The Conversations That Move Companies Forward with Gustavo Razzetti

Welcome to Tip Top. Grow up your business with Metronomics. Join me, Shannon Burn, Susko and Metronomics certified coach, Jed Roberts. We'll be talking to business thought leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and business team coaches who have all taken the journey to grow up their businesses to their Tip Top. We'll be sharing strategies, systems, stories on how you can grow your company up at the speed you want. If you're searching for your path to the Tip Top and feel your time is running out, then this podcast is for you. Foreign. Well, welcome back, everyone. I'm super excited today because we're going to talk about something that really every CEO says they want, but few very, very truly built. Right? And we know this. We've seen this out there. A culture that moves us forward is rare. Not just talking about change, but actually executing it. And Gustavo Rossetti is the founder of Fearless Culture, which I'm so happy to meet and to be introduced to through my good friend Paulo Kelly. But Gustavo is a highly followed voice on leadership and culture and all the things we need to focus on as a CEO that sometimes we just don't find enough time. Gustavo is releasing a new book. You can see it in Gustavo's background Forward talk. Gustavo, welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm so happy to have you here. Awesome. Thank you, Shannon. Great to be here. Very excited. Well, if we kick off with sort of where this work began, that was some of my curiosity when Paulo Kelly introduced me to you and your work early on. So maybe take us back to what led you to focus on your work on culture and leadership. And was there a moment where you said, like, something is broken here. I gotta do something about this? Totally. I think that. Well, I spent over 20 years working in advertising agencies, helping clients innovate, come up with new ideas. And at some point, I realized that companies don't lack talent. They don't like ideas. Actually, they have more than they can use or need. The point is, the culture is not conducive and all those ideas go to die before they actually see or they are considered right. And I realize it's culture. People talk about experimentation, talk about taking risks, talk about being AI first, but then they forget to create the right environment for those ideas to actually see the light of day. And in working with those organizations, did you personally struggle as a leader early on? Was it something that sort of, you know, set you on this path? Was it a personal experience? I think it was a realization, you know, that we call blind spots. Blind spots because we cannot see them. At some point, you realize, oh my God. So you mentioned that you were a former CEO. I also run advertising agencies as a CEO. Yes. And I always joke, but I'm not joking that I'm fixing all the screw ups and mistakes I made when I was a senior leader myself. Right. So now I see all my clients, I say, oh yeah, sure, I was doing that and I was doing that and I was screwing up as well. So yeah, So I don't, I wouldn't say it's a moment like a moment, but it was the cumulation of a lot of things. And then I say, well, it's time for me to do something about it. I love that, you know, we'll get along just fine because I'm doing the same thing with all the things that accumulated over the years I was a CEO. And yeah, those blind spots are, can get, you know, there's little ones, but they do build. And so when we think about the companies you've worked with, what's the most common, I'm going to call it a just dysfunction. What's the most common dysfunction you see, that leaders are either blind to or avoiding. I'm trying to prioritize because if not, we're going to need like three shows to come. Well, maybe this is part one then I would say, and I talk about that in my book the Illusion of Alignment. That's one of the most kind of significant, like blind spots for most leaders. They're so obsessed about having everyone on the same page, like all the ducks on a row and that kind of language that in the end, the way they approach alignment drives anything but agreement. So people say, yeah, sure, no one wants to contradict their leader. No one wants to have a real conversation. The leader doesn't poke to see are there any gaps? Are there really people understanding me? Do they really agree or they just want to move on? And in most of the cases, my research and many others show people just want to move on. They give up. Yeah. And alignment is definitely one of my favorite words because we need to align so many things. And you know, as a CEO, I know as a CEO we get so focused on where we're going and we're driving so hard. You know, sometimes our team members don't want to be unaligned with us or don't want to say they are not aligned with us that they are misaligned for many reasons. Sometimes it's fear, sometimes it's like lack of clarity. But when we think about your new book, and I love your new book, let's Talk about your new book, because I'm excited. Your new book, Forward Talk is coming out in weeks, right? Two or three weeks. Is it May? What's the date? May 5th. Yes, May 5th. Love