of course. How. How have you dealt with that cross Functional tension in both either coaching the individuals or even coaching their leaders.

Yeah. So something I've enjoyed. My VP has encouraged this as well. We try to have constant contact with our managers.

We've got a 150 headcount organization so we're not tens of thousands. We can keep up with this a bit better just in the rotation. So keeping that constant contact, constant communication, what's going on. That has been a big help of identifying these earlier on communication gaps, silos, things like that still doesn't solve it.

It still takes effort. So it's that constant just encouragement of you need to go have that conversation. It's going to be difficult addressing this with your boss, but you need to go do that. Hey, we're hearing from these employees like it's sharing that knowledge back out wherever we get it.

There's diplomatic ways to do that and sometimes you cross a line and get in trouble. But always trying to operate, you know, in the employee's best interest in the end. And ultimately the companies, we're trying to help everybody. I think one of the funnier parts for me, I don't know that's funny haha.

But funny with engagement surveys in particular is a lot of the organizations that I worked with would share. Here's a industry benchmark, here's our company's total. And then as I'm working with a particular business unit run into this, ah, our numbers are better than the company total. And having to then counsel leaders to say yeah, don't break your arm patting yourself on the back about that because your number, your feedback is still your feedback on what are the screws that you need to tighten down and the things that you need to do.

Right. And I think that's one of the places where at a kind of business level or team level we where I see or a leadership team level rather where I think that's where the whole part of how do you go from looking at the data to saying what do we as a leadership team need to do? Right. And how do we actually put a plan behind?

You know, So I have lots of Experience in this and something our managers, our L2s have started doing. They have really started owning the engagement survey results. So they have that more direct, you know, we know what the decks are typically thinking and then we're one step closer to our more floor line managers. They're driving the action items so they know the stories, the personal anecdotes as well as the business strategy that we're trying to get to.

We've been doing this for going on like eight months now. Maybe we've had a lot more success that way. It's really, it's what we're talking about, what you're saying, getting those managers involved. It's not just the executives looking at some scores and saying let's improve this one number.

No, what's actually going to make the difference regardless of what the score says. That's where engagement surveys are good and bad. And I dislike the industry standard ones. Let's, we can do that on the very first one.

Let's measure against ourselves and try to grow even the top scoring manager on a survey. It's like a performance review. You're not performing for one day a year or the four reviews you do each quarter. It's every day the performance review, the engagement survey, that's just a snapshot in time.

Here's what our employees were thinking, that one day they took this, they took five minutes to do this. It's really what you do those other 364 days that are getting you there. So yes, we do need to action, create action items that are going to align with our business goals and align with our culture goals. But it needs to go down to the managers.

Whether we call that like the trickle down goals setting from the bottom up, right? Or really just owning your team's engagement, your personal engagement, your department's engagement, it's having those constant conversations we talked earlier about feedback to employees. There's also the receiving of feedback. That's not just a one way conversation.

Hey, my team, what could I do better to support you taking a few minutes at the start of team calls or your one on ones? How are you doing as a person? Where are you struggling in your personal life? Where are you struggling at work?

Like how can we make this situation better? They both have to live with each other, deal with each other eight hours a day, five days a week. But like a real focus on that and using an engagement survey is one way to look at that. But it's really the 364 days that go into it.

So before I, I'm looking at the clock here, I'm like wow, time flew. So but before we get into sort of what I call the advice column, I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't say what have you found to be unique of a primarily virtual organization? Because I think it's one thing in a hybrid environment where we're still seeing each other three to four days out of the week. What tell me about how you've been to because I'd imagine some of these folks, they're leading for the first time.

They maybe may or may not have been working on a virtual team for years or their entire career but perhaps and perhaps maybe I'm going to pick on first time leaders for a moment. I'm leading people for the first time and it's a virtual team. Like how would love to just hear a little bit about your experience with this fully virtual organization and trying to help coach leaders around what engagement looks like in that environment. Something that I personally believe trying to bridge that gap in person versus virtual.

If I join a call, my camera's always on. That's not always said for most employees. We did start a company camera on policy because we were feeling this general disconnection. If that's the one thing you do as a manager, just joining your calls with your camera on, you need to set the example.

It's gotta come from someone and it needs to be you. That's just the easiest thing you can do. Being present, being focused. The best way to showcase that is when you can see the other person.

That's huge. That doesn't take training. Other things you can do though are just our time always slips away. But finding that time, it's blocking for me.

I need to block off time on my calendar. I'm a Microsoft user user as well. Microsoft has an updates app. It sends me a thing at 4:30 every day that says hey, time to recognize one of your colleagues.

It's a just reminder. If I didn't have that I'd have a calendar reminder. Hey, shoot a random person a message. Let them know they're doing a good job, you're here to help them.

Manager, take your team. Do one person each day as a leader. Pick a leader in your org, pick another somebody else. Pick your CEO.

Even that recognition, it feels good. That's that positive encouragement, the positive feedback we need. My so it may have been a slightly loaded question because I I was actually my very first management experience was with a distributed team. I think only two of my employees were physically co Located with me.

