Episódios
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Jeff Hunter:
Hi, I'm Jeff Hunter, the founder and CEO of Talentism. Today, I'm speaking with Dave Fano, the
founder and CEO of Teal. Dave is an architect by training and a serial entrepreneur by
compulsion. He founded the successful building information and technology consultancy Case.
He then sold Case to WeWork and took on the role of chief growth officer there, where he was a
key driver of their meteoric growth. I met Dave when he started his latest venture, Teal. I
remember when Dave was first talking about his career experiences and how he wanted to
make things better for the people who actually build companies, the employees, he told me that
it struck him that the way people think about their careers and their jobs was broken, and he felt
that the need to create a company to fix that. That compulsion led Dave to create Teal, an
incredible group of people dedicated to providing the education, community and tools to help
professionals build successful and fulfilling careers. I'm especially grateful to be talking to Dave
today because Teal is one of Talentisms, first IP partners, and is using our big four framework
and methodology to help people create their own unique path of professional excellence. I
encourage you to learn more about this amazing company at Tealhq.com. That's Tealhq.com.
Dave, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the conversation.
Dave Fano:
Thanks Jeff, I'm super honored to be a part of this as you know, someone who I look to as a
mentor and someone that's really paved the path for some really incredible things. And so I'm
really appreciative to have the time to talk to you and to do this with you.
Jeff Hunter:
So, Dave the way I understand it, at Teal you provide career coaching. You've worked with me,
you've partnered with Talentism. So, you know, our approach and thinking, and of course I know
you've done a lot of coaching over time as a successful executive. How do you think about the
value and importance of coaching?
Dave Fano:
So I think coaching is critical and I think that for anyone to push beyond their understanding of
their limits, some kind of external force is incredibly valuable, right? I think you know, for the
short time that I had a personal trainer, I was able to push myself, they were able to push me
further than I was able to push myself, just because I think we kind of you know, we like to play
it safe. We don't want to hurt ourselves. We don't like to fail. And so there's something about
having someone who you know, has your best interest in mind and helps you push to what they
think your potential is. And also that they've seen it done before, right? I mean, a lot of, I think
life is quite lonely in the sense that we're doing these things and we're experiencing them for the
first time and having that broader perspective, because even though that thing we’re
experiencing for the first time, there's a high likelihood someone else has experienced it. And so
I think that that is a lot of the value that, that coaches bring. I do think there's an important
distinction between coaching and advice and you want both, but I think that distinction is
important. Now all that said, that's not really what we do at Teal. I think that coaching is a
component of what we do and we're trying to be quite cautious about how we engage with the
theme of coaching. I think one of the things that's inherent in coaching is this one-on-one
relationship with an individual. And I think one of the things that you guys have done great at
Talentism is that you're establishing it as more of a platform. But you're still obviously have your
association to your coach that is using the platform. We're hoping to take that a step further,
mainly because we want to make it accessible to more people. There is an inherent cost
structure that comes with, you know, the livelihood of a person being based on, you know,
advising and this one-on-one high touch way, that I think is great for those that can afford it. And
a lot of times it's funded by companies, but we really want the consumer or the person that
works at companies to be able to do this and have agency with their career. And so that puts
the pressure on us to figure out ways to make this cost accessible and really leverage
technology and develop a platform and a methodology and framework that allow people to do it
on their own without the need of the high touch one-on-one coaching. So then that pushes us to
invest in tooling, content and frameworks that people can do in a self-guided way with the ability
to level up into a coach as necessary, but even that we're trying to figure out ways where that
can happen through chat or other low cost models and mainly so we can make it accessible to
more people, because that was kind of one of my contentions that you brought up earlier on in
the introduction is that these kinds of resources that I've been incredibly lucky to have. I got later
in my career, once I was sort of fiscally eligible. I have very few regrets, but I just think that if I
would have had access to these kinds of things earlier, I might've made better or different
decisions, and I really want to help people get access to those things sooner. So that's kind of,
so I think there are aspects and essences of coaching in what we do, but in terms of like a
delivery model and methodology, we're trying to break some new ground.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about something that you said at the beginning of what you
were talking about. So I've shared with you that, you know, seven years ago, when I started
Talentism, I really didn't intend to start a coaching organization. I had these theories about the
human mindand how things work and a way to unleash potential. And it turned out that what I
thought was going to be a consultancy ended up being very much a coaching organization,
because as I worked with leaders and brought these frameworks and this way of thinking to
those leaders, they said; Hey, would you coach me? And so then I went out and started trying to
figure out the world of coaching, cause I had never done it before. And I know there's a lot of
incredible coaches out there and I wanted to sort of respect the craft as also learn about my
blind spots and ended up really differentiating or at least trying to differentiate what I was trying
to do from what I experienced most coaches trying to do. And I think you brought up a little bit of
what I experienced most coaches trying to do, which is be almost like a change agent or an
accountability agent in a person's life. Like there's a, I'm gonna push you or I've got a better way
of doing something. And what we've been trying to do is figure out how to be a good detective in
your life to help you make sense of the evidence that you're producing as you try to achieve
your goals. So it's really not an attempt to provide a place of security or safety. It's not an
attempt to say; Hey, listen, you said you were going to go out there and, you know, apologize to
people and he didn't apologize or whatever the thing is that the pushing of the, towards a
person's limits, but more to help them gain a level of self mastering a level of self awareness, a
level of self skepticism and self-acceptance and use experiments along the way to try to
produce more evidence, more data. So you can sort of see who you are. So help me, help me
connect that because I think when I think about the coaching sessions, you and I have, I have
found you to engage with that methodology really well. So can you help me understand what I
may be missing in what your saying, did I misinterpret that or do you see like different coaching
in different situations?
Dave Fano:
So I think the methodology is incredibly powerful and I think it's amazing. I just know what I pay
for coaching and a lot of people can't. And so what, and so I think it's that high touch component
of it that I think that's part of what makes it remarkable, but it's also part of what makes
inaccessible. And so I want to try to figure out what are the parts of it that can be extracted and
made more accessible via technology and automation, which hopefully then can guide people
through a journey to know when to engage in that at the right times, is because I think that like
point coaching could be super valuable, but also part of what's built into like the coaching
business model is a need to kind of keep it going, right? Like, there's, we're going to be monthly.
I'm going to get you to a monthly fee because that's just the nature of business. Recurring
revenue is good going out and reacquiring customers every month is really expensive and
costly. And so they are, and look, this is just, I think, kind of the, one of the tensions of
commerce, be it employee, employer, you know, a service provider service receiver. And I think
you have to be like fiscally eligible enough to get that kind of quality of service. And then what
happens is there's a like non-linear relationship of cost to quality. And I think as you get down to
the low cost coaching, I don't, I think that there is a serious diminishing of quality. And then not
to say that there aren't remarkable coaches, but the volume of coaches is also much, much
higher. And so the chances of someone engaging with a coach and them not being helpful are
quite high. And I think that then the scales tip from not helpful to hurtful. And I think that's really
dangerous because I think people, especially when it comes to navigating their career are really
looking for a safe place to talk, because there's so much judgment and pressure around talking
about things like how much money you want to make, or that some of the vulnerabilities you
have, because you have to maintain this identity of confidence that people actually quite quickly
intrust a coach. And if these coaches aren't experts like you with the experience that you have,
they can very quickly misguide somebody and then you actually give them quite bad advice.
And I think it's actually quite easy for people to lean into giving advice and not follow like proper
coaching methodologies, which are hard and you have to be practiced at. And so I think that's
the big concern for me and then kind of what we're trying to tackle at Teal, that it's less driven by
like a human to human interaction, which allows for a tremendous amount of judgment in a very
vulnerable space and making a bit more systematic and predictable and not necessarily in
terms of outcomes, but at least in terms of experience.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as you were speaking, I was just reflecting on something
that happens to me a lot of days, not all days, but the, you know, I'll be talking to maybe five, six
CEOs or founders in a day and I'll end the day asking myself, did I do a good job today?
Because I believe that responsibility of a coach to be fully present for the person and engaged
in what they're going through and suspend judgment in the pursuit of investigation of what's true
and try to, you know, put aside our own biases and beliefs, just so we can, at least in our
methodology be true to the framework and try to process the information well, and every day I
end up wondering like whether I did a good job. And I think that you know, in big four, that's the
nature of how we think about these things, right? Is it is not pleasant to wonder at the end of the
day, whether you did a good job. And yet I think its the very nature of a pursuit of excellence.
And I've seen you do this and many other people, is like the harder you work, the more you
realize how far you have to go to be excellent. And so you work even harder and are open to
the question about whether you're even doing this right. And so you keep pushing and pursuing,
but I can imagine that the difference between somebody in my position, being able to afford the
time and the pressure of being able to do that every day to challenge myself and somebody
who's trying to handle a much broader scope of people is different. I did want to ask you one
thing that you were talking about. So one of the things I think has been really clear and in
everybody I work with and I'd say you're an especially good case of this. They have pretty good
self-awareness and they care about that. Like they want to be self-aware, absent
self-awareness I think it's almost impossible to get better at something. Because you spend
most of your time caught in your internal narratives about how everyone else is to blame for
what's going on, as opposed to seeing where you are in that picture. What have you found in
the world of Teal with regards to a career, a person who's going through a career change or
career challenge and how they bring a sense of self-awareness to that? Are they just trying to
get into the next job or are they really able to step back in your experience and sort of reflect
and think about, you know, a bigger picture.
Dave Fano:
That's probably been the most exciting and intimidating part of these early parts of the Teal
journey is it's so complex what people are optimizing for and the way that they've crafted their
life either, you know, strategically or opportunistically or proactively or reactively to get them into
the situation that they're in and watching them navigate all those things to make that next
decision to, you know, people who get laid off and say, well, this was great because I was never
going to quit. And now I can take the next three to six months to figure out what I want to do to
someone who abruptly quits and says, I need a job in a week because I was so miserable, but I
really don't have any cushion, but I made that decision anyway. And so just like watching and
dissecting the way that people make decisions and what those triggers for them are, has been
really interesting. And we're actually going through an exercise now trying to archetype people
and it's really hard and it's no, we're not going to be able to just like bucket people. It's going to
be these different dimensions and just seeing where people are on those scales of what matters
to them. And you know, is someone a saver so that they can make these decisions is someone
you know, kind of a bit of a planner, but not a saver. So they're less willing to take a job that they
don't like. Where are they in their career? You know, are they, is this job one or is this job
seven? Are they, why are they pursuing compensation because the world has told them to, or
because they really need the money. And how have they attached like compensation to
self-worth and identity. There's, our careers make up such a massive part of our identity and
they trigger a lot of parts of our biology. I think that, you know, amygdala hijack is a real thing in
career management, but it's not life or death in the same way. It was that our amygdala was
kind of like built to do when we were being attacked by a saber tooth tiger or something, but we
confuse ourselves and that's been really interesting to see, like where is someone using more of
like the calculating parts of their brain versus more of these like animalistic survival parts of their
brain as they make these career decisions. And it's been super fascinating and to say that I've
got like patterns, it would just be way too early.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. So Dave, I think something that you and I have talked about frequently that as part of not
only our ongoing coaching, but also as part of the partnership between Talentism and Teal. And
I think it's embedded in what you were just talking about with regards to what people are like
and what their context is, what their situation is. Is this notion of how individuals pursue their
individual or unique path to excellence embedded in this idea, in this concept that excellence
really as being good at what you do, being good at your craft or your job or your responsibilities
is really the only sustainable competitive advantage, even in the midst of huge disruptions and
how work gets done with technology and global markets and all those kinds of things. What you
see is that people who are truly excellent tend to have secure, security and the people don't can
be much more at the whims of bad managers, bad leaders, bad companies, etcetera. When
you're working through coaching individuals or working with individuals and giving them the
toolkit that Teal is giving them to help them think about not only what they want to do for a living,
but what they're really good at. How do you guys think through that and how do you work that?
Dave Fano:
So it's early days for us on that front, we've been laser focused on helping people land jobs, you
know, given the current climate and part of that is understanding what they're good at. And this
is where one of the reasons we're excited to partner with you guys because you've done a lot of
work on that front, what we have done some work on is that we've developed our own what
we're calling work style assessment. It's more of like a behavioral assessment. It's got a lot of
learnings from disc which is a pretty common workplace behavioral assessment. And we've kind
of put a little bit of our own flavor on it. And one thing that was really important to me in us
building it, which is I saw in a lot of flaws in these assessments is you can't take them multiple
times and compare the data and you, and they don't have a lot of like three sixties, some do.
But it's, you know, those, then you have to like hire a consultant to read you the results. And so I
wanted to do something a little more self-serve there. And that's been really interesting seeing
how someone perceives themselves versus their reputation, right? That's kind of the distinction
Hogan makes which I think is a good one and that's prompted some great conversations when
someone would say, even for myself, I, one of the words pairings is questioning and accepting.
And I was, I put myself all the way maximum accepting, and I think of the 15 people that took it
on my behalf, not a single person put me on the accepting side and part of it was semantic, but
then it was like a huge eye opening for me. I was like, oh right, yeah. When I do that, like
intensive questioning that I do, it makes people, like it comes off as a different way, or me
thinking that's my path to becoming accepting. And so it was, I think that, that is really helpful.
And I think in the context of shaping your career, understanding how others perceive you,
because your career really is influenced by the people that enable it, scaffold it, you know paved
paths for you. It really isn't this singular thing. It has a ton of dependencies. And so that's an
area where we see ourselves really investing, is having other people that you trust, give you that
input and making it really easy. You know, so one of the ones we want to work on now is skills. I
might have a sense of what I think I'm good at, but I'm also incredibly susceptible to blind spots.
So in a way to help me understand what I'm good at, I'm going to start to engage with others
and say; Hey, what do you think I'm good at? Like in my last role at this company, as my
manager, what were areas where you think I excelled and I want to leave out the negative
because that's kind of not the point. I think you can do that in other ways. And then it gets
awkward for people to then give that feedback and then they want an amenity and you have to
end up having to do all these things to obfuscate the value. So let's just keep it simple and have
people tell me what they think I'm good at. And so I think my intuition right now is that that will
surface things that either people didn't realize they were good at, or they thought that they just
took for granted. They didn't recognize it. What I've seen oftentimes is things that people are
really good at. They just think that that's kind of like second nature and that's not worth
articulating as a skill, but in the pursuit of building a fulfilling career, those are the things that
unlock you. When you can find these things that are these talents that come natural to you, and
that you don't even recognize them as a skill. If more people can help you identify those, then I
think you can get that much closer to doing work that's fulfilling, energizing, engaging, you know,
that you jump out of bed for, in the morning to do. And that's really what we're after.
Jeff Hunter:
That's so cool. Because I think what you're talking about is the nature of confusion and how to
apply that through the lens of Teal. For me, this idea of confusion, I've been working through it
for many, many years or decades, but I always use the American idol task, which is, you know,
the first five years I watched American idol just loved it. Then, you know, they picked Carry over
Bo and I had to leave, but the thing that always struck me and of course it's the way the
producers cut it and everything, but we have to acknowledge all that. They're creating drama,
but you can sort of bucket people who are in effect seeking a career change right there. They're
not professional singers who have big record contracts who are coming in to be judged by the
assignment. They're actually people who would like to make a career change, make a move up.
And so you had this group of people who were just incredibly confident. Incredibly confident like
I know myself, I know what I'm good at. I know my skills and they'd open their mouth and sing,
and it was like a cat screeching. It was just horrendous. And then similarly, there are a group of
people walked in who you could just see it in their face and in their narrative. Like, I have no
idea why I am here. I am a terrible singer, but there's something that is compelling me to show
up and try this. And then they open their mouth and they're just glorious, right? And then you've
got people, you know, in between, there are different levels of self-awareness and confidence
and capability or skill. And to me, we're all just singers trying out for American idol. We all have
different levels of self-awareness about what we're good at and what we're not good at. And we
need help to figure out what's true because just because you can sing it in the shower does not
mean you can sing it on stage and you need help to figure out exactly how good you are and
also what different contexts you're good in and what contexts you struggle in. Because there's
lots continuing with the singing analogy. There's lots of things where, you know, somebody
really good in the recording booth and they get onstage and they're terrible or vice versa. It's
singing both times the same skill, but the context is extremely different in our minds process,
that context very differently. And so I love how you guys are helping people figure that stuff out
because I think having a safe set of hands, an expert set of hands to help somebody figure out,
work through that confusion, help them see what they're really good at, what they're really
compulsively driven to do, what kinds of outcomes they find meaningful and connect them to
opportunities that exist out there is, it's just awesome. It's in my opinion, it's sacred work. I'm so
glad that you're doing it. I'm so glad you've moved from the initial conversations we had to
actually making this thing a reality and helping thousands of people. And I'm just grateful to
have been a small part of helping you. So Dave, we're at the end of our time, I just want to say
thank you so much for participating in this inaugural podcast. We'll see how it goes. We'll just
you know, we'll put it out there and let's see if anybody thinks that we're good singers or bad
singers, but we'll get some feedback and hopefully get better. I really, really appreciate it. Thank
you so much.
Dave Fano:
Awesome. Yeah, I really appreciate being asked to do this and you know, that it means a lot to
me that you would think to have me as one of the early people on it. So I'm incredibly
appreciative and I'm excited to see where it goes and, you know, I volunteer to do another one
where I spill my guts out and then you sorta dissectomy live if that's experiment number two we
can see how the crowd feels about that.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, that would be awesome. Okay well, we'll get the anesthesia ready and we'll prep the
room and invite you back.
Dave Fano:
All right. Thanks Jeff.
Jeff Hunter:
All right. Thanks Dave.
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Renee DeAngelis:
And so I think it's really all about being uncomfortable. And I don't know if balance is achieved. I
think that balance is achieved by testing things out and potentially falling, but when you break
through it's the craziest most awesome feeling in the world.
Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to Coaching in the Clear, the podcast
committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we
believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best
way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your
coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their
potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a
production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders
achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a
weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues
affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to
enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. So Renee,
thank you so much for joining us today on Coaching in the Clear, my first question for you is
how did you come to use a coach? How did you get to the place where you decided you wanted
to use a coach?
Renee DeAngelis:
Well hi Jeff. Thank you. Coaching came to me through an acquisition and merger involving
private equity. And so we were merging with another company that did the same thing as we do.
And that's when I met you and your team and we, there are a lot of intricacies to those types of
deals. And so we met and we decided to, that having a coach would help me navigate through
some of the challenges with what happens with a transaction like that.
Jeff Hunter:
Great, and just say for the audience, that was a very successful transaction. So congratulations
on that and has helped you build an amazing company. So tell me a little bit about what you've
learned about coaching and how you experience it. You came to it pretty new and I've really
enjoyed our relationship and the opportunity to coach you. And I've seen you grow a lot through
that process. So tell me a little bit about how you've experienced it and what you've learned
about over time.
Renee DeAngelis:
Oh my gosh. So much. I think the, I mean, overall I think coaching is this opportunity for you to
become the best version of yourself. And I, one of the biggest takeaways I've had is I had often
lead a team and managed a team and run a company, grown a company a lot through this
instinct that was deep inside of me. And I think working with you, I've been able to put a
framework together around it and language around it that not only I can use, but also my
colleagues and people I work with can use, so it's been a sort of common, we've created a
common language. We've been able to all learn together through using that framework. I also
think that throughout my whole life I've always had a coach and I think, I truly believe coaching
is not really a one-dimensional thing. You know, as a coach, as a person who leads a team or
leads a company I find that I learned just as much from the people I'm working with or coaching
as I do, hopefully help them as well. So I feel like it's for me and either seat or either hat that I
wear, I feel like it's a, there's a lot of growth and opportunity and an opportunity to master
something and a lot of opportunity to learn something new.
Jeff Hunter:
So I'm going to let the audience in on a little thing. So one of the things I love about our
conversations is you are not only an expert and a professional in the world of climbing, you're
also an enthusiast and you’ve spent a lot of your time, free time such as it is, there isn't a lot,
climbing and so I'm always trying to impress you by bringing up climbing references. And you're
always very patient with me as I stumble my way through that. And that's been a very cool
dynamic in our relationship, but one of the things that I've found when I'm coaching people is
there's usually some area of their life where they pursue excellence. It's not always in their job,
but there's some area of their life where they push themselves and they're testing themselves to
really uncover what they're capable of. And I not only have seen you, I mean, we've talked
about climbing and what that means for you, but also I've seen that in the world of your work, is
there some way you can connect those two things for me? Like what it's like to climb versus
what it's like to lead?
Renee DeAngelis:
Oh my gosh, there are, it's all the same. Well, first of all, I want to say, I'm not an expert climber.
There are so many people who are way beyond me. I think I'm, I have a deep love and passion.
I've been climbing for so long It's almost embarrassing, cause I should be a lot better than I am,
but I love it. And that's the wonderful thing about this sport is that at any level you can enjoy it,
but there's so many parallels. I often, you know, when you're climbing you are, well actually let
me give you a story. Back in 2008, when I was just with planet granite, which is the company
that I was part of and helped grow before we had the private equity merger and acquisition, I
went to climb El Cap and the actual El Cap in Yosemite. And I remember standing at the bottom
of the route and looking up and thinking, oh my gosh, I am, how am I ever going to do this? It
looks really steep and long. And during that time we were in a really busy growth phase at work.
We were opening a new gym. We were hosting a national competition. I had a brand new team
of people that I had just assembled in anticipation of this growth. And so it was really crazy at
work. And I just thought, I looked up at that rock and I thought, well, if I can get through all of
that, I can get through this climb. And you just kind of tackle it one pitch at a time. And I think
that, that's what we did in that moment at our company is that we just slowly crept up the, you
know, indoor climbing version of El Cap to accomplish all the things that we had to do. And so I
think the, you know, when you're standing on the top of it, or when you're through, you've got all
your gyms open in your past, all the competition and craziness, you feel that same sense of
success. So I think an overall sense that is, there's so much similarity and I've always loved it.
And it is, you're constantly pushing yourself. And if you feel like I'm always driving myself to
excellence both at work and in my personal time, and there is no one thing, but I think I'm fairly
lucky that it is so similar and there are so many overlaps.
Jeff Hunter:
One of the things I've experienced in our conversations and it's really helped me sort of
formulate this in my mind. So Talentism is constantly talking about goals and unleashing your
potential. And because people talk about potential in different ways, it's sort of this mystical sort
of thing, right? Like it's always out there, it's never achievable, etcetera. And so that can make it
sort of squishy for lack of a better term. And so we talk about potential is as potential does, like
you gotta keep pushing the boundaries of things to figure out where your potential is. And yet
the thing I, the very little I know about climbing, and I appreciate your humility so much in
describing that, but of course, relative to me, you are an expert. So we'll continue to use that as
your rep for now. But one of the things that, the little climbing I had done earlier in my life is that
sense of how much to push yourself because pushing yourself beyond a certain limit actually
could be dangerous. And yet, if you aren't willing to put yourself in a position where you have to
figure something out, or you have to make a big move you know, then you'll never really know.
You won't know what your potential is. How do you think about the balance of those things?
Again, both in climbing and with respect to the excellence you're pursuing at work.
Renee DeAngelis:
I don't think that you really know unless you try and you have to be okay with falling. I mean,
that's really what it comes down to. And I think in climbing and in a work scenario, you have to
be okay with being uncomfortable. And I have often told people, I work with that well, when
you're climbing the first person up the route or the pitch is lead climbing, and that's a little more
scary because the higher you go up your place in gear, clipping into a gear as you go up. And
you fall to that last piece of gear that you have clipped and that's called lead climbing. And it's a
little bit scary cause you fall a little bit farther than if you're following, if you're the second person.
And so I think that when I'm, when you're leading a team or helping someone get through
something, I think you have to be okay being uncomfortable. You've got to kind of be on lead
and push yourself and navigate the unknown. You don't always know where you're going, but
you do know, you know, where you want to end up, but you don't necessarily know how to get
there. And so I think it's really all about being uncomfortable. And I don't know if balance is
achieved. I think that balance is achieved by testing things out and potentially falling. But when
you break through, it's the craziest most awesome feeling in the world. You know, that's when
you tap into your fierce, when you've tried something, you've been on the edge of, I don't know if
I should go forward or not, and you go forward and you are successful then it is, it's just the
most amazing feeling out there and confidence building and everything that goes along with
kind of becoming the best version of yourself.
Jeff Hunter:
One of the things, so you just use the word fierce. And as you know, I've got a sticky on my
computer that says, find your fierce. I learned so much from the people I have the good fortune
to coach and from you, I've learned a lot about courage. And so I've got this post-it that says,
find your fierce because that's something you were talking about with yourself and I've seen you
exhibit it. What have you experienced in coaching with regards to helping you find that fierce?
Or do you think that’s just something you have and then coaching is playing another role once
you have it?
Renee DeAngelis:
Oh my gosh. I think that finding your fierce is something you always have to work on. It's not
that you have it and it stays with you. I feel like I lost mine for many years and Jeff you've been
instrumental in helping me find that and helping me really make sense of how you do that. So I
don't know if that's really answering your question, but I think that it's something that you, it's
easy to become complacent. I guess, it's easy, I think as a female to get knocked down and to
start to not believe in yourself. And so it takes, you know, I have appreciated you as a coach
because you have been dedicated to knowing that I know how to tap into that and helping guide
me along the way and how to do that, how to find it and what it looks like when I have.
Jeff Hunter:
Okay. So you provided an opening. I want to pursue this a little bit. And because it's actually
something that's deeply meaningful to me, and it's also a scary topic to talk about. And so I just
want to put it out in the open, which is, as you know, I coach a number of female founders, a
number of female executives and something I'm asking them during the course of this podcast
is about my blindness and about the privilege I have as a straight white male and about what
that does with respect to whether I can be an effective coach for somebody who I don't share
their experience, because I do have so much privilege. And you and I have talked a fair amount
about this, about your experience being a female executive and for you it hasn't just as far as
I've understood it, it hasn't just been being a female executive. It's like you're sort of a trailblazer
in a lot of different areas in climbing as a very male dominated sort of sport. At least that's where
a lot of the attention goes to. And so I would just love anything you could tell me or tell us about
what I need to pay attention to or think about with respect to being the best possible coach for
people who don't have my privilege, and I don't share their experience.
Renee DeAngelis:
Well, I think that you, one of the most important things is doing the work and it feels to me like
you do, do the work. You're always asking questions that sort of stop our conversation. And
when you're able to say, well, you know, wait you know, I don't know the perspective you're
coming from and you kind of recognize when you might be coming from a place of privilege.
And so part of that is to be, I think it's absolutely possible, but it, but the coach has to be
someone who is humble and open and willing to do the work, to learn what coming from a place
of privilege means. But I guess that's it for now. I’m trying to think. I mean, I think that it's just,
you know, I kind of think of it as we're in this together, you've been helping me and I, you know, I
hope that you've learned a perspective from me that maybe you didn't have before and the other
women that you coach, but I don't, it's sort of, it's just a journey. And I think that if you have the
relationship where you can be open and honest with each other and have the conversations,
when, that it is a start and, you know, I don't really have a... I just don't think there's a blanket
answer to that because every, not every coach is going to do the work and get educated on
what it means to be coming from their perspective.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, that's great. Thank you. Okay. So tell me if you could change one thing, two things,
whatever it is, I don't want to put an artificial limit on this, about what the people who work in the
corporate world need to know about what they can do better to create an environment that
unleashes the potential of their employees. What would it be?
Renee DeAngelis:
So what would it be to create the environment that would unleash the potential of the
employees? Well, I think, I mean the first thing is create a culture in which that is able to thrive
and have a huge ear to listening and learn how to ask really good questions.
Jeff Hunter:
Good. So what would be a really good question?
Renee DeAngelis:
Hmm. Well, I think if you asked anyone that I work with, they will tell you that I am very good at
asking questions. So I think a good question, if there's maybe not one good question, but I think
that I don't pretend that I know everything. And so it's trying to, when people come to me with
challenges, questions, you know, help me get through this. It's being able to ask them a
question that helps them think critically about the situation so they can learn to come to a
conclusion on their own or get to a conclusion together. If you don't know the answer is either.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. So the thing for me, and we've talked about this a lot. So, you know, I have this belief,
like, we're all confused. Confusion is this thing that's happened to us as a species. Like it's not
some people are bad and some people are good and some people are confused and
unconfused and stupid or lazy or whatever. It's like as a species, we have this interesting sort of
thing where we're able to create lots of complexity, but we don't necessarily have the right mind
to deal with the complexity that we've created. It's over constantly and confusion about what's
happening around us. And then I think great leaders and people like yourself come to it with a
sense of humility about the fact that you're probably missing something. And because the, I
think of things like, and again, this is something we've talked about. I think of it like the, you
have lots of tools at your disposal to achieve your goals, but the biggest, most important tool
you have is your brain. And so what you really want to do first and foremost is be like a
craftsman of your own brain. You want to be excellent at using that tool. It's not the only tool
you've got, but it's a really big one. It's a really important one. And because the brain is giving us
consciousness and giving us awareness and all those things, it's almost sort of like we're inside
the tool itself as opposed to separate from it and looking at it and saying, oh, how could I use
this better? And so the first thing is to understand that we have a lot of agency in any situation to
be able to step back and say, okay how, you know, what could I do better? How could I
improve? And then the question to me, the single point question that continues to help people,
both reinforce that humility, as well as ask a productive sort of inquiry to help you move forward
is what am I missing? Because I think we're all missing stuff, right? It's just constant. And it's
both just a reality that our brain can't possibly process all the information that's flowing into it. It's
also our reality that our brain makes all sorts of unconscious distinctions and biases that we
aren't even aware of. And so we're just sort of dealing with what another part of our brain has
already led us, sort of, deal with and coming to a place of humility and saying, what am I
missing to me is the question that sort of, you know, sort of unleashes that moment to explore.
And I've in our coaching I've seen you do that well
Renee DeAngelis:
I agree. I think this is a great example of what I was, when we were talking earlier about sort of
what's the value I've gotten out of coaching is so, you know, as soon as you started talking, I'm
thinking in my brain, of course, yes, the best question is ask, what am I missing? I don't
immediately go there. And I go to my gut instinct in this intuitive of, you know, I'm asking
questions to help people think critically about something. And so I think just, I want to, I don't
know if this is making sense, but it's just like, I'm pointing to the framework that you all have put
together as a way to talk about this as a way to maybe formalize how and speak about how I
would go about coaching someone or how I would go about creating that environment that
people can become their best selves and is, yes, you're right. That is the best question, is what
am I missing here and getting to that through a series of questions. So I don't know if that
makes any sense.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, yeah. I think it also connects back to the previous question, the previous thing we were
talking about around privilege, I think if more people with privilege would just ask themselves
that question, it would create a space and an opening to really learn. I think every again,
something you and I have talked a lot about is power grades privilege, and that we're all
somewhere in a hierarchy somewhere, and we all have bosses and we all have somebody who,
you know, people are more powerful than us and less powerful than us. And especially when
we're an executive, there's a lot of people who are less powerful than us and how we show up to
that experience with a sense of humility and yet being completely focused on our goals and not
losing sight of that, holding that tension is just so incredibly difficult. And one of the things I've
always loved learning from you about climbing, etcetera, is that dynamic tension that you can't
have arrogance as you're working towards the summit. And yet you have to be laser focused on
the summit and knowing that, you know, there is an end goal you're trying to achieve. I've
learned a lot from you about thinking that way and thinking through that. What do you think
about, so one of the things I'm pretty curious about is how you create a really great organization,
an organization in your case. You know, ELCAP runs these incredible climbing gyms and I've
always loved hearing from you how important it was that people walk through the door of the
climbing gym and they find a safe place to try something extreme and something important to
sort of unleash themselves on the wall if you will. And so when I think about all the details you
and your team cover in the myriad little things that have to go right. So somebody has,
somebody, one of your customers can only pay attention to one thing. You can only pay
attention, like, okay, have I picked the right wall? Am I clipped in? Am I going to do this as
opposed to like, wow, this place smells or whatever it is, how do you think about both holding
high standards for just a lot of little things, while at the same time being incredibly open, that a
person who's helping you achieve that goal isn't having a good day or is, you know, they, today
just, they made a mistake and in the mistake is affecting a customer. And so you care deeply
about that customer. You care about their experience. You care about that employee. How do
you think about being a leader and a manager in the midst of that tension?
Renee DeAngelis:
Well, I think it helps in our, in my particular world that we, there's not a lot of separation from our
team at work and the community that we work in and our personal lives. So if we are all, you
know, I can speak to myself, I work here. I, but I'm also part of the climbing community. So
there's a tremendous amount of accountability and ownership that I have on a personal and
professional level just every day, whether I am stepping into the gym to work, whether I'm
stepping into the gym to climb, or even if I'm out at a local crab, local crag, climbing crag. I think
that it's on one level, that's, it's a lot of weight on your shoulders. But on the other, I think it
makes that tension a little, it eases that tension because it gives the sense that we're all in this
together. And, you know, it's not just when we're talking about safety in the gym, for example,
it's not just on us to ensure safety, it's on the whole community. It's on every climber who walks
in to make sure that if they see something that potentially might lead to a mistake that they're
speaking up about it, whether to our team members or to that fellow customer member guest.
So I think that it's a little bit, I feel very lucky that it's a little bit easier because we care deeply
not only about the experience and not only about the safety but the people in the community.
And we've really, haven't, you know, we've had our success by building great communities and
having a good culture and having a great vibe when you walk into that door. And so we're all
part of it, whether you're working or whether you're there for fun.
Jeff Hunter:
That's awesome. Okay. So what if you're managing someone and you, as their manager, see,
they have so much more to give. They have so much more potential in them, and they're just for
whatever reason, at least the way you're perceiving it is, they're not bringing it. They are just,
something's going on. And there's a pretty big gap between your expectation and your
experience. There's confusion. How do you approach that? Thinking as much as a manager, as
a coach in that moment to try to unleash their potential?
Renee DeAngelis:
:
I mean, how do I approach it? I mean it's a very, I feel like it's a long road and that starts with
understanding what's going on with that person. So it's the question you asked, what am I
missing here? Is there something, you know, have we missed a skills assessment? Is there
something going on in the person's personal life? Have they performed previously? And there's
suddenly a change in performance? I just start by asking all of those questions initially. Yeah.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. So you talked a little bit just to connect to this. So to tie some of those together, you
talked a little bit earlier about culture. You're talking a little bit about performance, about
potential and you went through a merger and mergers are always interesting experiences
because they take two organizations filled with incredible well-meaning people who are trying to
achieve something. They may even be trying to achieve the same thing, like incredible climbing
gyms, but they have different cultures. They have different behaviors, they reward different
ways of making sense of things. This was really your first time going through that experience.
What have you learned about that merger and about people and about cultures and unleashing
in the midst of that?
Renee DeAngelis:
Well, so we've actually now gone through two because we, so we merged with earth planet
granite merged with earth treks two, almost three years ago. And then just this past December,
we also acquired another, a third climbing gym company called movement. So we have been
putting together, stitching together and creating a new culture out of all three brands since
January really. So my experience with that is, I mean, it was really eye-opening because when
planet granite and earth treks first merged, we very much viewed each other as wow, we're the
sister companies, they, you know, we knew each other. I would always call up that team and
ask questions. How are you doing this? Or, you know, what software do you use, etcetera? And
we would collaborate on a lot of things when we were two separate companies. And so the
merger seemed like it would be easy. It, you know, of course all the puzzle pieces are fitting
together, but when we actually dug into it is, the companies did things drastically different. Not
that one was any better than the other. It's just, we then realized very quickly, we needed to
figure out how to take the best of and create new. And so what I've learned about people is that
there are, you know, I think the success of it depends on people being really open to change
and open to new ways of doing things. And I think it also, it was also a lot of conversations with
people of, do you really want to, you know, be part of creating this new thing. And I think as
leaders, it was really important and it still is very important to cast a vision of where we want to
go. And what does that look like and how we get there is important, but where are we going to
get everybody, you know, on the bus and are in the boat and rowing in the same direction. And
that has been incredibly hard to do. And I remember you telling me that creating culture when
you've gone through a merger takes years and years. And I am definitely, we're three years into
it and yeah it does, it's a lot of work and that's a long road.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. Culture is one of those things. I think it's, first of all, it's one of those words that's thrown
around a lot and a lot of people do. And yet it's typically, it's very difficult to sort of define it. We
have a particular way. We define it as you know, we've talked a lot about that. But the thing that
strikes me is when you're going through any sort of integration, cultural change associated with
that integration, and it doesn't even have to be two companies, it can be two teams. It can be
you know, two people then you're really dealing with this thing. That's interesting about human
beings that we all think one thing about ourselves, we believe something about ourselves as
true. That may not be true. In other words, if you go to two, if you go to a person and you say,
would you be open-minded to doing things in a better way? They'll say yes, almost universally.