it. That's. I will start sleeping again, I guess. Yes, I can relate to that for sure. So your new book is called Forward Talk. So what does that mean in one sentence? Why did you call it Forward Talk? Because most teams are stuck. And the reason that they are stuck is because the conversations they are not having or the ones they are having that basically dance around the issue, but they're not really addressing the issue. Okay. And so Forward Talk allows us to be thinking about, you know, not just dealing with it, but to deal with it, to move forward. Is that the idea behind it? That's the idea. And sometimes I say it's easier to explain something, but what? It's not. Yeah. So white people are stuck because most conversations are stuck in the past. When we have people blaming each other, they are more focused into who's at fault, who screwed up like in the past versus trying to find what in the system is not helping the team and what should we do and move forward. Oh, I also stuck in the past when it comes to alignment. So group think. It's a illusion of alignment. We all look that we are on the same page. Everyone nods in the room, but inside their head they're thinking, you know what, suck it, I'm going to do something else. I don't care. Yeah. So when we think about, okay, you write Forward Talk right out on May 5, what's the biggest problem? If you had to sum it up that leaders are getting wrong today, or maybe what are they getting right, but what are they getting wrong? That when it comes to communication and culture, what do they need to overcome? Yeah, we talked before the recording about culture is something everyone says they want. But then when you invite people to a meeting about culture, leaders don't show up. Right. So my book is about moving one step deeper, which is all the conversations. In the end, conversations shape culture. I say that teams don't rise to the level of their potential. They fall to the level of their conversations. And most leaders were taught to dominate the conversations, not to facilitate them. What they are facing is what I call conversational depth. The same way that if you don't pay your mortgage or credit card statement, you start accruing interests. All those conversations that don't happen because leaders are clueless start piling up and affect trust, alignment, belonging, and so on. So, okay, if I'm a leader or a CEO listening in, you know, lots are nodding their heads like I am. Lots are relating to it. But the funny thing is that we know, and we did talk about this before we started going, like, everybody wants this great culture and they want to, like, you know, have it. They know it's important to grow, and then, you know, they're not necessarily doing anything about it. And the thing that I found that in my work, I'm sure in your work, I'm sure, as a CEO, is understanding and being able to put back, you know, everyone wants to know, what's the real cost to a business? When teams aren't having the right conversations, what's the cost overall? And lots want to put dollars to it. Otherwise they want to go, you know, we can't create the ROI on this, so we should. We shouldn't spend time on that. How do you talk about the cost or how do you think about the cost, or how do you share the cost with leaders in order to get their attention? Because that's a little bit of what we were talking about. And I said, oh, I. I've been tricking people into it without, you know, really going into the roi. Totally. I think that the. I mean, there are different ways to measure the cost, right? On one hand, it's productivity loss, and if you multiply that times time. So the more you spend without addressing the issues and the more unresolved issues, then it start to compound. And that's what drives conversational debt. We have a calculator that we created that allows teams to measure that conversational depth. I love that. Not only that, but it provides a result describing what are the three types of depth that might be affecting your team? Is it something regarding alignment? Is it about belonging? Or is it about collaboration? How we work, how we make decisions? So not only they can get a score of how bad they're doing so good, but actually they can pinpoint to which specific areas are the ones that are suffering the most. Love that. Love that. Because that's the key to bring, you know, bring up that awareness to go, oh, this really is in my blind spot or is in my organization. And you can track it over time. So love, love that. Because that's an assessment that, you know, we're always looking for in this area, to bring awareness to the strength of the culture in any one organization. And, you know, in Metronomics, as we talked about briefly, you know, there's seven systems, but the foundation is the cultural system. And I know my board of directors back in the day in my first organization, they wanted to know nothing about that. They cared. Nothing, Nothing. But it was like the value in the platform, the foundation. If it wasn't there, everything else would crumble. All the value goes away. And if it's there, your value will increase. As we know so briefly and maybe this is part of how you're looking at this. From thinking