Some were in, in different offices of the company, some were home. And this was almost 20 years ago. And so this was phone, right? This was all phone stuff.

This wasn't even barely at that time WebEx was a thing and Adobe Connect was a thing, but we were barely using it yet. And I think and I took these lessons in as a peer, I started working virtually too, which is you have to recreate the ad hoc, right? Like the bumping into each other in the hallway, you know, quote unquote, water cooler conversation will not happen naturally for most people. And so you actually have to create it.

And at the same time, as a leader you need to also read the room too and understand. And I'll be really simplistic about it like which of my, what employees of mine are the extroverts who are going to want or need more of that? Which ones are the introverts where they're going to want less, but they might need more of it than they think too. And so how do you.

So it's for me, even as a peer, when I would be on a team with somebody who didn't work in the same location than me, I even as a peer tended to grab that person, grab virtually and just be like, hey, could we have a monthly coffee chat? Just so even as a peer, creating the opportunity to bump into my colleague to my encouragement to leaders who are working virtually is just try stuff, keep trying stuff and ask the team. It might be trying, hey, we're going to do a every, every other Wednesday drop in, lunch right at noon or whatever, grab your lunch, come on camera, whoever's available.

And perhaps no one shows up to the first one. Maybe some people show up to the second. You'll know within a first, you know, two, three tries whether or not this resonates with your team. But I do think your team will notice you putting in the effort of trying things to bring somewhat of a social environment.

And to add to that. Go ahead. Yeah, you mentioned introverts, extroverts. I had someone I would say is very introverted.

Ask I want to do coffee chats with other people, but I don't feel comfortable asking them. But me just setting up coffee chats where anyone in the company could join, like a open meeting, that was also intimidating. So sometimes it's what you're saying, giving them that encouragement, giving them that feedback of just send someone the invite, putting it out to the whole company. If there's someone you want to talk to, schedule time with them, that's we've got an open door policy all the way around.

I think that's super valuable. Everyone operates differently, thinks differently on how they can interact. I'm going to give us a shove into the advice column. So I've been tweaking this a little bit and so I ask, I've been asking guests to come prepare it a little bit differently than before.

So the focus of mine is I just used this metaphor today, Olympics metaphor of I focus a lot on trying to help support leaders who have just been promoted and how do we help them, quote, unquote, stick the landing to use some Olympics metaphors and gymnastics metaphors. But on the front end of that, as leaders who are looking to be promoted another level up leadership. What's one piece of advice you have for leaders out there who are looking to get to that next level in their career from a leadership perspective?

So if you already have a team, you can't get promoted alone. Getting to that next step, your team's performance is your performance. That's what's going to get you noticed them noticed. You need to help each other out.

So what we've been talking about creating those consistent feedback loops with your team, helping them identify what they're wanting to work towards, help them hit their goals. You hit your goals, the company hit their goals. It's really engaging. Your team, I think can have the biggest impact.

Everyone's a little different, so there is going to be some personalization. How do you interact with one person or the other? How do you interact with their peers to help encourage them? If you don't manage them directly day to day, I think that's going to be the biggest thing a manager wanting to get promoted, get to that next level needs to do, needs to focus on enabling their team so that they can meet the company's goals.

So for those who have just been promoted or they're within the first few months of their effective date at their new level, what's one piece of advice you have for them to help sort of effectively make that transition to that next level smoothly. I think continuing on with that same what we just talked about, it applies there too. Yeah, yeah. I think the real time feedback is really important.

So being consistent, continuing as you see things, you know, take that note, send it along, drive performance that way, really just keeping everyone in line, making sure everybody's what they should be, meeting your expectations. So documenting. Yeah. Sharing your expectations, trying to get alignment to those.

My yes. And to that is going to be part of the way that you create a feedback culture. Is also asking for it. Right.

Showing leading the way by showing the openness to receiving feedback by seeking it. Right. And depending on your level in the organization, the higher you are, the less feedback is being willingly given to you as leaders. And frankly, even as a first line sort of manager who's managing individual contributors, you never know what the level of intimidation might be to give you my manager feedback and so lead the way by creating openness to receive your feedback by asking for it and showing that openness to receiving it yourself.

Right. I think that's probably as important as getting good at delivery. Absolutely. Up and down goes both ways.

Yeah. Before before I wrap it up, anything else that you'd want to any kind of words of wisdom thoughts? I know we already threw out Getting Things Done. Great book.

I highly recommend it as well. But any other parting thoughts you have. For the audience, definitely go read that book if you've not already. It just might change the way you do work.

I think it's a life changing I agree. Start a book club. Get people engaged that way. That'd be a fun next for everyone that's listening.

Seth, thank you so much for being here today. This was a fun conversation. I was really happy to have you and I think we'll have to come on again probably and talk about other nuances of managing a virtual workforce. Thanks Karen.

Yeah, thanks. Take it easy. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you for listening.

I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent and start a conversation with me there. Or check out my Promoted Leader toolkit at Kent Coach Toolkit. Before you go on with your day, please take a moment to leave a rating and a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, click the five stars.

That helps put this podcast in front of more ears. Till next time, take it easy.