I'd be like, yeah, of course. And then, but what both the data and the experience shows is the
answer is probably no. Most people are very deeply grounded in these unconscious biases,
ways of working habits, procedures. We just get used to them. And our mind really attaches to
them as a way of like making sense of the world that when someone comes along and one
contacts, the conversation says, would you be open? Then the person says, sure. And when
you actually put them into the change process it's a radically different thing. And how you work
with human beings through that, again, you're trying to achieve a goal. It's very interesting,
especially in the private equity context, you're operating in where there's, it's not like, you know,
15, 20 year horizons, it's 5 and 7 year horizons, and you got to integrate a lot of stuff. Improve a
lot of things, go through a lot of change, open a lot of gyms, do all these things all at once. And
you're dealing at the end of the day with human beings and human beings, some like change,
some types of change. Some don't like change and you as a leader, have to take them through
that. And one of the things I believe that it's just so important for anybody who's listening about
how to unleash your potential is to understand that you yourself are probably the thing that is
standing in the way of that. It's you, you're saying authentically. And I don't think people are ever
lying when they say, yeah, I'm up for the challenge. And then later when they struggle with a
change or a similar challenge, then you'll hear them, you know, sort of blame others and say, no
I was up for the challenge if it had only gone down this way or whatever, but if you put them in a
safe space and you really take them through that, it often is that no, it was easy to say the
change you were open to change and it was actually very difficult to do. And that's why starting
with the premise that people are confused as opposed to bad or good, where, you know, stupid
or lazy or smart or dumb or whatever those sorts of models are frames we put in our head to
make sense of things are just not productive, but knowing that people are confused and getting
them to clarity can take a lot of work. I think is sort of the center of it. And I've seen you go
through that and work through that. Yeah.
Renee DeAngelis:
And I don't think we're there. I mean, it is such a long process because there's layers of
confusion. There's you know, I think we, it's creating that safe space. I think you mentioned you
touched on it when you said that. I think it's creating a space where people do feel that they can
express something and be heard and that there aren't consequences to it, but it has also been a
lot of conversations about what does a merger and an acquisition mean. And what does, you
know, it means that we're probably not going to be doing the same thing, because we've got a
whole new blank slate of way to, for me, it was this opening up to create an experience that
would transform our industry and I, for both team members and customers walking through the
door. And I think that getting everybody on board to do that meant letting go of how you did
things in the past, and it's still difficult for people, and you can see it on their faces when
something is challenging, the way things used to be. And we're slowly getting through all of that.
But I hope that it's been a great learning experience for everybody involved, but it has been so
many conversations on so many levels. And it's every person in the company from top to bottom
has to go through this. And it just takes someone with a, I mean you almost have to set your
kind of step outside of yourself to be able to view it. And trying to, I think for me, one of my
biggest challenges has been, and learning experiences has been, how do you encourage that
behavior across departments, across the whole company and at many different layers. So it's
been a journey and I'm incredibly thankful that I have a team of really talented people to help me
along with it because it can't, you know, it shouldn't, it can't fall on one person to be
spearheading all of it.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. And I think what makes it especially difficult is when I talk to people about the leaders I
work with and, you know, anybody who occupies a position of leadership probably has some
level of celebrity associated with them. I don't think that's a good thing, by the way. I just think
that's natural for human beings to take a look at somebody who has more power or privilege
than they do and say, oh, wow, there must be something unique or special about them in my
experiences. Like, no, usually there's not, we’re all just human beings. We're all confused. We're
all sort of working our way through a lot of stuff. Some people have particular talents and given
those talents or give them luck, they end up in a certain place, but, you know, tomorrow the
context could change and it could be you and you could be the right leader for the time. And so
it's really just about constantly being in pursuit of you know, as we've talked about the, your big
four, but to understand that when you're in a position of privilege or power, that you've got these,
as we've talked about psychological keys to the kingdom because you can hire people, you can
fire them, you can promote them, you can demote them, you can give them status, you can give
them membership or cast them out. You can give them the security, or you can diminish that
security. And to me, that's such a critical, important thing everyday to understand like how
important it is to be in that position of power or privilege, and treat that with humility and treat
that with a level of like, understanding that if you are as a leader, confused or having a hard day,
that's going to have a big ripple effect and that's going to really impact a lot of people. And I
know a lot of leaders almost sometimes get defensive about that. Like, you know, that's not fair
or whatever. And I sort of feel like use that celebrity metaphor. It's the, you know, the celebrities
that complain about the paparazzi and I'm like, okay, got it. But it's the reality. People want to
see pictures of you. So how are we going to deal with that? And the thing I've experienced
working with you, and again, so many other great leaders, as the times you're most connected
into that humility, the time you're most connected into that, like, okay, I may be missing
something. Or if I'm asking people to change, I've got to sort of start there myself and be the
change I want to see that courage of going first. Being first on the, you know, being first up to
the pitch is really the, one of the biggest, most important parts of leadership. And I think you've
exemplified it really well.
Renee DeAngelis:
Well, I think when you were talking about, you know, people basically being walking around,
being confused, it is courage. And I think it takes courage to lead and to set that example. And I,
but I also want to, our job is to help people make sense of things. And you've said that often,
and I think if we can't do that, then you know it's recognizing when we can't, but I think a lot of
people, something that's been on my mind lately is a lot of people are thinking about, you know,
I want a mentor, I want a mentor at work and I, you know, I need this to develop and what is the
difference between mentorship and coaching? And I think that is, you know, as a coach, you're
helping them make sense of things. And, you know, I'm not really sure, I’d love to know your
thoughts on that, but I'm kinda, I don't really like the idea of mentorship because I don't want to
create another person like me. It also assumes that I have some, you know, as a mentor, the
mentor is this person on a pedestal that the other person is trying to be like. And I think that it
wasn't, it's not about that. And it's about I don't know, like showing people these, showing
people courage and strength and vulnerability and how to bring that all into the workplace and
how to make sense of things. And I think that is, I don't know, that has been helpful to me. I
don't know how I don't know. I just kind of wanted to point that out.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I think it's very, it can be very easy to confuse management, leadership, mentorship,
advisory, or advice and coaching, and because they all sort of play in the same arena of human
potential in certain ways. And so when we talk about it, we think about leadership as painting a
picture of the future. You want the organization to create and developing a sense of trust and
meaning with the group, with the organization, so that they'll actually want to be inspired to go
there. Whereas management really is a discipline associated with achieving goals through the
work of others. And so, and then with regards to advisory, when you get advice from someone
or you hire an advisor, they're there to give you an answer in my opinion, as opposed to a
mentor, which is there, who is there to show you a path, because hopefully they've done it
before and they can show you a path, but it is your own journey. Whereas a coach, I think when
a coach is excellent is really there to help you just make sense of things. It's an externalized
sensemaker for you at the end of the day. I don't think they can inspire you to be somebody
different than you are, nor should they try. They should help you become the fullest, most
authentic version of yourself. And that has to do with helping you uncover the very confusion
that blocks you from the potential you seek. And the, you know, the excellence you seek. So
they play very different sorts of roles. And of course somebody can be all of those things, but
not at once. And I think there's a lot of people who get very confused by this as they're trying to
be coach and manager at the same time. There's a, at least in the way we think about
management coaching is a huge part of being an excellent manager. But at the end of the day,
a coach has just one goal, which is to unleash your potential and to help and do that through
helping you make sense of the world. A manager has a different order goal, which is to, you
know, achieve a bunch of work through the effort of others. And there are times where coaches
can be very patient and take long periods of time in order to work things out where a manager
may not be able to, they may be in the midst of a triage situation or something else. And then
with respect to what you were saying about what you were saying about mentorship, I think it's
wonderful that there's lots of studies on this. And one of the reasons I'm such a big proponent of
putting more women and people of color and transgender people and all sorts of different
people in positions of power is because I don't know, I think human beings often have to see it
before they can be it, and they often have to see a leader or somebody who's excellent do
something for them to think, oh my gosh, I'm capable of that as well. And so one of the reasons
I love working with people who aren't straight white guys, although I work with plenty of straight
white guys too. And you're all great if you're listening to this, but I, because I feel like that's how I
can help multiple generations unleash their potential because they can see somebody being
great, who's like them. And human beings just at a DNA level are very much like that. That's not
about we're inculturated that way or anything. We're very, from the time we're born, we're very
sensitized to physical attributes of others. And so if we can see people and behavioral attributes
of others, and so if we can see people like us succeed, then we become inspired and we think,
oh, that's the opportunity of myself. And so again, if those people, if they gain power are doing it
in a way that is humble and profound in a way, frankly, like guys like me, haven't done a good
job of I think the world will get better. And it's one of the reasons I absolutely love and I'm
incredibly grateful for working with people like you. Not just that you're a fabulous female leader,
but you're so fierce. And to see, to have people around you be able to see that and carry that
message into the future, I think is just incredibly exciting.
Renee DeAngelis:
Well, thank you. I hope that I can leave that impact on the world.
Jeff Hunter:
I think you can. All right. Well, Renee, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it
very, very much. I've loved our conversation and really just incredibly grateful.
Renee DeAngelis:
Thank you for having me, Jeff.
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Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you were listening to Coaching in the Clear, the podcast
committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we
believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best
way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your
coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their
potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a
production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders
achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a
weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues
affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to
enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I'm
speaking with Eric Kinariwala. Eric is the founder and CEO of Capsule, the pharmacy of the
future. Over the last five years, he and his team have built Capsule into a multi-city, multi
pharmacy platform across the United States. Eric and I met soon after he started Capsule and
I've enjoyed watching him learn, struggle, and grow as a successful entrepreneur and a
self-aware leader. We'll talk about talent, being a craftsman, helping others to do the same,
contextualizing intuition and much, much more. Eric, thanks very much for joining and welcome
to the conversation.
Eric Kinariwala:
Thanks for having me excited to have the conversation.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, well, let's give this a shot. So Eric, you have envisioned designed and built an incredible
company. You've worked with me, you've partnered with Talentism. So, you know, you're
familiar with our approach and our thinking. And of course I've seen you do a lot of your own
coaching over time as a successful executive and investor. And that leads me to ask you, how
do you think about the value and importance of coaching?
Eric Kinariwala:
It's been really interesting. I'd never had a coach before you and I started working together a
handful of years ago now. And I think there was sort of initially I had some trepidation around
coaching as almost a sense of like, you know, I don't need a coach. I can kind of figure it out.
And I think the phrase, the idea of like; Hey, even tiger woods has a coach that kind of always
resonated with me which is like, no matter who you are and where you are in your own kind of
journey. I think everyone needs somebody to bring out the best in them. Then that can mean a
lot of different things. But for me, it's really been, I think what's been valuable, has been a
couple of things. I think one has been to create a safe space to really have somebody be able to
work through with you some of the unique challenges that really only, you know, in my case that
only the CEO has to deal with and to have somebody who can provide and share a framework
that I think that not only has helped me, like, think about the specific sort of situation that I'm in,
but what are the kind of guiding principles that let me then apply that framework to the same or
similar situations are gonna happen over time. I think the other thing that's been really helpful is
sort of a process of self discovery around, you know, my own mental models, my own
assumptions that are bacon decisions. I make that I might not even know their assumptions
because they're so deep rooted. So this idea of a mirror and somebody who can both
understand who you are, but bring that mirror back and help you kind of work through what the
impact of your words, your decisions, your actions are on those around you all with sort of, I
think the consistent goal of unleashing the greatness within, you know, that exists in each of us.
And so I think for me, it's been two things. One has been sort of a set of tools and a framework
to approach problems over time. And the second has been a mirror to be able to uncover blind
spots or to better understand myself, to be able to be more effective with others over time.
Jeff Hunter:
That makes a lot of sense and so thank you for saying that and thank you for saying that
because of course that's what we're trying to do. So it's good to know that it's working in some
way. The thing you said about self discovery is something I wanted to pick up on a little bit. So
as you know, cause you and I have talked about this frequently, the way I think about it as the,
you are the only tool that you have to bring to the table when you're a leader or a manager like
fundamentally, you've got this mind and the mind has models and capabilities and impressions
and all these things in it. And the most valuable thing you can do is to get to know that tool
better and become a real craftsmen with that tool, as opposed to trying to acquire new tools,
because fundamentally, if the underlying thing that you're working with, the, you know, the brain
you've got is something that's a mystery to you. All the other tools are going to be secondary to
that primary problem of you don't know how to use that thing. So that self discovery is a critical
part of what we're trying to do. And of course, as you and I have talked about many times, what
makes that especially difficult is you yourself, can't really interrogate your own mind to figure out
what's going on underneath. There's this really thin channel between your consciousness and
your unconsciousness, the consciousness of what you're going through and how you think and
what you believe, etcetera. And then this whole huge mass of intuition and instinct and memory
and emotion and all those things that are really not accessible. So you have to go into battle in
essence, you have to like get to work and you've got to do things and then try to take the data or
the evidence that you produce and bring it back to the table and say, okay, how am I going to
make sense of this. How am I going to make sense of what this says about me? Because
frankly that surprised me or I thought I was better at that or whatever it was. I think the role of
coach, at least a clarity coach is crucial to try to help you make sense of that. So one of my
questions would be just for you personally, what's been one of the things that, because you and
I have worked together so long, what have been the things that you started out and thought, you
know, I'm pretty good at this thing. I think I'm good at it. And then over time through the process,
through the work and through just being a successful executive, you've come to maybe a bit
more humility or a perspective of like, wow, I've learned that's much harder than I thought, or I'm
not as good at it as I thought.
Eric Kinariwala:
A lot of things. Hey, you know, one of the things I spent a lot of time doing is building an
amazing team to tackle the mission that we have, which is large and ambitious. And so I spent a
lot of my time recruiting and interviewing, and I think there's, I think getting more, in some ways
getting more sophisticated about interviewing, but in some ways actually just becoming much
simpler and much clearer about what, you know, what is an interview process and what is the
point of the interview process and what are you actually trying to do in a conversation or a
series of conversations in an interview process. And I think the thing that has resonated the
most for me is that it's all about context and that, you know, one of the things that I've learned
through coaching is really to start with what is the context that exists at our company? What is
the context that exists of somebody working for me or being on my team? And then how do you
use the interview process to collect evidence, to suggest whether that person or that individual
can be successful in that context as almost the primary driver or predictor of whether that
individual you know, will be likely more likely or less likely to be successful, you know, in that
environment. And so this idea that it's not about finding the world's best marketer, it's about
finding the person that can be the world's best marketer at your company, working for you. And I
think that's a really important distinction that maybe was less clear and less codified when I
started doing this five years ago. And I think has come in to pretty extreme focus as an
individual and as a company, as a team, we get better and better and better at assessing talent
and building out our team. That's been a really powerful way I think to kind of combine what you
said is like, how are you a craftsman with your own tool and your own set of tools? And then
how do you bring folks in that are going to enable them to be the best craftsman they can be?
And that's all about the context and past evidence of being successful in contexts and
environments that are successful. So I think that's probably the, one of the biggest things that I
have. I think a lot of humility for people that are really good for being able to pattern match, you
know, what kinds of people will be successful in the environment that you have, or that you've
created, you know, both who else is around the table, but also just what are the values and
norms that exist at your own company. And a lot of that for founder led businesses, the way
Capsule is, you know, stems from the founder, you know, herself or himself. And so being able
to understand your own, the context that you create as a virtue of being you and then being very
upfront, open and transparent about what that is, and this is who we are. But also then seeking
to collect evidence, whether that individual can be successful in that context. So, you know, an
example of that is really, I think, you know, communication style and pattern is something that
you know, that is perhaps not unique at Capsule, but it's certainly consistent at Capsule. And
that we're a company that prefers to be in rapid sync to be in continuous communication. And
we, because we're a company that is very focused on learning and iterating and moving quickly,
the idea of, you know, we have found that there are individuals on either end of the spectrum.
There are individuals who really prefer to take a problem and then go away for a month and put
together a very polished presentation and come and kind of have like the, tada, big presentation
moment. And we have generally found that, that is not the context that we have at Capsule. And
so like while that presentation might be really excellent and that person might be very excellent
at their craft, that at Capsule we are about learning together. We're about winning together and
we're about, you know, continuously staying in sync so that, you know, every day, every week
we're learning so that over the course of that month, the information that gets put into whatever
the initiative is, is actually kind of an uphill trajectory versus staying static for a month. And then
I think we found that people that thrive in that environment of kind of short bursts of
communication and wanting to stay in sync with the folks around them really find the
environment energizing. And for individuals who prefer to be able to go off in a corner by
themselves for an extended period of time, find that environment to be, you know, find the
environment to be distracting, believe they're being micromanaged. And generally find that to be
the opposite of energizing.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I want to connect something you said, because I think it's a really important insight for
leaders and for managers, you're bringing up this idea of context, but also something that you
started talking about, which is like, what are your underlying mental models? So my experience
of us working together as when we first started working together, that you have had this great
career where you'd done a certain thing you'd been worked in the hedge fund industry, and
you'd have this sort of pedigreed educational background. And so early, when we started
working with each other, you would talk a lot about, oh, this person went to a good school, or
they've been at good companies, etcetera. And you'd really think, wow, given that resume, this
person's going to be great. And then over time, what I saw you do is cause you're very analytical
and you tend to like follow the data through to completion. So you can, so you can learn. What I
saw you do is say, you know, there doesn't seem to be much correlation in this context, inside
the Capsule between having done these sorts of things and being successful here, there must
be something else that is a correlation. And through that work, I think you've come to these
insights, but I believe connecting to coaching and the value of coaching. And what you talked
about in the beginning is this self discovery process. We all come to the table with these mental
models and we all come to the table. Anybody who's having a conversation at work is operating
from a position of having underlying unconscious mental models. And in those mental models
are all sorts of assumptions about how the world works and about what we're like, the
connection between the two and then all sorts of things like what kinds of people are going to be
successful here or not be successful here, etcetera, and a lot of those models are just wrong.
They just aren't predictive. They aren't helpful or predictive of future success. And it's incredibly
difficult to try to uncover those things because you have to again, do it through the, you know,
evidentiary investigative process. You've got to do stuff. And then you got to look at the results
and say, wow, that really doesn't work. What if we tried something else? And I've found you to
be very good at that sense-making action taking experimentation sort of loop. But now, so one
of the things I think you're especially good at is, I think you're very good at trying to use data to
understand what's happening and why something is happening. And you describe not only this
thing where you're in constant sync with people, but I can imagine also trying to find people who
want to speak your language since as CEO, you have ultimate hire, fire authority, and you sort
of create the context under which other people are going to be successful. How do you think
about having conversations about data and situations versus how people feel about things
versus how, when you're thinking about yourself as a leader and who you need to show up as in
different times in order to achieve the goal that you want, how have you thought about your
strengths around data and analysis versus other things that might be needed in leadership and
how you've come to learn about yourself in that over time?
Eric Kinariwala:
Yeah, I think a lot more like facts than data, I think same concept, but thinking about really,
because I think, you know, data can be, data is usually perceived to be quantitative, but I'm a
believer in sort of, you know, driving to decisions based on facts. And those facts can be either
quantitative or qualitative. And being able to use those facts, to be able to tell a story, to support
a hypothesis for a decision that needs to get made and being able to do that relatively quickly.
And I think it's, you know, I think in all businesses, there are parts of the, there are some parts,
hopefully they're some, if you're innovating and learning, there should always be parts of the
business that are more nascent and more unknown than others than when you first start out.
You know, you have the maximum period of uncertainty and as your business matures, maybe
there are, you know, new initiatives and new projects that have less certainty and less data and
evidence. But I think the ability for individuals to be able to gather facts and to compare those to
a hypothesis they have for a decision that they need to make is a really structured way of being
able to ensure that the decision making in the company compounds on itself, you know, with
every decision that you're getting better and better and better. And so the input to the next
decision is informed by what you learned from the prior decision that you made. But if you're
not, if you're not able to use facts to make your decisions, and you're really not getting better
and better over time, your really just staying on the same plane and just making, you know, kind
of spring a gun and just making a bunch of decisions versus really, you know, kind of coming up
a hill with every decision sort of elevating the next decision and the next decision. And so, I
mean, looking for, you know, looking for facts or looking for evidence of when people have done
that in their prior careers or in prior experiences has been something that we, or I personally
have, you know, found to be really valuable to ask in an interview process.
Jeff Hunter:
So that make sense to me, but let's talk a little bit about that. My experience is as CEO, not just
as a coach, but as a person who's started businesses is that there are times that you need to
deal with data. And I understand the distinction you're making between data and facts. Third
times you need to deal with facts and there's actually times you take a leap and there's times
you use intuition, which is a pattern matching, which of course is pattern matching, but it's
pattern matching blur consciousness or awareness, and in the intuitive space or artistic space of
like somebody is going to come in and say, I think we should just try this. And it's an opinion it's
not grounded. In fact, it's not grounded in analysis, there's very little data to support it. And yet I
do believe we should do it. I have found that to be important inside an organization as well, and
especially in the early stages, because every founder as a founder, I can say this. Every founder
I've ever dealt with is a little bit crazy because you just can't do enough analysis or have enough
facts at your disposal to convince yourself of anything other than the fact that you've got an 80%
probability of failure. And that, that's a pretty high probability. And yet you, I know you well
enough to know, you know, those odds are long and you know, that you probably could have
made more money doing other things. And yet you were inspired and compelled to start
Capsule and get this done. And to me, that was as much an act of intuition and drive and
compulsion as it was rationality, in fact. So how do you think about balancing those things and
how do you think about the time when someone shows up to you and says; Hey, listen, I really
want to give this a fly and I don't have a lot of rationality behind it, versus when someone comes
to you and says, I want to do this thing. And you're like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. How
do you think through that as a leader, especially as Capsule grows.
Eric Kinariwala:
I think it's spot on. I think there are high beta decisions and high and low beta decisions that you
have to make. And so I think teasing out, you know, hey, like does this decision even matter,
like, is it going to have a big impact or not? In fact, I think at some of the mental models from,
you know, Amazon and kind of one way decision, two way decision. I think those are helpful
heuristics in terms of how much time should any of us be even talking about this, because
whether it goes wrong or right, like just doesn’t matter. So it's just, you know, the benefit isn't
just making the decision and moving on, I think for decisions like, that can have high impact and
yet there's no facts and data. I think what is helpful then is to really understand, well, if I'm right,
what happens and if I'm wrong, what happens? And one of the reasons that might inform, you
know, either of those things. And so I think there's intuition is a wonderful place to start because
I think as you mentioned like intuition really is, is really just, is the accumulation of experience.
That is almost so second hand that you're not taking time to kind of separate it out and codify it
the way you might with something else. And so I think we're believers in having strong intuition
for things, because it probably reflects having, you know, done something, the quote, you know,
proverbial 10,000 hours. And having the ability to sort of almost instinctively kind of know what
that decision is. And so I think there, it becomes can you really just understand what the
decision path is then going, you know, going forward? Is it, you know, if I do this, then this
happens. And if I do this and it doesn't happen, this is the next thing I'm going to do, but I, you
know, I think you're spot on like, you know, early stage companies are moving often too fast,
and there's so much unknown that you can't have facts perhaps to inform the decision, but you
can certainly have facts to understand what the impact of that decision is going to be and how to
make that decision stronger and better or to mitigate the risks that, you know, may exist from
being wrong. Which, you know, there's inherent uncertainty in everything.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I think there's two things that you said over the course of our conversation, I just want to
pick up on and tie into that. So one is, I think there are, not to steal liberally from economists
and Klein and others, but there are people who are good at intuition. There are people are bad
at intuition, and you have to actually understand how to differentiate between the two. We all
have intuitions and we al,l there's innumerable biases littered throughout our intuitions. And then
the thing that I always loved about like, you know, thinking fast and slow and Gary Klein's work
is sort of differentiating and separating our, when should you trust your intuitions versus when
you shouldn't. And then to connect that back to something that you said earlier about context. I
think what that work show to the extent I understand it is people who have actually had to make
decisions that have big impacts and make those intuitions quickly without all available data, and
then experience the loss for the problems associated when those decisions go wrong and had
to repeat that and get it more right over time, because they were in that context, those people
have intuition more like that you're more likely to trust or should trust assuming they're in the
same sort of context. I think what many have talked about is the, station commander or fire chief
who shows up at a burning house and can make a relatively good decision about whether to
send people into a burning building or not, there'll be right more often than wrong in a sort of
surprising above random sort of way, but it's because the mechanics of building that intuition
have been pretty good. And the good feedback loops, high-impact feedback, loops, immediacy
low latency, etcetera. And that if you put them in situations similar to that, you can probably get
a good decision out of it. But where we make a lot of mistakes is we think because you are a
good fire chief, you're going to be good stock picker. As an example, you know, a lot of gut got
to make the trade, got to move fast. And the reality is they're extremely different contexts. And
so one of the things I've seen CEO’s think about is like, okay, what is my own mental model of
what intuition is and isn't and how I can use it and not use it. And who am I going to choose to
trust with their intuition? And some of that is, I don't know what I don't know. So I'm going to
pick, as you said, two way doors you know, simple two-way doors, sorts of situations and
decisions so that I can see how you do and we can test your intuition. And some of it is like,
yeah, I think this context is the same, and you're good at this. Like you have a good sense for
how to do these things. And I think I can trust you in that being explicit about that and learning
about your own sort of internal understanding of that through the coaching process, or just
through experience and being able to bring that as a leader, I think improves your own
leadership and management over time. And I've certainly seen that with you. I've certainly seen
you improve in that over time just by having that awareness of what intuition is and isn't, but it
very often has to do with building a fact base about the person, not a fact-based about the
situation itself and knowing when you can and should trust somebody or how you should be
able to test them as you move into that. Now, when you think about the future of Capsule and
what you're facing and all the things that you're aspiring to, cause you have huge, a huge vision
and a huge drive to disrupt the pharmacy industry, you know, to your credit, so far, so good.
What do you think about with regards to the challenges you'll face as a leader in that next stage
of growth, that next stage of evolution, what are you going to face and how do you expect
coaching to be helpful to you in that?
Eric Kinariwala:
I think you know, I think at some point you don't know when, but at some point, you know, my
job went from the very early is actually building the product that created value for the consumer
and for the doctor and for other parts of the healthcare ecosystem and making sure we got that
product right and spot on and that people love using it and that it was scalable and the
economics were right and the brand was right. And I think my job has evolved, continues to
evolve to really from building the product, to building the company that can then continuously
build the product or a series of products that create value. And so really almost from a macro
perspective, thinking about my job is now building the product, which is the company that can
then produce, you know, things of value or you know, consumers and doctors and other people.
And so that evolution or that transition is, you know, what I think about as the next what the next
phase of leadership needs to be. And so that's things like the communication cadence of the
business, that's the management, you know, it's the management rituals, it's like goal setting.
It's the team that we have in place. It's how the team engages with one another. It's what it's
culture, it's what are the behaviors that are rewarded, accepted? What are the behaviors that
are rejected and punished? It's all of those things that can then be built sort of a self
perpetuating, you know, organization or organism that allows us to, you know, systematically
and continuously uncover needs in the marketplace, you know, friction points, frustration points
consumer needs and then solve those and distribute those in the market and sort of build that to
build a quote unquote product that enables multiple products to be built and created without,
you know, without my hands in everything. And so anything from, moving the role from sort of,
you know, the builder to the, to kind of the architect, you know, is sort of, kind of something
that's already started, but where I foresee, you know, my role continuing to evolve into. And I
think the role of coaching in that transition or in that evolution, one is to have somebody who is
reinforcing that with you and making sure that your time allocations are, and your mind sharing
your attention are on those things. And that can come through a variety of things that can come
through, but the problems that get surfaced in a coaching session, you know, part and parcel of
that is fundamentally asking, you know, why are you even dealing with this? Because that really
seems like something you need to process and a machine to deal with as part of like the
organization that you're creating versus you actually need to solve that on your own. And I think
that coaching will help will be essential in uncovering where, you know, my own mental models
may prevent or preclude or make more difficult, the ability to build and architect that
organization. And so where there needs to be extra, you know, extra kind of attention to the
places that will preclude something that is highly effective from being put in place and then sort
of sustained.
Eric Kinariwala:
Yeah. So I think you're raising something that actually now that I'm thinking about it, you and I
haven't talked a great deal about, but we have this idea called the four D model. We love
models with numbers and letters in them, but the four D model is based on this concept of how
a leader, you know, a founder's evolution sort of maps to enterprise value creation. And so we
start at the lower, lowest level of enterprise value creation. When the founder first starts in their
doing, their just doing most of the work, a founder in the very early days as somebody who's
actually has to carry most of the load, they do everything from new product development to you
know, taking out the trash, and then at a certain point, you can't do everything and you start to
hire other people and enlist them in your vision and what you're trying to achieve. And then you
move from a doer to a decider. And the deciding is deciding what is important. What's not
important. What should we work on, etcetera. And the decider tells the people who are doing
stuff you know, what to do and how to do it. But at a certain point, there is a transition where you
can't possibly decide everything that needs to be done. And you move from deciding to
designing the, actually playing the role. As you just said, as an architectural role, a design role
of trying to see how this thing would operate, what is the org model and what is the strategic
model, etcetera, and how do you get people who are good deciders to be inside of that model?
And then ultimately as you grow and you build more enterprise value, you're going to start to
move from designing to decoding. And decoding is where you have the ultimate strategic birch
and you sit there and you see the longterm of the market. You see the longterm of the
customer's need in that market, and you're no longer really designing the organization. You're
just the person who sets the direction and talks about the vision and how to get there. And one
of the things that a lot of founders have is they're actually very good at the decoding. That's one
of the reasons they get into foundings because they have a vision that other people lack or don't
see, or can't activate. And I would say that was certainly true of you and that, but they also then
have to be the doing, they actually have to everyday be doing stuff to get that done. And when
they start to move from doing to deciding, it's still, it's the same sort of psychological and mental
activity. Like it's sort of quick turns high impact a lot activity in the moment. But moving from
deciding to designing is very difficult. It's a very different thing where you step back and sort of
visualize and imagine, and strategize and construct as opposed to do or tell. And so I think what
you're describing is like, you're in that moment, I think you frankly have been in that moment for
awhile, but you're in that moment of moving from more of the decider to the designer, which
makes a lot of sense to me. And then I think what you're doing is describing the role of coaching
as being like, hey, if you're going to be a designer, you've got to be good at A, B and C, and I'm
not sure you're actually good at that, which I think you should expect from coaching. But the
other thing I think in at least clarity coaching, what you should expect is calling out whether
you're actually good at that or not, because that's a very difficult term to take. And whether you
actually, I've worked with founders who cannot make that term and they can still be incredible
CEOs. They just have to make sure they have good designers around them. And so it's really a
self-awareness, which we're also describing with the self-awareness piece, so that not just like,
I've got to be good at it. So hopefully you expect that out with your coach since we continue to
work with each other and that's what we'll be doing. But I hope that makes sense to you.
Eric Kinariwala:
That makes sense and the self-awareness piece is incredibly, I think important as part of the
coaching process which is just sort of, you don't have to be good at everything. You just got to
make sure that the set, you know, in aggregate the set of people you have around you can be
good at the things that need excellence around them. So that's probably where everything starts
is being able to have the honest conversation with somebody who cares about you and who
knows you to be able to get to the realization of like, well, what are the things that you have a
shot at being great at? And what are the things that are going to be like Sisyphean, I guess, like
pushing, you know, pushing the Boulder up and it rolling back on you over and over and over
again. And which of those things may you want to bring somebody in who can actually get the
Boulder up and over the hill so that you can be that person for the things that you are that
person for.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, I certainly always enjoy a conversation that ranges from Greek myths to behavioral
economics. Eric, this has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the
show and participating. It's been a real honor to work with you and watch you build Capsule.
And I'm just very grateful for everything and especially for you being here today. So thank you
very much.
Eric Kinariwala:
Thanks Jeff, always fun to to catch up.
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Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to coaching in the clear, a podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a production of talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential. Learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I am speaking with George Arison. Talentisms’ been working with George and Shift, the company he co-founded with Toby Russell for over three years. I've come to know him as a hard-driving entrepreneur who has worked with the team at Shift, overcoming incredible obstacles. The results of all that hard work paid off this past October when he and the team at shift went public. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know George as a person over that time and I'm excited to have him share that story with you. It's pretty extraordinary. In our session today, I'm going to ask him about how a kid growing up in the former U.S.S.R. dreams of moving to America and becoming a successful business person. I'm going to ask him about the inspiration for those dreams, his plans for the future, what it takes to become incredibly successful by overcoming even more incredible obstacles. And finally, we're going to talk about how he's tried to stay humble in the face of that success and as he's learned from his many, many mistakes. George, thank you so much for being a guest on Coaching in the Clear just as background for everybody George and I met about three and a half years ago. I've had the great privilege of being able to work with him. His co-founder Toby Russell and the team at Shift over the last three and a half years, and have learned a ton from George. And George, I'm just really grateful to have you on the show and to learn from you and be able to tell your story to the audience, so thank you so much for joining.
George Arison:
Thanks for having me. And likewise, it's been awesome to be working with you for all these many months now. And you've been really instrumental in helping shift get to where it is. So we are super appreciative of that as well.
Jeff Hunter:
Thanks, George. I appreciate that. All right, so for the audience that has listened to our last nine, 10 episodes or so they may hear something a little different. I'm always in the process of experimenting and learning. I'm going to try a little bit of a different approach now. And so rather than having a back and forth about coaching, I actually just want to learn about you and I want to learn about your story and where I'd love to start is actually with your professional career. If
you could just take the audience through your career, where did you start? What was your first job and take us up to being, you know, founder and Co-CEO of Shift.