about breaking this down, thinking about structure and clarity on. On how in forward talk you look at this. Do you categorize different types of conversations leaders need to master? Is that one of the things that you look at, you talked a little bit about frameworks. I would love to understand how you break it down. And even thinking about in the assessment what we should be thinking about. Totally. The main framework is basically a two by two matrix that going back to our previous chat, conversations can be either pointing toward the future or stuck in the past. But also conversations can be addressing issues or maybe surfacing the issue or dancing around it. That give us like four quadrants. Of course, avoidance happens when we basically don't want to have the conversation or we meet but actually don't talk about the issue. Group think it seems progress because we're moving forward, but actually we're not addressing the issues. So it's an illusion of progress. Progress. And lastly blame when is we are talking about the issue but focusing on what happened versus what need to happen. So forward talk is about addressing the issue, going to the root cause and moving forward. That's kind of the biggest frame then from avoidance to commitment, which is when we not only kick off the conversation, but we progress until we become very good at those words. We have different, like five steps and I have a framework for each of those. How to start the conversation, how to go deep, and so on and so forth until you cross basically the bridge. Okay, I love that because when we're thinking about this and I'm thinking about, I go back to what we talked about is almost the avoidance of this whole area, right? Like let's just talk strategy, let's talk execution, cushion, let's talk numbers, all the hard edge stuff, right. And the avoidance of the soft edge is so true. But if I'm a CEO listening in, what are the two to three signs a CEO should look for? That their team is not having the right conversations? And then what's the role the CEO has in setting the tone for these conversations? Not only by looking at the frameworks. I know a team working through this. It'll set things up well. But like if we're a CEO, we're not quite sure, you know, is this a spot where we should spend some time as a team? What are some of the signs? That's great. First, when there's quick resolution, so we want to speed up, everyone wants to move fast. But when you're discussing strategy or direction or things that are really complex, if people are agreeing too quickly, it's because we're not having that conversation. The other extreme is when people are totally detached. So most of the people are silent or they don't push back, they don't ask questions. Basically, they don't come up with new ideas, that kind of stuff. And the other is when people are having. And it's hard to notice, but when people are having two conversations, one in the room, and the most important one happens outside the meeting, whether it's virtual or in person. And the way to start becoming more aware is to look at the body language, the signs, the poses. If you ask a question and people look at someone else, like saying, hey, Shannon, you should go first, or they're looking to the leader, like asking for permission to say something, well, that's a critical sign that they're afraid or they don't care. So being, you know, you've been in the CEO role, I've been in the CEO role. I know we've experienced this, and I know As a young CEO, I definitely experienced this. What is the CEO's role in setting the tone for these discussions, these conversations? How does the CEO behave if they're recognizing some of these signs, other than reading your book, following the frameworks, what can they do in the meantime? Because we have to wait to May 5th. The first thing is I'm going back to the idea that they need to realize that the role is to facilitate conversations, not dominate them. So you're paying a lot of money to a lot of experts and people with different expertise and backgrounds. So listen to them. Right. If you're the one trying to come up with all the solutions, first, you're probably going to land with with a solution that's average or not the best. But second, people are not going to contribute. If you're the only one who always brings up what needs to happen, people are going to just take notes and implement. I hear a lot of CEOs that complain and say, hey, we had a meeting. And then people just follow what I said and say, well, maybe because that's how they were raised or used to, because you're the most dominant voice, so of course, be the last to speak up. No, that's One trick that helps a lot, let people go first. Except when it's about taking risks. If you want to model courage, go first. So say something like, admit that you don't know. Lead with questions, not just with answers. So open the room for people, challenge your own thinking. So invite people to, I always say, like, you can name anyone in the room to be the devil's advocate of the week. So make sure you rotate that role and say, we're thinking about this. What do you think? Have people like maybe asking questions or writing their ideas before you start the