In this episode, we are talking to the founder and CEO of Vivo Team, Renée Safrata about change resilience, as well as how to be patient and enjoy the unknown. We are at a point in time when there will continue to be more unknowns than fewer moving forward, making this an important skill to master.
“We have to learn how to be patient in the unknown right now.”
In this episode, we are talking to the founder and CEO of Vivo Team, Renée Safrata about change resilience, as well as how to be patient and enjoy the unknown.
“Right now, every day, change is a constant.” And, as leaders, we need to be aware that our employees and team members are going through the same thing. So, how can we steady the internal and external ship with the unknown being huge? That’s what leading through crisis is about.
Some takeaways and specific learnings from this episode:
- Why saying “yes” is important
- The difference between big yeses and small yeses
- Why having built-in time for reflection and learning is key
- Balancing short and long-term planning/goals
- Why you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) do it alone
- The benefits of implementing a decision tree
I love Renée’s brain and how she thinks about things. To understand why, and to build your competency for change resilience, you’ve got to listen!
—
Over the past 30+ years, Renée has worked with thousands of companies and executives throughout North America and Europe, helping them to connect, adopt new behaviors, and become confident members of highly functioning teams.
Human connection and talent development are at the core of everything Renée touches. From one-on-one and team training to speaking engagements, she clearly demonstrates how this philosophy of connection is what ultimately drives productivity and directly contributes to company results.
After a successful career in interior design, Renée shifted to consulting where she helped CEOs, executive management, and entrepreneurs build focused and results-oriented teams. Recognizing the ongoing shift and future demand for digital workplace learning, she began researching and analyzing the market to develop the business plan for building out Vivo Team’s analytics and methodology.
She now has over 10 years of experience leading a remote team and creating and delivering educating, entertaining, and unique virtual learning experiences.
To learn more or to connect with Renée visit vivoteam.com or search Vivo Team Development on all social platforms.
- I'm Celine Williams and welcome to the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times.
My guest today is Renee Safrata, who is CEO of Vivo Team. Vivo Team helps increase employee lifetime value and business results by providing leaders and teams with insights and tools they need to succeed. Their solutions are tailored and backed by research, combining people analytics with online training and group coaching. And as many of you are probably aware, Renee has been here before. So, welcome back, Renee.
Thank you, glad to be back. Always enjoy these conversations.
As do I. I love having people back where I'm like, I genuinely just like talking to you and I would do this anyways even if we were just hanging out. So, it's kind of my ideal conversation.
Mine too.
Moments like this.
Yeah.
So, I know you would've answered this last time, but I'm gonna ask for this moment in time. When you hear the concept or the idea of leading through crisis, what comes up for you or what does that mean for you?
Yeah, I think that what comes up for me is going back to the basics. And for me and the leadership role, the basics are making sure that I'm navigating the long-term plan, the short-term plan. I'm making sure that I'm communicating with my team on any pivots or shifts. Being aware of not being a shiny object, like, "Hey, there's a shiny object, let's go there." But be being very strategic and tactical at the same time, but informing all members of the team so that they can be a part of that. And probably one of the most important things, I think, is not getting stuck in decision making. So, I always say, and you've heard me say this probably a number of times, make sure that we're always saying yeses and quickly that there're small yeses and big yeses, but really focus on the yeses that you can say instead of the nos. Because the nos just get us into the stuck place. And I think in crisis and then change, we gotta keep the compasses moving and the ship moving forward.
There are so many things that I wanna ask about from there, but I'm gonna start with the yeses and the nos first. And then I also wanna touch on what you were talking about that balance between short and long term. And one might feed into the other, which is completely reasonable. So, I think the concept of saying, continuing to say yes and focusing on the yeses rather than the nos. I haven't heard that before and I think it's a really interesting idea. And I'm curious if you can share a little bit about how that gets people unstuck, or prevents feeling stuck, or what the, obviously, yeses build momentum and theoretically nos, if you're saying no to the right thing would also build momentum. So, what is it about the yeses versus the nos for you that keeps you focused on them and small and big ones moving forward?