George Arison:
Totally. So I think to answer that I need to just start a little bit, even more back, which is that I'm originally from Georgia, the country. I was born in the Soviet Union when it was still very much the Soviet Union and then grew up while, you know, Soviet Union is going through a lot of transition. I had the, I guess, big fortune of learning English when I was quite young and we can talk later about how that happened, but that allowed me to get out. And I ended up leaving Georgia when I was 14 in 1992 to come to the U.S. to go to high school. I was the first Soviet kid they allowed to leave to go to a private U.S. prep school. And you know, my life kind of took off from there. I, in some ways you know, joke that I was reborn once I came to the U.S. cause a lot of what I probably would become would not have been possible had that not happened. And obviously it was a very fortunate event for me. I always thought that my life would take kind of the shape of; Hey, I'm going to learn, then I'm going to earn some money and eventually go back to Georgia and run for office and be in politics there. That was kind of always my aspiration for a long, long time. And being in business for the long term was never the plan. I thought I would start a company, but I never thought that I would start a company in technology, kind of the things I always thought about had to do with government relations. Cause that's pretty much what I knew. I actually thought I was going to become a lawyer first, because that's the logical kind of path you choose if you want to be in politics most of the time, right? So I got your technology a little bit, a roundabout way, and I'll talk about how that happened. So after college I moved to DC and I took a job at a small consulting firm locally which mostly did consulting without traveling. So that pitch was; Hey, you do the same work that you might do at McKinsey or BCG, but you don't have to be on the road. That sounded intriguing to me. And I liked the idea of living in Washington because it was so close to the types of things I'm really passionate about in politics, but obviously getting a job in politics was not an option because I was not a U.S. citizen. So I had to do it more of a businessy style job. So that's how I started my career. The first job I had was quite frankly, a horrible experience. I really hated it. It seemed super rudimentary and basic, and I really didn't like it, but I started to get to know more and more Georgian politicians and people in DC who were working on Georgia. And I was this kind of really unique animal who knew a lot of what was happening in Georgia and spoke Georgian really well obviously, and understood what was happening there, but also knew a lot about U.S. politics as well because I had always followed U.S. politics so closely, so had an opportunity to switch within about nine months to a job at a think tank with me, myself, having raised the money to fund my presence at that think tank to work on Georgia. And so then I spent the next couple of years writing and presenting a lot of information to you as policymakers on what was happening there and why it was really critical for the U.S. to stay very actively engaged on promoting democratic change. Georgia had a government that needed to be transitioned out. The president was very old and was ready for the new younger folks to take over. And there was later, two backups of people who could take over the country. A set of very socialist and ultimately not very democratic folks, and then a set of more pro-business and more democratic set of folks and the goal was to try to push the ladder, contra the former. So eventually in 2003 that many of the people I was working with asked me to come back to Georgia and help run
them, their political campaign for parliament. Obviously I said, I don't really know anything about how to run political campaigns, but perhaps we could hire somebody from the U.S. who knows a lot when it comes to what to do. And that's when I came in contact with a guy named Mike Murphy, he's a political consultant who had run Jeb Bush’s campaigns and Mitt Romney’s campaigns. He's really amazing actually. And so I convinced him to come to Georgia with me and run this political parties’ campaign for parliament which was really an incredible experience for me because I probably learned more from Mike in that time span of like five or six months when we were working together than I ever have in that short of a time period in my life. You know, politics is very different from business, but there's also so much connectivity and so much of what I do in business today inter-relates to what I learned then. It was just this incredible thing of, he came to Georgia for a week, spent a week talking to, you know, politicians, journalists, analysts, and had the clearest articulation of what was happening, what needed to be fixed and how to win than I could have ever imagined anyone being able to do. And that really just kind of gave me a lot of passion of; Hey, you can take a lot of data and then apply it to knowledge and to driving decisions in a way that I didn't really know you could do before. And that was really, really intriguing to me. So we spent about a year on this political campaign. I didn't really run as good of a race as I think we should have. Frankly, our candidate didn't really follow my instructions as well as I wish she had. Oftentimes we'd see the opposition following Mike's directions better than we did in terms of staying on message and repeating the things that we needed to say all the time. And so when you couple that with the fact that being a pro kind of business group in a former Soviet Republic is not easy. We did okay, but we didn't do that great. And so, that was kind of my first, you know, really professional experience and learned a ton from it, but also realized that being in Georgia longterm was not for me. I had just changed too much during the time when I had been in the U.S., excuse me, and needed to kind of be back in the U.S. cause that's what my life was. Being gay in Georgia was not easy and I didn't think it was going to become any easier. And so that was a factor obviously, but not the only one. And the biggest thing was that I ultimately loved America a lot more than I loved Georgia. And this is not to be crude about it, but like if Georgia and America went to war in my mind, there was no question which side I was going to be on, and so it made no sense to be living in a country where you kind of didn't feel like you would be on their side if a war happened and suddenly it made no sense to live in that country and try to be in politics if that's how you felt. So Toby, my best friend from college who is the co-CEO of Shift now, and a person who, with whom I've shared pretty much my entire career since that time period, had just joined BCG. And so he really urged me to come into BCG as well and thought it would be really good for me to learn what it was like to be a business consultant. And so I had no clue what BCG or McKinsey really did, and obviously I had heard about them, but didn't really understand the job and knew very, very little about business, but I'm like okay, sure, let's try, you know, created my resume that I hadn't updated in a couple of years and submitted it. And they called me in for interviews. It was an unusual interview process as people who have done those know, they're very case focused. And most of the time I didn't really know what I was talking about, but I think what people found intriguing about me was that I answered questions very differently from what people with business training answer. And I kind of pushed them on things that they normally don't get pushed on. And so they offered me a job and that was really awesome. You know, the first six months in BCG was completely drinking out of the fire hose in terms of learning what to do, you
know, a lot of us springing at the computer being unhappy with the Excel spreadsheets that I had to help build out but I learned a ton. I had a really good mentor there named Neil Howden who taught me a lot about how to kind of apply the data that I had become so interested in to actual business problems and how to use data to get to business answers. So, spent about 18 months at BCG and about halfway through, started to think about; Hey, what's next for me? This was really good learning initially, but ultimately being a consultant was not my cup of tea. I'm not as focused on detail as a lot of the consultants have to be. And that was becoming very, very obvious. So I was really good at like client relations, for example, but not as good at writing the ideal PowerPoints that people were looking for. And, you know, that's when I really started to think about; Hey, what happens next? I had a mentor in Washington named Tom DePasquale, who is a really great founder, has started a bunch of great companies and has done very well with them. And we had initially met through politics, but, you know, over time turned more and more of our thinking towards business. And so we started to think about ideas and that's how the idea for a company called Taxi Magic came about and how I got involved with that. This is when I did not have a driver's license and so I would book a taxi to go everywhere. I would get a taxi to go everywhere. And obviously in DC booking a cab was next to impossible, yet to really flag it on the street, no matter what the weather was, so oftentimes in massive rain or snow, I would be waiting out in the street trying to get a cab to get to the airport, to go to my BCG location. And then vice versa when I was in the middle of nowhere in Rhode Island, for example, or whatnot for a client, I'd have to have like the phone number for every single tap company locally to try to get somebody to pick me up, to take me back to the hotel. So that world was obviously so different from the one we live in today. And my thinking was like; Hey, why can't we use the black boot to book a taxi? And Tom really focused on that as well because he had built a company called Click Book, which was a way to book airline tickets and hotels for business travelers, and then tied that to a system called Concur, which is an expense management tool all fully integrated in terms of how you do booking and expense management. But in that entire ecosystem, ground travel was all cash and was a huge source of fraud and also unhappiness of consumers. And so he's like, you know, if we could figure out how to manage expenses for ground travel, that would be a huge win for expense management and a huge win for the consumer experience. And so that gave birth to this idea of Taxi Magic of using a mobile device to book and pay for taxi services, you know, the existing tech centers that were in place back then. And so eventually Toby and I left BCG in 20.. 06, 07, and started Taxi Magic with Tom and a few other founders which was the first time I really kind of started something completely from scratch, totally insane experience frankly, and a massive, like, I have no idea what I'm doing. I knew very little about tech if anything at all, and then you need to learn how technology works. So, I think we built a really cool app, made a ton of mistakes along the way. And obviously, you know it was a great technology, but it got over and left. And so that speaks a little bit for itself in terms of how well we did it versus how well we could have done. Eventually my green card was rejected in 2009. And I needed to figure out what to do about that, because I couldn't stay in the country without a green card. And it was rejected because I owned so much equity in Taxi Magic. The government did not believe it was a real job. And so they were like, you have to go get a job somewhere else, basically. And so the lawyers are like, look, we can try again while you are here, but most likely the outcome will be the same and that's still risky. And so they encouraged me to get a job at a bigger company. And so then my next job search was focused
on; Hey, what are the best companies for getting your visa situation taken care of? And also places that I might enjoy working at. And that's how I ended up at Google, which was a really fantastic learning experience for me, allowed me to move out to the west coast because Taxi Magic was based in Virginia as well as to, you know, be in a very different kind of technology setting where you work with really great people and you know, figure out what you can actually do that's amazing in tech while at the same time having my immigration stuff taken care of. So spent three years at Google and, you know, knew that I was going to start another company and eventually Tony and I came up with the idea for Shift and I left Google in 2013 and have spent pretty much my entire time working on this. It's been a crazy journey and in many ways, not what I had expected, it would be. But now we are public and here we are. So it's really awesome to be here.
Jeff Hunter:
That's amazing. I love stories like that. I love stories where, you know, somebody dreams a big dream and they take a lot of different paths in order to achieve it. And I think for anybody listening, you have to recognize that a lot of the people who achieve big things, they take different routes in order to achieve those things. So of all those things of Taxi Magic and politics and Shift and everything, what is the accomplishment you're most proud of? What's the thing that well, let's say, I know you've got two kids, you and your husband have two kids and someday you're going to tell them your story and what's the thing you're going to tell them you're most proud of.
George Arison:
So I think I have to say two, because it's really hard to just talk about one. And then one is professional and one's less professional. So I mean, no doubt kind of getting to America and building a life here, is the biggest and the most challenging thing I've ever done, right? In my life. And frankly, I don't think anything else is going to equal that, at least I sincerely doubt it. Because, you know, I don't even know if I wanted to do that. It was kind of mostly beaten into my head by my dad who had these crazy ideas that Soviet Union would fall apart and so his children had to learn how to speak English to be able to have a life after the Soviet Union fell apart, which it wasn't a totally insane notion to have, say in 1981, which he very much believed. And so this idea of coming to the U.S. was not my idea. It was more his idea. I was just executing on it. And I got a lot, a lot of help along the way. Like there's no palms about it, that none of this would have been possible without a lot of people who helped me make happen especially this family in Vermont that I got to know while they came to visit and lived in Georgia, they really made it possible for me to come to the U.S. and go to school and obviously you know, have had an incredible impact on my life, but the fact that I was able to kind of do it and got through it and manage through the challenges of, you know, being completely away from my family and not really being able to communicate with them, because this is all pre the days of internet and video connectivity I think was a pretty big deal. And being able to build a life here is something I'm very, very proud of. You know, when you couple that with the fact that, you know, today I'm sitting in Palo Alto, and yes, my kids are sleeping downstairs and my husband is here with me. And like, I have probably the most amazing life you could have. But, you know, 10
years ago, the idea of getting married was not even close to something you could consider, is also pretty incredible. And it speaks to how amazing our country is that these types of things are very much possible here. So that's probably one. And then secondly, you know, I think the Shift story to me is a really awesome story and something I am very, very proud of. It has not been, you know, when you look at companies from the outside, the successful ones you oftentimes think about; Hey, oh, it must have been an easy ride, the along the way, cause it was always kind of up and up and up and things always were going great, which is obviously not true of any company, but in our case in particular that was very much natural. We've had more than one, you know, near death experience whether it was, you know, in 2017, when we were weeks away from running out of money to, you know, the incredible challenges that happened when COVID hit and us having to run a business in a completely like unknown environment, not knowing what was going to happen and not really knowing how to, what to expect from consumer behavior, from the government, etcetera. And by the way, that was all happening while we're planning on our next capital raise and how to pursue that at the same time. So it has not been the easiest journey and no company really is easy, but Shift has been hard and, you know, it has been a huge work of perseverance to try to get it here. And that is something I'm also obviously incredibly proud of. And from the professional standpoint is the biggest thing I've done. And within that kind of mode, you know, I think still raising the series A. was the single biggest moment for me in my life. Because once we did that in 2014, you kind of felt like you went from like, just an idea that, you know, maybe could happen maybe could not to actually being a real company. I still feel completely amazing about that moment. Like I remember, you know, checking, clicking refresh on our savings account every three minutes to watch the money come in and as the $20 million or so kinda arrived, it was like really incredible to watch. And you know, I think going public was kind of the closest that I've come to feeling the same way in the seven years I've been working on Shift.
Jeff Hunter:
So, you talked a little bit about near death experiences and of course you have a lot of experience in the startup world, not just with Taxi Magic and Shift, but also I know that you've invested in other companies, you work with other companies. And so, you know how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and how hard it is to be a founder and to start something from nothing. I certainly have experienced that as well, I'm sure a number of the listeners have. Take us through what it takes to get through one of these near death experiences when everything seems to be going wrong and you're on the verge of not being able to make your dream a reality, take us through that and how do you work through that and how do you process it and how have you been successful in spite of those odds?
George Arison:
So I think the single most important thing is a ton of grit and never giving up. There's a lot of moments when it's really easy to say, okay, I'm kind of done. I can't do it anymore. Let's move on. It's not worth it. And you know, for me, that was frankly, never an option. And having people around you who think the same way is also really critical because I don't think you can do that alone. And so in all the moments of kind of; Hey, we might actually die. We might not survive.
Toby and I have been at it together. And I don't think it would have been possible for me to do it on my own. And obviously he should speak for himself, but I think he might say the same thing as far as him. And so that's definitely then the number one most important thing is kind of this belief that no, I'm not going to fail. I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it succeed. And, you know, you'll run for the cliff and hopefully you can stop before you quite fall down or fall into the cliff. Which, you know, we've generally been able to do, but having this view that like I'm going to focus on making it work no matter what rather than focusing on, you know, how do I shut down? How do I do something opposite? Is really critical. You know, in our own kind of experiences at Shift in 2017, like, I remember my team sat me down and said, okay, we have this much money. And if we want to have an orderly kind of shutdown here are the things that we need to do and when we need to start to make decisions and I'm like, okay, that's all great. I don't ever want to have this meeting again because I'm going to focus on ensuring that we raise capital and survive. And frankly, if I had spent any energy and time focusing on an orderly shutdown, that would have been time, I didn't spend on raising money and might very well not have been able to execute on that. So that's number one. Number two is I think, understanding where things have gone wrong and then applying, you know; Hey, I learned these things from this. This is what I'm going to do differently is also really critical. I don't think that our series C., which was kind of the lifesaver around for us in terms of; Hey, we might not succeed and then we were able to get that round done. For that round, that learning of like, where did we make mistakes and how are we going to do things differently? Was really, really critical and having to be, both have a clear articulation there is instrumental. You know, I think obviously having the right audience, having the right investors, being able to listen to you is also really crucial. And Christian Muskie who led our series C, you know, played that role for us where a lot of people, I think, ignored the opportunity because it was complicated and having complicated restructurings. That's not something that a lot of investors in here are doing versus he was very willing to get his hands dirty and make things work. So that's number two. Number three, I think having a really supportive board is really, really critical. I've said this publicly many times, and I'm kind of very happy to say it again, like Shift would not exist today had I not had the series of investors that I did have which were Emily Melton and Maneesh Patel and, you know, each one played a unique and critical role in helping us get through some of the tough times that we've had. Emily in terms of structuring and figuring out how to get the capital that we needed to get from here to there. And how to tell our story and also kind of keeping me going right, because she's the person I would always call whenever I had a massive problem I had to deal with. And Maneesh in ensuring that we could all work together to get our team to be aligned and to be in the right place and executing against the right goal and keeping people, you know, happier during tough times and engaged during tough times, which is also really tough to do. And also along with that, without helping me keep my head straight. So having, you know, with the right board I think is, is really, really critical. There've been, you know, other investors whom I've described what we had to go through in 20, late 2016 and early 2017. And you know, the comments I've gotten back like; Hey, you have a really enlightened board. And I'm like, well, I have two really enlightened board members who made that happen. And I think I owe them an incredible debt of gratitude. It's really easy for investors to be your friends when things are going great, it’s really tough for investors to be your friends when things are not well, but those are the investors you want to have with you are the ones who are going to be with you along the way,
when things are going really, really tough. And that's something, obviously again, something I'm super, super grateful for. So I think that's kind of a combination of points, right? A ton of grit and perseverance having the right people along with you, along the journey, and then having the right investors who can, you know, encourage you to ensure that you don't fail out of the ways in which, you know, we were able to succeed. Coupled with; Hey, let's learn from the mistakes we made and try to do things differently in the future.
Jeff Hunter:
So I wanna pick up on two themes in there. So again, you know, I've worked with you over the last three and a half years. I think I've gotten to know you pretty well. And when you say grit and I see that in you, I've seen you be incredibly, persevere through incredibly difficult circumstances. There is another word for that and that’s stubborn, and you are a very stubborn guy. Like, you know, people come to you and say; Hey, why don’t you give up, why don’t you do this, and you're like, no, forget it. Like we're going to keep going. And most of the great entrepreneurs I've worked with in Talentisms worked with, have that attribute. They're like, they're not going to give up. And usually that can exhibit sort of in a close-minded sort of way, right? Like, so someone comes to you and says, Hey, what if we tried this? You're like, no, I'm going to keep going. But at the same time, you're talking about being able to learn from your mistakes, which frankly is really crucial. And because, you know, your life history and your career history, it shows that you're going to take, you're going to try a lot of things. Not everything's gonna work out. You gotta be able to bounce back from that, learn from it and keep going. And so there's this thing about entrepreneurs where they're both very stubborn and have a lot of grit and won't give up, and also they learn really well because they try different things and some work and some don't, and then they adjust. How do you bring those two things together? How do you bring those two concepts together? Being the stubborn guy who learns really well?
George Arison:
So I don't know how I do them, but it's something you have to do. I think I'll answer that question in two parts. When it comes to like business knowledge and business problems, product problems, that's always been easier for me, like, see what you did wrong. Look at the data, try to analyze as much information as possible and come to a conclusion; Hey, what, what went wrong and what went right. And how are we going to do things differently? And that's always been kind of my core way of learning and doing, you know, from college onward, like in terms of feedback, I would get on papers, right? Like you don't want to make the same mistakes again and you want to do that better. So that's something that, I think, always been a part of me. On my own personal thing of like, how do I change and how do I behave, that's definitely been a newer phenomenon for me. I have definitely gone through change. I was a lot more aggressive and pushy and stubborn in terms of my political use, for example, when I was younger, and I'm a lot more accepting of alternate points of view today. And I think that was true, you know, even 10 years ago, in many ways my Georgia experience really taught me how to manage people a lot better. And so I realized that being very stubborn on that, could be really bad in terms of people engagement. And so I became less kind of pushy in terms of my own political views, as
an example, when I came back to the U S after my Georgia experience, and I remember Toby hearing kind of feedback about me and what my personality was like from some of the other folks at BCG, and he’s like, wow, that's a very different George than what I would have expected him to be in terms of how he engages with clients. And I think that was all kind of what I learned in Georgia, but the piece that I didn't really have much experience with prior to Shift and really has been a massive journey over the last, you know, four or so years has been around self-reflection and knowing what I'm good and what I'm bad at. And frankly, like I would probably have been a much better founder for Shift and Shift would be a stronger company and would have a better product if I knew all the things about myself when I started it versus what I know today and, you know, let's kind of call a spade, a spade, like you have been a huge part of that journey for me in terms of me learning through my own self-reflection what I do well and what I do badly, I think the point that you just said of like; Hey you know, grit and perseverance, the kind of other side of that is being stubborn. Like that’s logical then when you think about it, okay, that makes sense. But that's not something I would have thought about you know, four or five years ago and what kind of impact that might have on people. And yes, I can be very stubborn. I think one of the other big learnings for me has been is, what my actual communication style is and how I engage in discussions with people. I'm very active in asking questions, which can be coming off as being confrontational or disagreeable in terms of what a person is making a case for, but then I'll come back the next day and oftentimes be on the side that I was arguing against. Which I think kind of makes people feel a little bit Whack-A-Mole because they don't know what just hit them. Like how did that happen? But turns out that's actually, that's just the way I think. I tend to prefer to think through a very kind of open dialogue way. And having someone be peppered with questions is a way of me testing them in terms of what it is that they are making a case for. And if they can continue to make the case and they can actually convince me, and then it takes me, you know, 12 hours to absorb it and come back with; Hey, okay, that made a lot of sense. And so that's something that took me a long time to realize that I was actually doing and now when I started working with new people, I tell them; Hey, just so you know, this is going to happen and you need to be comfortable with that. And that's not George kind of being stubborn. That's just George's way of communicating. But there's no question that I have a stubborn streak in me. And if I really, really strongly feel like this is something I really care about, it's really tough to change my mind on that. And you know, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's really bad. And unfortunately, you know, founders a lot oftentimes have that and you kind of have to take the good with the bad. And I think there, you know, big learning for me over the last three years in terms of working with you has been to have the right people around me, ones who can handle that type of behavior. I think if I was a stronger founder or if I had more time, I would say; Hey, can I become better at actually changing that stubbornness without losing the grit? And maybe there's a way to do that. I haven't had a chance to think through that. I actually am, fortunately I haven't even had time to think about like; Hey, can I do that or not given how complex the heavy lift of it has been to get shipped to where it is today, but you
know, probably somebody like Jess Bezos actually has that, right? Like he probably has incredible grit and also belief to change himself, more than I do. Versus, you know, Apple founders, say Steve Jobs, on the extreme side probably has incredible grit, but also would never change himself. And kind of, and that was well-known right? So they're probably two types of
founders and I'm guessing the Jeff Bezos one’s probably stronger and, you know, let's see over the next decade, you and I working together, I can figure out how to do that.
Jeff Hunter:
That's very nice, George. I look forward to working with you over the next decade. I'm not sure I'll survive it, but yeah, so I want to pick up on a theme that came up earlier and something I think is really important and maybe is part of the link of this. So you've mentioned through the course of this conversation, a lot of interesting people who helped you along the way. You talked about Neil and Tom, the family in Vermont, you've talked about Maneesh and Emily, and you talked a lot about Toby and of course I know Toby well, and I know how critical he's been to you achieving what you wanted to achieve and unleashing your potential. What is it that keeps bringing people into your life who want to help you? Because what, because listen, you can be a tough customer and you're also somebody I love dearly, but you can be a tough customer and sometimes tough customers have a hard time getting help and you don't. People seem to really want to help you and have wanted to help you for a long time. And you're, you know, part of the reason you're here by your own admission is that those people stepped forward and gave you the support you needed at the time you needed so that you could succeed. What do you think it takes to be somebody who can be helped?
George Arison:
Well, I think you will need to want to have help, right? First and foremost, you have to acknowledge that you need support from people and you need to be able to go in and ask for it. And I think generally speaking, I have been willing and able to do that. And people have normally kind of come to me in terms of being there for me. Secondly, I mean, I think I have a lot of energy and I deploy that energy towards the things I'm really passionate about. And I think that helps as well. I think people get excited when they see people or when they engage with people who have a lot of passion, a lot of very strong belief about what they wanna do. Again, there is a limit to that, right? Like if you go to the extreme that's a bad thing, but if you do it in a way that like is accepting to people that usually ends up working. So that's probably point number two there. And then, you know, for me, point number three is around just mentorship in general. I actually, someday I want to write a piece on this because I think it's a really interesting phenomenon. You know, for me, like almost everything I've learned, I’ve learned through amazing mentors. Now obviously I'm learning things from books as well, but even accessing those books has been through mentors. On the flip side, you know, if you look at our youngest generation, right? Like the ones that are in the workforce today, because they grew up in the age of Google, their view is; Hey, I go to Google, I ask a question, Google comes back to me with an answer, I can learn from that. Mentors are a lot less critical. And so I think that one of the big distinctions between kinda, I know gen Y, gen Z and early generations, is how critical we view mentorship. And I think that's something that the younger people in the professional world are actually missing. How important mentors are. And for me, mentors have always been super, super crucial, and I've always really appreciated people's willingness to actually spend time helping me be better and helping me kind of improve in what I'm trying to do. And, you know, I think the best way to respond to that is to try to do the same thing for others today, right? Paid
for or in a way that makes sense where you are doing the same thing for others, and that people were willing to do for you oftentimes without asking anything back. And that's a big learning for me and kind of moving forward, right? It's like; Hey, now that I've actually done a ton of stuff that I'm really proud of, it's time for me to give back to others in the same way that people have given to me over the last 20, 30 years.
Jeff Hunter:
That's great. That's really cool. Okay. This is really apropos of nothing, but it's just something that I'm currently fascinated by. And I think you're a great example of this. So I just, I want to ask you these questions and pursue it. So again, you and I have had this great relationship for three and a half years, and I would say something that's given what I'm like and given, you know, the work I do that for someone to be in a good relationship with me, they have to want to hear the truth, at least the truth, as I perceive it, I'm always learning. And I miss a lot of things, but at least the truth is I perceive it. And I work with a lot of amazing people, but they all have the sort of quality of, I'm going to say sort of unpleasant things to them about them, what they've done, how they've affected others how they've, you know, failed to live to their own standards, etcetera. And that can feel like a very conflicted conversation. It's not pleasant. It can be pretty pointed and sharp. And I've experienced you as being extremely good at receiving that kind of feedback. I say very tough things to you and you listen. And a lot of times you fight back to me you’re a fighter, but we have really good engaged discussions, but you're never defensive. You're not dismissive, etcetera. At the same time, I think you struggled to initiate conflict. I think it's very tough for you to actually go to somebody and initiate very difficult conversations.
George Arison:
It's one of my biggest flaws.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's something that, frankly of all the many, many, many people I've worked with, including a lot of, I think very iconic founders, it's a pretty typical trait. They're way better at taking conflict than they are initiating it. And I'm curious cause I'm in the process of learning about this. Why do you think that is? What is it about going and telling someone; Hey, listen, I don't think this is going well and I think that you're not doing a good job on this. Why is that tough? But someone coming to you and saying, I don't think you did a good job at that is easier?
George Arison:
Yeah. I think I have two parts to that. And I think it's a really good question cause I do struggle with this, right? Like giving feedback for me is really tough to do, especially if it's quote unquote negative or developmental feedback. And the result oftentimes is like, I won't give it, I won't give it, I won’t give it, and then blow up like; Oh, this is not working for me. And it's kind of a huge surprise for somebody because I've not told them this for six months, even though I probably should have. And it's a very, very challenging thing for me to do. The only time it's not challenging is if someone really pushes me into the corner, like if there's some demands that
have been made on me and I get really upset because I'm like, come on, like I've already given so much and you're still pushing. Then I can like easily initiate conflict. But that moment has to happen of like; Hey, I've already tried to get a deal done so many times. Why are you still asking for more? But, so I think there's two kind of two things that caused that. Number one is that I am a pleaser. Emily Melton, one of my board members, says this a lot. Like, you know, I like to please people. And so coming to people with bad news or negative feedback, or; Hey, this is, what's not working for me is tough because it kind of goes contrary to me being a pleaser. And I think I am a pleaser. I like to try to make people really happy. And number two is that when I come to people and say; Hey, this X or Y is not working for me, or this is what I would like you to do differently. Oftentimes it makes me feel like I'm letting them down and I've kind of failed them which is really, really contrary to what I like to do, right? Like I don't like to fail people. I want to do the opposite. I want to help them succeed. So those are the two things that are really tough for me. The result is that I don't want to make people feel bad and not wanting to make people feel bad, actually results in even bigger, making them feel bad later, which is a huge problem and something that I need to become a lot better at. And, you know, obviously kind of like the first thing of improvement is to realize you need help. And so I think it's taken us a long time to come to that realization, right? The result is, I work a lot better with people who don't apply feedback as much or who can kind of figure out what I mean on their own by just kind of how I might message things, but not spared directly. Versus people who want very, very direct feedback, which is also kind of not ideal, but the really big problem from us has been that it then perpetuates into the entire company. And so I think when you go back to Shift, you know, four years ago, nobody was giving feedback to each other in the way that was necessary because George was not giving feedback to people who work for George and then kind of comes down across the entire org, which is really, really not helpful. And you can’t really improve as an organization when that happens, even if everyone wants to improve. Now to go back to your second part of the question, like, why are you, why is it okay for you to receive kind of feedback? Well, it's because I always want to be better, right? Like my entire focus is on how can I succeed and how can I make sure that I achieve the goals that I have and part of doing that is to become better at what you're doing wrong. And so when I have people come to me very directly and provide feedback, that's very operational like; Hey George, this is what you're doing and this is what's not working, you should do it differently. I actually really like that and that's been helpful, and that's something that you do really, really well. I think one of the reasons I really like working with you is that not only do you come and tell me very directly what you think I'm doing or is happening that I'm missing, but actually you're able to put a different picture on it that results in me understanding the issue a lot better than how I would understand it on my own or how the opposing person, the person I'm engaged with the conversation on at Shift or elsewhere might be putting on that. And so you do that really, really well. And I actually really appreciate that and it really helps me be a better leader for this organization in a massive way. I mean, frankly, my husband does that to me a lot too, which is also one of the reasons why we get along so well, and it works really effectively and it's really important.
Jeff Hunter:
So those themes of, and thank you for the compliment, but those themes of pursuing your dream, asking for help, that help coming in many forms, coming in the form of mentorship,
coming in the form of feedback and then not giving up and then keeping going and going, even as you're making lots of mistakes and taking lots of different paths and trying things that don't work out, but learning from that, as opposed to let it discourage you, seem to be common themes that are coming out from what you're saying. And that makes a ton of sense, a ton of sense to me. So what do you want to accomplish in the future? What's next for you?
George Arison:
Well, first and foremost, you know, now that we are a public company, we have huge obligations to our shareholders. I mean, in some ways you're like; Oh, wow, okay. It took us so long to get here. And this has been a goal for so long. Awesome. But it's just the beginning, right? Like you know, Jeff Bezos is the one who said it was like day one and going public was like day one.
Now we have years and years of work to do and a ton to accomplish. So focusing on that, we've put out a pretty clear plan in terms of what we want to do, you know, grow our market share, grow our new markets or launch new markets or grow where we are available and then offer additional products to our customers, is something that's going to be a really big focus. That's very, it comes off as very tactical, but like it's a really, a really big thing to do as a company. And that's what we're going to be really focused on. It's really nice to be in an environment where you're like not focused on, hey, I need to raise money again in six months, which has been my life for the last seven years. And so I'm really happy about that. And I can actually focus a little bit more long-term and more strategically on what we want to accomplish over the next, you know, 12, 18 months. And talk about things in that type of horizon, which I think is really great. So that's number one. Number two is, you know, just kind of purely in my own personal development. There's been a lot of stuff that I've not been able to focus on and which I hope we can in the coming months and quarters, things that we know we've talked a lot about in this call, but we need to be, you know, improving on to be a more you know, successful company and where I want to be paying attention to it. So that's, that's the number two thing. And then number three is, you know, I'm really hoping that as we scale, as we've attracted, you know, stronger and more senior leadership to the team, you know, we just hired a CRO a few weeks ago. And in general have been kind of on a spree of hiring really strong leaders, you know, find a little bit more balance between the work and the rest of my life. It's been very much like work, work, work only. And you kind of have to in the early days of the startup, but that's not sustainable forever. And I think I need to do a better job at finding a balance between work and then not work. It's been a little better than last year in some ways. And as much as COVID has been horrible, there have been positive things that have come out of that. And the fact that people are more comfortable working from home, I think is one of those, at least in my particular case, because it has done better for my family, right? Because I've been able to work really, really hard, probably harder than I have, but at the same time, see my kids more, but finding that balance between kind of life and work is something that, you know, is more important to me now than it's ever been. Because now my life is not just about work. And now that I have kids, it's also a little bit about them as well.Jeff Hunter:
So you have the people of Shift hopefully are listening to this, you've got potential future employees listening to this, I'm here as your coach, you got a lot of people care about you and want you to succeed. How can we help you accomplish those things?
George Arison:
I think keeping me honest is the, is the single most important thing, right? Number one. And that's kind of on you and on Toby and on other senior executives at the company. Number two, is I think we just need to hit our goals. We have very audacious and big goals and we need to do what it takes to hit them. I think it's really awesome to be doing that and we'll continue to but I think that's the biggest thing that the team can do is kind of, hey, keep those goals in mind and then focus on what do I need to do in my day-to-day to ensure that we hit those goals. I think those are the things where you know, Shift really comes into that. And then, you know, thirdly I think as a company for us, this transition comes with some challenges, right? Like one of them is around transparency. It's still taking me, it's going to take me a lot of getting used to, to not be as transparent as you know, I normally would like to be because when you're private, you can be a lot more transparent. We had a question the other day around earnings and somebody asked like; Hey could, you know, George and Toby talk about kind of, what are they thinking about the earnings and, you know, what they expect from the process, etcetera. And I'm like, well, we can, except it's going to all have to happen after we do the earnings rather than before because it's totally not okay for us to talk to, you know, 150 people about earnings before we actually announced them. That's just a tough process to go through, to get used to kind of having less transparency, but I hope people at the company are appreciative of the fact that that's just a kind of a thing that comes along with being a public company.
Jeff Hunter:
Great. Well, at least from my part I commit to keeping you honest. George, thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate it. As I said, I've enjoyed working with you immensely. I'm looking forward to the next decade. I'm looking forward to Shift going through the roof and just accomplishing everything that you hope. And I'm hoping that I can work with you in other ways and that we can mentor people and help them achieve their potential. So thank you so much, George. It's been a real honor.
George Arison:
Thank you very much for having me.
Jeff Hunter:
Coaching in the Clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review. To support this podcast please sign up at Talentism.com there you will find important content and up-to-date insights about how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening.
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Jess Hunt:
Because what you want, you want progress to be the idea of the person you're managing. You want them to drive the bus. And so you want to elicit, you want to pull from them the best ideas and to do so you have to start with understanding.
Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you were listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Jess, thank you so much for joining me on Coaching in the Clear. I'm very grateful for your time and for your participation. Thank you so much for joining the conversation.
Jess Hunt:
Thanks Jeff. Delighted to be here.
Jeff Hunter:
Okay. So let's start at the beginning. As I love to know how people come to the world of coaching, when you first hear about it, what you think about it, the first coach you have, can be in an athletic or an executive setting or any other setting. And just generally how you think about coaching.
Jess Hunt:
Well, I remember when I had my first professional coach, my CEO at the time was at a tech enabled startup, New York City, early odds. And my CEO at the time recommended that I get a coach and it was a cohort coaching. And so there were a number of, sort of up and comer managers that I think there were six of us in a group with a coach. And I did the first coaching session with, you know a framework, very thoughtful framework. I now realize, and I went through the first coaching session and we were sharing our challenges, learning more about her framework. And I walked out of the room and I walked down to my CEO, who I was close with, and I said, well, that was a bunch of bullshit. And I really, really wasn't comfortable with what I now know, coaching can ask of you to get a lot out of it, which is vulnerability and self-awareness. And then if you're lucky, self-acceptance and there was a lot of learning involved for me in that first coaching experience, I think, which lasted almost two years and to a coach that I'm still close to.
Jeff Hunter:
Okay. So I love that. I love that you have that experience and goes, that's a load of bullshit. Two reasons I love that. First of all, because I think in the first minute, the audience just got to know you really well. I've had the good fortune of knowing you for a while, but that was awesome. And then the second thing is I believe a lot of people who are suggested into coaching are recommended like a, should get a coach, sort of have that. Like there are the people who are, I think they sort of fall into three camps. There's the people who say no, I'm not going to do that because I don't need a psychologist and that's bologna. Two is like, sure, I'll do it. But in their mind, like no way. I think it's sorta like Matt Damon and Goodwill hunting. It's like, sure, I'll just go mess with them. Or the third is like, they go and they're like, oh, this sort of surprises me. So tell me about going from, Hey, this is really bullshit to, I remember when you and I first met, you're like, well, how does your coaching work? Cause I'm sort of used to this way. How do you go from one coach to another, because you obviously had a profound experience with that first coach.
Jess Hunt:
Yeah, well, she was, I think coaching, that was earlier in my career, coaching at that stage became useful quickly because coaching is highly applicable, at least at that stage in my career, coaching that was highly applicable to my work every day, the content of my work and everyday my interpersonal relationships at work became useful very quickly. And I, in retrospect, I believe that was because I was probably within my first five years of any major management responsibilities and becoming a really good manager, which my coach helped me do, I hope, just made me a lot more effective at work. So I think that coaching experience was earlier in my career and it was management coaching. And management’s a skill as I've moved along and certainly most recently with Talentism, I mean, that's, you balance the management, whether you're managing an executive team or managing a board or investors executive management with executive leadership. So certainly the kind of coaching that I think I've probably required has evolved and what that coaching has asked of me, hopefully it's stayed the same, which is I get as much out of it as I put into it.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And one of the things we talk about is different forms of coaching, and this is just sort of our language around it, nothing that's, I think, widely accepted in the industry and probably derives from the fact that we came to coaching sort of as outsiders as executives ourselves. So we were, we were executives and then had never, I'd never coached anybody before and people asked me to do it. I thought, well sure, but I wonder if I, what it is and if I could even be good at it. And through that research a lot and try to understand and simplify this incredibly complex world of all these, you know, career coaches and life coaches and executive coaches, business coaches, yada, yada, there's just a ton of them. And so we came with this thing like there's times when you just need a safe space to talk, there are times where you need someone to show you the way, like, you know, help you train in a specific skill or craft. And there are times people actually need to help you get to clarity, which is obviously where we're trying to operate, but just take me through that a little bit in the nature of our engagement and the nature of how you think about coaching. If you were recommending coaching to somebody, how would you help them think through other than just really in their career later in their career, how would you help them think through when they need someone who helps them sort of hone a particular skill and when they need someone who's identifying for them, how they're standing in the way of their overall success, given their cognitive profile and how they're thinking and behaving?
Jess Hunt:
Yeah, well, you've seen much, much, much more than I have, but I've certainly managed lots of people. And tried to be cognizant and incur, cognizant of when someone needs coaching or could really benefit from coaching and proactive in helping them get coaching or becoming open to coaching. When that is true. The two times I can see coaching being or feel easy to me as a manager, a leader of executives is when someone really does need a space to work through challenges at work that are yes, practical, but may have something to do with their emotions or psychology or their understanding of themselves. But they need a space that more than I can give them. And that often will allow them to really focus on a certain relationship or a certain skill that they need to develop. The other place that I, it’s a sense that you get, is when, especially when someone's in a new environment and a new role, but not always. It's when you can see someone really benefit from self awareness and that's kind of a hard thing to describe, I'm sure you, Jeff, you can describe it much more, but once you've really worked with a coach on self-awareness and self-acceptance, it's something you can appreciate. And it's hard to have that ladder conversation with someone who could benefit from coaching, but I think if you can get someone into coaching, they can begin to understand what that's like. It's really knowing yourself. And so in knowing yourself, you can often become more effective. And in many cases happier, I don't know, what are the other, those are two things that stand out to me as places where I can help when I can see where coaching would really be applicable or help someone unleash their potential.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. The way we talk about it is ultimately, your ultimate competitive advantage, both as a business and as a leader or manager, is your speed of productive learning. The world changes really rapidly, and the people who stay ahead of that and lead that change, then do well. The people who can keep up with it and sort of adapt to it, do okay. And the people who are flummoxed by it or put into threat by it really struggle. So where you try to focus on is the speed of productive learning along the path of every individual, finding their own individual excellence. I mean, you said coaching, sorry, management is a skill. The reality is most people aren't good managers. You're a very good manager. Most people aren't. So your particular path to excellence may be down the route of management, but in order to become good at something truly, truly good at something and to stay ahead of change and to be leading that change, you really need four elements and you've identified two of the most critical you need self-awareness, you need self skepticism, you need self-acceptance and you need the ability and courage to experiment because your mind is always in a constant state of fooling you. That's what our minds do. It’s like they're literally designed to fool you because fooling you helps you survive. Believing that I know you have some background in primatology. You know, I geek out on that. I have loved dark conversations about that, but to have that monkey brain, that mistakes, a moving branch, because of the wind, as a potential predator, you know, millions of years, that's a real benefit. That's a positive. And now when you're an executive, not so good. And so we're, we've got, you know, 99.6% monkey brain, and we're dealing with some other stuff called rationality. And so just being able to train yourself in the skill and craft of managing your brain and managing yourself, I think is one of the greatest tools you can have to help yourself achieve your potential and to unleash that inner excellence and to train yourself towards it and to stay ahead of changes that could be disruptive and instead be leading those. So I completely agree with self-awareness, self-skepticism is often underappreciated.