conversation. Some people, many people need to think before they talk. And if you're having a live conversation, pushing those people to basically stay silent because they are not ready. Most CEOs like to talk and then they think as they are talking, and then they shape their ideas. Many people need to shape their ideas first to help them clear before they can share with someone else. Yeah, so I love all of this because it definitely was bringing me back to different times as I was growing up as a leader and a CEO. And in metronomics, we talk one of the other systems. There's a cultural system, and then one of the pieces of the framework is the cohesive system. And we talk about cohesion, you know, driving really everything around the feedback loop, conversations, you know, healthy team conflict, all those things. How do conversations in your experience either build or break the cohesion of a team? One thing that's important is people fear conflict. No one likes it, right? You and I are not here fighting. We are getting to know each other. We try to do that conversation, which we get to know each other, right? However, the damage that people are doing to the team is much harder by being polite or agreeing too quickly or not sharing their true opinions. Because in the end, there's going to be a lot of gaps when it comes to implementation because people are not really agree. So being nice doesn't help. Daniel Pink has a study he conducted around the regrets, right? And in personal life, he realized that we regret, you know what we regret the most? Not the things that we did, even if they ended up badly, but the things that we didn't try. The things that we thought about doing in our lives and then we never even tried. The same applies to conversation. My research shows that the conversations we regret the most are not the ones that exploded or went so. So. And maybe we were frustrated. They are the ones that we wish we had, but then we never had. So the cost of that avoidance always comes back. It never goes away. Right? So I Think that one of the things that we do is how do I get started? Yes. And, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with Pad Lencioni's framework, overcoming the five dysfunctions. Right. Team trust, healthy team conflict, you know, team accountability, commit, team result. How does what you have in forward talk, does it align with this? It sounds like it aligns with it because that's a nice view and a nice assessment, and there's lots of work that can be done to improve the different areas in that pyramid that Pat put out there within your frameworks. And you talked about the different frameworks. Is it supportive of that? Does it help sort of actionably work through some of those areas? Give me some feedback on how it aligns with that. It does in the sense of trust. Addressing conflict and commitment is the end of our talk. When you go there, people are committed to. Yes. Like every model has nuances or differences. One of the. And I think that Lynn Johnny talks about this. My model is more about, less about what the leader does. And of course, the leader plays a Kim. But we need to start providing what I call a conversational agency. So I've been working culture for a long time, and I've been promoting psychological safety before people knew what it was all about. And now I'm changing a little bit my mind because I think that we move the pendulum too far to one place and people are expecting for the culture, the workplace, the leaders to do all the heavy lifting. And in the end, there's never going to be the perfect moment to have a conversation. The culture is never going to be safe enough, perfect enough, but it's going to become worse if you don't do anything about it. So if you keep silencing yourself, if you're part of the problem and you're not saying anything about it or you're having, like, you see the solution and you're not sharing with the others, then you're hurting the team. Yeah. So we need to focus more on building that conversational agency and that courage in which team members realize, hey, I own my part. I shouldn't be waiting for the other colleague, for my leader, for the culture. Because the culture, we build it all together to become perfect enough for me to do something about it. And actually, if it was perfect, they wouldn't need me. Right? Yeah. Well, in metronomics, you know, we think about three phases of growth. The foundation growth phase, as we call it, the momentum and the compounding. And these exist in all organizations. There is a critical path to growth and One of the things get out of that foundation growth phase is that 100% cohesive, a player leadership team. You can't just have a players, they must be cohesive. The culture amongst these leaders must be very, very strong. And in that phase as well, we talk about mapping the strategy, and we're mapping the strategy without a fully dialed in 100%, a player leadership team that's cohesive. But once we have those two things, you know, it sort of throws, throws that leadership team into like the next phase. It just, you know, it's uncanny to, you know, coaches over the last 15 years to have lived it, you know, the 15 years before that as a CEO, what