In this episode, we are talking to Stephan Wiedner about why and how to improve interpersonal skills. This message is especially poignant for managers and leaders in today's work environment.
"I think most people in business would say, 'Yes, culture matters and I don’t know what to do about that.' It’s this big, amorphous thing, that we have no idea how to practically influence."
Today's guest, entrepreneur and founder of skillsetter.com, Stephan Wiedner talks to us about creating psychological safety at work, as well as making the intangible tangible so companies can measure the impact of their L&D training and spending.
In this episode, we cover:
- How folks in helper professions and leaders/execs are similar
- What psychological safety is and how to create more of it
- Why "soft skills" is a misnomer
- The one thing most leaders really struggle with (and a 3-step strategy to help)
Plus, so much more. We covered a lot of ground in this one!
Join us for an interesting discussion and some tangible advice on how you can get better at _____. This conversation is fully customizable to you and your needs in this area.
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Stephan Wiedner is an entrepreneur whose mission is to abolish apathy in the workplace. He firmly believes that for great work to take place, everyone needs to have the courage to speak up and the confidence to know they’ll be heard. His passion for unleashing the collective potential of people has led him to cofound Noomii.com, the web’s largest network of independent life coaches and Skillsetter.com, a platform similar to a flight simulator for interpersonal skills. As someone who is immersed in the world of amorphous concepts such as culture, human performance, and soft skills, he is obsessed with making the intangible tangible so companies can measure the impact of their L&D spending.
Stephan has been a guest speaker for Truth, Lies, and Workplace Culture Podcast, Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, Building Psychological Strength Podcast, and many other audiences interested in psychology, business, and technology. His writing has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and other popular publications.
In addition to his professional career work, Stephan serves as a volunteer firefighter in his local community. Stephan is married with two children and enjoys spending quality time in the outdoors, hiking, biking, camping, and reading.
Learn more at skillsetter.com and/or connect with Stephan on LinkedIn (@swiedner).
- I am Céline Williams and welcome to the Leading Through Crisis Podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Stephan Wiedner, who's the co-founder of noomii.com and skillsetter.com. Welcome, Stephan.
Céline, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure. I'm really excited to talk to you today. But before we get into all the good stuff, I'm gonna start with a question I always ask, which is the name of the podcast is Leading Through Crisis. When you hear that moniker, what comes to mind for you?
Well, a couple things. The first is, in all of my professional work, I do a lot of work around coaching and interpersonal skills and leadership development, all this sort of stuff. I'm also a volunteer firefighter, and so when I hear leading through crisis, I immediately go to my role as a first responder, as a firefighter. And we're regularly showing up during crisis. Now, hopeful it's not every day as a volunteer department in a relatively small community, but I've been to all sorts of car accidents and fires and cardiac arrests and stuff like that. And so often when we're showing up, it's someone else's worst day. And so, and we have an a job to perform and we need to perform it under those circumstances. And one of the things that I've noticed in my seven or eight years of being on the department is that we hold ourselves really high in terms of how we interact with the public, and we interact with the other people on the scene. So often the focus is on the patient or the individual, and yet there's other people around, other family members. And for example, one of the incidences we went to recently, there was an adult patient with children in the room. And so how we interacted with that adult, we wanted to signal it's okay, right? So we're mindful of how we're interacting with all of those folks. And we're also sometimes interacting with other agencies like paramedics, and RCMP, the police department, et cetera. And we're really critical of looking at how we show up for all of those people. Yes, we have a job to do, and yes, we also wanna be respectful of all the other folks that are in that room. And so that's what leading through crisis makes me think of and how we're holding ourselves and creating a safe experience for everyone. And the other, maybe I'll pause there because that's kind of a lot of information, Céline, and I wanna get your thoughts on that or some sort of response, I guess.