Well, let, yeah, great. So, let's unpack first the concept of a small yes and a big yes. A big yes is when we have all of our data, all meaning all of our information in place and we can confidently make a robust fulsome confident decision. That's a big yes. Got it, nailed it, go. A small yes is, I only know what I know in this moment in time now. And so, I can take a small risk without it having a big impact, but yet, a small yes will keep us moving forward, and we can check in frequently. We can check in daily, we can check in weekly, to see if that small yes is still on track. I think often people revert to no, because they have to have every decision a big yes.
Hmm, that's really interesting.
Right?
Yeah, so what immediately pops into my mind is continuous iteration.
Yes.
So, those small yeses to me are, feel kind of part and parcel of design thinking or continuous iteration where you say yes to something that is small enough that you can kind of test it, break it, see if it's the right thing, come back and prove it, move on to something else, whatever the case may be. And I might be way off base, but that immediately that's what came to my mind.
Yes, correct. And I think, it just occurred to me, literally, just occurred to me in this moment, in this conversation that again, we work with teams, we work with the system of the leader on the team. So, if you think about teams, there's often people who, they'll take the risk first, then they'll think later. There's others that think first, take the risk next. And one of our biggest premises at Vivo Team is to not put people into a box, but to drive collaboration. With a small yes, if we can wrap everyone around the fact that we will check in frequently, but we will take these small risks and move forward, that's I think where we start to really unlock true collaboration. Because those people that want more information can still have and I hate the word safety, but they can have the confidence to move a little bit. We're gonna check in tomorrow at noon. Okay good, that's building trust in your collaborative effort. But if it's like, woo, we're jumping off the cliff and we're not gonna meet for a month. Well no, that doesn't help build the trust, the confidence and the competence. Like we've all heard this thing, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, the risk or the confidence. We have to navigate those two together and I didn't think we were gonna go down that road, but I think it is really important context to the small yes and the big yes. And try to make the nos minimal, because you're right, sometimes you clearly have to say no, if the risk situationally dependent. The risk is too high for you to take. And I totally understand that. I think what's also really important is that we understand who is involved in the big nos. Because it might not be the full team, it might not be the full company. There are things that we hold in our private self of the company in developing our change resilience, in developing our ability to then take the next yes. And that might be a small yes.
It also seems like when it comes to big yeses that that's the time. Okay, let me take a step back. Saying a big yes, saying yes to something big, One of those, you know? I think there it, I hear what you're saying and what kind of runs through my head is that's where you're more likely to have to say no in order to say yes to one of those big yeses. And if you have smaller yeses along the way, then you're really clear on what you're saying yes to in a big sense, or what that looks like. So, that no is because you are, it's not because you're just saying no, but it's because you are saying yes to something that has this momentum of these small yeses behind it.
Correct.
Well, I'm glad we solved all the world's problems with yeses and that's...
We're done.
But I think that's, I really like that concept and I think it's important not only for the building of confidence and competence and trust as you were saying, but we are really, I think leaders, whether they are running a small business, a medium, whatever size of business, whether they are at in a large business, at senior leadership level or in that wherever they're making decisions, I think we get so focused on the big yeses or nos as like these are the deal breakers, this is what matters most that we skip over those small yeses that you're talking about that'll allow us to make better decisions with those big ones.
It's true, very true. I once read this book, but it's sort of interesting that you're bringing this up. I once read this book and it was really an interesting book for me at my time in my career. It was probably, I'm gonna say 30, 30 years ago or 25 years ago or something. And it was called "Bulldog: The Spirit of Entrepreneurialship", which is kind of interesting.
Yeah.
The premise of the book was is that everything that you do in your career adds to your portfolio of your career achievement. So, speaking about those small decisions, even if you are an individual contributor in a company or an emergent leader, maybe you don't have team members or direct reports yet, but you're leading projects. All of those little small yeses, all of those decision trees that you go through, even if they are decision trees for your career around is this the right company that I'm with? Does it match my values? And is it matching the values perhaps of my new relationship or perhaps my spouse, my children and the vision for my family? We are all going through this multiple interaction of personal and professional right now. And I think too, the pandemic really pushed us into that where we start to recognize that we're bringing our whole person to work. And so, my point being is if people can be more aware and that lends itself into the whole conversation of emotional intelligence, that they could be more aware of not only where I am now where I wanna get to, but what are the things that I'm doing in my decision making communication. Thinking about the vision of my professional and personal life that are all things that are building my portfolio of competence and motivation that I bring to the table every day. So that, I find that really fascinating, that whole idea.