do you see that gap? You know, what's the gap between the strategy and execution? Right. Is there a gap between strategy and execution? And is it a conversation around strategy? And I was thinking about before, you know, I dug in deeper into your book Forward Talk. Like I love the title because I think about always, you know, looking forward, having leaders look forward. Let's just be factual about today and then, you know, have the conversation. What's your experience with the strategy to execution gap? Because there's normally a gap and there's many reasons for that gap, but one of them is cohesiveness. What has been your experience with your work and with leadership teams? The thing is, there's always going to be a gap, right? So the point is, how profound is that gap? Is it significant or we can manage or work around it? There are two things. First, I would say when it comes to culture, strategy, we're not into the democratic or consensus business, right? Leaders are paid the big bucks because they are the ones who have the vision. So this is one thing. However, we need to involve people in the process. And some leaders fail to involve people in their process or they involve them when it's too late. And they treat strategy like more of a communication thing. This is what we're going to do. Boom, take note. Boom. And that's it. And they repeat it over and over. But the thing is, it's not just a messaging thing if people don't. It's more of a storytelling thing. How do we engage people? There's a London Business School study that shows that over 70, whatever, 73% of senior executives cannot name the top three priorities of their own organizations. So imagine if the people running the business cannot. What happens with the rest? Even worse, the people that were the ones who define those strategic priorities sometimes fail to remind what they decided. And this is a study with 5,000, whatever CEOs. So it's not. That is near and dear to my heart, making sure the strategic story is told and built together Right. With the leaders. But it takes that cohesiveness, it takes that willingness to have those conversations and to actually care enough to have those conversations around. Totally. And the thing is there are many aspects, but on one hand, they keep repeating the perfect messaging that someone in the PR team or internal comps develop and practice. Yeah. And so. But people don't buy into that message. First, because it's too perfect. Second, because we know that people resist not change, but as Len Jolie says, they resist being changed by others. Right. Which is different when change is being imposed. So one thing I work with client is don't focus that much on what changes. Also address what doesn't change. So your identity, what brought you here? The key you were talking about the fundamentals. So that foundation, that doesn't change. Jeff Bezos, when he was leading Amazon, now he's a chairman, he used to ask his team, what's not going to change in 10 years from now. Right? Yeah. Technology changes, but we know that people want variety, they want great service, they want cheap prices. Those fundamentals of every business doesn't change or don't change. So when you can, as a leader, connect to first, our fundamental, our principles are going to stay the same because that's what make us successful. But the new strategy is this. People are going to be more open that when you try to impose a new strategy and they feel that everything else is going to disappear. Yeah. I love that. It's just critical to look at it. And that's why I was joking about you have to trick into it. So I hate to say it like that. It's a little bit of tricking. Right. And you know, we're following this process and we're liking it and. But not going now, we're going to do this today. You know, like people go, whoa, whoa, don't want to do that. Let me get a little bit more practical because I love learning about frameworks, your thoughts, your experience. But for the CEOs and the leaders who are listening today, what's an immediate action they can take after listening to this podcast? What's one? What is one conversation that every leader listening should have this week to take a step forward? What would you recommend? I'm going to give you two. That's it. Okay. Love it. With a question every time. Going back to your point, you're trying to sell a strategy, direction, whatever, before assuming that people are on the same page, and they're buying into what you're selling. Ask, what are we not aligned on? Not are we aligned? When you say, are we aligned? People are going to say yes, of course, because the question is no, you're being forced into agreement versus what are we not aligned on? First, you're open the door to, I see that there are some gaps. But also you're not saying we are aligned or we are. You say in which part of the conversation we're not. So that helps polish the agreement. The second part, it's a quick way to get started with the Forward Talk framework, which is reframing conversations. We talk about conversations getting stuck and getting stuck in the past. One of the key reasons is people, basically, when they're presented by a challenge by their colleagues, their leaders, the