Jess Hunt:
I went from self, I went right to self-acceptance without the skepticism.
Jeff Hunter:
That's right. Yeah. Right. Because the reason I love self skepticism is self-awareness can be a trick in and of itself like, Oh, I'm self-aware, I'm not good at this. I call it the, what was the name of it? The American idol test, right? American idol test is, you got three groups of people. Well, there's four groups. One group is I'm bad at singing and I know it so they don't ever show up. But the three groups that show up are I'm bad at singing and I don't know it. I'm good at singing and I don't know it. I'm good at singing and I know it. And so two of the three groups actually have no clue what they're talking about. So even when you're in that place of like, Oh, I'm a bad singer, you could be wrong. And so the self-skepticism is a critical part of trying to figure out what is true before you get to the self-acceptance, but it's really just a loop, right? It's just a, you're just learning all the time. And so being purposeful about how you design your experiences and your interactions and your work and all those things so that you get good data back so you can keep learning, is I think what's what is really crucial, but of all of those, just to be clear, human beings are not wired for self-awareness. It's a difficult thing for human beings to do, especially if they're at all under any sort of threat. And so whenever I run into anybody who's even attempting self-awareness I just have to honor that courage because it's not a natural act for a human being.
Jess Hunt:
Well, it certainly feels like it takes courage. I do feel like I bounce back and forth between confusion and clarity all the time. So I don't, it's certainly not by design. It's almost that you have to suffer through that. You have a new insight, you have new awareness and then you, you somehow environs your situation or your brain takes you back to confusion sooner or later, usually sooner.
Jeff Hunter:
Yes. I don't think you can learn without confusion. So I think a lot of what I just said is common and commonly known, or, I mean, you can read a lot of people much smarter than me who can tell you a lot about what I just talked about, but what we try to be different at is celebrating the confusion, because I just don't think there's any productive learning or meaningful learning without confusion. Otherwise it's mostly blind. It's reinforcement of blindness, right? It's like, Oh, I was right. I was right- is you're either not correct about being right or where you are right, but you need to get better. It's just a constant process of trying to really just trying to get into the flow of being okay with continually putting yourself into confusion to form the learning. And the confusion, we're all physiologically wired for confusion to not be pleasant, so I'd love that, you know, Hey, love your mistakes. I've never met anybody that loves their mistakes. Like it's, I think you can habitually have a sort of internal trigger of like, Oh, I feel awful. Oh, that means I should feel good, but it feels bad to be in confusion. And that's why so many people want to back out of it and just sort of lock themselves down and not open themselves to the learning experience. And one of the things I love in the coaching I do, and I have seen this from you many, many times is really just that like sitting with the confusion and recognizing it, and again, having the courage to try to push through to clarity. So, I have found, I've found that the leaders I work with who are, I think are just truly extraordinary, have a lot of that courage. They'll have the courage of self-acceptance, which are self-awareness and self-acceptance, which is incredibly difficult to have the courage, to have the conversations, to get to clarity, which is incredibly difficult. I think you exhibit a ton of that courage. And I'm curious about how that happens. If you were coaching you, what would we be looking for, with regards to what are the attributes that lead you to have that courage. And then how do you think about that as a leader and manager and finding other people who are like that?
Jess Hunt:
You know, as you asked, I'm thinking, when have I experienced confusion? Like, surely it doesn't happen very often, but of course it's on the regular. I think first the concept of confusion is difficult to grasp. And so making space for it as a part of it is the first thing, like acknowledgement of confusion, you know, is a little bit of a skill, but I think making space to sit with it, which requires time and I would say a significant amount of emotional energy, emotional energy you'd like to spend somewhere else. You'd like to spend it outside of work, or you'd like to spend it getting work done, but the work, but it's work to sit with confusion. I do think it requires some ability to reflect on one's thoughts, which I don't know, I'm certainly better at it than when I was in my twenties, but that in itself is a skill. And then I would find it really hard to do by myself. I think this is why coaching can be so important and it doesn't have to be a coach. Of course it could be a manager or a confidant or an advisor, but the space plus the ability to self reflect and look at one's own thoughts. And then frameworks and/or some figure that's a coach to help you self reflect on those thoughts and ask hard questions are probably the things that make it possible for me.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. That makes sense. I like to think of the term personal responsibility. I think there are and we can talk more later about some of the tricks and downfalls of the personal responsibility mantra. But if people start with the basic concept of I'm missing something, or what am I missing, or I want to start the investigation with me, it will lead to good places. And almost inevitably, if they start from a place of, it feels terrible, therefore it must be somebody else's fault. It leads to bad places. And so...
Jess Hunt:
That is an interesting, pointing at oneself for a moment is really interesting thing, because if you tend to be kind of an egoist that might feel comfortable because you'd like to focus on yourself, but uncomfortable, because you're going to have to kind of examine yourself or even point the finger at yourself a little bit, like does the challenge I'm having is the confusion I'm having start with me. If you are another focus person, which sometimes I am, that's uncomfortable for different reasons because in general I'm much more comfortable solving other people's challenges in certain contexts, than my own. And so focusing on one's self can be, for different people, can be really uncomfortable, but that is exactly who it starts with. It can even start with, what do you want? Questions that aren't like, what's the problem? But what's the goal for you?
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I think the reflexive, what am I missing? Which while it does start with our “I” and therefore it smacks of egoism, is the very opposite of what a narcissist would do. And so the thing that egoism does involve sort of internalization of self and focus on self, but that can be a good thing if you're using it to improve, get better and take personal responsibility. It's a bad thing if you're using it to defend yourself against the perceived sense of others and, you know, sort of justifying yourself through arrogance or through close-mindedness. So I make that differentiation, but the ability to sit there and say, hey, listen, what am I missing? But immediately when you get to self skepticism or you get to any form of evaluation, you have to do it against the goal. And I love that you brought that up because so many people don't start at the goal level. It's very difficult. It's like, self-awareness, it's just not a human attribute. It's crazy to me because we spend our lives fulfilling goals. Now, if we want to eat, it is goal achievement. It's like I have a state of hungriness. I want to make a change in that state. The state is relatively measurable. I'm going to go from being hungry, to not being hungry. It's all, we're human beings are goal achievement machines. Like most biological entities are like you pursue goals in the further ends of survival and further into growth and relationship and all those things. But somehow when we get into corporate settings or commercial settings, the concept of starting with the goal and talking about the goal and say, as a reflection point or an evaluation point for a behavior or for a outcome, or whatever, really becomes incredibly difficult. And so I love the fact that you start with the gold question because you have to evaluate against what you want and what you aspire to. Not just against some internal feeling.
Jess Hunt:
Right. I find the goal part pretty hard.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. It's very difficult. So I want to connect a couple of points. You said something earlier about it doesn't have to be a coach. It can be a manager. And I agree with you so much. I think if, well, first of all, you know, the data's pretty clear. Most managers aren't good at their jobs. And that's, to me, one of the root causes that most businesses don't achieve their potential. But I think really good managers are adept at when confronted with a situation at picking one of three hats to work on right then, or to take on this role. Like sometimes they have to be doers. Sometimes you just have to dive in and get something done. And sometimes you have to be a driver. You have to actually get more into the weeds and link arms with somebody and say, no, this has got to happen. It's got to happen now, we got to go. But so much of the time, excellent managers are excellent coaches. You're helping somebody get to clarity. Because I tell this story a lot. You know, if you go through and you say, okay, a manager is somebody who designs an organization, they go hire people to be in that design and to populate that design. That design and those people start creating work outcomes. As the outcomes come in, you take a look, some of them aren’t great. Mistakes happen all the time. You have to clarify, go in and say, okay, let's just take a step back. This is what good looks like. This is how things should work. And then when mistakes persist, you gotta dig in and figure out why. And often those diagnoses create change. You gotta change the design, gotta change a person. And that's just a big learning loop that happens all the time. And if you were to talk to anybody who's ever made a bad hire and we all have done it, did you talk to him about it? He's made a bad hire, and you said, which of those four steps do you think you failed at? Cause obviously, when you hired the person you thought they're going to be great. It didn't turn out that way. What do you think happened? And since I used to have this conversation hundreds upon hundreds of time; I can tell you over 90% of the respondents will tell you they failed at the employee step. I just picked the wrong person. But when you actually dig in and examine, it's not. It's either at the clarifier design step. It's either they actually didn't know what they wanted when they designed or even more so that when things started going wrong, the manager didn't take the beat to step back and reorient and help the person get to clarity. Instead, the manager themselves panics and drops in and goes to the doer mode, not the coach mode. One of the things I've seen from you is again, being an excellent manager is you will typically go to that coach mode. How do you, when you're working with, you know, managers report to you, cause you're a senior executive, how do you coach them to help them understand the value of coaching for themselves, not to get a coach, but to be a good coach to their people?
Jess Hunt:
Yes. First of all, I just want to agree with you. What's the hardest part of hiring the JD? So it's all about design and the clarification of the role and what good looks like before you hire. And if I've made a bad hire it's because I didn't get the design of the role and the person who would be most successful in the role, right? So how do you get managers to be great coaches? I think coaching has a lot to do, coaching with, a manager with a coaching hat on has a lot to do with context setting, being pretty, usually my style is to be pretty socratic. So really I'm sitting on the same side of the table with someone and looking at the design and the goals of the organization, the process and saying, what are we trying to accomplish here? What needs to happen? So that basically whatever's going to happen next is the idea of the person you're coaching. I suspect that, you know, your excellent coaches at Talentism ask many, well I know you guys asked many more questions than you answer questions. I think good coaches, especially with like, really high potential people. Managers should ask lots more questions than answer questions because what you want, you want progress to be the idea of the person you're managing. You want them to drive the bus. And so you want to elicit, you want to pull from them the best ideas and to do so you have to start with understanding. I think that's the first step. What do you think?
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah I love the fact that you're talking about a socratic, because I do believe, well, first of all, asking a question is assuming it's not a pointed leading question. Like you're getting cross-examined, but asking a question, creates an open space for inquiry. And I think good managers have a certain sense of humility about the fact, like maybe they don't know the right answer either. And no matter what, even if they do have a better answer, the reality is, as you just said, what you want is this person to be excellent at their job, them being excellent in their job is a huge win for you as a manager, a lot less work for you over the long run. That's somebody who's incredible and then not. And so I think just too much time is spent with managers, the typical loop you see is a manager gets confused. They expected one thing they experienced or received another. They are feeling overwhelmed and busy. They go into sort of an anxiety slash panic state. They spin up all sorts of stories in their head about, oh my god, I thought this person was good at their work. They're bad at their work. Those stories start to form a model of how to interact with that employee. So all of a sudden the manager who is sort of out at a distance and happy and gregarious, all of a sudden is really close and intense and asking like, where's this and driving a lot and that’s just confusing, right? Because when most of the time when the employee makes a mistake, well, first of all, they may not have made a mistake that the manager could be misinterpreting it. But when they make the mistake, they don't know they did that. They just don't know. And so they thought they did something great. The manager freaks out, doesn't have a good forum of inquiry to figure out what is true instead starts micromanaging. And then the employee is like, oh my gosh, I'm in trouble. Even if they inform that, informed those words in their mind, that's the feeling. And then when that feeling hits really starts to, you know, suck up your resources, your internal, cognitive resources, your creativity, your judgment, your perspective. You're just all of a sudden getting worse at your job. And it all comes from this thing where the manager isn't, as you just said, forming this forum for inquiry to figure out what's really going on. And what did I miss? And you know, how could we do this better? And were you clear on what the standard was? I probably didn't tell you and those kinds of things. And I think those are all coaching attributes. I think those that, as you said, the form that place to ask those questions are coaching attributes.
Jess Hunt:
Yeah. You just used expectation and reality at least once. And when you first described what confusion was and you should tell me exactly how you define it. But I think it's when reality isn't meeting your expectations and you experienced the discomfort of that, or the dissonance, is that right? When I first heard that description, my challenge was like, what are my expectations? I don't think I said anything. In other words there's lots of pieces of reality that show up in your life, you experience it and you take for granted that you had expectations around them. And the reason I point that out is because I don't think, at first blush, the definition of confusion when reality doesn't meet your expectations is really easy to understand without some practice. However, the manager managing interaction we've just been talking about is basically if done well, is being in the practice of setting up expectations and then together inspecting reality. So you have to work together to constantly set expectations. Is this the goal? Is this, what is the deliverable? What is the timeframe, whatever work you're doing through others as a manager, what are the expectations of the outcomes of that work? Okay. Is that a shared understanding? Got it. And so then the management part is iterating on the reality. Is what's going on today going to deliver those expectations. And so I find that I would never have applied the concept of confusion to management, but I very much think that that it's highly applicable and it's something I use regularly now since you've tattooed it in my brain.
Jeff Hunter:
Well I just, I mean, obviously I'm a partisan for this particular concept and I just want to acknowledge that upfront, but here's the thing about human beings, all of us, by the way, anybody who ever tells you, hey, listen, I have no expectations. They're full of it. Your brain is an expectation machine. It sets up models to future, for it to forecast the future. That's what it does, right? How would you know that it's bad that a tiger is coming at you and could eat you? Well, you'd have to have a sense of like what a tiger at 50 feet means for you in five seconds. It's constantly trying to like set expectations about the future and then have you react to those expectations. So to me, personal mastery, which is the ultimate goal of clarity coaching is to help you find that thing within you that's that route to excellence and your own personal greatness through this act of helping you become a craftsman of your own mind is just constantly being in confusion. And then making sense of that to figure out what the expectation was, because it's not accessible to you. It's just not. And so you actually have to do stuff and then watch your reaction and go, oh, that's what I expected. And in leaders, this is so difficult for leaders because leaders think they have to act like they know stuff. Like they have the answer, right? Like I know exactly what I'm doing. No you don't, the only way it's true that you know what you're doing is three conditions have to have been met, one, the environment is completely stable. Two, you have a long history of success and three, you knew exactly how to get that success and just repeated the same pattern again and again. If you meet those three conditions, you probably know what you're doing. Otherwise, what you're trying to do is learn faster to stay ahead of everybody else's confusion. So to me, this thing of like, oh, I'm confused. I wonder why I am confused. Well, it's because your model, the model that drives that confusion, that thing in your head probably doesn't work, or you don't know.
Jess Hunt:
So would you say when you, when you're coaching then with your, you know, the senior most folks, experienced folks that you're coaching, do you see the confusion, you know, to the extent that you, the people you're coaching understand their own confusion. Is the confusion born of poor expectation setting, or in other words inaccurate expectations setting? You set expectations, they were just wrong, or the fact that maybe folks, I certainly have been in this position before, where I'm not purposeful, deliberate enough about the goals I'm setting and the outcomes I'm driving for. And so my expectations were there. They were just inadequately set.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, both. But the most common is the first, so both exist. I work with people. We work with people who actually know what they want and can articulate it fairly well. But they suffer from the basic cognitive problem of they believe because it's obvious to them, it is obvious to others. This is something we all suffer from, right? In any relationship we have, there will be a moment in that relationship where we are dumbfounded that somebody else doesn't get it, but how could they not see that? And that's one of the biggest forms of human arrogance is like, it's obvious to me, so it's gotta be obvious to you. No, just to be clear, just because you're a leader doesn't mean that everything that is obvious is right, is one point. But the other is, if you are on a level playing field and there wasn't a power dynamic involved, that other person who you're like, how could you not get it? They're having the same reaction with you about other stuff. So they're looking at you and going, how can you miss that? And so you're just constantly looking across the table at each other, like what an idiot, what a dummy. It's all a myth, right? Even if you really are crystal clear in your mind, and by the way, most people aren't, most people think they are because when they start having conversations about it, their mind tricks them into believing the things they're saying have been in their mind for a long period of time. That's another classic cognitive confusion, this sort of rationalization in the moment like, oh, I've always thought this, but that's actually usually not true. Let's just say, no, I wrote it down before I've referred to it. I know the goals. I just didn't talk to the person about it. That's fine. You would discover that because that person would make a mistake, right? And then you would refer it and say, you know what, starting with me, I actually didn't tell you that. That's so, I'm confused. But then I immediately get to clarity by having personal responsibility and saying, that's interesting. I didn't tell you. So I can't reasonably expect you to know
Jess Hunt:
Certainly most of your, much, much, much of good coaching has to do with the mindset of others or communication. Once you understand, that's essentially what you're pointing to, it's once you understand yourself a little bit, what are you playing for? What are your goals? What are your expectations? What's the reality? What is reality that you're experiencing? Then you have to unpack it with all the people you are working with, working for, and who are working for you.
Jeff Hunter:
Yes. And not just unpack it once, but unpack. It constantly
Jess Hunt:
Sounds like a lot of work.
Jeff Hunter:
It is. So first of all you are an excellent manager. And so you've habituated these, you both, have in talent, and you've habituated a lot of this stuff. So, but for most people it's terrible. It's terrible to try to learn these things because of what you said earlier, like you're working, you got a ton of stuff on your plate. The last thing you want to do is say, huh? I'm self-aware, I'm confused. I wonder what triggered that confusion. You know what I bet upon reflection. I didn't tell that person. So I want to have a good conversation with that person. So I'm going to make the time, and then I'm going to invest in that conversation. I'm going to make sure that I do that well. And then once I do that, well, I'm going to document that so I can come back to it again so we can keep growing and learning together. When I describe that to people, it looks like they're going to, you know, like they're going to embolize and just fall over. And I'm like, I know it sounds terrible, but here, let me describe something that's even more durable. Like I'm expecting greatness. Oh my god, this is awful. Now I'm scared to talk to you, but I have to deal with you. Oh my god, I don't want to deal with this crap anymore. I just want to go home, but I have to fire you. They don't want to fire you because I'm probably a bad boss. Like it just, so you're going to be on one of those baths. You can pick your poison, but if you want to manage other people, you're going to have to deal with one of those two things.
Jess Hunt:
That's right. That's right. There are worse things like a whole company that's confused.
Jeff Hunter:
Yes, exactly right. So listen, I had so many more things I want to talk to you about. I always love our conversations. Could I have you back at some future time and yeah, I'd love to talk to you about so many things. I know that you are so deeply passionate about creating extraordinary workplaces about the current environment for especially the me too movement, black lives matter, etcetera. There's so much to examine there. We've run out of time, but I would love it if you'd come back and talk with me some more.
Jess Hunt:
I would be delighted. For all of those topics and also early hominid evolution and the basis for our behavior today is always exciting too. So thank you Jeff, for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Jeff Hunter:
It's my pleasure. And bless you for saying hominid on my podcast. That was a highlight right there. All right, thank you very much Jess. Coaching in the clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review. To support this podcast please sign up at Talentism.com. There you will find important content and up-to-date insights about how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening. -
Jim Wagner:
I think as a leader and being fortunate and privileged to be in a position to lead an organization, it's incumbent upon that leader to create the space for everyone to thrive and to recognize when and if there are either systems in place, structures in place, that need to be broken down to create opportunity for everyone.
Jeff Hunter:
Hi, and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market-leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the sense maker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. So, Jim, thank you so much for being on coaching in the clear today. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time
Jim Wagner:
Thank you for having me, looking forward to the conversation.
Jeff Hunter:
Good. So listen, I'm starting all my conversations the same way, which is, I would just like to know how you decided to enter the world of coaching, how to get a coach when was the first time he got a coach? Just take me through some of that narrative and background about how you approached coaching.
Jim Wagner:
Absolutely. So I think there's the long version, which is my own history going back as an athlete who was fortunate to have some incredible coaches and really learned about how important a coach is to anyone's individual success as well as team success. I think often times when we get into a business context and certainly as a first time CEO, which I was at, at Roland foods, when I started working with you as a coach you really realize you're in a position by yourself. It's actually a very lonely position where there's lots of decisions you need to make. There's lots of responsibility. And while I have mentors, I have friends, I have confidence. What I knew I needed was somebody who was going to work with me to provide the unvarnished feedback and help me to remove or see some of the blocks that existed in my own leadership style as well as in the business. So I was fortunate that I had great experiences with coaches in a different context and knew that I thrived when having that. So that's how I arrived at that.
Jeff Hunter:
Wonderful. So tell me, because you were an athlete, a very highly regarded athlete, and in incredible collegiate program as a waterfall polo player, I was a water polo player. Although I would imagine comparing your skill to my skill is a not a fair comparison, but let's just say we were both in the water splashing around. So tell me. Something that's fascinating, I was just talking to somebody this past weekend who was an athlete, and they were talking about the role of coaching and in helping get better. What do you think is a similarity between the sports context and the business context with that role of coach? Because obviously coaches take on different jobs and different contexts, but from what I've heard, people had coaches in their prior lives, in their, you know, sports and those kinds of things really seem to gravitate towards it more in business than people might not have had that experience. Could you help me sort of navigate that?
Jim Wagner:
Yeah, definitely. So I think that again, the good fortune that I had of having excellent coaches, even in high school and in college and with the under 20 U.S. national team was that great coaching is a constant feedback loop and it's about learning to learn and that every practice and every game is very much an experiment in the sense of improvement as opposed to the idea that winning is in kind of, the aspect of winning a game is about winning the game, which it’s not, it's about all of the preparation and all of the feedback and that, you know, you get that feedback in a game, then you realign, you get the feedback from your coach, and then you go and you try it again. And I think that's very much how I think about business, which is while we have a goal that you cannot just achieve the goal, the goal is about running a series of experiments and getting that feedback and quote-unquote being coachable. So I think a lot of people who haven't had that are challenged with the idea of coaching because they don't understand that feedback mechanism, that it's about a constant practice and it's about constant improvement as well as going into the unknown. There isn't an athlete that's ever played a game or run a race that didn't do something they hadn't done before, which is very much what business is all about. You're trying to achieve something that the company hasn't achieved before. You're trying to develop a product that hasn't been developed before. And so I think having that history and knowing to try to, the ability to figure out what you don't know, you can't do it yourself. You need those feedback mechanism. And I always found a coach to be the best way to do that.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. One of the things I know you and I have talked a little bit about in the past and I speak with my clients frequently about is the difference between goals and measures. And I think a key point of confusion since, as we have talked about many times, confusion is sort of our shtick, it's the thing we're taking a look at, we're reviewing performance and cognition through that lens. One of the things I think is very common is that people confuse goals and measures. And so in a sports sort of context, as an athlete, of course, as I said, honestly, not as accomplished as you, but as an athlete, what I figured out was if excellence is the goal, the win is the measure, but if the win is the goal then it gets pretty confusing because it creates a certain fragility and identification with the win, as opposed to the practice and the process of constantly pushing ourselves to find that outer limit of potential in the moment and outer potential in the game and find our own potential in that game. And I think that's something that I've always found very similar in a lot of different things, whether it's world working with world class performers on the stage or in film, or it's in business or sports or whatever it is, there's this thing of not confusing the goal of excellence with the measure of the win, the win is a nice sort of point in time. They can tell you things are probably on the right path, but you never know you could have gotten lucky etcetera. And I've always experienced in working with you that you kept those two things very clear in your mind. And I think that's what you're talking about.
Jim Wagner:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the phrase that I use consistently is “if you run the system, the goals will come” sort of in, in the athletic context. And I think it's in the business context as well, which is if you're not running a system, which again is a certain set of experiments is you run it and if, and if you're running a system, then when you evaluate, if you achieved your goal or not, you then can tweak the system as opposed to what happens a lot of times is if again, taking this athletic metaphor a little further, if the goals are the objective, you actually don't know if it was luck, if it was skill if it was the quality of the other team, did you actually do what you set out to do? And I think that happens a lot in business as well, which is if revenue is a goal unto itself, there can be, you know, random revenue events. There can be one client who happens to grow faster, but underneath the system is not healthy. And so I think consistently focusing on running the system and tweaking the system, knowing that the goals are, as you mentioned, measurements along the way, and they're derivative of the effort and the experiments I think that's what keeps a company healthy and thriving as opposed to what I've often seen typically with investors and others is they're so focused on the metrics as being the goals that they lose sight of what a healthy business is and where what changes need to be made. And I think, again, this goes back to why that for me, that scenario of being a CEO who led and operated in the fashion, I just described but had investors who very much confused goals and metrics, also as what led me to reaching out, to working with a coach to try to understand my own confusion about that.
Jeff Hunter:
I want to come back to that point, cause I think there's something really important there, but you mentioned the word, you mentioned the phrase healthy business, and I just want to give a perspective on that because what I find in clarity coaching and in our methodology, that it can be very, it can be very confusing for clients who are seeking to gain a short term sort of outcome that are, you know, looking to flip their company or juice their valuation before the next big financial event, or make a big hire, whatever it is. There's just some, you know, some shiny object at the next level. And what we're trying to do is much more, as you say, systematic, right? What we say is systematically unleashing human potential, but it really is about the system by which people continue to find and unleash their potential. And our perspective is that every business is going to have luck and it's going to be unlucky. It'll be lucky and it'll be unlucky. If you're around long enough, you'll have your highs, you'll have your lows. If you take a snapshot at any particular time, you're going to either feel too good or too bad, but what's happening underneath all of that is that you've got an organization that is either fragile or is resilient, or is antifragile it's when an organization is fragile it is unhealthy. When we, as people are fragile, we are unhealthy small shocks. Whether it be a, you know, something that happens in our lives or an illness or whatever, small shocks can have big profound effects because we're just not healthy. And then a lot of people over the last 20 years have talked a lot about resilience, the ability to take the small shock and or big shock and be able to just keep standing. And while certainly resilience is better than fragility. To us the thing we're trying to do is find true health, which we believe is antifragility, which is the thing where when you get the shock, not only does it not knock you over, not only do you resist and stand tall, but you actually absorb it and improve. And I think that, that's consistent with your concept about learning what you're saying about learning, because the future is impossible to predict. And so therefore all we're trying to do all the time is learn the most effectively we can. So we keep improving our level of mastery to be able to deal with those unpredictable shocks. And I think that one of the things I've commented to you many times that I think you're an excellent operator and you have an incredible, like both creative and systemic sort of view as an operator, but being able to view the system and being able to view the health of the system and not get caught up in any particular measure, or even as you're saying goal, but just constantly sort of building the practice of being excellent in taking in new information and improving as a result of it means that you build excellent companies. And I think you also build excellent relationships. And I think you also create a place where people, that people are coming to work for you are finding an extraordinary experience and find something in themselves they never have before. Am I sort of feeding that back to you right? Am I hearing that correctly?
Jim Wagner:
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s certainly my objective in the organizations I've been fortunate to be a part of and to lead is to create an environment where, what you just described exists at in all facets of the organization, whether that be the customer dynamic, whether that be the supplier dynamic, but first and foremost within the employee dynamic, which is that every situation should be designed as a series. I know we've used the word experiments. I often use the word project in the language when I am running an organization, which is, we don't know what we don't know. And however lots of people approach things with certainty and oftentimes that means dictating to particular employees what they should or shouldn't do, which is not something that I'm wholly supportive of. I try to create a, with a team a situation where, again, it's this consistent feedback loop in terms of, we're always testing, we're testing the market, we're testing opportunities, we're testing customers, we're testing suppliers in the sense of what are we learning, not testing them in terms of a pass fail, but testing in terms of pushing the envelope asking the questions is the system resilient? Where is the system breaking down? Where do we need to maybe pivot away from certain things that have existed for years, but the market is moving away from us? There may still be revenue there, but if you, if you don't start to pivot now, that will change. And the company will be very fragile in the future. So I think it is being constantly diligent about that. And I think, again, it goes back to this athletic metaphor, which is one of consistently being in discomfort and because you're constantly pushing yourself and testing yourself to be better. Hopefully we get better sometimes, you know, just like a practice or a game. We don't always play our best and it didn't, you know, it doesn't always work out and we make mistakes, but hopefully we learn from those mistakes. And then, you know, come out the next day better than we were the day before.
Jeff Hunter:
So, I want to pick up on the thread about something you talked about a little bit earlier, you said a person should be coachable and I want to connect that to, so you now have changed contexts. You're not currently a CEO, you're currently an investor, a coach and an advisor. And if I was to give you just five minutes with somebody who is looking to you, either they wanted your money as an investor, or they wanted your time as an advisor, they wanted your wisdom as a coach. And you got five minutes with you to impress upon you that they are coachable. What would they do?
Jim Wagner:
Well I certainly start off with a bit of a life story with anybody that I'm speaking to about coaching. So having an understanding of where they've come from, what their genesis story is even going back to their upbringing, how they operate, how they operated, you know, across most of their life. Usually in that conversation and it oftentimes does become more of a conversation than just a presentation. You start to see the threads of where somebody has either achieved a lot, but there's recognition that, that came through the hard work of others who supported them along the way whether that's in different teams, whether that's professors, whether that's a parent or, you know, a friend that usually comes out. I think oftentimes if somebody in my brief experience around coaching, you have somebody who's coming to you who has been, it's been suggested that they should get a coach and maybe it isn't organic. And usually there's a trail of resentment of others that comes out maybe, or blame or, you know, things didn't work out. And it always appears to be somebody else's fault. I think. So the short answer to what you just asked is, does the person have a history and an internal culture of accountability? Are they willing to really kind of own up to, they're in the position they're in because of their own participation in that. That is first and foremost for me what I would look for in working with somebody is that culture of accountability
Jeff Hunter:
You're hitting on a theme that I think will be an interesting thread to pursue. So I'm a huge believer in personal responsibility and in, I hope as you've experienced in our coaching, and as I work with a lot of incredible people, one of the hardest things, when a person's in pain you know, as you said earlier, leadership is a lonely position and a lot of times our coaches the only person they can speak with. And yet you're also depending on that coach, as you said, to give you the unvarnished feedback, and there's something in that moment where a person, a coach can both maintain your trust and help you continue to feel safe to explore, but also point out that you probably created the situation you're in. And that's incredibly difficult, I think for most people to accept. And what I've found is the people who are really good engaging with coaches, probably you could take a lot of different attributes under that personal responsibility, but they seem to have sort of two elements. One is hunger and the other is humility. And those display as sort of a ceaseless curiosity about themselves and their situation. It's not that they feel good about what's going on. It's not like everything's an adventure. They have emotions just like everybody else. They feel put upon, they feel victimized. Of course they do. But there's something in that, that they want to explore and get to the other side of. And there's sort of a relentless hunger and humility when you find either one of those things, absent the other, it can be very difficult when you find a hunger absent humility, you can end up with people who are very closed minded, bullying, etcetera. When you end up with humility without hunger, it becomes more of a contemplative act as opposed to a practical sense making, action taking sort of loop an experimentation loop. So those two things together, but under that concept of personal responsibility, as you say yeah, that makes all the sense in the world to me.
Jim Wagner:
Yeah. And I think that dovetails into, you know, similar to Carol Dweck you know, the open mindset versus closed mindset. And I think that the other aspect of somebody I wouldn't necessarily look to join to coach is when they're looking to have the coach solve a very specific problem, as opposed to your point about intellectual and curiosity around how did I arrive here and how do I keep moving forward? I think oftentimes a few people I have talked to where there's the resentment and the anger about where they are, and they just want to solve that problem, thinking that problem is the real problem. If that makes sense? And so I think I tend to lean towards people who have the same goal that all of this is a practice. The we're trying to move a company or an organization into a future that we're also creating at the same time. And it isn't just an individual problem to be solved.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I love that. And I experienced the same thing, although I believe you and I have talked about this in the past. I think there's a lot of different approaches and tradition to coaching and clarity coaching. We certainly are not there to solve any specific point problem because we believe that all problems are a manifestation of a larger sort of thing that's happening around your level of clarity and confusion, certainty. But there's something now I want to go to, I think what is an interesting area in a conundrum of leadership, especially right now and frankly, hopefully into the future. So, I'm a huge believer in personal responsibility. I'm a huge believer that in order for you to learn, you have to own your experience and you have to own your situation and what's happening around you. And the coach can help form a sort of externalization of separating out what is true about what you can control and what you can't control, right? There's a lot of things that happen in business and in life that you just can't control. And obsessing about those things is generally not effective, nor helpful. There are a lot of things you can control but you believe you can't, they're out of your power or there of somebody else's making, but there's also a lot of things, and I'm becoming more and more open to this, and I'm becoming more, I'm learning more about this. There are a number of things that you can't control, but are controlling you. And aren't grounded in acts of nature or in you know, forced mature. They're grounded in the bad behaviors of others. And they're grounded in the systems created by the beliefs underneath those bad behaviors and by the bad behaviors themselves. And we see this when we're leading, where we're trying to create open and inclusive environments, where people are free of the sorts of ongoing threats, aggressions, and indignities that many people have had to suffer for long, long, you know, millennia because of the color of their skin or their gender or their orientation. And so as a leader, how have you thought about that? How have you thought about this duality of the personal responsibility with the, in the separation of the things you can control and you can't control, with the reality that there's a lot of stuff that happens inside of institutions and organizations that just isn't good and it isn't right. And we're responsible as leaders because we have the power to fix those things. And it's when somebody is raising an issue consistent with that, that it isn't them blame shifting, it's them actually raising something that is systematically terrible and needs to be addressed by leadership. How, how do you as a leader work through that?
Jim Wagner:
I think that in, I think that's where the phrase personal responsibility gets thrown around a little bit in not necessarily the best way, right? So to your point, you know, blame shifting and to everybody saying it's their personal responsibility to change, etcetera. I think as a leader and being fortunate and privileged to be in a position to lead an organization, it's incumbent upon that leader to create the space for everyone to thrive and to recognize when, and if there are either systems in place structures in place that need to be broken down to create opportunity for everyone. I think oftentimes in the context of business, lots of bad behavior gets justified going back to what we talked about a little earlier ago, a little while ago, which is this idea that goals are the end all be all. So there's this conflation of all these things that we're talking about, which is why while I am extremely goal oriented, it's how you arrive at that goal. That is the most important part of this conversation. I think that culturally, we have lost sight of that. And we think of the goal as the end all be all which then allows or condones a lot of behavior that should not be condoned because potentially an individual is a producer or they're responsible for a significant amount of revenue for the company. Those are small examples. But the going back to how I view as a leader, the personal responsibility, it's personal responsibility of the leader to lead an organizationnwith integrity, to be a place where everyone who comes in the door can thrive and that any structure implicit or explicit that gets in the way of that needs to be, needs to be torn down.
Jeff Hunter:
Great. Okay. So now let's go the next step because I think this is where a lot of leaders, where I as a leader and where, and the leaders I coach, it's a struggle, it's something to work through. So you want a place where people can thrive. And I believe in order for people to thrive, they need to have a sense of safety. They need to have a sense of, and this word is thrown around a lot now, psychological safety, two words thrown around a lot. Creating psychological safety and that people who don't feel psychologically safe, actually, aren't going to thrive. They're going to be defensive. They're going to hide their talents because they're going to be in a constant state of trying to protect themselves against what's happening around them. And, but you said earlier, and I agree with you that something that's incredibly important in the coaching relationship and for people to find their potential, is a discomfort, is not being comfortable. It's to be in a place of exploring, which is always inherently at the edge of comfort or beyond comfort. When you're thinking about creating a place where people can thrive but the part of thriving is exploring things that are uncomfortable. How do you square that circle? How do you set up a place where you can get both of those through the mechanism of safety?