It is fascinating and it makes me wonder how many people are being as intentional about that as what you're speaking to. I would say, and I know I said this before we even started recording that I would bet there's a lot of people out there who are not one or they hear decision tree and they go, "What's a decision tree? I've never used one of those." So, they're not thinking in that way to begin with. So there's almost like a lack of intention there, but and maybe not but, and also, based on just instinct, not I have zero data on this. I would guess that people think those big decisions, those big yeses, hold more value than the small ones. So, they don't look at these small decisions, these small opportunities, "small", as helping them in any way as building their portfolio, their confidence, whatever, because it's not the Steve Jobs starting up, whatever the thing is. And I also think we tend to glorify those and minimize other decisions. And I mean, I don't know if you would agree or if you see that, that's kind of my instinct though.
I think if I were to repeat back the gist of what you're saying, you're saying do people really have an awareness and do they really think through that thoughtfully? Correct? I think that's actually a competence scenario that as leaders we have to support and develop for those people in our organizations that are moving up, because that awareness is critical to them being able to take on more strategic thinking. It starts there. It's like you're starting to think strategically about your own life, your own career, and now how can you apply that to the role that you're in? I find that even on our team, we have people that we are wanting to bring up to a different leader level and it is important for us to consistently, and we do this every quarter, review with them and they participate in it. What are their development areas to get to where they're going next and what are the problems or the difficulties that they're having, because we all bring in our human beingness into an organization and sometimes in our blind spots we have locked points. So, for instance, what we're just talking about right now is this whole idea of developing your time to maybe just reflect. Just take the hour on a Wednesday morning and just reflect on what Monday and Tuesday brought to you. And now how am I gonna bring those learnings into my Thursday and my Friday? People can say that, that looks like downtime or not working time. I think that that's probably the most important time. Sorry, something's caught in my throat there. But I think that, that reflection time and that learning time and that continued an openness to committing to doing better is again moving those small yeses into big yeses and for people to start to pivot their brain from thinking strategically to tactically. And if you think right now when we're talking about this whole idea of leading through crisis, right now, every day change is a constant. And so, if working in companies, the company is pivoting and changing and shifting, it can look quite chaotic for the individual. Particularly, if they're not informed, and particularly, if they're not connected with a manager, or connected with a colleague at work, or a mentor at work, where they can have time just to say, "Wow, I need to be less stuck. I need to be less attached to needing to know all the information, and I don't really know how to do this, 'cause I've never done it before. What does that look like?" Because I know even for myself, change resilience and my ability for change resilience has been on a continuum throughout my career, but right now, it's almost on an hourly, daily basis. And I think as leaders, we need to be aware that our employees, leaders, team members, whatever, are going through the same thing. So, how can we steady the internal and the externalship essentially, with the unknown. With the unknown being huge. That's what crisis is about. Sorry, Celine, I really got something stuck in my throat there.
Fine.
And I think that is exciting that if you can look back and go, like even the last time you and I spoke. We talked about leading through crisis, specifically, to the pandemic. Well, now everyone, everyone around the globe went through that and everyone has in their back pocket how they got back to the basics, what decisions did they make, how did they navigate the turbulent times, try to rinse and repeat, because it still exists and I don't think it's gonna change. All of us need to just get better at it. And that's competence, that's all.
And it, this kind of leads me into one of the things you mentioned originally, which was this idea of balancing the short and long term. And I think that, I mean, under the best of circumstances, I think that people find that very challenging, because of what you're talking about, now more than ever, there's so much unknown. I know I mentioned, again, I mentioned this before we started. every leader I'm talking to has brought up AI, ChatGPT, whatever in the past month. It just more and more, and some of them, some of it is like, this is really exciting, what could this do? And some of it is, oh my gosh, there are so many more unknowns. How is this gonna affect this? How is this gonna affect this? And there's a stuckness that comes from those unknowns in terms of long and short, short and long-term decisions, in terms of being resilient with change, modeling that change resilience you mentioned. And how do you find balance in that? What has worked for you? What have you seen work for other people? I think it's gonna be more and more of this and of the unknown rather than less.