customers, they always find a way to say, no, that's not going to work. For example, we tried that before and it didn't work. So leaders get mad, they get into a fight, and of course, everyone doubles down on different sides of the story. So reframing the conversation is saying, okay, in today's context, how can we make it work? So basically say, yeah, in the past context it didn't work, but now we can make it work. Another way could be, we cannot make that decision because we don't have the budget. Okay. What decisions can we make with the budget that we have? Or we don't have money? Okay. What product or project can we sacrifice to fund this initiative? So you reframe the obstacle into possibilities instead of getting into a fight? So we cannot make the decision because the leader is not here. What power or authority do we have to start moving things forward now without having to ask for permission? So you're always reframing the issue and opening up possibilities. I love that. And I have one more question for you around that. Because as leaders, we always have a tough conversation in front of us. There's always one. And so my question is, what's your advice for leaders who know they need to have a tough conversation this week but are hesitating? How could you help them approach it? Many things. First, there's a lot of coaching on how to manage conversations and staff and preparation. I'm not into that business. My book is not into that business. I think that the sooner you face the conversation, so if it's a performance conversation, people know. People know what you want to tell them. People know when you're pissed off. People know when you are unhappy about their performance. So the sooner you address it, the more relaxing it's going to be for everyone. Because a conversation takes two sides. Sometimes a lot of people, sometimes a leader with one of their key team members. When you're avoiding the conversation, the other side notice it. So the tension harms the relationship. People get it. It's like a marriage. No? If there's friction, if there's miscommunication and you don't say how you feel, the other person feels how you are feeling. And actually they might be making even worse assumptions. Right. Maybe you want a vacation and they think that you want a divorce. And if you want to divorce, the sooner you get rid of a bad relationship or a bad employee, the best for you and for the rest of the team, right? What? I love that. Thank you. A little rapid fire. Here's some quick questions. What's one belief you've changed your mind on as a leader? I want to get started admitting that I was wrong or actually admitting that I didn't have the answer. So. So as a really, I was into it, trying to always be the one who had the answer. And I realized that by saying, hey, I don't have an answer. I don't know. That immediately opens people to, oh, great. Boom. Yeah. Love it. That's a great answer. Yeah. What's one behavior that separates great leaders from average ones? Frustration. But challenging that frustration towards yourself and what you can change, not towards your people. So frustration is an indication that there's potential that's not being kind of realized. And usually that starts with you. So when you feel frustrated, say, what am I not doing versus what they're not doing. I love it. One question every CEO should ask their team weekly. What am I missing? Good. Finish this sentence. The fastest way to move a business forward is to stop avoiding conversations. I love it. Love it, love it, love it. Okay, that was really fun. I liked our little speed round. Gustavo, where on May 5, your book forward Talk is released. Where can people go and buy this book? I like to say wherever books are sold. So it's distributed by Simon and Schuster, so it's already available for pre order in different retailers, of course, Amazon and Bars and Nobles, but also smaller retailers. Love it. And it's getting distributed to different retailers as well. So. Yeah. What's the best way that listeners could get in touch with you if they want to learn more? They can go to my website, Gustavo Rassetti with double z double t.com or hook me up in LinkedIn. I'm the only Gustavo Rassetti here as well, at least last time I checked. And you have a pretty followed blog, right? You have like a well followed blog, is that correct? Yeah, I have a nice 44,000 followers on subscribers. I've heard lots of good things about that. So lots and lots of great info. Well, Gustavo, what I love about this conversation is how simple and how hard this really is. It's not another tool, right? This is not another tool. It's how. And I love how you bring it back to how we show up as leaders every single day and how we bring ourselves to move us forward. If you want to move your business forward, start with the conversation. That's what I love about today. And Gustavo, thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you everyone for tuning in. This one you'll want to action on immediately. Get connected with Gustavo. Check out the pre release of Forward Talk. Pick up the book. Follow all the great info out there. I'm so grateful to have you here today. Thank you so much, Lewis. Thank you, Shannon.