Jim Wagner:
I'm thinking through the question and I think that as I think of an organization and I think of a framework, guardrails, around the environment as opposed to edicts. So there are unbreakables and negotiables that are, that were within this context we're talking about, right? So there are lots of situations that are very clear cut that would make somebody feel unsafe or uncomfortable in an environment. Those have to be, those are non negotiable. They can't exist, right? I think we're on the same page there. I think that it's about dialogue blogging. It's about having the ability to have those conversations across the organization, to get an understanding of why somebody is feeling uncomfortable. Why is somebody feeling the way that they're feeling as opposed to dismissing the way that they're feeling and then seeking to arrive at an understanding from which we can all move forward. I think that it's, and it's not easy and even the context of this conversation, which is interesting. And I think it's why some leaders don't address it, is because it actually makes them feel uncomfortable, right? So you have somebody who is feeling discomfort in a certain situation or discomfort with the environment, but people won't have the conversation because of their own discomfort of what may be discovered. And that is a challenge. I think that goes back to some of the words that we've used previously, which is it's a practice and it's a culture of best effort, which is every day, we're all doing our best to move forward and to be in a space where everyone can thrive and everyone can can achieve their potential, which I think I'm completely aligned with Talentisms ideals of that is just unlocking human potential is critically important to me. And one phrase that I've often used is anybody, my goal and it's, again, a practice, is if you come into an organization that I'm fortunate to be leading you'll be more marketable the day that you leave than the day you arrive. That's a commitment that we need to make. And I think that, do we always get it right? No, but if we start from that place, we're going to get it right a lot more than we're going to get it wrong. But I think at the core it's facing our own discomfort with having these uncomfortable conversations and trying to learn from them and move the organization forward, as opposed to a historical hierarchical organization. And I think to me, that's what inclusivity is also a big part of, there's the capital I in inclusivity, which should exist, absolutely. And then there's also the lowercase, which is that every day we have to understand what being more inclusive really means.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, I think there's a really interesting facet of this. So I believe that no matter what, whether we believe that hierarchies are good or bad, and of course there are different people with different points of view on that, but businesses are hierarchies. The CEO is the ultimate executive decision maker, or at least should be. And they have ultimate hire fire promote demote authority, and that they create a sense of safety within that, or a sense of threat. And of course, if somebody is under performing their job, no matter how well intentioned people are, and no matter how much feedback has given and help is given, not everybody can be good at every job at every point in their career. And people will struggle and fail. And of course that happens and we should be decent and compassionate as they work through that. But that doesn't mean that compassion doesn't mean that we say, Oh, you're doing a good job when you're not doing a good job again, if the goal is to unleash potential, you need that coaching. You need that feedback loop. But the thing to me that makes this so difficult as a question is we're depending upon the person at the top of the hierarchy, we're depending upon the leader to have a level of personal mastery and insight into self that few possess, because really where the breakdown is in my opinion is, I think it's okay, there are boundaries of law and boundaries of decency and that's the thing that you're saying are non negotiable and I agree with that, but within that, we know there can be a lot of different behaviors, right? There can be behaviors where there are cultures where everybody is rewarded for everything. And there are cultures where it's very difficult to get noticed or rewarded. And there are cultures where you get a lot of very difficult feedback and cultures where you get no feedback, and there's a whole bunch of different behaviors and quality standards and outcomes in every culture. And I don't think it's a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. People can find homes within those cultures and find their own sense of safety and their own sense of unleashing their potential. But too often, what happens is the person who's responsible for setting that culture, because they are the top executive and they have the ultimate hire fire, promote, demote authority actually, doesn't know what they want. And they actually don't know what they're going to reward or what they're going to punish. They like to imagine certain things about themselves. They would like to imagine that they're always fair and decent, but often they aren't. As most of us aren't in our worst situations, we can fail that standard or that aspiration. And so therefore the person who's joining the company can't really have a solid contract with that executive, the contract of like, okay, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. You're going to do X, Y, and Z. You expect this of me. I expect this of you. We're staying in sync. We're communicating. That's a beautiful relationship, but it's very difficult to do when the leader doesn't have the requisite level of self awareness, self skepticism, self acceptance, personal mastery, to actually be able to articulate those things well, and continuously invest, as you've said in the practice of getting better at that, in getting better at themselves and getting better at, as they are getting better at them themselves, articulating that back into the organization with this deep sense of personal responsibility of saying, I made a mistake. Here's what I learned. Here's what will be different. Because all leaders are just people and people get under threat, and when they get under threat, they hide, they defend. And, but when leaders do it, when managers do that, it has concussive ripple effects throughout an organization that when an individual contributor or somebody who is lower in the hierarchy, does it, it doesn't have that. And I think that's the contextual difference of personal responsibility and solving the problems that are of systemic racism and sexism and gender bias and all the things that lead as leaders we're called to solve. That's what it is the most difficult is for each of us as leaders to summon our best selves, to be the most, have the most self knowledge and most transparency and humility so we can communicate that to others and form a good contract that then I think forms the basis of safety. So that's a long ramble, but that's sort of my perspective on it.
Jim Wagner:
Yeah, I think that it ties in with what we were speaking about at the beginning of the conversation, as I mentioned around how we have used the word goals or targets as the measuring stick, right? And oftentimes the focus, the relentless focus on achievement of those goals, and usually then a review, did we achieve it or not achieve it is what causes a lot of this, a lot of these challenges within the constant context of managers and employees. As opposed to I think it's incumbent upon the leadership at whatever level of leadership you may be to anybody within your purview, you need to, one needs to be able to articulate what is a successful day, week, month, quarter, year within that job. So I think and it's hard and I can't say that I always achieved it, but objectively again, the practice of being able to articulate to somebody on Friday afternoon, when they turn off their computer shut down, they should under their own guys, regardless of the goal, which again, most goals in companies, revenue goals, targets are completely arbitrary and swags and they don't totally have any idea how it's more driven by what did the investors want? Oh, they want us to grow by 15% a year. Oh, that's now our goal, no relationship to whether it's achievable or how we articulate to the team, what is a successful week? And that goes back to my concept of running a system. If you ran the system, regardless of what it produced, then it was a successful week. Did you run the system well? And if you're not achieving the revenue targets, then we have to ask, how do we change the system or are our revenue targets out of line with what the market will allow in terms of what we're trying to achieve. But oftentimes what we do as managers and as leaders is we blame the individuals for not achieving something that we can't necessarily even articulate how they're going to achieve it. More is not a strategy. And so I think a lot of this discomfort comes around the inability for managers and leaders to fully understand what a successful week for an employee is and it's incumbent upon us to provide that to them. Then this goes to your point about personal responsibility. Whereas if that helps to create the contract that you mentioned. If we now have the contract, then we can ask objectively, not subjectively, did we do the things that we were supposed to do as a team to achieve our goal. But if everybody's left to their own devices, now it becomes a subjective conversation, which brings in lots of fears and insecurities and many other psychological responses that have nothing to do with the work at hand. That's been, that's how I see it. And like I said, this is why I keep using the word practice because we're practicing this, we are constantly working to get better at it. And there are times where we, where we fail at that. There are times where we didn't organize ourselves effectively to be able to articulate to the organization or an individual, what is a successful week for them? What are they supposed to do to then ultimately achieve? And then, but once that is laid out and there's alignment that, yes, I understand this is what we need to do, then you can have that objective feedback loop that we've been talking about because now it's, you know, did you do acts? Yes. Okay. And we still didn't achieve it. So now it's either the system, potentially the individual, potentially market fit, and we can diagnose that challenge.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. As a matter of fact, it's so awesome. I think that's a great place to end our discussion. Because I think that encapsulates a lot of it. Jim, I am so grateful for your time. I've always loved working with you. I've always been grateful for the opportunity to work with you. And now I'm especially grateful that you can bring some of your wisdom to our audience so thank you so much.
Jim Wagner:
I have really enjoyed it. Always enjoy talking to you, Jeff. You know that. Thanks Jim. Alright. Take care.
Jeff Hunter:
Coaching in the Clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review. To support this podcast please sign up at Talentism.com. There you will find important content and up to date insights about how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening. -
Jeff:
Today, we're speaking with Kerry Van Voris. For over 15 years, Kerry has been completely focused on the world of talent, attracting, placing, and growing people across the technology, financial and healthcare industries. Kerry is currently Chief People Officer at Oscar Health after leadership positions at Amazon, Microsoft, and Bridgewater. We'll talk about inspiring individuals and finding their loyalty to the purpose of an organization using that inspiration as a common thread for different styles of coaching, and the way that focusing on blind spots can be the best approach to increasing effectiveness. Kerry and I have known each other for almost a decade, and I am thrilled to have her join our conversation and share her wisdom. So Kerry, thank you so much for being a part of Coaching in the Clear and welcome to our podcast.
Kerry:
Thanks for having me, Jeff. I'm really happy to be here and having the opportunity to chat with you.
Jeff:
Fantastic. Okay. So let's just start at the beginning. What was your first experience with a coach?
Kerry:
When I think about coaching, I mean, for me it really comes down to sixth grade. You know, I was just a kid growing up and, and somebody, a friend of mine in school who happened to be in seventh grade, said, Hey, you should try out for the basketball team. And I'd never touched a basketball in my life and, you know, I didn't know anything and, and thought it was just kind of a, it would be like one night after school, a week and found myself found myself kind of playing basketball for two and a half hours a day after school. All due to the, the gentleman who was coaching the team and his name was it's, his name is Dave Margraf. And so that was really my first experience with a coach and outside of it being, you know, apparent or anything like that.
And, and so much of what he taught me and how he coached still rings true, actually in my personal and professional life. I mean, one of the, one of the biggest things that I, I realized about him is that he coached each one of us on the team very differently. And he was adept at recognizing what would motivate each one of us and how there were some of us that really responded to encouragement and positive reinforcement. And there were others on the team. Particularly one, one girl who was just an incredible athlete that that responded more to with the coaching. That was, that was really hard and actually was much more negative and much more about everything that she was doing wrong instead of pumping her up and motivating her too with encouragement. And I found that both super interesting and and also really effective.Jeff:
So you bring up a great topic and what I've experienced over the course of doing these podcasts is typically this will come up later, but you just gave a great intro segue into it. So two things, one I want to explore what makes somebody coachable and you have a, you have a great perspective on that because as a leader at Oscar, you're a person who thinks about coaching and how coaching will work with leaders, et cetera. And so I want to talk about that. And then the other thing is in our coaching, at least we're sort of going in and we check for this when we're matching people, but we go in with a very clear goal. What we're trying to do is unleash your potential. And that means we're going to be focusing on trying to get you to find your individual point of excellence or greatness and drive you towards it, which means, you know, to do that, it's really hard.
And you've got to have a certain motivation to want to go down that path. And not everybody does want to go down that path. So we try to sort it out, but a lot of people don't want to go to coaching for that. A lot of people want to go to coaching for something else, for a safe space to explore issues, et cetera. And it sounded like this coach was figuring out, Dave was figuring out how to put together an incredible team where there were different motivations on the team, but ultimately he wanted the team to win and function well together. Am I, am I getting that right? Yeah.Kerry:
That's exactly right. And he had to kind of handle each individual differently in order to get there.
Jeff:
So now let's take that to your, to your current life, to your professional life. When you're working with leadership teams and you're trying to put together this fantastic team, that's gonna achieve incredibly difficult goals. Oscar has done amazing things. You've worked at very distinguished, amazing organizations like Bridgewater and others. So you've actually been a part of teams that have, that have striven for excellence and know that they're going to have to work incredibly well together in order to get there, but are very different people and have different motivations to try to function well together as a team and achieve that goal. How do you, in that thinking like Dave, how do you take a look at each person around that table and think about what they need and what their motivations are.
Kerry:
Yeah. And, and it's, it kind of, there are just certain themes that I look for Jeff and, and the first one, the first one really is across the team. I look to ensure that each individual is aligned to the larger goal. I mean, that's one of the first things and just make sure that each individual believes in the vision of the company, or team or whatever it is, and truly wants to be part of it. I think that's, that's one, one the main thing. And then for each individual, when I think about coaching and what makes sense, and that could be, that could be hiring an external coach that could be individual one-off, you know, sidebar coaching from me, et cetera. The, the first, the, the first thing that individual has to have is just a hunger for improvement. They have to actually want it, like you mentioned, and want to evolve and want to improve.
And then secondly, I think, I think they have to have this raw openness to feedback, because like you mentioned, it's not, it's not, coaching isn't pretty things are gonna come up as you're being coached. Even as you're coaching others where just, just ugliness is going to come up or you're going to hear things that are really hard to hear. You don't want to hear. So someone having the openness to feedback is going to be a really important thing. And then, and then third for an individual, I think there's gotta be an awareness that, that each person has blind spots and they don't have to necessarily know what those blind spots are, because I think that's part of the, the excellent part of coaching is that you get to unearth those blind spots and then figure out what to do about them. But you have to at least have the awareness that we're not, none of us are perfect. And, and that each one of us has blind spots and, and, and coaching is part of the process to really identify those. And then, and then, then figure out what to do about them.Jeff:
Awesome. So I've asked that question now, I think six, six different people, and the answers are similar and you're, I think you're answer encapsulates it particularly well. There's elements of the hunger, the drive for improvement, the desire to get better. And there's the humility of entering that arena and being open to what you're going to discover about yourself. It's more than curiosity. There's a humility to, like, I do have blind spots. I do have problems. I don't have it all the, all the answers and I have to enter that arena sort of understanding that and, and being okay with that.
Kerry:
Yeah, absolutely. Jeff and I think, you know, one of the, one of the things I always go back to is just, you know, the, that whole aspect of the growth mindset, right. That someone I think to, to enter the arena, it's really important for them to have, to know that they're going to grow by identifying the blind spots and working with someone to figure out what to do with them. That there's an opportunity to actually change direction and truly, truly get better. Okay, great. So I love the concept of the growth mindset. Have you ever experienced someone who you didn't think had the growth mindset? Like they seem to be not open, not hungry, not humble. And it was really about them, the context they were in or the place they were in more than like this innate sort of set of beliefs about themselves. Cause I think one of the things about Dr. Dwecks work and, and with growth mindset is there's almost this, at least as far as I understand it, and I could be completely wrong here just to be clear. But but I always sort of said it as like, there's a set of beliefs, right. And beliefs, or at least the way I understand what beliefs are, they're very deeply held. They're not really super accessible to a reflection they're sort of driving your behaviors, but doesn't mean that you actually even know they're there.
Jeff:
So there's this set of beliefs about like the potential and opportunity for growth and, and through those beliefs, then you come to the place of being hungry and humble. I, so that, that may be right, or that may be wrong. I don't know, but the thing I've experienced and I'd love to get your perspective on this, is that those beliefs aren't actually poured in concrete, inside a person. And they're very context dependent that when you get an excellent leader, an excellent manager, an excellent coach, like you were speaking about with Dave, who can create safety so that you feel like you could try to be your best, or you could try something new, then the hunger and humility can evolve out of that safety, as opposed to sort of being a set of beliefs that you're walking into, regardless of what situation you're in. What do you, what have you experienced?
Kerry:
No, and it's so interesting, Jeff. I mean, I, I'm sitting here just, you know, jotting a few things down as they come to me and I literally just wrote down, I was like environment. It has to be safe. And I, I mean, to me, I think you nailed it because the environment does shift and there are some environments for individuals that just aren't, aren't a fit. And either you know, the environment for the individual isn't safe, the individual for some reason has a difficult time just kind of letting down their guard and, and kind of diminishing the ego in order to actually receive the coaching. So you know, I find, I find a couple of things. I mean, either putting them in a different environment that might be safer, where they can fail and feel comfortable failing is one thing. And then the other thing it's sometimes, sometimes actually finding a coach that makes them feel really safe and gets them to a comfortable point during the coaching of even saying, Hey, and if we come out of this and, and realize that the environment or company you're a part of now, isn't the right fit, that's okay, too. And even, so I find, I have found that individuals will, will often if that's part of the coaching will, will open up more so if the coach helps them get to the mental state of, Hey, if, if one of the outcomes of this is that you, you leave the current team or you leave the current company, that's an okay outcome.
Jeff:
Yeah. When we were, to piggyback on that, when, when we were moving from just purely individual coaching to group coaching, especially when a group coaching, like coaching, a lot of executives on the same team, something I had to learn the hard way is that is, I made a lot of mistakes around this, is I'd be coaching a CEO and then four people on the executive team let's say, and I was getting a lot more traction with the CEO than with the four members of the executive team, even though they had all volunteered to be there. And then one day it dawned on me. I might go, of course they don't feel safe because they think I'm a conduit pack to the CEO.
Kerry:
Yeah, yeah. Your work with the CEO. Sure.
Jeff:
Right. Because of course the power, the power dynamic, the hierarchy that exists in their world exists in our relationship too. And so it drove me to this very simple but important set of principles that I bring when I'm going into those situations. And I'll first address it with the CEO and then I'll address it with everybody else individually. When I'm coaching you, I'm just coaching you. I'm not coaching you to get you someplace for someone else. I'm only coaching you to get you to the best place for you. And that might mean that we come to a point where I'm like, yeah, this isn't a good CEO for you. And this isn't a good place for you. There's a better place for you and don't hire me or anybody at Talentism who does this work if you're not going to be okay with that conversation, because if you're not going to be okay with that, this is going to go really badly cause I can't build the trust I need to actually just create that, that safety so that we can really do the work well one-on-one. Does that, does that make sense to you?
Kerry:
Yeah. It really resonates Jeff it's it's, it's that it's that trust. It has to be there in order for in order for individuals and teams to open up and, and help help move the process forward. And then, you know, just general comfort with, with the outcome, maybe looking a little bit different than you thought it might be when entering the coaching relationship.
Jeff:
Yeah. And I think it's, I would imagine in your role, that you experience this as a sort of organizational and or enterprise coach, because part of the role of the chief people officer is the, to be the coach, to the team and, and to sort of be there for each individual and build that trust while also representing the goals of the overall organization. I've always been fascinated with people who could do that well. They could be there for the organization, they're there to achieve, as you said, the goals or vision of the organization, but they don't put, they don't put that above building the trust of the relationship with the individual executive. You are there trying to help unleash their greatness. And so how do you, how do you deal with that tension? How do you think through that?
Kerry:
Yeah, and it is very interesting because as, as a chief people officer, you know, an HR sometimes gets, gets a bit of a bad rap, right. Because I think, you know, one of the, one of the views about HR is kind of, you know, that, that you, you hold a lot of the, the company kind of people, people secrets and, and are able to kind of just conduct things in the background. And, and I actually look at the position completely differently. Yes, I, I, you know, when I'm, when I'm with a corporation and you know, for right now with Oscar, yes, I, I work for the company and, and the company's, the company's goals and best interests are, are crucial to my job. And I think about that all the time. And then I also, I mean, I'm the voice of our employees and our leaders and I, I deeply care about I deeply care about them as a group and I care about, I care about our people as individuals. So when I think about be it, my peers, or even, even our CEO for that matter, I it's, it's really important to me that they know and understand that I, I do have their best interests at heart. And when I say best interests, it's that they are thriving and having the most impact that they are able to have at the company and, and just, and just happy and wanting to be there. And, and that, that in and of itself, I think when, as people know that that truly is what I, what I want and care about it, it helps to, it helps to just make it a much more straight forward conversation about where they're going or, or, or the kind of impact that they want and are able to have at the company.
Jeff:
We talk a lot about the ability to make sense of what's happening around you. And a little bit later, I want to talk about this concept of making sense of things and connecting it to this concept of safety. But, but what we believe is that if you can't make sense of things around you, you are not productive. And then companies, you know, when they, when they hire someone they're saying, Hey, listen, we'll, we'll compensate you, we'll invest in, you, we'll do these things. And in return, you're going to do great work. And that's the, that's the contract, that's the agreement we have. And then sometimes people do great work. Sometimes they do incredible work, and sometimes they don't. And when you dig into that, a lot of times it's because the thing you thought you were investing in and saying, okay, come to our business and bring that special talent you have to help us achieve our goals, isn't happening in, in that place in your company, because they can't, the employee can't make sense of what's going on - culture, manager, there's something going on where it's really confusing them and confused people are not productive people. And so, so I always, you know, when CEOs will, will talk to me and they'll say, how could you have told my CFO, talking to him that, like, I'm not the right CEO for him. I'm like, look, I'm trying to help this. Everybody. When you, when you've got a confused person and you refuse to acknowledge that and work productively through that, then you're just paying a lot of money to make somebody miserable. And it's a terrible thing to do. It's terrible thing for you. It's a terrible thing for them. Let's work hard to see if we can work on that and resolve it.
But if we can't, trying to ignore it is a terrible, is the worst option you have. And so I don't think in when a chief people officers I work with who are extraordinary in their jobs, they're doing what you're talking about. They can hold both the nature of like what's best for the company and what's best for the individual together. Cause they understand when somebody is in their home and they're doing their best work, they're helping the company. And when they aren't doing their best work and that's not because the manager has done something bad, there's always those cases, of course, but it's just like not a fit. That ignoring that is actually to everybody's detriment, not to, everybody's not to everybody's benefit.
Kerry:
Right. And, and, and horribly painful as you explore it. And as you mentioned, Jeff, really detrimental to the business and, and, and oftentimes I think it, it creates just a lingering effect on the individual that, that makes it, even as they move on, if that ends up being the right decision it just, it lingers with them for awhile. And so getting, you know, not ignoring it is is, is always the right thing.
Jeff:
Yeah. When I, when I started coaching I used to tell people, I used to tell executives, they'd say, well, give me the secret. Like, what's the one thing. And I'd say, well, the one thing, like, if you could just accept who you are and what you are like, you could be way more successful than you are. And they always told me, Oh, that's such a foo foo answer. And I'm like, yeah, you'll get it eventually. You'll find your way there, we'll work through it. Now I always say, well, the first thing is accept what you are, second is like, get over your conflict avoidance problem, because your conflict avoidance problem always leads to bad outcomes. And the number of conversations that need to be held that aren't held because the executive is like, Oh, I don't like I could make them mad and then they're gonna leave. And what do I do without them? This is a terrible way to run a business. Like we got to work through this.
Kerry:
Yeah. Never. And never, you said something interesting. It's like that, that fear of, I think for executives or managers or that prevents them from helping an individual make the right decision, potentially move to another team, go to another company. You know, part of my role is I never want any of my leaders to to make a decision based on fear or feeling like they're backed into a corner. And so I, you know, that's something at least that, that I always keep top of mind. So, so leaders and managers can, can help, help get to the right decision and in a place of just balance and being proactive instead of super reactive.
Jeff:
Yeah. I love that. So let's go back to something you said earlier, because I think there's some threads here that are interesting and sort of start weaving together. You had said, Hey, listen, I'm going to start from a place with my leaders of first of all, making sure they're aligned to the larger goal. They believe in the vision. They believe in what we're trying to do. And then we talked about what makes somebody coachable and we agreed it was this combination of hunger and humility. What do you do when you've got an executive or group of executives on a team who truly believe in the goal, but actually will accept no personal responsibility for their own growth, progress or contribution to what's happening in the organization.
Kerry:
It's really hard, Jeff. It is really, really hard. Because you, you ultimately feel like you have a lot of the right ingredients in someone. And usually the, and usually I find these individuals are extraordinarily capable. They're very good at their, they're very good at their jobs. And so you know, it's, it's hard. And I think, I mean, one of the things is certainly one, you can kind of wear them down with constant constant feedback, at least from me or conversation. I oftentimes will pull in people that they trust and maybe even find more credible. I think that's one of the things when, when someone isn't isn't hungry for the improvement or, or humble you know, sometimes they don't, they don't want to hear from me. But they might trust someone or, or find someone else in the organization more credible. And that's where a lot of times there can be inroads and, and finding, finding someone else's voice that's gonna, that, that is going to be heard better from an individual like that.
Jeff:
I think that's an incredibly fantastic answer. And I, I just want to call this out to anybody who's listening, because it took me years to learn what you just said, which is as a coach when I'm, when I'm working with someone and I'm saying, okay, once we get to a certain point, I'm going to be, I'm going to be by your side as we work towards your goals. I'm not just showing up every once in a while and trying to help you make sense of things. I'm going to care deeply, fundamentally passionately about where you're going and what you're trying to achieve. And there'll be times where we've identified a problem. And I know you're just not going to listen to me and we don't have time to figure out why you're not listening to me. We got to get through to it. And so who else can we bring to the table?
Who's going to have you go, Oh, geez. I hadn't thought of it that way. And I, and I talk about this all the time. My wife says yeah, if I ever really want you to get what I'm saying, I just have to like, have your mom say it to you or something like that. There's somebody else who's got to tell you. And, and by the way, since she listens to this podcast, I'm trying to get better, honey. But but listen, we all have different voices who we'll listen to at different times. And so often it's the role of a coach or the role of a leader inside an organization to figure out like, who, who are you going to listen to? It's not just that insight that Dave had in sixth grade with you, like different people are gonna have different motivations are gonna, they're also gonna listen to different voices.
And so I think that's a really fabulous insight that people should take away should take away from that. So thank you for sharing that. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about this concept of safety, because I think it's a really, I mean, psychological safety is sort of the core in the corporate lexicon. I think hit about four years ago with Google's work and really started to take flight. But now it's a frequent topic of conversation. And I find that different people mean different things by safety. Some people mean, when creating psychological safety or a safe environment, they're really talking about people not ever feeling under threat feeling under, and by threat I don't, we use that word to mean, like, I feel triggered. I feel like you don't respect me. You don't like me. There's something in that, that I'm feeling emotionally disturbed or agitated based on an interaction I'm having, or a perception about the interaction we're having.
So some people say, Hey, listen, a place isn't safe if, if people are ever experiencing that sort of disorientation or discord, and then some people say, no, it's actually like human beings, even when they love each other and support each other and trust each other, get into conflict, it happens. And so really psychological safety is about feeling safe and raising those issues and being able to productively work through them. How do you think about it is as a people leader? How do you think about that topic and how do you implement that in your workplaces?Kerry:
Yeah, and I think it's one of the reasons that um, really understanding as much as you possibly can, the kind of culture you're entering into when you join a company is really, really important. And there are, there are some companies that, that value this discord or disagreement or, or, or conflict more than others. And I think depending on how, how an individual is wired, that that works really well for some and for others it doesn't. So knowing, knowing the, the, the culture you're opting into when you, when you, when you work, start, start with the company is really, is really important. And then and, and I have worked as, you know, Jeff and I have opted in for those kinds of cultures, because I think there is such high value in, in being able to, to, to disagree, to receive difficult feedback and to, and to work through work through conflict.
It's not easy. These cultures and companies are, are not, not easy places, but I, I am a believer that they, they bring the most out of people. And, and I, and I, even though these cultures are often intense and uncomfortable and hard, I actually think that they're safer. Because in most cases they're transparent, they're honest kinds of cultures, and those are the values that you see from people. One of the underlying things that I think is so critical to having a culture be safe is just is just the intention of individuals and that are operating in the, in the culture and the values. I think they can't be, they can't be manipulative. And I think if you, you know, one of the things that I thought about with, you know, especially having been at Bridgewater is it with the principals is thinking, you know, it's like really, really strong set of guidance that that if you manipulate it, it can just really be received in a, just in a way that, that doesn't work and is wrong. And it's kind of like, you know, handing a 13 year old the keys to a Ferrari and saying like, now this is going to be a really powerful car, but I want you to, I want you to drive it really slowly and, and not like whip it around the street. It's just, it's really difficult. So people have to be, you know, really thoughtful about how, how they're operating within the culture. And I think that that helps to create a safe environment.Jeff:
I, I think that's, well, first of all, you and I met at Bridgewater and worked together at Bridgewater. So we, we share that experience. And I not only from my work prior to Bridgewater, at Bridgewater, but also as an entrepreneur and starting my own companies, try to bring a culture or try to represent a culture and help build a culture where people can unleash their potential and where they can do that not by thinking of safety in terms of, I don't ever want to be uncomfortable, but thinking of safety more in terms of like, I can make sense of what's going on and I can learn really well. And of course not everybody wants to do that. Right. And that's fine. As you, as we've talked about, there are, there are people who don't understand the value of being a humble, humble, and hungry.
They don't understand the value of that because they've never felt like they were in a place that really rewarded that, maybe paid lip service to it but if you ever said, Hey, listen, I'd like some negative feedback. They'd instead get a, like a lot of terrible stuff that made no sense to them. And so, so that always has made sense to me, but one of the things that I've really grown to appreciate over the last five years, and, and I, frankly, I, I credit my kids with this. I have grown children who are very active in different communities and, and they've really taught me a lot about just privilege and blind spots. And they've taught me a lot about like, Hey, listen, when you're a big white guy, you don't even know a lot. You don't understand what's going on with other people.
And when we take you and put you in a position of power and you have those blind spots and you aren't every day trying to uncover them and make it better you're, you've got a lot of problems and you could be a risk to others. And when, when they first started communicating that to me, of course, you're, you know, you have that classic sort of father reaction of like kids, what do they know? Right. But then as real, cause I of course love them and I was listening to them. I'm like, wow, this is really profound. And it's impacting me fundamentally. And I, I don't think that people, I love your Ferrari analogy because transparency and truth in giving open and honest feedback and engaging in those conversations is such a powerful tool. But in the hands of somebody who's fundamentally blind to their privilege, to their position of power, et cetera, those tools can often be used to the detriment, not only of the company that we all care about, but also that individual. And so how do you, when, cause you so eloquently answered earlier about the need for humility and for hunger and especially around blind spots, how do you work with leadership to help them understand the blind spots they're bringing into the room when they're thinking about concepts or topics like safety.Kerry:
I mean, Jeff, and especially, especially now because you, you mentioned it, it's like not everyone is aware of the position of privilege that they may walk into the room with. And, and that's something, especially recently, as we've been working through just unconscious biases of, of, of leadership and managers and, you know, individuals across the board and a company needs help. And when I say a company needs help, it's, it's, it's really pulling in, I have found, you know, external experts to truly help identify that in individuals, across teams by utilizing tools, by utilizing, you know, impactful trainings. We recently went through one, you know, my team, and then we've, we've put it out across Oscar of, you know, an unconscious bias training where you walk through exercises that, that you get to learn about yourself and how you, you do have unconscious bias. And, and then it's working through what, what to do about it. And, and especially now I feel like we're at a different point in, in companies and corporations where at least leaders are, are open to saying, Hey, I I'm ready to, I'm ready to be open about the position of privilege that I come to the table with, and I'm ready to receive feedback and I want to change, because it's so important to the health of the company and the health of, of individuals on my team.
Jeff:
Yeah. To connect it back to this concept that we've been talking about. I think what this moment in time is finally starting to drive is a basic, fundamental openness for people who've had this position of privilege to start to think about hunger and humility in themselves to challenge themselves on their most basic beliefs. And, and again, those beliefs are, they're not conscious. They, you said it, you know, it's unconscious, but that doesn't mean they're not accessible. And through the work of coaching is often so difficult because, because you said it, you know, coaching is difficult. It's so difficult because at least in the way we do it, we talk a lot about, we're going to take a look at what you did and we're going to help you figure out why you did it. And when we help you figure out why you did it, we may end up in a really uncomfortable spot because it may be that you actually are blind to how privilege is being used, not to help the organization, not to help the individuals within the organization, but just to protect yourself. And, and when that happens, you end up with not only people who don't build a sense of trust in their leadership, but also an organization that really can't achieve its big goals, because there's just a lot of confusion and the confusion, you know, zaps the productivity of the organization.
Kerry:
Yeah. And it's really, really painful for a person to hear about that. Right. And that but if they're open to it and, and open to working through the pain it can you know, it can, even less to the company. I think it can be, it can be pretty life-changing in the individual.
Jeff:
Yeah. I agree. One of the things I love about my work about our work and by our, I don't just mean Talentism, I mean, like the work you and I share of helping build these extraordinary teams is the chance to watch people finally become open to and expose to these concepts and start to learn about themselves and unleash their potential. It's an incredibly cool thing to participate in.
Kerry:
Yeah. It, it's, it's really, really fun. I think that was one of the things that originally attracted me, you know, toward continuing a career in recruiting is just that you're, you, you, you have, you don't just hire people in, but then you get to work with them as managers in building out their teams and, and, and you get to see what they do. And and that to me has always been such a fulfilling part of being in the space that you and I are in. And yeah, you, you get to see what these incredible people that you've helped to, to hire what, what they, what they go on to do for the company.
Jeff:
Yeah. And I'd like to to close out our, our time together with a admission, which is you and I met a little over nine years ago. I remember the day we met. I was interviewing at Bridgewater. You were one of the senior recruiters who was working on my position. And it was you and several other people who we, we mutually know I met for the first time. And I came out of that room more so than meeting the other big names that I was being recruited by. I came out of that room and made a decision I wanted to join Bridgewater because of just how awesome you were. So nine years later, I wanted to thank you for that. And and share that reflection publicly that it's been a privilege and an honor to, to know you over these last nine years.
Kerry:
Aw thanks, Jeff. That means a lot. I remember that day too. And you were such a critical hire into Bridgewater at that time, especially. And and then obviously just, just became such a mentor to me. So and, and, you know, have, have continued to help me along my path. So very, very grateful.
Jeff:
Thank you. Okay. with that, we're going to end and Kerry, once again, so grateful, it was wonderful to speak with you. Thank you for taking the time to be on our podcast.
Kerry:
Thanks so much for having me, Jeff.
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Neil Parikh:
Truthfully, it's a little bit hard to accept because as a perfectionist, I want to be right or successful a hundred percent of the time, but you know, you're, it's an interesting point to think about you have, if you don't engage in the values, you never learn. You never get better. And so you can never realize your vision unless you're continuously doing that.
Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth, personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market-leading big change businesses.
Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the sense-maker, where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content and enable you to unleash your potential. Learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today we're talking with Neil Peric, the co-founder, and chief strategy officer of Casper. Casper has been an amazing story of growth and success, but it's also had its struggles along the way. Neil has been there leading since day one. He and I met about three and a half years ago, and it's been a true honor to watch him and his co-founders and the team of Casper take the dream of a better-rested world and make it a reality. Through our time together Neil has consistently demonstrated a huge vision and a desire to make a big impact on the world. We're going to talk about accepting shortcomings and leaning into strengths, catching frustrations at the root of the logical fallacy, the way safety plays into acceptance, and discovering capabilities that the perfectionist in us wants to hide. Neil, thank you so much for joining and welcome to the conversation.
Neil Parikh:Thanks for having me, Jeff. It's an honor to be here and an honor to work with you.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, thank you, sir. So, Neil, you have helped build and grow one of the preeminent sleep brands. You've worked with me and partnered with Talentism. So, you know our approach and thinking, and of course, you've done your own coaching over time as a successful executive and investor. You and I have often spoken about how I think you have a significant talent for coaching in your own right, and so that all leads me to ask, how do you think about the value and importance of coaching?
Neil Parikh:
Thanks for the introduction, Jeff. So coaching is a, it's a kind of a funny thing because to your point earlier, it can be so many different things, right? From giving advice to helping people understand something. What I've always loved about the model that we've been working on and that you've brought us into is that to me traditionally, coaching was about behavior change. And in my life before this, it was you're doing something wrong. You need to get better at it and work on this. And the problem is that when you're in a fast-paced environment, you know, you're reordering every six months, you have new problems every three months. I used to joke when people said, hey what's, you know, what's our year-long plan. I said I don't even know what's going to happen next month, let alone six months or twelve months from now.
And so when you actually apply a different lens to it and think about, how do we get people to be unconfused? And secondly, how do we think about, how do we design systems to enable success rather than just people? Because people are kind of hard to change. It takes a really long time, a lot of effort, and maybe, I've always believed, maybe you can get five or 10 degrees off of center, but you know, it's very hard to radically change people in a short amount of time. And so it kind of goes back down to, for me, coaching has been a space first and foremost for self-reflection and understanding to have somebody to bounce ideas off of, or to be that person for people to help them work through a framework, to get unconfused, to take something that seems like it's creating chaos in their world and to try to make sense in order of it through a systematic process. So that's a repeatable thing. And so that both for me, so that I could, you know, be successful in whatever it is that I wanted to do. And for the people that I've worked with as an investor mentor do the same.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, so, I'm glad you brought up the concept of behavior change. First of all, just using one of our principles and starting with me, I have to be open and honest with the audience that I have a huge, what we call autonomy trigger and that leads me to be a contrarian about most things. So if everybody's saying, Hey, it's all about behavior change. My mind habitually really goes to, it must not be, it must be about something else, but even within the context of that self-awareness, the thing that sort of struck me about growing up and, you know, being a founder of fast-growth companies, venture-backed companies, working with very fast-growth companies. I started my career at a place called Connor peripherals, which at that time was the fastest-growing company in history. And you know, in my formative years being 21, 22 being a manager inside an organization that was achieving billion-dollar $2 billion marks year after year, just growing at an exponential rate and listening to the CEO say the most important thing about a five-year plan is how you rewrite it every three months.
And so really growing up inside of that and realizing that human beings, as you were saying are just so difficult to change, right? And not, I think this is an important distinction and I think it's consistent with what you were saying, actually change isn't that hard. Attention is really hard. And so like I, if I say I want to change my diet, I can change my diet. I just have to put all of my attention on it in a fast-growth environment. You don't have that attention. The attention is going through to the context shifts, rapid changes in the environment, and trying to make rapid decisions with limited data, stay one step ahead of the competition or funding, or whatever it is. And you just don't have the attention to allocate to behavior change. So the question is going to be, how are you going to get successful?
How are you going to unleash your potential and achieve your goals when you just don't have that attention available? Then I think it really is through the concept of self-awareness, knowing yourself, and then designing for that, you know, and I've seen you, who've been especially good at the South awareness piece of that, which is, I think is incredibly difficult for people. We, human beings are not wired for self- awareness, it's a habit that has to be developed. Some people are lucky they developed very early in life. Some people have to develop it through struggle over long periods of time, but it doesn't come naturally. The mechanics of our consciousness is very much about trying to make sense of the world by blaming others and believing we've got the answer and nobody else, you know, anybody who doesn't see it is a dummy and all those kinds of things.