Absolutely, I totally agree. It's gonna be more of the unknown than less going forward. And again, I repeat, all of us. Every one of us went through the pandemic. Let's not forget the learnings from that crisis. What's that saying? I never know that saying, don't let a crisis pass you by kind of thing. There's good stuff to take from it.
Yeah.
So, two things I wanna say. That piece about this whole idea, that all of us have been here before. What did you do, think back, what did you do? How did you get the basics in place and how did you navigate that? Now, what can you transfer into your day-to-day, right now? Now, to answer your question to me. And in alignment with short and long-term thinking. I'm lucky in that I'm a planner. So, and I'm also in a role as CEO in a business where my thinking has to navigate the present, the current scenario and what I call down the pipe. Where will we be in six months, nine months down the pipe? And are we tracking well in our short-term goals, objectives, things that we're doing, tasks, development of people, so that when we get to what I predict, which I call a scientifically wild ass guess, the swag, for the six months, nine months down the road that we're tracking well. We're sort of putting those pieces of the puzzle in place. So, I'm lucky that I have that naturally, that I think down the pipe naturally. I think that again to that idea of competence and remember, we're behavioral scientists at Vivo Team, so we look at behaviors of competence and motivation and collaboration. In that idea of competence, if we see that people have that natural thinking down the pipe, great, nurture it. Make sure that you put them in the right roles. If you see that people are much more executive function in the day-to-day than in a crisis, how do they have someone that they connect to regularly who is discussing with them the idea of that decision tree? Well, what if this happens in six months? What if that happens in six months? What would it do? How would you change what you're doing right now? And lead to their strengths, which is, you know the right now. I know I can do the scientifically wild ass guess. Now, how do we come together again in a collaborative way where we can lean on one another's strengths? I hope that helps. So, for me, I do that within my team. I have people, in particular, my VP of Ops, I lean on her on a regular basis to bring the snapshot of what is going on within the team, within our projects, within what we're working on. And I believe that she truly leans on me with regards to, well, where could this go? Where do we think this can go? So, we don't have to be the whole person, is what I'm saying. We can understand who we need to lean on. And for a lot of young business owners, or for a lot of new managers, that doesn't have to happen within the business. I know for me, my career has been based on having mentors to help bounce things off of. And those mentors, you know, one of those, the best mentors I had was my mom for that on those nightly phone calls, "Eh, this is what I'm doing." That's okay, they're reflective. You can hear yourself talk it through. They can help you with that short-term and long-term thinking.
Yeah, I love the, first of all, I love that your mom was one of your mentors. I think that's amazing. And I think that we often get so focused on being the sole source of whatever that we forget that mentors, people around us in our organization, coaches, whatever it is, they can help. It doesn't have to be us as a island in and of ourselves doing everything.
Exactly.
So, I appreciate you saying that.
And you know what I wanna connect the dots to on a couple things we've talked about. So, if you think about that no conversation that we've had. Probably the no conversation pushes us into the short-term thinking, because we're in the moment, we're in the snapshot, and this is where I think we need to be now. So, this could actually be quite instructive for the people who are listening. If you find yourself stuck in multiple nos in a day, in a week, is it because you're actually, you've got your feet in the current and you're not, actually, taking that reflective time. Our Wednesday coffee that we just talked about to sort of map out, well, what could be the future? Because we know, again, we know from the pandemic, life can change in a heartbeat. Well, it still can. Tomorrow can be very different than today. So, if we get our minds open to that and we think, well, what if this happened, this happened, this happened, where would we go or where would we be? How would this be new? We can make those decisions. One of the things that I see happening within organizations right now is that, with the conversations about the recession, people are pulling back and sometimes they're pulling back in the areas that are not in alignment with long-term growth. At the end of a recession or as we're pulling out of recessions or wherever we are, I don't even know, I'm so confused. We, as everybody else is, there's always the upswing, but have you placed yourself well for that upswing? So, some of the decisions that you think you need to pull back on right now may actually change, change your mind today, that you go, no, actually, I need to protect that aspect and keep that here. Whether that's resources, whether that's data, whether that's people, projects, whatever it is, I need to make sure those are in a small yes to big yes moving forward. Because that will support us in the long term. Might not look good right now, but I'm gonna do that right now.