So to put ourselves at the center of any confusion narrative and say, wow, this is probably about me. It's probably about the insufficiency about something in my mental model. What I don't understand and have that self-awareness to work through and say, I need to design right now for success. And I also need to get better over time within the container of the safety that success will create. Then I think it gives you the opportunity of behavior changes, an outcome of good design. Not as the goal of coaching itself. And I've seen you engage really well in that. So I think it's an excellent point.Neil Parikh:
Yeah. I appreciate that. I think it's a good point and also, traditional coaching never really thinks about the system design, right? I know we've talked about this before. To me, it's a blend of maybe not management consulting, but really the point of view of you have to have the container along with the capacity if you want to change. So agreed. And I think that that's an important part to be aware of as you think about going down the journey, is that it's not just about the singular idea that I'm going to change. You have to really set up the circumstances for that as well.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. Well, I think one of the interesting, again, when you're in the midst of not having your goal be behavior change, but the goal being, building a great company or being great at your work or finding your individual path excellence, whatever that may be, then change is a result of doing things the right way. It's not the goal. It's sort of a measure. It's not a goal. And I think this is one of the things that I struggled with. You know, I didn't, I was an entrepreneur by practice. I wasn't a coach by practice and over the last seven years spending my life coaching or a good portion of my life coaching, I've had to learn a lot cause I was blind to a lot of things.
I didn't know a lot of things, but one thing that always struck me was a sort of internal contradiction in the classic coaching models I understood to the degree. I do understand them. I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing, but the contradiction was sort of like the goal is behavior change. But in order to go through that, you really at the very beginning are failing to engage on one of the most fundamental things about a deep, fundamental behavior change, which is self-acceptance. In other words, like I think psychologically what happens is that we set this stuff up in our mind where we're like, oh, I'm really bad at this. Or you know, there's a negative impression of this thing. Or I don't like this about myself and it sets it up as something that's painful in your mind. And one thing we know about basic biological cognition is, your mind doesn't like painful things in it, it likes pleasurable things. So you set this up as this really painful thing, like, oh, I'm really, really bad at this. And then your mind is actually not seeking to engage it well in the unconscious, it's like seeking to avoid it. And so I just, it always struck me as like, if I could, I remember the first big talk I ever gave as a coach. And I was talking to all these executives and they said, well, what's the one big thing, you know, the big secret, because everybody wants the one big secret. There is no one big secret, but if I was to wish for any one thing for you, it would be self-acceptance. And they all, of course, all thought that was a terrible answer because I don't know, I kept using the F word or something, but like, they were just like, this is, no, no, you don't get it. I'm like, you don't understand the fact that you can't accept what you're like prevents you from change. And because it prevents you from change, it prevents you from adapting and because it prevents you from adapting, it means you're always in structural fragility. You're always waiting for a competitor to come along who, through lock or discipline or practice or whatever, is just going to be better at that thing than you are. So the only way you stay at the head of that is self-acceptance as a key part of that change.
Neil Parikh:Well, I was just going to set it to double click on that though. There's also this beautiful thing about self-acceptance because you know, a lot of the people that are coming to want to get coaching have been probably extremely successful at something in their life, right? You're usually, you're an entrepreneur or an executive you've made it. And so I think the beauty of self-acceptance is that there's also this ability to accept the amazing parts about you and how to unleash the potential and lean into the things that you do really well. And then also accept the things that you don't do well so that you know where to focus your energy. And, you know, we've talked a lot about unleashing the potential of people. And so I think that there's something actually really interesting on both sides about accepting the things that you're not good at as well as, you know, leaning into things you are.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I love that. I think I brought up in one of the prior podcasts, I was talking about the, what they call the American Idol effect. So my wife is a singer and so we used to watch American idol. And so there's a, there's always like, there's one of three things that are going on in American Idol. There's a singer who is terrible and thinks they’re great. There's a singer who thinks they're great and they are great, and there's a singer who thinks they're terrible and they're great, right? And so the people think they're terrible and they are terrible don't show up. Because they know they're terrible. So you've got this group that is, of course, they get up there like, hey, I'm a really good singer. And then they sing something and it feels like cat scratching glass, but then you're like, Oof that’s terrible.
But the things that are always so amazing is how many people show up saying, I feel compelled to sing, but I'm really bad at it. And they're good at it and that was one of the, you know, I'd spend time within organizations that had more of a tradition of your superego involved in all your strengths and you know what your strengths are and you're clear on that. The problem is you won't deal with your weaknesses and that struck me as wrong. My work has always been, human beings are sort of evenly confused like they’ve got these incredible strengths they don't know about, they've got these incredible weaknesses they won't face, it's all sort of a confusion battery and you can't go in assuming like the weakness is the thing that you gotta go after. You have to more take a picture of like, how does the pattern of confusion emerge?
Because when people, you know, this thing we've worked on over time, this big four model, in order to populate that and get the evidence to sort of figure things out, you have to have evidence of when you do things well. And what circumstances are you in when you're doing that well, and people don't pay attention to that stuff. All the diagnostic procedures are against the negative, right? The bad outcomes and the bad outcomes can provide a lot of really good, a lot of really good insights into what we're like, what context, etcetera. So I'm a big fan of spending time when things don't go well to figure out what's behind it, but it's absolutely just powerful to spend, you know when things do go well to spend time there and figure that out because it's so easy for us to dismiss that. There's this thing about as we gain mastery, that again, another weird facet of cognition, as we gain mastery, we tend to undervalue our own excellence.
And I see it all the time. It's like somebody who's really good at something, but it's just so obvious to them. It just is so apparent to them that this thing is true, that, you know, this would be the way you would paint, or this is the way you would act or where you know, where you're like it's so obvious it's not valuable. So I'm not going to pay attention to it because of course, everybody knows how to do that. And then you'll have these experiences where you'll do something or have some insight or say something to somebody, and everybody will be like, whoa, where the hell did that come from? And in that moment, the person is just as confused by the positive feedback as most people would be about negative feedback. They're like, what the hell do you mean?
Where did that come from? That's just so obvious. So you just can't depend on human beings to have clarity about what they're like, you just can't. And that's the problem to tackle. It's not like, Oh, you're, you know you're bad at communication. So let's go fix that. Maybe you are bad at communication. Maybe you aren't, maybe you're bad at communication because in certain contexts you don't feel comfortable, so let's try to address that. Not like, here are three tips for, you know, faking your way through a conversation. Now, of course, everybody's got their own impressions and ideas about this, but that's sort of at the root of what I was realizing is as we were developing our stuff and hopefully bringing it to incredible entrepreneurs like yourself.
Neil Parikh:
Agreed. I think a corollary to something you were talking about is also that when you're really good at something, I think it's really hard to sometimes understand that other people might not be good at that. Yeah. Because we're living in our own world. I've seen this because I've spent a lot of time just thinking about the way people think and act, and, you know, being coached by you and you sometimes forget, Oh, wait, my worldview, because it's so Neil centric and yours is so Jeff centric, you can very easily forget that other people might perceive the exact same situation completely differently because of, you know, where they're coming from or their strengths or weaknesses. And so it also makes a fascinating set up for coaching because you're coaching people that are going to go through conversations on a daily basis with other people, and in some ways, you're only getting one side of the story, but you've got to coach the person to be able to try to understand the whole situation, which is challenging.Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I see this all the time. And it's so interesting you bring this up. We all have this. One of my favorite things ever is David Foster Wallace’s This is Water. His speech at Kenyon College. And while he was making a point about the necessity of education and how it opens our minds, he is in fact talking, he has this thing where you're in traffic and the guy cuts in front of you and you start going to road rage, and you're screaming at him. And in that moment, how you're not stopping to ask yourself, what is their experience? Let's say they were on the way to the hospital to, you know, to see somebody who was important to them. And they wanted to say their last goodbyes, would you give them a pass for cutting you off then? And most people would say, Oh yeah, that case, of course, but that's not what we experience.
Right? What we experience is, Oh, that guy just put me at risk or he's making me late or whatever. And so, you know, you son of a bitch, and I think it's just this thing about how we're all self-involved in our own world and getting back to this point we were talking about before, about self-awareness, how difficult that is, because our mind is really scanning the environment all the time for risk to us. And it's also scanning for opportunity for us, and to get out of that and to be in the moment of above we, as opposed to me, and to be thinking about what am I missing about, you know, how I'm interacting with others. Or about how I actually feel or what my actual motivations are or how, what I could do to help this person and how that might be helpful to me, all those things, those are acts that fall outside of our sort of basic biological wiring and require help to get there.
We don't naturally fall into it. We all need help to become better in any particular moment or overtime to discover that thing in ourselves, that we can become better. And the absence of that, all these things that you and I are talking about happening, we don't see what we're good at or bad at. We don't see where opportunities are. We think that things are obvious. And so therefore we dismiss ourselves or we dismiss others because they don't see it. It's all this, again, confusion in our minds that leads us to be less than we can be. And I've always loved coaching leaders who are open to that, right? Who are open to that, like, okay, there has to be a level of self-awareness and self skepticism here for me being able to build the thing I want to build. Because my mind is messing with me all the time and that's job one, today and every day is I got to deal with that effectively.
Neil Parikh:So I have a question for you. And I've been, this came up as you were just speaking now because part of what I was thinking about is that, you know, that coaching sometimes people think you know, I'm just going to do four or five sessions, learn it all, and then get right to the rest of my life. I've learned the frameworks and I'm good. And I found it actually to be more and more helpful over time to engage in continually thinking about this. But is there a point at which some people just aren't confused anymore, you think? Or that they're so attuned to this? Or how does the progress of self-development as you go through the model work?
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah, It’s an awesome question. So I think you can get to a point where you're not confused, but if you get to that point, then you're not getting better. So you can't have both. And so what I mean by that is, I think, and I wrote a short piece about this last week. There's like two dimensions to this question for me. And I was a philosophy major in college, and that was a real trip. But you know, you end up saying, all right, all these impressive people over time have had all these fundamental and insightful questions. What are my questions? And for me, the question was like, do I want to get better or not? And then how am I going to measure what better looks like? And so, you know, for me, that was the nature of a life well-lived.
If I could ask myself those questions and answer them, well, then I was probably doing okay. And I said, yeah, I do want to get better. I want it. Like, I hope the best I can ever be is on the last day here on earth, that's the best I wanna be, like every day, I'm trying to get a little better. And then I'm going to measure myself against what is possible, not against what has happened because what is possible is almost an infinite set. And what has happened is a finite set and it's usually protecting us, right? But if I was to just step back from those two questions and not to judge anybody, I would say, if someone says, I don't want to get better either because I don't know that opportunity exists or I've thought about it. I'm really super comfortable right here right now.
And I want to measure myself against what has been now, you know, what is in the future, then I think you can probably design your world so that you were never confused, right? Because nothing is ever happening that isn't what you expect, right? Like you live in a very contained world. You get up every morning at a certain time, you eat a certain breakfast. Everything's sort of going as you expect. And that's great. But if you do that, there's a thing you have to pay. There's a penalty you pay for that decision or that blindness, which is, you're never getting better. Confusion is required to improve because you have to see that what you believe about the world is not accurate or complete or useful and that's where confusion flows from. And so you have to be able to keep experiencing new things and being like, wow, I was wrong about that.
Oh, I missed that. Or I am not good at that. Or I am good at this. These are all things that, where we have beliefs about ourselves, about the world and the connection between those two things, that are not, they're not productive, right? And so that's awesome, confusion is a signal that we've got something to learn. And so I do believe you can create a life that is where you get out of confusion, but then that's a work. That's a life where you're not growing and learning. And of course, that's a very fragile life because you lose all the ability to adapt and so then, you know, if unexpected shit happens, you're probably really in a bad place with regards to it. But sure, I think you can, you can live a life of no confusion.Neil Parikh:
So then if you're thinking about the people that you've seen that are, you know, very successful what percentage of their, maybe this is a trick question, but you know, I'm trying to think about if I were to build a grid, should I be in a high confusion, but also high ability to get out of confusion state or, you know, I guess you can't be in confusion all the time either. And so when you think about like, what's a place, you know, where you can deal with enough of it, like where should we be targeting?
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. It's not really a percentage cause everybody's going to be, you know, different, not just in their beliefs about this, but also in what their brain can handle and all kinds of other things, the circumstances they're in. You know, as an example, I think there's a large portion of the population that every day has to spend significant attention to elements of survival, to housing and food security and do, you know, communal security and all the things that we're seeing people talk about now are really about like, there's a group of people and it's a large group that has to take every day and apply attention to trying to figure out how to navigate a world that a guy like me can take for granted. And so I get to apply my attention to other things. And so I get to grow and learn faster and discover my potential faster because I can allocate my attention to those things.
So I don't want to give a blanket answer here because the playing field is not level, and not everybody gets to play in a way that they can allocate a ton of their attention to turning confusion into clarity. Because that's really what you're trying to do is take these confusion signals and turn them into productive learning in the form not of coming up with a final answer, but in the form of coming up with a useful next step in your experiment of discovery, right? And so I think as a general rule for those of us who are fortunate enough and privileged enough to have the opportunity to think of these things and engage in these things, I think if the day goes exactly as you expected, you probably failed. And if the day feels completely overwhelming, you probably failed.
Where you want to be is more in that flow dynamic of what is coming at you can be productively engaged with. In a way sort of sounds like this. That's interesting, I expected A and I got B, I wonder why that is, and wonder what I'm missing and now how am I going to go test that and get better? Like, that's a mental process that you want to go through when you get to confusion, right? A really productive self skeptical sort of engagement. Well, you only have a certain number of those you can give yourself. And after a period of time, your brain's like, yeah, I'm on full meltdown, this is not going to work anymore. I'm in full protection mode. I just want to get in the fetal position and go to bed. So if you hit that point, you can't turn your confusion into learning.And in fact, you run the real risk that your confusion is going to turn into certainty, right? It's going to harden into the, I can't deal with this stuff anymore. And so I'm just becoming close-minded, but if you don't have every day something that sort of gives you the opportunities say, huh, that's interesting. I'm surprised by that. Or I'm curious about that or I expected one thing and got another, then you're probably not pushing yourself well. There was this one, there was this very early in my career I had the great, good fortune, this was the early eighties, they had the great, good fortune to listen to a guy named Bob Graham, who is one of the, you know, originators of the integrated circuit. Everything we're doing right here right now is partly because Bob Graham worked with the right group of people to develop entirely new technologies.
And Bob Graham was talking about how to make silicon chips, the things that drive our world now. And he was saying, you know, the amazing thing we found out is that if you're ever making silicon chips and they make a whole bunch of them on a single wafer, if that wafer goes through, we make the chips and it gets tested and there's a hundred percent throughput. In other words, every chip on that thing works, that we have failed. And I remember hearing that at the time and thinking that makes no sense. Of course, you'd want every chip on the wafer to work. Of course, you'd want that perfection. And his point was our goal is to stress test the tolerances of these chips through our designs every day. And you need to get a certain failure rate to know that you're at that limit.
Too much failure and you know that you've designed beyond the tolerance, you know, that these chips are actually not capable of working just as a design element, too few errors, too few failures and you actually haven't pushed far enough against the physics and against the design. And so that stuck with me, you know, that was 1982. I heard that and I remember being in that room and hearing that, because it just blew my mind that your life is about being in that range, right? It's like, if you're not getting any failures, you're not pushing the tolerances hard enough. If you're getting too many failures you're pushing the tolerances too hard. And so you're trying, each of us is trying to find our place inside of that bounded region.Neil Parikh:
I love that framework. It's hard, truthfully, it's a little bit hard to accept because as a perfectionist, I want to be right or successful a hundred percent of the time, but you know, you're, it's an interesting point to think about. You have, if you don't engage in the failures, you never learn. You never get better. And so you can never realize your vision unless you're continuously doing that.
Jeff Hunter:
Right. Well also you don't know who you are and you don't know what you're capable of. This is, I have seen so many people. One of the joys of my work is I have seen so many people discover things, capabilities in themselves that they didn't know existed. And the perfectionist never finds those. And I'm speaking as a perfectionist and somebody who has failed to take risks and do things because I couldn't find my path to perfect. And in that, you never find out truly who you are. And to me, that's the amazing thing about being a human being is we get to design a life where we can actually figure out what we're capable of and who we are. And the people who are given to perfection are people who are like, I'm only going to try it.
If I know I can get it now, if I can nail it now, which is great. I mean, it's incredible. It's important to have high standards, all paths to excellence lead through high standards. But if you don't try stuff, then you don't discover, you know, the thing that is hidden from you but is actually within you. And so there's so much you have to do, my father in law, I've been married a long time, and my father in law, who is a man I hold him incredibly high estime, and he's an aeronautical engineer. And he has planes from the Smithsonian. He's this amazing, amazing guy, humble, incredibly humble. And he said, you know, if you want to make it, if you want to have a world record, then you’ve got to understand a very, very simple fact.
And that is if it's worth doing, it's worth doing shit. And I remember when he first told me that I was like, that makes no sense whatsoever. That can't be true. You're an engineer. One of the best engineers I know, I'm sure you sweat every tolerance, I'm sure you sweat every scenario. And he said, sure, but if you don't push the plane out of the hanger, you don't know if it's going to fly. And so like, you got to get the plane in the air to get the data. So do your work but you gotta get the plane in the air. And that always struck me as this guy who I thought was the ultimate perfectionist had achieved all these things because he was willing to get the plane in the air. And he was willing to figure out whether this is going to fly and if the plane crashed and they lost everything. And, you know, they were literally at the point of ruin, that was a real risk they were taking by going too soon, but that risk was preferable to the risk of never having gotten it in the air in the first place. And so to me, it was just another example of hearing something where I thought at first, wow, that just doesn't make any sense. And over time I realized the wisdom of that approach.Neil Parikh:
Right. Fascinating. Jeff, appreciate you having me on, I think it's always interesting to talk about the intersection of coaching, clarity, confusion, and how this is such an important thing for all of us as we think about growing and scaling our companies, but are trying to create systems and continuously unconfuse ourselves so I appreciate the guidance.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, thank you, Neil. I really appreciate you being part of this inaugural podcast. And it's again, it's been a great honor to work with you and I can't tell you how grateful I am that you agreed to show up and try this experiment with me. And I look forward to continuing to watch you and Casper do amazing things in the future. And as a Casper user, I just want to say anybody, I have bought Casper mattresses, sheets, pillows, bed lights for everybody in my family. And I strongly recommend you do this same, some incredible products that are led by an incredible team. So thank you so much Neil for your time. And with that, we’ll sign off.
Coaching in the clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed, and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review. To support this podcast please sign up at Talentism.com. There you will find important content in up to date insights on how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening.
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Chloe Drew:
That grounding in your values and principles again and again, every day can be the, okay, my feet are planted solidly on something and it allows me to make better decisions. And what I always say to leaders, when it comes to diversity inclusion, to bring it back to that is, it's a lens you apply to every single thing you do.
Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in depth, personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the SenseMaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content and enable you to unleash your potential.
Learn more and sign [email protected]. Today I'm speaking with Chloe drew. Chloe can spent the past 20 years achieving significant impact in both the corporate and political worlds in the areas of social justice, philanthropy, diversity, and inclusion. We'll discuss her first experience with a transformational coach and how it helped her find direction and purpose. You'll also review ways to make ourselves more coachable. Then we'll shift our reflections on empathy and creating safe spaces in the world of business and how critical this is in our current business environment. Finally, we'll explore how business leaders must challenge their blind spots around social, gender and racial inclusion by starting with more self skepticism. So Chloe, thank you so much. Joining me today on coaching in the clear I am so grateful that you've made time for us and just really appreciative of you making the space to have this conversation. So thank you.
Chloe Drew:I'm really delighted to be part of this. Thank you for asking me Jeff.
Jeff Hunter:
Of course. So let's just start out with how you found coaching, everybody comes to be a part of a coaching experience in their own way. Some people have been athletes and got to know it that way, other people have just through being successful executives, but everybody sort of comes to it in their own way. And I'd love to hear your story.
Chloe Drew:
Yeah, no. And I have experienced coaching, frankly, in both of those parts of my life and being. I ran cross country and track in high school and I was thinking, and sort of preparing to talk to you today. I was thinking about coach Cody, who was my cross country coach and track coach when I was 14 years old. And he sort of had a bunch of qualities that I think are good professional coaching qualities, good managerial qualities. And one thing that really struck me as I thought about him is he used to tell us running tips and sort of coach us real time in races, but he also ran with us and there was this feeling of hanging with the team, solidarity, literally sort of sweating in the hot summer with us. And then on race day, we were kind of on our own except he was there and, you know, every lap I would do or every sort of, you know, break in the trees or he'd pop out and yell something he was there.And, you know, I think the important through line for me from sports coaching to professional coaching is the best of coaching wires in your very sort of cellular makeup and musculature, the better way of doing things. Because you're hearing feedback real time, you're then practicing it. You're screwing it up. You're getting more feedback, you're trying it again. And that's sort of the definition of sports coaching, at least in my life. And then the best kind of professional coaching had those qualities too. So that was sort of my high school years. And he's one of the most memorable coaches I had. And then I had three different sets of professional coaches. One was when I was a very young executive director of a nonprofit and I had a very young untested coach and she was, I would say sort of friend-like and her approach.
It was a weekly session for me to download, vent, get some tips on managing. I did not know how to manage at all. I manage this team and all these volunteers and this board, and she had some sort of valuable frameworks for me, but then I had this truly, truly transformational experience of spending time with a coach and Carol Morley who had the right approach for me at the time that I came to her because I was probably about 32 and needed to move on from the nonprofit that I was running, but didn't know who I was or what my skills were or sort of how to think about the change I wanted to make in the world. And it was this very rigorous, I mean curriculum is probably the best way to put it, of sort of soul searching, strength searching.
And we never talked about the job I wanted to have until one day it came to me as if it was sort of the hand of god, and I was brushing my teeth one morning and I realized, Oh, that's exactly what I want to do. And for the first time in my life, I had the idea of what I wanted to do and I went out and got the job and it was, and I really credit it to that, that coaching experience. And of course I've had my most recent, incredibly, incredibly valuable, critical lifeline experience with Doug at Talentism, which was very different, very important and suited what I needed at that moment, because I was in, I would frankly just call it a professional crisis. And he was my life raft, kind of got me to calmer shores. And then as sort of now, even helping me think about what the next phase looks like.
Jeff Hunter:
So that's wonderful. So let's pick up on something there. So you're talking about what coaching is both in different sorts of forms and also at coaching at different parts of your career or life. One of the things I've been talking to people about is what are the essential sort of elements of a coachable person? What is it that makes you want to be coached and what makes you successful in coaching? Because you've had what sounds like four successful coaching sort of engagements in your life, very different, very different approaches, different people, different times of your life. And yet the sort of through line of all of that is you. So what do you think makes a coachable person?
Chloe Drew:
It's funny, I love this question and I've started coaching just as a pro bono offering to the world, two women, one who works for a startup for-profit enterprise and one who works for a nonprofit. And I've been thinking about that a lot, cause one is a more difficult engagement than the other. I think that coming to coaching with an, you know, such a cliche, but sort of openness and vulnerability, which means different things to different people, but a real willingness to be bare and introspective and absorb and think to really look squarely in the mirror at things that you're not doing particularly well. I think those are some really important sort of foundational elements. I think eagerness to, I would say curiosity about the world and curiosity about yourself, curiosity about other people. And, you know, I don't think that I'm particularly good at this, but I think someone who, I'm not sure if this makes you more or less coachable, but someone who I think does well in coaching someone who's forgiving to themselves, kind to themselves, because, you know, at some point you want to sort of absorb lessons, absorb mistakes, and then call that solid foundation of things learned and then kind of move on and say, well, that's solid.
I, you know, good scar tissue gained and now we're gonna move on to the next lesson, the next challenge. So I think those are some qualities and I'm observing those in these two women I'm coaching, one who has a tougher skin for lots and lots of reasons that I really understand. And the other who is much more vulnerable and feels really open. She feels to me like she's at an inflection point.
Jeff Hunter:One of the things we talk about a lot at Talentism is that there's in essence, every one of us has our own unique path to our own individual form of excellence and excellence has certain components to it and as you've heard us talk about, but that being on that path to finding what you're truly great at what your greatness is and uncovering that is a difficult journey. There are some people who are there who are cheering you along, but a lot of people who are doubting you, including often yourself, and you're trying to make sense of everything that's happening around you. And because we all have these brains that are pretty confusion oriented, they tell us we're good at things we're not really good at, they tell us we're bad at things we're not really bad at, you know, et cetera.
And we're always sort of feeling both under threat and trying to realize the opportunity of our greatness. It's just such a confusing sort of thing. And for some, what my experience has been for somebody to engage with coaching well, at least in clarity coaching, our particular form of coaching, there's been these elements I've been talking about in the podcasts about hunger and humility, that there's this sort of inner drive somewhere that can at least be tapped into. It doesn't have to be evident on the face or when the person comes to the coaching engagement. But there has to be this drive in there somewhere to want to learn about oneself about the world and about the connection between those two things. And there has to be a basic fundamental humility in that action, because as you just said, which I thought was beautiful, there's a humility, there’s a vulnerability to it.
There's a sort of curiosity to it. And I think humility, this sort of belief, the skepticism of like, well, maybe I don't know all the answers and maybe you know, maybe I am the thing that's standing in the way of my own success and how would I possibly work through that? How would I think through that? Those seem the attributes that really come through and yet in something you just said, it just struck me the forgiving of themselves. I think that's so incredibly powerful connecting to self-acceptance because, you know, our minds don't want to, basically as biological entities, we don't like pain and we do like pleasure, not as a surprise. Nothing profound about that statement. But then if you sort of dig a little deeper underneath that you think of, well, what are the things that cause me pain that my mind would want to back away from or avoid?And one of the things that causes us pain is our own self judgment, our own, you know, our own internal critic. And when our internal critic is in there, the voice of the internal critic is in there saying that we suck at something or that we really are a mess. It actually doesn't make that problem better. It may, it actually accentuates the problem, creates pain barrier around it. And so we won't approach it. And so that problem starts to get worse in fact, instead of better. And I love the way you said forgiving of themselves, because that basic act of having the humility flow into that self compassion, I think is so, so incredibly important. How have you, you've worked with a lot of incredible people throughout your career. How have you seen if at all powerful people in, in the highest levels of leadership, have you seen them apply that sort of lesson if at all, or do you think that's something that might be lacking?
Chloe Drew:Self-Forgiveness? You know, my sense, I guess a couple things. One is I don't think we talk about it enough. And so, as I think through the mentors and leaders, I've known the best intimately, I think it's something that I've heard people talk about a little, but not nearly as much as they should. And it's interesting, I've been, I'm very into podcasts, which makes this extra fun to do. And I've been sort of, ravenously consuming podcasts of leaders, masters of scale by Reid Hoffman, leadership next. So I've just been listening to a lot of CEOs tell their stories. And I think, you know, the sort of notion of failure is the new black. Everybody's now talking about their mistakes. Everybody's talking about self forgiveness and it's enormously inspiring, but it's also soothing. You know, it sort of helps to hear other people say, Oh God, I was terrible with that.
I just pick myself back up again and, you know, took my lumps and kept on moving. So all that to say, I don't know that I've heard intimate leaders talk about it, but I do think that one of the ways that I've seen people manage their mistakes and failures and sort of find ways of forgiving themselves and moving on is to have a really strong sense of purpose. And I'm thinking of, as in, why am I doing this? For whom am I doing this? And okay, that hurt, but it's really not about me. And I'm thinking of my, one of my very first bosses, Congressman Barbara Lee from Oakland, California who, I mean talk about pain. She was getting death threats when I met her, she cast a very unpopular vote and she had two full time bodyguards. And she was getting very threatening phone calls and nervous for her life.
And a lot of lesser people would have said, screw this. You know, I don't need this. I can make change in other ways, but she, it was this higher order sense of I'm doing this for the people of the ninth district of California. I'm doing this for my mother. I'm doing this for all single moms who grew up in public housing. I mean, it was a really profound sense of connectedness to something much bigger than herself. And I think that lifted her out of a lot of the kinds of wallowing, self pitying moments that other people might find themselves in.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I love that connection to purpose to a broader sort of perspective to help us get through those difficult times. Something that I was thinking while you were talking is this thing that I used to talk a lot to my kids about actually, and I don't know that I used extensively in my coaching, but using the metaphor of a book as a way to describe your life and sort of put yourself in the narrative. And what I would talk about is look your life as a book, and you don't know when it's going to end. And then where we typically get confused is that we are involved in a sentence when we need to be looking at the chapter, or we need to be looking at the overall narrative arc. We need to see that there are ups and downs, and we need to see that the downs always proceed the ups and the ups always proceed the downs.That's just the way a narrative works. And then we're all living some version of that narrative. And when you read a book that you really love, what you come to understand is first of all, deep empathy for the character going through it, and you should have that empathy for yourself, but also you don't get caught up in particular flaws per se, but just in how that fits into the overall sort of flow of how this character is progressing. And so there really aren't like these devastating weaknesses or these glorious strengths. There's just this story that's progressing over time, where put in the right context of a larger chapter or a section or the overall book itself, makes a lot of sense. And they aren't devastating. But if you're reading the paragraph where the mistake happens, it can be, it can be extremely involving and extremely devastating. And so one of the things I think good coaches do as well as good friends and anybody in a relationship is help you pull out of the paragraph and start to see the book and see, you know, that this thing isn't as devastating itself. And I think that's something that good coaches can do to sort of give people perspective. Because it's so easy for each of us just in the way we're wired to lose perspective on where we are in that, in that overall narrative arc.
Chloe Drew:I love that. I mean you know someone with little kids and we read a lot of books and we think a lot about stories, you know, and one of the things that the appreciating the arc of a chapter slash a month, or even a week in in one's life and for little kids probably a week is about as much as they can handle. It actually does force different perspectives for sure and gratitude, you know, all of the golden moments of my week, add up to something more beautiful than, you know, I had a crappy morning, I'm devastated and I just threw my blocks on the floor and I hit my brother. But if you can sort of appreciate, actually this was a pretty good week. So I'm going to use that Jeff, I like that.
Jeff Hunter:Great. And the other thing I used to like to say for whatever it's worth is trust me, the best chapter is ahead of you. And usually that's true. So listen, I want to turn the conversation a little bit because there's something I've been, I've just been really excited to talk to you about which is the current environment of calling for racial and economic justice, calling for, going from the me too movement through the black lives matter movement through what's happening in boardrooms and executive meetings right now. And the reason I was so excited to talk to you about this because as a diversity and inclusion specialist, somebody lives your life and your passion in helping to write these wrongs and make companies better as a result of the work you do. I was dying to understand your perspective on this moment in time, and also to understand how coaches can play a role in this moment in time.
Chloe Drew:Yeah. You know, it's sort of a moment in a movement, perfectly suited to a coaching sensibility. We've seen other movements for sure. My parents have seen more than I have, but I've seen my fair share of what feel like, you know, I remember in the Gulf war, I mean, there were big street manifestations. So I've seen mobilization before, but what I've never seen is, and I see it frankly, more now with black lives matter than I saw it with me too, even though I saw some of it, is a level of personal introspection, personal accountability, and real pausing to think about, no, it is not in fact the job of young people of color to change the world. It's impossible, by the way, we've now seen that. I am as a white person, culpable, even if I'm not doing something that's overtly racist.
And I think a lot of white people have a really hard time with the word racist or anti-racist, it suggests something to them that feels sort of intentionally evil, actively evil, but I think we're sort of understanding it better. And so I think for coaches, it's this fascinating moment, like let's just take CEOs or top leaders of any enterprises, for coaches to help those people understand in whatever way, where does your story intersect with the ability to understand equity? What is your personal experience or experience of your child or your mother with inequality or unfairness. And I think that's a first important place to start. When did you feel excluded? Well, interesting. I'm a white guy, but I felt excluded because you know, my dad was an alcoholic and he was a vet and we couldn't talk about it as a family.
And we had experiences at home that were violent, upsetting, and it was really, it was a secret and I had to cover that and I it was a secret burden and it still gives me a, you know, a pain in my chest, and a coach can then help that leader appreciate, that's what Kenji Yoshino would call covering or that's what an inclusion person would call sort of subsuming your identity, and can you imagine how a person of color might feel that everyday? Cause they actually can't even cover as much, but that clench in your chest and that pit in your stomach, didn't that make it hard when you felt that way, didn't make it hard to bring your full self to work and didn’t it make it hard for you to perform at your maximum ability. Didn't you feel your words getting caught in your throat?You don't want anyone at your job and workplace to feel that way. How do we create an environment where people don't have to hide essential parts of themselves, beautiful sides, unfortunate sides, shameful sides, ugly sides. And so let's start talking tactically now about what does that mean and how do we build that? But I think people tapping into their own human experience because I would sort of suggest there's not a single person on earth who was not experienced at moments, feelings of lack of belonging. And I think coaches are really well suited to bring people through that journey of empathetic understanding.
Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. I love that. So there's another topic I've been covering, that's connected to this. I would, I would just love your perspective on this and I'm approaching this you know, as people, I think we'll hear through the course of the podcast that we've been recording, I'm approaching this from a perspective of, I am just blind. And I think that connects to what you're saying. I'm sure I have done things that either appear or are in fact intentional that have hurt others or have created divisions between myself and others. I'm confident. I've done that, but I think the insidious nature of this thing is actually more, devastation happens because of leaders blind spots than their overt actions. And it builds in these sort of systemic biases in the way this entire sort of business world works.That keeps reinforcing the privilege of the people who currently have it. And regardless of getting into it, I'm not trying to make an argument or any moral argument of whether that's right or wrong. I think it hurts. I think it hurts businesses. I think that it creates fragility in the way they operate that then eventually will show up in their inability to compete in their inability to actually be the kind of place that people want to buy from. Because I think consumers are increasingly voting their values with their dollars and that this is just a reality that the C suite has to deal with. And they can either deal with that as a laggard to saying, Oh, geez, I just gotta do this. Or they can understand that they have invested in the human capital of their organization and they're just not getting everything they can out of it because of the way they operate and because of the way they design their jobs and the way they go, you know, source new hires and onboard and do all sorts of different things, all of which create in effect unsafe spaces for people to bring this entire sort of capability that we all aspire to bring to our work, but it doesn't create a safe environment for somebody to be able to do that. When you're talking to an executive about DNI and about their role and just about not only connecting at the empathetic level, which you so beautifully described, but also at the operational level, what are some of the things that you would tell an executive they need to be looking at?
Chloe Drew:You know, we've applied design thinking to the customer experience for a long time now. You know, I love the example of Southwest that is famous for thinking through, I don't know if they'd call them moments that matter or moments of truth, but sort of every time that a customer touches Southwest, there's a moment to feel great, or there's a moment to feel, gosh, that didn't really meet my standards or made me feel like this is a brand and a company that I want to fly with. And they've now pivoted that thinking to their employee experience. And I think we just haven't done enough of that nor have we, I think carefully enough segmented the customer base to appreciate different kinds of customer experiences, but let's just sort of take employees for a moment. I think too few companies have said let's plot from the moment we think about the kinds of talent that we need in the building, to how we find that skillset and that perspective and that background, to how we recruit them, how we onboard them in all of the different moments that matter in their life with us, what's going to build an experience where they feel that their talent can be unlocked, that they can speak up with creativity and innovation, that they are supported in moments where they might be having a baby or get sick, or one of volunteer in the community.
And, you know, I think blind spots to me have always let people off the hook a little too much, as in I think I'm sort of over that notion. I think there's a required spirit of inquiry that we've all been reminded of as in, it is incumbent on us to think about the people around us. Think about, do I in fact have a diverse workplace and a diverse social circle. And if I don't let's make it so, and there's ways to do that. I think most white people now are stunned by these numbers. Most white people simply do not have diverse social circles, let alone diverse workplaces. Most white people live for most of their lives in white worlds. And it's very hard, I think, to empathize and experience other people's lives. If you don't know people who don't look like yourself, but I think once you can, once you've diversified your worlds really ask people, what is your experience? What is getting in your way? And then to your point about search of systemic and structural operational individual inclusive behaviors are essential, but the machine has to disrupt biases and enforce inclusion, enforce objectivity recruiting as sort of a classic HR mechanism where there's so many moments where there can be bias that's baked in or inclusion that's introduced. So I would sort of take that as a classic kind of HR phase, but there's many, many other moments of the employee life cycle as well.
Jeff Hunter:
So I'd like to pick up on that and go to something that I'm very, very curious about, and this is relevant to clarity coaching. So clarity coaching is very much focused on the unleashing of potential, the belief that everybody has greatness within them. And that because of the way the system works and not just racial and economic injustice, just about the way we think about ourselves and people in general and the way our brain works, that very few of us ever get to tap into that and find it. And that if you truly want to make a difference in the world, you gotta be in the business of trying to change that system that prevents people from finding and unleashing that potential. And one of the things we know about people who achieve incredible things, just incredible things. You talked about Barbara Lee earlier, somebody I admire greatly.They go through extremely difficult circumstances and those circumstances test them and they learn as a result of that. And sometimes that's because they put themselves in those circumstances, they push themselves to try something they've never tried before, many times it's because they're tested because the world just doesn't make sense and it doesn't work. It doesn't work well to unleashing our potential, it can be very harsh and it can be extremely confusing. And so there's this concept that we bring to coaching where we're trying to create this idea of safety and this idea of psychological safety, not just to the coaching experience, but helping leaders understand how critical that is for them to achieve their goals, creating the sense of safety and belonging and inclusion, and being heard, and from everybody in their workforce and their workspace and bringing even more diverse and more you know, more pointed voices into that conversation.
And at the same time, what I've found is safety often gets interpreted as comfort. It often gets interpreted as, okay, you're safe. If you don't feel any sort of challenge or threat, et cetera. And there are times when people are feeling that challenge or threat, and it is because something is terrible and it's wrong and it's unjust and needs to be called out. And there's times we're feeling that cause we're confused. And we're afraid like we've been given a job we don't know if we could do. We could you know, we're wondering if we're up to it and we have all these internal narratives and doubts that all human beings have. How do you think about that concept of pushing people to greatness and enabling them to unleash their potential while at the same time creating a safe workspace?
Chloe Drew:Yeah, it's such a good, it's such a good framework. And I think this is one of those important cultural elements of an organization that has to be so much more than words because lots of organizations would say that they believe in being a learning culture and being a risk-taking culture, but then it really has to manifest itself in a way that we give people opportunities, give them feedback about how things went, allow them to speak up themselves about their own kind of self-critique and I mean, sort of constructive self-critique and then continue to give them opportunities. And it's funny, I keep on in this conversation, Jeff thinking about running a race and athletics and the cultural things on a team that make it possible to really screw up a race. I mean really screwed up even in a relay.
I mean, the horrifying thing when you're a runner is being a relay and letting the whole team down, cause you didn't on your leg, pull through in the seconds that you told them you would, but if you can culturally build in a team enough safety that you've literally observed everyone else's mistakes. And you've literally picked yourself up off the mat and gotten back on the track the next day and cheer each other on-again, those kinds of qualities brought to a workplace can create an experience that certainly I had in high school and college of feeling like I still belonged, even though I'd screwed up and kind of this healthy discomfort and this healthy indignation and how could I have done that? And I'm going to get back on the track and I'm going to crush it today and didn't always work, but there was something culturally true on the team.
So all that to say that was long-winded, but I think that there can be things that, and I would say, and this is something that is a truism that I actually believe in, that culture has so much to do with what the leader does. Every single place I've ever worked in government and politics and in the private sector, culture flows right from the top. And it's, I heard this wonderful interview with Mary Barra at GM, who said she came on board and then fired all of their cultural consultants, fired all of them and said, culture is not a strategy. It's how I show up and what I do every day. It's what I model. It's what I reward and give feedback and demand of my deputies. And it's what they then do to their deputies and their deputies. And I really liked that notion of it's it's the actions that you do.It's as a leader, I tried something and you know what, that was the wrong decision. And I'm going to tell my team that it was the wrong decision and we did it with the best information we had at the time, but here's what we learned and we're going to pivot and I want everyone's input as we pivot. And I want to apologize for that because, you know, maybe I missed something and, you know, I acted too quickly, but we've gotta be the kind of place where we make decisions and we learn from them and we keep it moving. And then the leader then has to not just share that they did that, but also in my opinion, really create an environment through allowing other people to take risks, not punishing them, allowing them the freedom to admit where they went sideways or went well and continue to give people opportunities.
And one thing to sort of bring it back to the DNI piece, there's data that shows that people of color experience having to prove themselves again and again and again. And there's an experience that their white colleagues have that is being given more opportunities based on potential and then feeling like they've reached a sort of safe plateau and they don't have to keep on climbing up the mountain again and again and again, and talk about the lack of psychological safety. That's exhausting to have to continuously prove that you can do it.
Jeff Hunter:Yeah. I think from my conversations again, through the podcast and many conversations outside and coaching circumstances, non coaching circumstances, just this deep humility I'm trying to bring to this experience of hearing things from people I've worked with for awhile, people of color, or of like, I have to prove myself all the time. And not just hearing that, but feeling that and feeling what it must be like to be in a position where you aren't given the benefit of the doubt. And you aren't assumed because you have the right skin color or the right gender or the right orientation or the right pedigree or whatever it is to be better than, which is frankly the nature of, of my privilege. And I have to constantly search into that and be open to that and expose myself to the fact that I'm just not, I didn't get it.
I just didn't get it. And I'm so grateful now that I'm having these conversations with so many people who are helping me get it, or at least beyond the beginning of that path. One of the things you just said that I wanted to pick up on a little bit, at least something that I've shared with the CEOs I've worked with, CEOs I've worked with for an extended period of time and earlier in my career, I spent a fair amount of time in the world of recruiting and hiring. And the data's very clear that most senior executive hires fail. Like the failure rate is 49%, according to some surveys it's 57% according to other surveys, but it isn't great. And of course, most of those executive hires when you break them down by gender and race, et cetera, they're straight white men.
And one of the things I've tried to take my, the CEOs I work with through is just take bad hiring experiences had where they've hired a C suite position and it didn't work out and help them understand the following. First of all, that they actually have given over their judgment about what is required for somebody to be successful in a job, sort of given that over to the admissions committee of Harvard and prestigious institutions. Like if they got in there, they must be good here, when in fact there's almost zero correlation between those two things. And definitely no causation. They’ve said, if you were successful at this kind of job, you must be successful here. They've done a whole bunch of things where the hiring managers, the CEO has bought into a narrative that prior experience pedigree different successes is a good indicator of future success.And the reality is most of the time it's not, that's what that data means, it's at best 50-50, and sometimes it's worse. And so if you're going to be flying blind, quote unquote, in a hiring situation, but you really are whether you know it or not. And then once you make a bad decision, a bad hiring decision, you're going to invest a ton of time trying to fix it, which they all do. They all spend a lot of time in remediation and in their conflict averse, or they're trying to not engage in the situation. And then it goes on forever and on average it goes 12 to 18 months of displeasure and bad conversations, et cetera. I said, if you take a look at all the time, you invested in trying to recover the bad hire, wouldn't it be better to invest that time and taking somebody who doesn't have that pedigree and didn't have those prior job experiences and doesn't come through the classic sort of sourcing mechanism that reinforces privilege.
Wouldn't it be better to take somebody outside of that sort of channel and invest the same amount of time you're going to spend in a bad hire and make them a great hire, same amount of time. It's the same amount. I'm not asking you to invest more. I'm asking you to change your perspective about what continually gets you into this bad spot and how you continually waste time trying to institutionalize this badness as opposed to break through it, and give yourself competitive advantage as a result, because the person you do that for is actually probably going to be incredible. And I found that to sort of get to them, but they sort of start to see it, cause I can pull up various cases that I've worked with them on so they can see how they've been burning that time, just to sort of go along with the current methodology. Do you see things like that experience, things like that when you're doing your work with leaders?
Chloe Drew:Absolutely. And I think there's a few things that show up. And I love the way you put all of that. I think one thing I see is it is just subconsciously so much more comfortable to hire people who, with whom you feel comfort. And you talked about this a little while ago, but that comfort is not necessarily good for organizations and fancy credentials can serve as a security proxy. You know, I don't really recognize this person. This person doesn't look like me. They didn't play squash or they didn't do whatever. I'm not trying to sort of create some waspy sport category by the way. But because I feel a little uncomfortable because I don't see myself in this person's path, these fancy degrees, give me a sense of security that I'm probably okay by hiring this person. And that often turns out to not be true.
And, you know, there's lots of data on other qualities that are much more important, like persistence and grit. And I think that's something that particularly is important when you do young hires, but I think it's important with more senior hires too. I think the second thing is, I think we were kind of heading towards this and you've got at this point, Jeff, with your comfort comment, I would love to understand more what you're seeing CEOs say isn't working in those 18 months, because one thing I've seen is what isn't working is I would call it healthy friction, it's friction, but it actually may be really good for the organization. You know, there's a lot of analysis after 2008, about what would have been different. Had there been less homogeneous boards and less homogeneous executive teams would harsher questions have been asked, you know, the CEO puts his buddies on the board.
They're just going to ask and I'm using him deliberately. They're going to ask him less tough questions because, you know, well, I know Paul and we go to the same golf club and I trust him and he made the last four decisions that I liked and trusted. Had there been someone who wasn't part of the inner circle and wasn't part of the club who frankly just had a little less to lose, would that person have asked questions that didn't feel great to Paul, but that may have prevented global financial meltdown. That's just one example, but we're in another crisis now where, you know, I've certainly observed different perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, add healthy, you know, there can be a grading quality to some of the questions, but they're important and they're central, you know, I think yeah, so I would, I would completely agree with you there.
Jeff Hunter:So, I've truly had the great, good fortune to work with many, many extraordinary CEOs, extraordinary leaders both in commercial contexts, artistic, political and try to always say the same thing as if first of all, if I could give you any gift, it would be the gift of self acceptance. So much of what's going on around you right now is really a result of the fact that you just can't deal with your own shit. And then I said the second thing is if you end up in a bad situation at some point in the future, it may be because you didn't see it today, you have a blind spot, but it's probably because you didn't have the courage to have a conversation. And so if I could just have you do those two things like just self-acceptance and have the conversation.
And of course we try to teach skills towards having more productive conversations, how to enter those with a sense of humility, as opposed to aggression, et cetera. But at the end of the day, every bad hire, you know, the takes that 12 to 18 months, they always know it after three months, it's uncanny. It doesn't sort of, you know, slowly unwind. It happens after three months and then rather than sit down and have the conversation of, I leader am confused. Because I expected A, and I was seeing B, what am I missing? They don't want to have that conversation. And so it sort of starts to calcify the problem. And then the longer the problem goes on, the harder it is to talk about, because you're not talking about one little incident, you're talking about five big incidents and it's just a complete mess.And I think that's just basic hygiene for any good relationship is that you're actually having good open communications quickly. And then the other thing I'd say about the leaders I've worked with is I think they aspire to, they really do truly aspire to greatness. They truly do aspire to build something that's amazing, but when the critical point comes where they have to hold themselves to a higher standard in order to exhibit and demonstrate, as you said through the culture, that that's what matters, that leaders eat first to use Simon Sineck phrase and that they, demonstrate actually, you know, what editor leaders eat last, that's the Simon Sineck phrase. And they demonstrate through their actions what matters. Are they going to actually hold themselves accountable for high standards? Are they going to be public in their self critique? Are they going to have the courage of their convictions about that? Especially when it applies to themselves.
These are, to me, the critical questions of leadership that face us in the current moment and frankly in all moments, but especially right now. And I think coaches can help with that. Obviously that's one of the reasons coaches are there, but at the end of the day, it's just gonna be, you gotta jump, you gotta just do it. And there's no amount of tweaking it or writing it or prepping for it. That's gonna make that an easy experience to do, take personal responsibility as a leader, to talk openly, engage with your failures and then do the hard work of constantly having the difficult conversations so that you can learn and make the thing better. It's just an ongoing, it just, it just sucks, but it's the work that has to be done if you want the privilege of leadership. So that's basically how I've experienced.
Chloe Drew:
One of the things that I found the most moving that I've seen over the past three months is the way that, and this is as an outside observer. So, you know, I didn't work at Airbnb, but I so appreciated the way the CEO, Brian Chesky talked about. I'm going to need to jump. We're going to need to move fast, but we've got to do it with some principles in mind. And he wrote down, you know, about four or five, six things that were going to be the lens that he applied to everything they did. And I think in moments of crisis, that can be incredibly powerful because a deep involved strategy for everything is going to be impractical. But if you say we're going to hold inclusion, belonging, and diversity, top of mind, every single stage, we're going to remember that our most important stakeholders are our employees and our customers.
And we want to go above and beyond to take care of them. I'm making it up. That grounding in your values and principles again and again, every day can be the, okay, my feet are planted solidly on something and it allows me to make better decisions. And what I always say to leaders when it comes to diversity inclusion, to bring it back to that is, it's a lens you apply to every single thing you do. It's not something that shows up in recruiting. And then maybe at performance evaluation time, it's something that you have literally almost as I was imagined sort of as a note card that you sort of glanced to the right glance to the left, is inclusion and diversity and belonging showing up in the way that I'm making any business decision, any firing decision, any new product development decision, because it shows up everywhere. It's the thing that makes your people feel like they belong. People broadly defined your customers, your employees, and, you know, going back to Brian, he was able to make some very, very tough decisions that his people, customers, hosts employees, if not entirely forgave him for often did forgive him for, but also understood because they saw his framework, they saw his humanity and they said he tried to do his level best to make decisions based on something that he believed in.
Jeff Hunter:Yeah. I thought what Brian did, I don't know Brian to be clear, but I thought Brian did it was extraordinary. The other thing that I saw at the beginning of COVID was when the gentlemen, I think was the head of Marriott, he recorded that video communication to everyone and then sort of broke down in the middle of it. The authenticity of that moment I thought was extraordinary. And I think it connects to something you said earlier, which is it's so hard to be a leader right now. I'm not dismissing all the privilege that comes with that, with those roles. But it's so hard because the world is changing so rapidly and they both have to be following it and leading it at the same time. And in the midst of that, this whole concept we've got of a leader's strength and never admit a weakness and all that stuff.
I'm not sure that was ever great advice. It certainly was a toxic culture, but it really doesn't work now. It just doesn't right? All the people who now are saying, Hey, listen, I think I'd rather stay at a Marriott because of that leadership. Because what that leader did that moment of vulnerability, and it has to be authentic, right? I know a lot of good actors who are CEOs, but you're not that good and you're not going to be able to pull that off. So just being vulnerable in that moment, like, wow, I'm so sorry. I'm a part of the suffering that you're experiencing. And I commit to the values and principles that you're talking about, Chloe, that will make this better. And right now we have to do this thing. I just think that people are going to gravitate to those leaders.
They're going to build better organizations. And I don't just mean that in the sense of a better branded organization, I just think they're going to operate better. I just think they're going to be better investments. I think they're going to have outsized returns. I think they're going to unleash potential that frankly, you know, people may be paying for it, but they're not experiencing because of their bad management leadership practices. And so I'm excited about the work that you're doing, the work we're doing to try to help companies see that and deal with this moment.
Chloe Drew:Totally agree.
Jeff Hunter:All right. Well, Chloe, thank you so much for your time. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I've loved this conversation and just deeply and profoundly grateful for really
Chloe Drew:This was really fun and so grateful to what you're doing. I mean, you're such a role model to me, Jeff, and the whole Talentism team. You're playing a very important role right now. So thanks for having me on.
Jeff Hunter:Thank you very much. Coaching in the clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review to support this podcast. Please sign up at Talentism.com. There you will find important content and up to date insights on how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening.
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Christina Sass:Yes, coaching is hard, but if you're coming to coaching with real shit, it's already hard. You know, like you're already not loving the situation and so you can do it feeling like you're developing new tools with which to do it. Or you can, you know, give up or decide that those are the only tools you want to use.
Jeff Hunter:Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. We're going to help you better understand the value and application of coaching by having in-depth conversations with the people who use coaches to unleash their potential; The founders, leaders and managers who are shaping our world. Coaching is more popular than ever. And we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market-leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity.
We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content, to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I'm speaking with Christina Sass. I think Christina stands as a shining example of someone turning their compulsion into a lifelong career, into someone finding their calling. She held high ranks at some of the largest global nonprofits and worked closely with Hillary Clinton's office as an advisor, helping build solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in international relations. After amassing nearly 15 years of experience in those fields, she co founded in Andela, a company dedicated to the proposition that brilliance is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And Andela has trained and placed thousands of software engineers from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, and Ghana. We're going to talk about her personal experiences with coaching on both sides of the equation, seeking out inherent blind spots in the corporate world and relating lessons she's taken from her experiences as a founder and activist and how we should be investing in people and handling growth both personally and as a nation.Christina, thank you so very much for being a part of this experiment, not just the whole experiment, but also this more free flowing dynamic that we're going to try today. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being here.
Christina Sass:Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here and I'm delighted to try it this way. It's what our conversations have always felt like and have yielded so much, so I'm looking forward to it.
Jeff Hunter:Well, thank you. So Christina, you are the co founder of Andela and I’ve had the great good fortune, Talentisms had the great good fortune over the last four years of working with Andela, a company that I've been truly inspired by across the board, not only your mission, but also the benefit you're bringing to the world and just what you're putting into practice. I thought that just before we get into the coaching conversation, if you'd be willing to reflect a little bit on Andela a little bit on how you started Andela and also a little bit about how we met I'd really appreciate it.
Christina Sass:Absolutely. Well, we started Andela in 2014 looking at how to get talent globally, to recognize brilliance, in particular brilliance among software engineers, which are so desperately needed by startups all over the world. At the time I'd been working across the African continent for about the last five years and knew the incredible depth of the talent pool and really the excitement and energy around tech careers. And so my co founder Jeremy, and another group of entrepreneurs, and I got together to kind of put this experiment out, to see if we could attract really extraordinary tech talent and then match it with the needs of employers everywhere that needed great software developers. The world was getting accustomed to remote and distributed teams at the time. And so we were kind of part of this wave to really bring that about and what an incredible six-year journey the company has now taken kind of many different shifts and turns and pivots as, as startups do.
For the first, probably three to four years, we were really focused on finding raw talent that had all the indicators of a great engineer and then honing them and really placing them in environments where they could succeed. Today Andela is more focused on big pockets of mid level and senior level developers and being an on demand marketplace for what other companies need. And so that entire journey I think, has been... I really can't, it's hard to, it's hard to state the value that you, Jeff, have brought to me and my co founder and the senior team, and Andela on our self awareness and big changes that we needed to make to move the business forward. So, how did we meet? I think this is a great story. So I worked with one of your colleagues at Talentism on a smaller project.
And one where candidly, I wasn't thrilled about the end. I think the gentleman I was working with was like on his way to I forgot what the circumstances were, but anyway, he was transitioning from Talentism to a full time role elsewhere and wasn't able to make a trip where he was supposed to facilitate a big conversation. And so in Talentisms IP had added a ton of value and then kind of the end of this thing, didn't go well. And so I got the final bill and I wrote you all and said, I will pay this. I'm happy to pay it, but can we get on the phone and can we talk and can I give you some feedback? And to my surprise the CEO of the company, you Jeff undertook the call and listened very carefully.
And you explained that you kind of knew that this younger employee who had a lot of promise, but that you're going to have to entrust them with some things, and they may not always go right. That you had been also experimenting and that you took full responsibility for that, that I indeed would not be paying that bill. And could you have dinner with our entire senior team and give feedback on what you thought, what your learnings were from the scope of work that Talentism had done. And so suffice to say I was blown away by that. And that was certainly the kind of leader that I hoped to be. That had the courage and strength to give my team members, my leaders rope to do an experiment. And then when it didn't go well to really take responsibility and make that relationship right.
And that's what I witnessed that you did. We had a phenomenal dinner with the C suite of the company at the time, and everyone was very impressed. And then I think I called you the next day. It'd be like you’ve got to coach us. You have to coach us. We know we have gaps in our self awareness and our knowledge and where we want to take the company. And to our great surprise and delight, you said yes. And that's been the beginning of a many year, very fruitful, painful at times, but overall incredibly rewarding relationship.
Jeff Hunter:Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I like any human being enjoys caring how great I am, but I can assure you that in the mountain of my mistakes, that was a small nugget of success. So I appreciate you saying all those nice things. I can imagine a lot of people know me, listening to this and going aha. So, but pretty much Christine, and I appreciate that. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about coaching. That's why we're here. You, as you just said, you know, you and I have worked together for awhile, I've worked with other members of your team, Talentism has coached a number of people at Andela, we've done off-sites with you, etcetera. So you have a real exposure to how we think about things and how we try to coach.
In addition, as you know, I've told you multiple times, I think that you have a real talent for coaching yourself, at least the kind of coaching that we think about, clarity coaching. I think you've seen it from every side. You've seen it as an executive. You've seen it as a person who receives it as a person who offers coaching as an investor etcetera. Tell me a little bit about how you think about coaching and how you think about the value of coaching importance. And in that, if you could tell me a little bit, what did you think was going to happen when we started coaching and what did you actually experience and how has that thinking about coaching evolved over time?
Christina Sass:So when we first started out, I think I knew that we had some, you know, pretty typical barriers to success in the company and that, you know, some outside counsel would help. We had tried a couple of things before, but I definitely didn't have a set definition of, Oh, this is the exact kind of coaching that I wanted. I did know that I wanted a coach that had a strong opinion about working with founders and that had been in a high growth, you know, kind of tech startup world. And this is an interesting comment to make with all that you know, of me, but I did, I wanted a male coach that had immediate gravitas because that was sort of the C suite that I was operating in and I needed to understand and be more well versed in that in a safe space and environment.
And so I don't think I had that in mind when we went to that team dinner, but after listening to you and being around you, it was like, I feel like, you know, this person is immediately adding value and can, you know, push back on kind of the heaviest hitter at the table and also feels very safe. And so I kind of just opened up to whatever your type of coaching was. It definitely wasn't seeking out or didn't know or have any idea what clarity coaching was at the time. Now, looking back on clarity coaching, the analogy that I would give is like, it's like being in the matrix where Neo is offered, like the red pill or the green pill and when you actually take the red pill, it's brutally painful and you go through this journey of seeing the world exactly as it is.
But that is really the only way to get through to where you want to be. And so that's what that experience was like for me, I learned that I didn't, I certainly was open to self exploration. I knew that was going to be a hard part of it. But it was way harder and more fulfilling than I thought. And I think in my hardest darkest moments, I felt as if I had a real partner where I was just able to learn about myself, even if it took hearing the same thing, five or six times to unlock whatever slight piece of information it was to be aware of a blind spot or be aware of a pattern. And so being able to work together over years, I have now gotten, I think, a heck of a lot better at seeing those and being open to other ones.
And so, that process of seeing the world as it clearly is, not jumping to any assumptions about your colleagues and what's happening became a framework that I got to apply any time I felt the common things we all feel in difficult work situations and they're very human. It's not like, Oh, I had trouble with the same budget meeting. It's like, whatever that thing was really pissed me off. And I wasn't able to think straight, or I feel my heart rate rising again. It was kind of those individual triggers that it was like, it didn't matter what the trigger was, but I recognized it. I recognized a pattern and was like, now we seek clarity and we have a lot of different tools to be able to seek clarity. And I think it was so successful for me that I wanted to take a step back and look at coaching from a different viewpoint and look at your IP.
You know, so it certainly has benefited me most as a struggling leader who deeply wanted to fulfill the mission of an organization and was willing to change to do that. But then the next level out is exactly what you've said, which is learning to become a coach and I'm still very much, you know, new on my journey, but being able to seeing how powerful that is, and then looking at the tools and the IP and practice that Talentism might give me, be able to do that for others I think is one of the greatest gifts I could give other founders leaders that I respect. So that's been my journey.
Jeff Hunter:Thank you very much. You know, you said something at the very beginning that frankly I was a little bit, I was a little bit shocked to hear, you wanted a male coach, you've never told me that before. And so that inspired me, I just wanna, let's just take this somewhere, cause I think it would be super cool to try this. So in the spirit of total vulnerability, one of the things that I often question, because I work with a lot of female founders, a lot of female executives I work with people of color. I work with transgender people. I work with a lot of different people and I always worry that given my inherent blind spots as a straight white guy, that I'm not going to be an effective coach because I just can't no matter how desperately I want to, or no matter how much I want to try.
And no matter how much I do try to open myself and be authentic to the fact that I've had so much privilege and I just can't experience, I just can't see, I can't experience what others have experienced and I take the responsibility of coaching so seriously as almost a sacred duty. That can I in fact be effective, working with somebody who I can't understand their experience like truly, truly understand. I can be open to it, but I can't truly understand it. And so that's always been a fear of mine and frankly, I don't know that I've ever articulated that. So why the hell not articulate that to a public audience, but I would love the…
Christina Sass:Coaching qua coaching
Jeff Hunter:Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So tell me a little bit about how you thought about that. And also I have experienced you as somebody who gives me such incredible feedback, but you hit me when I need to be hit, which is just awesome.
I love the nature of our relationship that way. And so I trust you to tell me like, what blind spots do you think I do bring to it? And how can I be even more aware in my desire to unleash human potential and not just for people like me, but to unleash the potential of everybody, what are things you think I might've missed? What are things that I could get better at? What are things that I should be more aware of? I would just love to, you know, get your feedback and coaching in this moment on that.
Christina Sass:Give me a moment to think about that, but first I want to tell you why I think it's, it is actually highly effective that you are a white male in certain situations. I think a lot of women leaders, transgender leaders, like I think that we are frustrated by all the typical things that you hear. Hey, I just said that three minutes ago and no one listened to it. And then someone else says it and you know, it's repeated and sounds great. Or I don't feel as if I have the, I feel like what I'm saying is like fully grounded and well- researched and is somehow not getting heard. And so I have to say that the power for me was that the Andela leadership team and my partner, we gave you permission, we gave you the power to be a broker, to kind of really hear each other's perspectives.
And it's sad for me that is the world we live in, but, you know, there are benevolent and, you know, other actors and so to find a philosopher King or find, however you think of yourself, Jeff, but find someone who like truly wants the company to do well and to succeed in its mission and its purest mission. I felt like I got an honest court for lack of a better analogy, like to be heard for both sides to be heard. And I do think that requires a certain kind of gravitas and whether that was like board members or our senior team or you know, it's kind of the toughest personalities where I feel like you recognized my strengths, you recognize my challenges. One of my strengths is absolutely vulnerability that did not give me strength and courage in male dominated situations.
And so to really have an arbitrator that was in the middle that would present both sides and give equal air was like immensely comforting. Even if I didn't get the outcome that I wanted, I felt understood and heard and could really rationalize. I could grapple with the logic of the moment. Hey, it's not just a no, because you're not being heard. It's a no, because you know, you can understand where all the parts are, it's clarity, right? It's from confusion to clarity. So that's the opposite of what you asked, but I do think if there's other leaders out there who feel the same way, I think that's like a superpower, it's a superpower to feel like over and over again, I don't feel heard and understood. And all of a sudden I can create an environment where I can break out of a pattern. I can break out of an unhelpful pattern and have a person in the middle to help us both hear each other was just immensely helpful. Okay. So the question that you asked
So I think It's hard to add in all of these extras, as I said, you would definitely be aware when I would come to you with a problem that I was triggered, that I was not thinking clearly, etcetera. I think it's impossible, as you said, to step into anyone's shoes and think of all the complex reasons why that might be, even if it's, you know, perceived gender or not an equal playing field or others. And so there's part of just being a white male coach that isn't, you know, that you're not going to be able to change. But I think, you know the places where I have given you feedback is where maybe you're in situations where for whatever reason, it's mostly males around the table and that, you can control. That, you can find situations where it's easier to to make all voices be heard and ensure that even in your desire to seek out the best opinion or the purest version of something that you're really aware of what might be going on in people's heads and hearts that's preventing them from being their best selves in that situation.
And then think about not just as a coach, but as a CEO of Talentism too, what does a real level playing field look like through putting that into practice? I think it will help in the situations that you're hearing from any of your coachees. Does that make sense?
Jeff Hunter:Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it does. And thank you so much for that. I want to share a specific example where you were especially powerful with me and I just so much appreciate it, but I would just want to take the audience through that experience. So we have this thing called the executive clarity forum. It's where we bring CEOs together, CEOs and founders together to first of all, learn about clarity, clarity, methodology, principles, etcetera, and then start to really form a community with each other to gain support and strength from each other and help from each other as you navigate very difficult situations. And so we did the first cohort. You were in the first cohort, our inaugural kickoff. And I was taking a lot of the airtime. The talentism airtime and I was doing this.
I was co-creating this and leading this with Sharon billings, who's our head of coaching, sorry, head of training. And after one of the sessions you came back to me and you said, yeah, you talk way too much. Like you have this incredibly powerful, amazing woman in the room and you're sucking up all the oxygen with your ego. You were kinder than that. But that was the gist of it. And so my experience when I heard that is of course defensiveness, cause I'm just like everyone else. I'm like, Oh, I'm not doing that. And then of course, I've tried to habituate this process of, Oh, I'm triggered. Okay, that's interesting. Why am I triggered? What, where do I feel at risk or under threat? And then of course I realized that I have a stat, what we call a status trigger.
I want to be seen as good. I felt like you were telling me I wasn't good. So that's where the nature of the defensiveness I was able to then go through it and say, that's not what Christina is saying. She's, she's actually giving me something so precious, real feedback. You know, when you're a CEO, people just don't do it, right? I just wish people would tell me how crappy I am more often. But anyway, just to be clear to everybody, I get a lot of that, but it's a, I need more of it. And then I couldn't stop thinking about it about that failure of mine. I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Stayed up most of that night, next morning, I went to Sharon, I talked to her, I apologized and I said, listen, from now on I shouldn't be talking.
You should be talking. They need to hear from you. They can care for me all the time. Like I'm a total blow hard. You need to get up there. And since that point, I hope and you know, hope you've experienced this as she's very much taken the lead and shined in that. And just done an amazing job. And so I just wanted to bring everybody through that full journey, because I think that's in a lot of ways, what we aspire to with clarity coaching. It's not just about, you know, I'm a coach and you're a client or whatever, it's that people come to each other and share something about, I know you aspire to greatness or to excellence. You're falling short in this way. I want to help you by showing you the specific problem and that even if that's difficult to hear, even if that it just feels terrible to feel like you're failing.
That's such an incredible gift, especially from somebody who you love and cherish because it's helping you actually get better. And through that, I believe Talentism is a better organization. You know, it was something I think that executives all the time, it's crazy and we can go into why this is, but they separate the world into the soft stuff and the hard stuff, right? Like the hard stuff is how are you going to build market cap and enterprise value? All of which is super cool, but all of which are lagging indicators of excellence, not leading indicators of excellence and the leading indicators of excellence are how you are showing up as a leader and as a contributor every day. And that's what builds the infrastructure of excellence within your organization. And that starts with the kinds of interactions you and I had in that case. So I was just so deeply grateful for that. And I'm glad you shared it. Thank you. And I'm very excited about continuing to have this relationship because I am going to make a lot more mistakes and you can really help me with that. So thank you.Christina Sass:
Well, you're most welcome. And that's kind of what I mean by the red pill analogy. And I I think I feel safe to say anything like that to you because you've said it, you've done it for me so many times that, that process of getting real feedback, feeling super defensive and hurt, and then being able to like take a deep breath, take a lap and be like, I really trust that this person wants me to succeed. Like they have no reason to be telling me this. They don't want me to stay up all night and agonize. They want me to be the best at what I'm doing. And so seeing that purity of intentions and then you open up just enough of a crack to see what your blind spot is or what your failure is. And I just, I've experienced this more times than I can count in our sessions.
But I remember coming to you one distinct time and saying, you know, like this person that I'm working with, he's done this thing. He's done it four times now. I know he's done it to other people and it's just like, it's malicious. Like, there's no other explanation for it. And you, you know, calmly talking me through how like that, you know, the certainty with which I decided it was malicious. It was, you know, a failure all in itself and what could be the other explanations for it. And basically walking me through not making it so personal and seeing just a glimpse enough to be like, that's, that person's blind spot. And for sure, it's not helpful that they're telling you or other people, you know, that they're in a pattern of giving people unhelpful feedback. But what you've noticed is not that, that's a bad person, but that person has a blind spot.
And now you have a choice to make, you can help them see that blind spot and help them through that blind spot. Or you can decide that they're bad. But you know, I definitely had to go through all of the, he doesn't believe me, and that's not the point of coaching and why am I doing this? And then enough of a, I really think, I really believe that Jeff wants me to succeed, and that is the point of this feedback. And so how do I just sit with it for long enough to open up some space in my head to be like, okay, what would it be like to get on that person's side when you notice that they're in there, as personal as it is, but when you notice that they're operating from a blind spot, it actually opens you up to all this other information and all these other choices and how to act.
And so I found it like at the end of the day, super empowering, that doesn't mean it's not painful every time, but it really does, when you feel when you immediately, when you have a pattern of feeling trapped and helpless, and like, you can't get out of it. All of a sudden you have a painful period, but then you have a period of feeling multiple options and feeling supported in testing out different roads. And that was so, so, so useful. And so I'm delighted and thrilled to be able to give the same back.
Jeff Hunter:Well, as I've said, many times, I think you're an excellent coach. So, and I think this is an example that proves it, but you just said something that I want to sort of highlight. I think it's sort of indicative of how we think about things, but it is interesting if you think just about helping others. So we start with this premise that human beings are wired for confusion, that they've evolved that way, that confusion isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing the brain does when it's trying to navigate reality. And for millions of years, it was a feature and now it's a bug. But it's something you gotta deal with, right? Because we all have it inside of us to believe things that aren't true to bias information, etcetera. And one of the things that's been fascinating is we started with that, then built out coaching and did all the other things we do, is to come to a very simple realization that if you're coaching someone and you believe they're confused, that you're completely and totally committed to helping them, and you can't believe much of what's coming out of their mouth.
And it's a weird phenomenon, right? Like you're sitting there saying, Oh, I'm going to do or give whatever it takes to try to help you get to unleash your potential, to see reality, clearly, see yourself clearly see the connection between yourself and reality clearly. But you're about to tell me a bunch of bologna and not because you're bad, not because you're not smart, it’s just because your brains’ messing with you. And one of the things I loved about our work together is when I would say that to you, cause one of the things about you is you can really come across as fierce. You'll be like, this is happening. Just so you know, I'm not asking, I'm telling this is happening. And I'd be like, okay, yep. Got it. I understand that you're very confident in this moment, that, that's true.
But you didn't ask me to help you to validate your certainty. You asked me to help you turn confusion into clarity. So let's work through that. And in my experience has been, is some people, nobody loves that process, right? The human mind is like, no, hold on. I feel really good about my certainty right now. And you're taking me back to confusion and that's painful. So could we just stop this and stick with the I'm right narrative? But there are some people who go back into that journey of confusion to get to clarity and process it well, no matter how competently they come to their initial conclusion, they work through that pain, they process it well and then some people are just like, nah, I'm out. I'd much rather talk to somebody who told me I was great.So how do you think you came to the point of like, okay, this is painful, I don't always enjoy this, but this is the kind of thing I was looking for as you described it, wasn't where you started with our, with our coaching, but it is over time how that developed. And I saw the biggest of all the people I work with, like going most from certainty to clarity, with the greatest sort of commitment to the truth about yourself. I saw you deal with that with more courage, in more consistency than frankly, most people, I have the good fortune to work with. What do you think it was that kept you driving through that, that kept you determined and compulsive through that process?
Christina Sass:Well, I think at first it just yielded better results than anything else that I'd tried. Like I think some of the most painful things to hear was, you know, Hey Christina, you're, you're ultimately fighting for this cause for the software developers in your company and you're not able to get there because you're in these, you know, tough situations with your colleagues. Like what do you want, like stare down that, you know, ultimate objective, what do you want if it really is to unlock the potential for these software developers in this specific way, then you gotta get better at these conversations. So it was, to me that worked, it was like, you are getting in your own way. Can you see that you're getting in your own way? And I wasn't, you know, it wasn't feeling effective in those conversations.
And I'd certainly tried, you know, two or three different ways, but it was centering on the purpose, centering on the main goal. And so I think it's, yes, coaching is hard, but if you're coming to coaching with real shit, it's already hard, you know, like you're already not loving the situation. And so you can do it feeling like you're developing new tools with which to do it. You know, or you can, you know, give up and or decide that those are the only tools you want to use. So for me, it was just seeing my experimenting with different difficult conversations and seeing them go differently and seeing a couple of things go my way or seeing a couple of things, not go my way, but it'd be less painful. And I was like, okay, I'm going to lose this battle to win the larger war.And I can start to put those pieces together. I started to feel less panicky when I was triggered and I had a series of mental exercises that I would go through when I was triggered. That made me feel like I handled the situation better. And that's one thing you really worked with me on Jeff is that fierceness is like, it's one tool, but it's like, it was very off putting to many of my peers. It was not off putting to my team when deployed in the right way, but off putting to my peers. And so to rein that in, you know, to really learn when to use it and not, and learn that just like digging in and fighting with that for us it often didn't really get the end goal. And so it was that I think that's part of why Talentism is so effective to me, it's about unlocking human potential in people that are really deeply dedicated to that will listen.