So, as you say that too, I have two questions. One is, actually, they're probably both more tactical than anything. Oh my goodness, that's my bottle just knocking over. Sorry about that. Nice and loud. So, I have two questions that come to mind, both of which are probably more tactical. The first one is, when you're talking long term, what do you consider long term? And the context for that is, I speak to some leaders who are like, "We need to be thinking 10 years out." And I hear that and I go.
No.
You can't do that. That's impossible. Job, everything is gonna be so different 10 years out. And then I talk to other leaders, or I hear other people and they go, "Six months is as long term." And that feels too short to be long term. So, I'm curious for you, and I'm by the way, you could be like, no, six months is the right, like I'm very, but I'm curious for you. How you would define that and what you think of as long term. And then my second question related is about the decision tree you were talking about. If you could explain a bit about that, because I think people go...
Sure.
I think it's interesting what you're saying and I can hear people going, I don't know that I understand that.
Yeah, so I think, actually, there's multiple long terms and short terms. So, what I mean by that is with a company, yes, you have to have that big hairy, audacious goals, a vision for what are you going to do? Like our sort of big term, the haa! what do we wanna do as an organization is we really wanna disrupt this whole idea of employee disengagement. Like we wanna disrupt that. And so, that's the big, the big thing. That's great. So, you've got that as a beacon. We all need that beacon, whether that's 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, doesn't really matter, for you it's gonna be different. But then with regards to next on how we're looking at long term. And again, I think this depends on the company size, the company growth, where you're at. I used to, let's say 10 years ago, I used to do strategic plannings with companies, a lot of strategic planning. And we used to go for a three-year maximum, that pretty quickly actually tracked back to two years. And I think right now, since the pandemic, people are really looking at that two-year window, but they're measuring it on a quarterly short-term basis. And if we can keep thinking two year, one year, but keep measuring it quarterly. And of course, you get as short term as weekly on sales, you may be weekly, you may be daily, how are things going? So, there's different aspects of the organization as well. So, I think my answer is, we all need to consider for our own companies what feels right, what is best? Do we have a big, big hairy, audacious goal? And then how, again, on the small yeses and the big yeses, how are we managing those on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis? So, in my mind, my long-term thinking as a leader of Vivo Team is generally, I am watching what's gonna be in nine months. And maybe six months, but nine months, six months, is where my head is very dialed into looking. And then I'm checking that weekly, daily, quarterly kind of thing.
Yeah, I love that. And thank you for sharing. And one of the things that you said that I think I really wanna emphasize is you spoke about this idea of a beacon. Your Vivo Team is to disrupt this idea of employee engagement. You did not say Vivo Team is going to have worked with 1 million people to disrupt employee engagement by 2025 or 2030 or whatever. And I think a lot of times, by the way, nothing wrong with smart goals, I'm not disparaging them. However, I do think when you're talking about what you call the beacon, which I really like that language, it's less about we're gonna do this number by this day and more about heading in that direction consistently and with the momentum to make those short and long-term decisions. And I think that, that really stood out to me, because I think too often, when we're looking at that big hairy, audacious goal, people get really stuck in the specifics and making it a smart. Again, nothing against smart goals, but I think what you were talking about is actually much more meaningful and allows you and would allow anyone to be much more clear on what their short and long term is and how to continue to move forward and measure towards that beacon.
Yeah, okay. I heard you say that some people get stuck in the, a billion people by 2040, net zero, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
And I think, essentially, we're talking about different things and we may be conflating them here in that there's the vision. So, I always think about it like this, or I talk about it like this let's say. When you go to bed at night, the vision is what you dream about. That's where you wanna go. In the morning when you're having your shower, you're thinking about the mission. What do you need to do to get there? Well, the specificity, the smarter goals of the mission may, actually, require that smarter context. But the big dream may just be a statement of this is what I think we can do. Like I always loved Mustangs Survival, I don't know if you remember them, I don't know if they're around anymore. They made the life jackets that they weren't like those big bulky life jackets. They were around your head and sort of strapped on your waist and they would inflate when you hit the water. Well, they still have them, but I don't know if Mustang Survival's around. Their big goal was to save lives for a living, but yet they knew how many of those they needed to produce as well. So yeah, okay, decision tree, let's talk about that.