So part of being a startup founder is like this brutal process of being good at a couple of things. And then having your situation change every, what, six to nine months I'd say is, you know, was kind of what I experienced. And so just when you would start to get the ropes and feel good about something, your whole world would be turned upside down and like that’s scale, that's what it is. And so the founders and leaders that I love to work with in that startup phase have to be really open to what they're good at and what they're not good at and how to love something to be so attached to it, and then let it go and why they have to let it go. And so that's just a common pattern. So recognizing that that's the work pattern you're going through and that your parallel personal process is about being confused over and over again, and getting out of that confusion and doing it in a way that's healthier for you. Like there's a world of discomfort in there and learning for that to not be totally miserable, that you have support. You've got tools to live in that discomfort and to actually get better at it is very, very freeing and comforting to me.Jeff Hunter:
Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you. Okay. So we're coming to the end of our time, but I have one big question for you. I've been dying to ask you this question. So you have been for a long time at the frontlines of social justice, economic justice and change. You've also been a startup founder and I maintain in the, you know, the relationships I have with CEOs, founders, etcetera. One of the things I talked to them about is how the nature and role of the organization, the corporation, the enterprise is changing in the midst of social change. That there, if you were a white dude, 40 years ago, who was a CEO, you had a pretty limited set of rules and you were in the power position and you just had to do certain things relatively okay and it probably would work out okay for you. Now, the power of the consumer, the power of the voice of the previously disenfranchised, the people who I think are starting to finally come into their own and wield economic influence in the center of the founder and the CEO and the executives in the center of that, and trying to make sense of that, navigate it.
What would you tell those founders, those CEOs about what they should be looking out for, what they should be thinking about, and that's A and B, Then how as coaches can we help those people achieve that? Because I do believe they will be at the center of a lot of change. The government institutions, etcetera, are really struggling to take on their proper role and that corporations are increasingly stepping in and trying to make positive change because it's good business and also it's the right thing to do. You have a unique perspective in the midst of that. Tell me a little bit about first, what you think is going to happen, what's required. And then secondly, like what does coaching need to bring to that?
Christina Sass:Yeah, it is a great question. And it is a moment for all leaders to be thinking about that, you know, Jeff I think at the heart of it, every leader has got to drill down to the purpose and meaning of their work and really face the things that come up about how that work may or may not be contributing to, you know, to a very problematic system. And if it is, if indeed it is that they are taking concrete steps to change it for the right reason, I don't think leaders today can get around that and they have to, and there's, there's sort of no way, but through. And so there are, I think there are social businesses out there or businesses that are somewhat neutral, but they're still existing in these, what they're going to hear from their team members or from their clients may seem like it's at the periphery at the edges, but it is contributing to, you know, a racist system or a system that, that continues to keep power where it is.
And so I think it's going to be very hard to say, but that's not what we do or that's not, you know, and to be able to be open, to hear that, I think what they could do that's most important for their leadership path forward is be really authentic about their journey, be really genuine about it. And then have really excellent feedback and safe space. Because it's not a moment to share all of one's feelings. Like you need to really, you know, think through it in a safe space and get your thinking right no matter what it is, but then to share authentically what it is that your company is doing, what it seeks to do, if it has, you know, been part of a problematic system, why, how you see that clearly and and sort of what changes that, you know, you’re gonna make to be able to do that in a in a clear and thoughtful way, if it's the case that there really isn't, you know, that the companies are really, you know, really doing great work, then I think it's getting every single person in that company clear and aligned as to the, you know, not the day in, day out KPIs, but that much larger picture and getting every employee to feel like they can really directly connect to it.
I don't think that comes often from, it could come from an inspiring line manager, but I think it often comes from the CEO. And so gone are the days where, you know, a lot of our colleagues in Africa experienced that leadership was on the 16th floor and you never saw them. And it was very hard to push back. And now we're on systems where like everyone's on a Slack channel, anybody can Slack anybody and that is jarring and it also opens up the psych, you know, kind of amazing feedback loop. And so how to deal with kind of a barrage of everyone's opinions. I don't believe that it's the CEO's job to weigh those opinions evenly but to be open with them and come back to a very sincere, authentic message about why they do, what they do and if they're part of causing problems, how they intend to to move forward with that. I think that would be my advice. And then I'll continue to think on it. It's a great question.
Jeff Hunter:Yeah. Thank you. One of the things that really strikes me and after I just said, we're near the end of our time, but I just want to bring this up. The entire system of how we think about business really lends itself to reinforcing privilege and human blindness. And one of the ways that I think about that is the numbers, the KPIs, the metrics that most business people are obsessed with are all lagging indicators, which to me is pretty fascinating. They're obsessed with things that measure what has already happened.
Christina Sass:
Yeah.
Jeff Hunter:And so when that number you expect your growth to be a hundred percent and it's 80% you freak because you think, Oh my gosh, we're going down, but you don't really step back and say, you know, the reason we only achieved 80%, not a hundred percent was because of something we did six months ago. And how could I have known six months ago that we were going to be on this path rather than waiting for six months to figure out, and then having a reaction to it. And the reason I say this as I work with so many incredible people who are really genuinely want to bring about change, they want to be a part of that change. They want to follow the advice, but they're measuring themselves against the lagging indicators and then having to respond to things that have already taken place. And it puts them in a perpetual loop where they can't get better because they're always running to catch up to something that they set before they were fully aware of what the new world was like. So anyway, just something that's sort of struck me.
Christina Sass:You know, you and the Talentism team have mentioned many times, like even at the beginning of the COVID crisis, somebody in your organization right now is super forward- thinking and has a path to, you know, how, what the silver lining here is and how the company can thrive through this. And if you don't have it surround yourself, you know, surround yourself with those people. I think that also takes self-awareness. But, you know, I think one of the things that drew me to Talentism and that I completely share is that every CEO, every leader in a company is in a position to, is in an awesome position and has the honor of thinking about unlocking the potential of all of those people within their company. Yes, you need to delight your clients and you need to do all these other things, but you have this amazing group of people that you're trying to get the fall into a complex, you know, line that achieves certain goals and thinking about them and yourself, like your most complicated employee.
Okay. Well, you're twice as complicated as that. Because you have all the shit that you grew up with. And so just thinking, you know, being able to move away from, okay, the KPIs that I've always looked at and being like, if I could make life, you know, if I can unlock the potential of this one group, that's going through a super complicated time. If I can listen and hear and, you know, get these people to feel free enough with all the insanity going on in the world, just to unlock their brains enough, to be like, it's gonna feel good for all moving towards the same thing and you'll feel safe about it. I think that's a real achievement in the midst of the moment that we're going through. And, you know, I can't imagine a better thing to spend your day doing than trying to unlock the human potential of the people that are hustling for you, of hustling for you day in, day out and know that is not deeply analyzing the KPIs. And I'm not saying that we can forget that. But improving on KPIs is an exercise in how people learn and they’ve got to have part of their brain free to be able to learn. And our brains are grappling with a lot of noise right now. So for a CEO to work backwards and help to make people feel safe and make people feel productive during this time, I think is massive.
Jeff Hunter:Yeah, I agree. All right. So let's end on that note of brilliance. Thank you, Christina. You are the very best, I can't tell you how grateful I am that you were willing to take some time on the Saturday and speak with me. Thank you.
Christina Sass:Thank you for all the years of brutal honesty.
Jeff Hunter:Of course you can always count on me for brutal honesty. Well, thank you very much. And thank you to everybody who is listening and Christina, I'm hoping that we can catch up again at some point in the future.
Christina Sass:
Absolutely.
Jeff Hunter:Great. Thank you very much. Coaching in the clear has been a production of Talentism. It was recorded, mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review to support this podcast. Please sign up at Talentism.com There you will find important content and UpToDate insights about how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening.
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Jeff Hunter:
Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. We're going to help you better understand the value and the application of coaching by having in depth conversations with the people who use coaches to unleash their potential; the founders, leaders and managers who are shaping our world. Coaching is more popular than ever and we believe that sharing in depth, personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity.
We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker, where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content, and enable you to unleash your potential. Learn more and sign [email protected]. We are launching coaching in the clear with Jameel Spencer. Jameel has been a force in the world of fashion and brand management for over 20 years. He has worked with some of the biggest icons in pop and hip hop culture, helping them build successful businesses before co-founding his current venture, Rightful Place. Rightful Place scripts narratives for brands and personalities so that they can achieve their full potential. We have a very powerful episode ahead, where we will talk about his introduction to coaching the lessons learned from some of his favorite peers and role models. We will then turn to our current climate of racial inequality and the ways we can keep intention at the forefront of our business practices and daily lives.
Jameel, thank you so much for being with me today on coaching in the clear, I really appreciate your time. I know you're incredibly busy and I very much appreciate you making the time to speak with me.
Jameel Spencer:
Nope, no worries. I appreciate the opportunity. I always love to speak to you.
Jeff Hunter:
Thank you, sir. All right, so let's just start at the beginning. How did you decide to start working with a coach? Just take me in the audience up to that point.
Jameel Spencer:
So the reality is that I didn't decide, it was actually something that was decided for me and interestingly enough, like most things in life, had I been given the choice I probably would have chose not to, because I'm probably more about what I didn't know and what I thought that coaching meant. But what I experienced was amazing.
Jameel Spencer: So at the time I was, running the fashion division at an IP holding company and we were going through some changes in terms of, you know, growing from a really small company to a much bigger company. And what it took from a culture standpoint to effectively run a larger organization was significantly different than what our experiences had been. And so our chairman had the idea to go out and seek coaching and because I was part of the management team I, you know, was a part of that. And so, it wasn't something that I chose to do.
I will say that once I did it, I really embraced it and found that it was really an extension of how, you know, we continue to get better in life. And so, you know, I'm an athlete. I was an athlete in college. I continued to work out every day to work on my body, you know, I try to work on my spirituality and so why wouldn't you work out your career and your ability as both a manager and an employee or an entrepreneur or whatever it is. And so what I experienced was something that I did not expect quite honestly.
Jeff Hunter:
So I've been talking to a bunch of different people and one of the things I talk about is I say, in order for somebody to be great in the coaching experience, they probably need two attributes. At least this has been my experience to date, which is that they need to be hungry and they need to be humble that they want, they are curious and they want to learn about themselves and they want to learn about the world. And they also show up with a bit of humility about it. They understand, they don't know everything, they understand they're missing things, and they use the coach effectively to help them get to clarity. And I have to say, of all the people I've worked with, you demonstrated both of those characteristics as much as anybody I've ever worked with. What is it you think, that makes a person have those attributes; want to be hungry to get better, hungry to improve, but also have a level of humility about themselves and what they do and don't know, and an openness, therefore, to want to get better and improve.
Jameel Spencer:
Ah man, I would say it's just living life. I think the more you experience, I think, you know, when you're younger your focus is on maybe going out and you know, accumulating things and, you know, it was all about you and making your mark in the world. I think that as you get older and you've had more experiences and you, you realize that, as much as you think you know, you don't really know anything at all. And that, you know, being open-minded is probably the most valuable trait that you can have if you're trying to be successful in life. So I think that, you know, humility and hunger come with experience. And so you know, I think that when, like I said we tend to be really full of ourselves when we're younger.
You know, if you can see that right now in the COVID area, that era that we're living in, you know, young folks are out at the beach and they feel like they're invincible. You know when they have someone in their family, they get sick, then they become open to the fact that, hey this thing is serious. And I think that's like everything else in life. So I think that it's more about just experiencing things, you know, seeing what doesn't work and realizing that you never have all the answers even when you think you do.
Jeff Hunter: Yeah. So I know a big part of your identity, a big part of the way you think about things is you're a father and you're very proud of being a father. And I know that your children are very active in sports themselves, very accomplished. How do you coach them? And I'm sort of fascinated about how parents coach their children in the midst of so much change and so much confusion. How do you coach your kids?
Jameel Spencer:
So, the irony of how I coach my kids is that it has nothing to do with, or maybe it's more of a reaction to how I was raised. And so I was raised, my mom was, you know, 18 years old and the freshmen in college when she had me and so I grew up without a dad in my household until I got older. When she got remarried, I had a stepfather who actually really, really showed up for me. And I don't think I even really appreciated it as much until I got older and had my own kids. But the reality is that the way I show up and coach my kids is more of a reaction of what I didn't have growing up. And the good news, and this is one of the things that actually was an unlock from the work that I did with Talentism, quite honestly, is that I do it unapologetically because I realized that, it's not about them liking me, right?
It's about me helping them become the best versions of themselves and whatever it takes to do that, I'm willing to do it with no remorse. Like I don't feel a kind of way telling them things. And I wasn't really applying that to my life as an executive. I was, you know, I was still trying to spare people's feelings, or I was concerned about people liking me, and realized that I should take the same approach that I was taking with my children, with people who worked with me, because if I really cared about them then you know, I would give them the unadulterated version of the truth. And so you know, that's kinda how I approach it. It was really just more like, whatever it takes for them to be the best versions of themselves. Being really honest about the fact that they're all different, and being okay with giving them, you know, things that are different.
One of the things that you know culturally, with people, have been consuming during this pandemic is a lot of people watch the ESPN, I think it was a seven or 10 part thing, the last dance on the bulls. And one thing that was really interesting to me was that Phil Jackson decided to let Dennis Rodman go to Vegas for like four days right before the playoffs, so maybe during the playoffs. And that to me was like, wow. That's crazy. But the reality is that you know, what it took for Dennis Rodman to be the best version of himself was significantly different than what it took for Michael Jordan, and was significantly different than what it took for Scotty Pippin. And you know, I look at my kids like that as a team and having a real sense of what it will take for them to reach the best versions of themselves and being unapologetic about giving it to them, whether they like it or not.
And so that has been you know, that's one of the things that I actually uncovered during the coaching was that you know, I really needed to look at the people around me the same way and be open minded and really be unapologetic. And that's not an easy thing. I mean, if you think about, you know, the crossing guard when you were in high school, right, like the kid or the hall monitor, right. Like, you know, most kids in high school want to be liked. So it takes a real personality for someone to really make everyone follow the rules. Right? You have to be unapologetic. You have to be okay with people and maybe not liking you. I admire that even in conflict or moments where I don't agree with folks that I work with. I admire the fact that they have the guts to stand up for their position, which makes me open minded and gives me the opportunity to maybe see it from their vantage point. I think that's something, you know, that has been really, really valuable for me in all aspects of my life quite honestly.
Jeff Hunter:
I think you're describing something I want to talk a little bit about, because I thought you were again, unusually good at this.
So, I think you're starting with self-awareness right? You have to know who you are to accept who you are. And a lot of people just don't know who they are, because they're so anxious to please others, or because they're afraid they're going to lose something or whatever it is. And so they're really caught up in that fear or that anxiety, as opposed to just being okay with themselves. Then as you start to get okay with yourself and you’re starting to get to know yourself, then you have to watch out that your mind's tricking you because you can get arrogant. You can start to think, wow, I've really got it going on. I really know the answers, where frankly if you care about getting better, you’ve got to learn all the time, which means you’ve got to have some self skepticism, some humility, and then ultimately the way people really up their game is self acceptance.
And I talk to people about this all the time, and it's incredibly difficult for them to see that self acceptance is not the same as arrogance. It's not letting yourself off the hook. It's understanding we're all human. We all have problems. We all have weaknesses and strengths. And if you say, I accept I have some weaknesses, it actually opens you up to go after those things and improve. If you fight against that, if you deny that you've got problems and your weaknesses, your mind sets up a block to it. And you just can't get to it because in your mind it’s just so unpleasurable and painful for your mind to even consider it. And the thing I experienced in our coaching was how, again, just how hungry you were to get to know yourself better, to engage in that sort of humility, and then to get to that point of acceptance.
And I remember during our coaching where we'd talk about, if you really care about somebody you're going to do what's best for them, and often what's best for them isn't what they're going to like. And you’ve still got to tell them the truth and you’ve still gotta be there and sort of hang out with them while they're upset at you, because you told them the truth. And I just, I really saw you do that extremely well. So I wanna know, I want to segue onto that, where I know that you've had some extraordinary mentors and coaches in your life. You've had people who made huge differences in addition to your mom and your stepfather and others. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about, cause I feel so lucky that we have so many of these stories, if you could share a little bit with the audience, like, what was the experience of working for some of the earliest people you worked with and what did they teach you?
Jameel Spencer:
Oh man. Yeah. I've been super duper blessed, and it's funny because it's not until these moments where you're talking about it out loud, do you even give yourself credit or take you know, the time to be thankful for the experiences that I've had. So, you know, I moved to New York in the early 1990s. You know, did a bunch of things and worked for a bunch of really, I mean, I've worked for some of the most amazing personalities. So I worked with Shaquille O’neal, I ran a clothing company called Twism and when he first came to the Lakers, which was awesome, I spent a lot of time in LA with Shaq. And then I was able to have some really amazing experiences, as I sort of progressed in my career, you know, I worked for Sean Puffy Combs and that was really interesting because of the way I got there, right?
Because at the time I was really, really comfortable in the job that I was in. I actually had just left Vibe magazine with Keith Clinkscales and Lynn Burnett, who were the CEO of publishers at Vibe. And we left, we walked out in a very public exit and went out and got funding and started a company called Vanguard media. This is right around the time that the .com thing, the first .com bubble where people, you know, spent and lost a lot of money. And so at the time I was really very comfortable in that job. Had no real intentions on moving. But, you know, Puff saw something in me from afar that he felt was necessary. And he started soliciting me, and I'm talking about calling me four or five times a day to the extent that, you know, I actually accepted the job after he had announced to everyone that I had accepted the job when I hadn't accepted the job.
And what I learned from him was really like, anything is possible and don't take no for an answer. And I remember, and I probably told you this story before, you know, one of the real aha moments around, you know, who he is and how he got to where he is today. Because I think if you look at him from the outside looking in, you would think that he was extremely arrogant and had this, you know, this notion of knowing everything. And I think that ultimately you know, he's nothing like that. Right? So there was a moment where he had asked me to reach out to someone and I was like, okay, no problem. And I saw him later on, that evening in the studio, because he would always see was, you know, famous for asking you to come meet him in the studio at some crazy hour.
Like yeah, meet me at 11:30 in the studio. And I'm like, Oh, that's horrible, but, okay, great. And I get there and he's like, so did you speak to him? And I was like, no, I sent him an email. He hasn't hit me back yet. And he said, you sent him an email? You sent him an email? Let me tell you something, man. If I send somebody an email and they don't get back to me in the first 30 minutes, I'm showing up at their door. He said, and the difference between my house and your house is that you send emails, I show up at people's doors. And that was really like, because the reality is that the reason why he and I were even having that conversation was because he would see me at a party and call me at three o'clock in the morning and be like, is a deal done yet?
When we working together? Come on, man. We going to make history together. And he still calls me to this day, that same way. He actually was celebrated at Howard university. They gave him an honorary doctorate. And he had been calling me to come cause he wanted everybody that he loved to come and be a part of this celebration. But I was, you know, I had just started a new job. I didn't really have time. So I was like literally ghosting him. I was like not taking his phone calls. And one day I'm in a meeting in my office and my son, my oldest son, his name comes up on my phone. So I answered the phone. I'm like, Hey, Jamani, what's going on. He goes, hey dad, I got uncle puff for you. And puff ends up on the phone with me.
And all he said to me was, don't come to my funeral, come to this, don't worry about my funeral. You could miss my funeral. I need you to celebrate me while I'm alive. And it's that attention to detail. And that ability to just be relentless is why he will always be successful. He will always be relevant. He will always do things where, you know, he may not have anything going on. So he'll run a marathon, right. And you'll have Diddy runs the city. He might not have anything going on so he'll do a voter registration thing called vote or die, right? Or he'll have nothing going on. So we'll go on Broadway and do a Broadway play. So you know, this guy has remained relevant for 15, 20, 30 years, right? Because he is relentless and he has his finger on the pulse of pop culture in a way that you combine that relentlessness and that connectivity to culture.
And then you become the guy that's driving culture. So, you know, that was an amazing experience. And then I was able to go from working for him to ultimately work with JayZ. And there was a brief stop there with Damon Dash, but ultimately working with Jay, his personality is the exact opposite of Puffs. While Puff is relentless, you know, Jay is laid back, right? But he has a code and he only does things that fit within that code. And so, you know, he says no, way more than he says yes, but when he says yes, it's going to be culture changing. It's going to be life changing. It's going to be something that the entire world sees. And it's funny, cause I watch him now and he still moves exactly the same way. So whether it be the fact that he took out full page ads and all the local newspapers to promote all the black owned businesses there are in East people city, right? Because now he's about empowering his own culture. You know, he just does things that are different than most folks. And so you know, having these amazing opportunities and the good news about those relationships, where I really felt confident that I was giving as much as I was getting and that’s why those relationships are still strong to this day, because I think that there's an appreciation for each other.
You know, I believe that God put me in those, in those guys' lives for me to get and for me to give, and I'm extremely appreciative cause I know that, I'm a much better, I'm not even just a better executive, I'm a better person for those relationships.
Jeff Hunter:
It was such a wonderful part of our coaching experience when you would tell me these things, because one of the things, one of the things I've learned over time is just how much, I don't know. Over time I realized just how blind I am to so many things and how many things I'm missing. And I learn so much from the people I have the honor of working with. And just as a side note, I was able at one point to talk to Paul, I believe you had introduced me to him and I walked away from that conversation completely blown away, it wasn't at all what I expected. Which of course is where you should be aware, self aware of your expectations and your blind spots. Because it was an extraordinary conversation with a person who was filled with curiosity and conviction and real humility I thought, which surprised me.
So thank you for making that connection and thank you for telling me about that. So now, let's move into that whole thing I was just talking about, which is blindness and talking about how to help each other. So one of the things I've been talking to my clients on and my friends on this podcast, is to ask them about my own privilege and the blindness that privilege causes and how that may prevent me from being the best possible coach and the most help I can be to other people and asking a very simple question, but I think a really important and frankly uncomfortable one, which is as a straight white guy, can I be a good coach for an African American? Can I be a good coach for a transgender person, for a woman? Can I be a good coach for people who aren't like me? And I'd love your perspective and opinion on that?
Jameel Spencer:
Yeah, this is a great one quite honestly, because, you know, I recently produced a black men summit on the essence streaming platform. And one of the things we talked about was mental health and how you seek people to help you work on your mental health. And someone said at one point he was like, you know, it was really important to be intentional around finding someone who was of color because, you know, they needed to understand the things that he was going through. And so for you to ask me that question now, which is really interesting because of the fact that like, quite honestly, the coaching that I did with you was super special to me. Right? And it was super impactful. And the reality is that it was kind of colorless, which is kind of like bullshit if we're being honest right? Because like nothing should be colorless, right?Like I am proud of the fact that I'm a black man, so I would never say when you see me, don't see color. I would never say that I want you to see a beautiful, proud black man, a beautiful, proud black father, husband, interex. But I think when it comes to, you know, coaching some of these things are evergreen quite honestly. And I love the fact that I, cause I felt like when we were doing our coaching, you know, there was a lot of, you know, sharing of information. And so I felt like, you know, you were learning a lot of stuff about the world that I came from, that you didn't know previously. And I think that goes back to your first question, right?
Where you say that, you know, how can you stay humble and hungry at the same time? I think there's gotta be the openness, the vulnerability that says when it comes to some of this stuff, I can't speak intelligently about that. Right? Like you don't know. I remember you, myself and my best friend, Emmett had an amazing call right after all this stuff happened with George Floyd. And I remember like seeing the look on your face and you were so emotionally, you’re full of emotion, right? And that warmed my heart because I knew that you cared, you cared as much about what you didn't know and what you couldn't understand. But I think that was also a moment where like, and I think the reason why we're seeing the reaction, the way we're seeing the reaction, when we, you know, who thought, who would ever thought that there would be these black lives matter rallies all around the world and probably more young white people there than young black people, like who would have ever thought that, and that's what the world needs.
So somewhere along the line, especially as it pertains to, you know, culture coaching for executives, the reality is that white folks have been on the top of that triangle forever, right? And it's been by design. And so there's things that are necessary in terms of understanding how to traverse through that world that you may be uniquely positioned to help me sort through. But I do think that, you know, had you asked me this question, had you and I never gone through the experience that we went through and what happened in the world had just happened. I probably would have a different answer. Quite honestly. I probably would think that no. And it's funny because I've actually suggested you for some companies that I work with today that are, you know, that are black companies that work in the black and their work, you know, with the black community and, you know, I've heard, well, you know, we can't have a white guy come and do that.
And my response is sometimes it ain't about black or white. It's really just the best, right? And sometimes we should just want the best. And I know I don't have a load of other experiences to compare it to and contrast it from, but I know that, you know, what we did together and what we continue to do in terms of, you know, talking, helping, caring for each other, you know, that's real. And that has nothing to do with, and by the way, it might have, it probably has everything to do with the fact that you're a straight white man. And then I'm a straight black man, right? It has everything to do with that because just as much about what makes us different, I think makes us appreciate one another too. And so like I said, if you'd have asked me the question today and you and I had never had the experience that we had, I probably would say no, I need a black man to do that for me but having gone through the experience I would choose you all day.
Jeff Hunter:
Thank you. I'm pretty... thank you. Okay. So let me compose myself after that answer. Thank you very much. But you want to continue along that vein a bit. So you said something very interesting. I think it's really important to understand something I see every day when I'm working with white male executives is that they don't necessarily understand that they're privileged because every day they're working through stuff, they feel terrible about their performance. They're just human beings. And so they're feeling terrible about who they are or whatever's going on and the last thing that's striking them is they're doing anything that's creating systematic racism. That's the last thing that's occurring to them. They all believe themselves to be good people they're trying their best and sometimes know the best thing to do and sometimes don't, but definitely would not consider themselves to be part of a system that actually creates a systemic level of disadvantage and fundamental injustice.
And yet my experience is in thousands of different little ways, anybody who has privilege or power does that, right? They want to keep what they’ve got. We all do. We all want to, when we feel like we've earned something, whether we in fact have earned it or not, we want to hold onto that, it becomes part of our identity. And then our mind is tricky and it does lots of little things every day to help us stay in that position. So for somebody like me and many others who are really very deeply and fundamentally concerned about that systemic injustice and about the systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia that exists inside the current structure and system of our, you know, of the workplace, what are the things that a guy like me can do to deliver to people who haven't had the same luck that I've had the same privilege I was born into and did nothing to earn? What can we do to start, to cure some of that and start to fix some of that. And I'm not talking about the big gestures, I'm talking about every day, the thing we can work on to actually break the system.
Jameel Spencer: Yeah. So what you're, what you're alluding to is, right? It's like we are all a byproduct of the most incredible marketing plan of all time, right? And it's like, it's insane, I guess, because like, you know, and marketing is really powerful. Like, you know, somewhere along the line, there were people who made eggs and bacon that they convinced everyone that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, right? And people walked around forever believing that. And I bet you, if you did a survey today, you know, you'd get in, you know, in the high 80% of people that still believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because that's what they told us. And so all those things you're alluding to is part of, you know, like one of the, probably the biggest crimes of all time, right.
And this country has now been built on a foundation of something that is not sustainable. And the reality is that it was already in the process of changing in and of itself, because one thing that you can't market is love, and there is an innate appreciation for black culture that is undeniable. And so if you go, especially when you get outside of the United States, like every time I've been in London, I've never seen a black man with a black woman. I've always seen the black man with a white woman, a black woman with a Chinese guy, like whatever it is and so they literally, the complexion of the world is changing. And, you know, and I forgot the number, but they say sometime within the next 10 years, right? There'll be more mixed race people than white folks.
And so, you know, this change was coming. And what you're seeing now is the reaction to people actually coming to terms with their privilege, they’re like, wow, I never knew, which is kind of insane, right? I never knew that black people were being treated this way. And so I think in terms of, you know, what can we do? I think there needs to be, I think we need to be intentional around creating opportunities and being diverse and showing it's funny because it's like you say these things. So like I'm working on something as we speak. And in the work, you know, there's a different look and feel to some of the creative that we have and people are again, people are so knee jerk reaction to what they're used to, that you hear things that are really just cold for racism that, you know, that the model she doesn't have on makeup and her hair looks crazy.
No, but our hair is natural and her skin looks natural because she's a black woman, right? And so it's not something that you can force feed the people. Because it's so much that went into creating the dynamic that unraveling it's going to take time and patience, but more importantly intention. And so like to the extent that, you know, people who probably couldn't afford this type of coaching could get this type of coaching. I mean, so now we're talking specifically about what you and what you do. I think that maybe if there was an opportunity for you to, you know, to provide this type of coaching to young people of color, you know, maybe even while they're in college. Because, you know, I literally got out of college and had no clue what I wanted to do.
This career kind of found me quite honestly. So, you know, I would say like providing coaching, I think that you have an amazing network, you know, you were working with a C suite level individuals and, I know you and I've seen the growth of your company over the years and it's, you know, it's powerful. So, you know, to the extent that you could continue to be a beacon of light around, you know, connecting folks like that. And people just feeling like a responsibility, right? You know, but it's hard for people to feel a responsibility when they don't even realize, they don't even recognize the privilege. And then even when you say it to them, they're like, Oh, okay, but you know, that's not me, right?
And they don't realize that, you know, it's so deeply entrenched into our culture that it’s not noticeable, but what you don't realize is as black folks, we always knew we had to be way better to get the same. We have to be better. And so now you have a whole generation of folks who, you know, so my parents, when I was growing up, they wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer or an accountant. I actually took accounting when I was a freshman in college, it was like the worst class. I was like, I would never do this for a living. Because in my mind that was one of the three things I could do to be successful. Then I got out of school and I saw young black folks that look like me talk like me, dress like me, achieving success on their own terms.
And now what you have is a generation of folks who grew up in that dynamic, who are now having children who, what they're capable of is totally different. It's so much more than what we're capable of. Now, the problem is understanding that your kids are different. Going back to the Dennis Rodman, you know, example, so what you'll hear, and I think this is not a black or white thing. I think you just hear this about, you know, this generational, you know, you hear these kids. Well, these kids and as probably, and it's definitely more so for black folks, right? These kids didn't grow up. Like we grew up, they don't have the toughness, they don't have the figure it out, right? Because all of their interactions are curated, you know, their play dates and all of these things, these kids, they don't go outside.
They don't do okay. We could talk forever about what they don't do, but what do they have? They have access and they have information and they have an ecosystem. And now they're starting to know each other at a younger age. And what they're capable of is, is anything quite honestly. And so I'm excited about the future because when I look at my children and their friends and my friends, my friends, children, I'm excited because without even knowing it right, they have now a really, really connected to a culture like them. They have these beautiful children with these hair and all this stuff going on. It's very rich, very Afrocentric, you know, our ability to connect ourselves to the continent of Africa is important because quite honestly, we are a Regal people, right? We come from Kings and Queens, but you don't learn that in school, at public school, in Norwood, New Jersey, you don't learn about that because they want to tell you about, you know, the pilgrims and Christopher Columbus and all of this crazy stuff like this.
I mean, there's still perpetuating these myths within our school systems. And so in terms of, you know, a guy like you, I think that first of all, I will never, I will always say it over and over again. I am completely touched and appreciative of your empathy. And the fact that, you know, you are diligent in trying to figure out, you know, how do you do your part? And so I think that, I would focus on the children. I would focus on the young folks because if you think about it, if you look about even this revolution or what's going on, right? These peaceful protests, whatever it is, it's all being led by young people, right? I mean, I'm comfortably in the backseat of the car while they're driving. But I'm excited about what they're capable of because, they have the access to the information, right? Speaker 2 (38:36):
And they also have their grandparents who maybe grew up during a time where it was way worse than it is today even. So they have the value of those stories. But, you know, when I grew up as a kid, all of my friends that I went to high school with, nobody had their father in the household, nobody. Now the people will tell you is, 70% of how black households are led by women. Okay. But, you know, I think that for the households that do have the men in the house, you know, we're building something positive and then I always would bet on black women anyway, cause I was, you know, I was raised by a single mom and really by my grandparents, my grandmother's. And my grandmothers were really the ones who turned me into who I am today.
And so, but I would say I would focus on the children. And then, you know, utilized your entire ecosystem to add value and give them opportunities and be super intentional around it because that's the only way we'll get there because everyone will tell you every reason why not to, you know, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make money, it doesn't make them, but then, you know, well, how do you want to live your life? I think that when you get older it's about, you know, like I said, when you were younger, you want to make your mark. When you're older, you want to leave your legacy, right? You want to leave the world a better place than it was when you got there. And you gotta be okay with maybe, you know, investing in some things that you might not see come to fruition, that may happen, you know, in your children's lifetime or your children's children's lifetime, and that's gotta be okay. And that work needs to start and be consistent.
Jeff Hunter:
Well my friend, you have my word of honor that I'm going to do that. And I'm putting that out in the public sphere and I will come back to you and how I'm going to implement that, but you've inspired me to action. And so thank you, thank you very much for sharing that. And it resonates deeply and it makes a lot of sense. So thank you. So one more question. We just don't have enough time to get into all the fascinating things I'd love to talk about, but in addition to everything we've talked about, you are a world class marketing mind and you've been at the front edge of, and the leading edge of changes in fashion and a number of different areas and seeing firsthand how the changes in the way consumers think about purpose in mission in spending their dollars more than just on a product, but an experience and a company that represents their values. You've been at the leading edge of that for a long time. What do you think if you're a white guy listening to this podcast and you're a CEO and you're sort of surprised by the, you know, by the changes that are happening around you, what do you think they need to know about how this is all gonna affect their business?
Jameel Spencer:
Well, I mean, I think the reality is, I think they just need to be more honest, quite honestly, because this dish has, this is not a new thing. Like, I mean, black folks have been the driving force of pop culture from the beginning. So back when, you know, I mean, first of all, I mean, you can really attribute, you know, American music to slave music, right? If you think about, you know, in the fifties, when white folks were listening to rock and roll and all of a sudden soul music became a big deal, but they put white faces on the album cover. And so this is not a new thing.
I think the reality is that like, it's time for us to get the credit for it. And the credit needs to be in the form of equity. But the reality is that we're living in a time right now where I feel like it's a right sizing. I think that the laws of physics says that, you know, for every action, there's a reaction. And so the action of slavery and oppression and all of that has happened. And now we're in the beginning of the reaction and there needs to be an appreciation but more importantly, an investment because, you know, we've been giving away our impact forever, right? So way more white folks make money off of black music, black films, like how crazy is it that Kim Kardashian has gone to a doctor and gave herself all the black attributes she could.
And now she's, you know, one of the most famous women in the world, right? And that dynamic is something that has gone on forever and so now I think it's time for people to give back. I think it's time, you know, I think people were going to hold people accountable. Like, you know, brands like Nike, right? People that have Nike's coming out saying all the right things, but people are like no, no, no, no, Nike, you don't have any senior leadership of color in that organization, which is absurd. You can't tell me, because first of all the talent is black, right? Tiger woods, LeBron James, Serena Williams. I mean, by the way, these people have buildings on the campus, right? And you're telling me that the majority of folks, I mean, think about even like the NFL or NBA, like how, how the hell is there no black ownerships in those leagues when you, when I'm telling you right now, especially if you see what's going on with the NBA right now, if LeBron James decided to go and take over wherever they are in the bubble right now and do that tournament himself, I think it's more successful, right?
But meanwhile, we're still here trying to get a piece of that pie. So I think that it's funny because it doesn't happen easily. It doesn't happen naturally, right? Because like if you go too far in the other direction, it doesn't feel genuine. But the reality is that there needs to be an honest appreciation for this culture that has been the driving force for pop culture for as long as anyone can remember. And then there needs to be an equitable share of ownership of these things because it's just not right. It's just not right that, you know, these white billionaires that run the NFL are making all this money and people will tell you, Oh, well, these guys are millionaires. Okay. But we know millionaires, you could be broke. Billionaires and you probably good forever, right?
It's generational wealth. And those are the titles. We need to own our own culture. And to the extent that you're selling something to, or as a result of black culture, then you need to be really mindful of how we get a stake in that, because I'm telling you right now, the tide is changing. And right now, if you're not going to be on the right side of the culture, you may be out of business. And no one would have ever thought that some of these brands would be in trouble, but we've seen bigger things go away over time for way less. And so I think that the time that we're living in people need to be honest about it and really, really figure out what side of culture you want to be on. And by the way, by not doing anything, you're making a choice there too, right?
Business as usual doesn't work. If you think about even people's timeline and social media, I think that people were very, you know, out in front of this and talking about it all the time. But the person that just goes on talking about regular things, again, like we're looking at you, like there's literally a cultural police that are out there right now that could literally make you go away. And so people should move understanding that.
Jeff Hunter:
Well, I'm going to end on that powerful note. I love that. Thank you very much, Jameel. I am so incredibly grateful for you, spending the time with me and always been grateful for the opportunity to play a role in your life and for you to teach me everything you've taught me. So thank you so much. I just can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
Jameel Spencer:
Nah, listen, I appreciate you, man. You asked me, I'm showing up all day.
Jeff Hunter:
Thank you, sir. All right, well that, and we're going to sign off.
Jameel Spencer:
All right, brother.
Jeff Hunter:
Coaching in the Clear has been a production of Talentism, it was recorded mixed and edited by 46 ad studios, original music by John Hunter. If you found this podcast valuable, please share on social media and make sure to leave a review. To support this podcast please sign up at Talentism.com. There you will find important content and up to date insights about how to unleash your potential. Thank you so much for listening.