Yes, yes.
So the decision tree, and I sort of spoke to this a little bit earlier about this whole idea is all of us are human beings. We have our personal or professional life and I think the pandemic, one of the things that it taught us was to actually connect those two and to recognize that we are a whole being and how does our whole being move through life with purpose. And there are many decisions, personal and professional, that we have to navigate. So, a decision tree is taking this whole idea of there's a lot of unknown right now. So, a decision tree is like, look, ideally this is the way I want it to go, but a plan B, if this doesn't happen at the top of the tree, I may have to move over to plan B, which is less ideal. But I think that the things that would cascade underneath that would be B, C, D, E. And then, wow, if none of that happens, option C is gonna be this and this is what the scenario looks like. With this then, we may be at the beginning of the month in option C, but something really fantastic happens and it jets us into option A of the decision tree. And we can make some changes, review and then all of a sudden we didn't really hit that, but now we're in plan B. But at least we have some sort of a layout of a scientifically wild ass guess of where we think things are going to go. And we have the flexibility and the interest to review. We have the flexibility and the interest to be in the unknown, and we are learning as we go along that the unknown is okay. It doesn't always have to be locked in. And again, I revert back to what we all learned in the pandemic. We learned that we survived it, we got through it, we all were wiping our groceries down with hygiene wipes. And move to masks and then outdoor social activities. We've done those decision trees and we have survived those decision trees. So again, it's something we all have in our back pocket. The question is, are you using it or not? And I think even, Celine, we talked about this the last time, about that whole idea of drama. Do you wanna stay in the drama and think that everything is chaotic or just kind of try to figure out what do I already know from my history that I can bring to my current, and how would things be different?
Yeah, I think that, and this may be a false assumption, I'm realizing as I'm about to say this. I was going to say that, I think that writing down, writing out, mapping out these decision trees in some way that's not just in your head is likely one of the things that makes them, I mean beyond just shareable to your team. But actually, allows you to put them into action and be aware of things and becomes much more intentional. My assumption was that that's likely something that you do. And I might be, that's why I was like, I'm fully owning, there's an assumption there. You're nodding so is that okay? And I think that oftentimes people will might hear, oh, I do that anyways. I'm always thinking about what else it could be. But we're not actually writing it out or looking at some of the blind spots that we would have without mapping it out in that way. And I think that's a huge opportunity for people.
Huge opportunity, huge opportunity. And then to bring, again, this whole idea of communicating and informing others. And in the information to others, we start to hear that they've added a what if to the decision tree. So, there your decision tree just got a little bit larger. Something that, as you said, might have been in my blind spot, but somebody else has said, well, what if this or what if that?
Yeah.
I think is really important, because then we can have that change resilience, and we can be more patient, and we have to really learn to be patient in the unknown right now. And we have to develop others on our team, within our companies, to be patient and be okay with the unknown. It's gonna happen, but maybe not in the timeline that we thought.
I feel like that's always the way these days especially, is like just whatever timeline we were thinking, whatever outcome we were thinking, it's probably not going to be exactly that and we all have to be okay with it.
That's right.
I wanna thank you for taking the time, for coming back and chatting with us again today, because just like last time, there's so many incredible takeaways and points and I just adore your brain, Renee. Thank you, I mean it. Thank you. This was a wonderful conversation, and hopefully, one day we will do it over wine.
Yes, let's do that. I would really like that. Well, I hope this has been valuable to all of those people who are out there in the world listening. And yeah, if you wanna tap into my brain, you reach out anytime. And I offer that as well to your listeners. I'm sure they can find me somehow on the internet. I think I'm all over the internet.
Well, we'll also have links for everyone. So, there will be in the show notes and on the website. There will be links to find Renee, to look up Vivo Team. It'll be everywhere.
Yeah.
So, thank you.
We'll have a chat. We can do the same thing that you just observed. Well, you have a great day. Enjoy staying in the unknown and lots of yeses, and we'll see you again, Celine. Thanks for that.
Thank you, absolutely. Thanks for joining me today on the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.