Well, I appreciate you sharing that. I'm also fascinated how being a volunteer firefighter affects and influences the other work that you do, 'cause I'm sure it does in that way that the more kind of diverse experience and view of things you have, the more inclusive, wholesome, fullsome, whatever you wanna call it, lens you tend to have on the things in front of you. And the thing that came up for me immediately was the how, so, the what matters, right? What we're doing, why we're doing it, getting the results, saving a life, you know, in your case, saving a life, not in my case, that's not the stuff that I do, but the what matters, but the how matters just as much, right? Doing the, being great at the what, but not thinking about the how or prioritizing the what over the how is problematic. And in a situation like you're talking about, it could be really easy to focus on the what, the saving the life, the getting someone out of the car, whatever these are dire circumstances. I appreciate that. And if the people around, if that person doesn't feel safe, taken care of, calm, whatever, then that what can become, I mean it, first of all, it might not, you might not end up with the result that you want in the end because of that, but it's, that person can walk away, the people around can walk away with an entirely different experience than you were intending, even if the what is successful.
Can't agree more. And I think there's a fundamental belief that underlies our work, which is relationships matter. Relationships matter. And so the what is often a technical thing, right? Putting out a fire, attending to someone's deadly bleeding wound, whatever it may be. And there's that relationship that we need to keep in mind, the relationship with the patient, the relationship with bystanders, the relationship with family members of that patient. And what we know from research, which really informs the professional work as well as the work that I do in the fire department, is that in the world of counseling or helper professions, if you will, like, I think it extends to doctors, nurses, you know, these helper professions. What we know is that the relationship really matters. And in particular, the data that we know about is that counselors that are the ones that are more likely to get great outcomes consistently over time. In other words, the best counselors, the best healers, the best helpers possess a high degree of what are sometimes called common factors or these interpersonal skills, these soft skills that are exemplary. And there's been a lot of work in academia to try to assess and measure those skills. And in fact, there's an assessment called the FIS, the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills, which is a performance assessment that takes a snapshot. It's like thin slicing, takes a snapshot of someone's skills under duress. And then that has proved to be predictive of how they perform with clients, with customers, with patients, whatever the term you wanna use. And so that to me is really fascinating because we know that these interpersonal skills matter, and now we have a method of measuring them and assessing people on those interpersonal skills. And I think the holy grail for us is not just assessing them, but improving them and being able to measure and say, objectively, yes, these skills have been improved by X amount over X period of time.
I would be so, and there might be data on this and I am ignorant of it, which is entirely possible, but I'd be so curious how those same interpersonal skills, or I mean, I assume there's a, you know, kind of library of them that is says, here's what they usually look like in some way, shape, or form. I'd be so curious what, how important those interpersonal skills are to success in a, you know, corporate environment, leadership environment where we don't think of executives as, and I'm picking on executives, managers, leaders in some way as helpers necessarily, we tend to differentiate these things, right? Like that manager or leader is not a helper, they're a leader or they're an executive. And yet there's, in my opinion, I think there's a lot of overlap with what a leader is meant to do and what a helper is meant to do in some ways. And yet, I think we often say, well, that, like I can hear, sorry to the people that I've worked with in the past, I can hear people I've worked with going, yeah, but that's 'cause they're like helpers, right? Like of course that makes sense. They're nurses, or doctors, or firefighters, or you know, therapists or whatever. Of course they need those. But in my job where I have to make really hard decisions, it's not as important.
I love where you're coming from, and we've asked, we have the same hypothesis basically, and we're testing that hypothesis. So we're currently running a study, and we're in the data collection phase. So the study, well, first of all, I gotta back up a little bit. What we're doing is we're assessing, our hypothesis is that in business, the best leaders and managers are going to produce the best outcomes, right? And it's hard to measure outcomes in a business environment because one team might be trying to sell more widgets and the other team is trying to develop the next new widget. And how do you measure performance in those two environments? So as a proxy for outcomes, what we're measuring is psychological safety. So for those who are familiar with the term, psychological safety is a belief that within your work environment, you can speak up, you can say what's on your mind, you can say, put your hand up and say, I made a mistake, and you're not gonna get vilified for it. So psychological safety has been proven to correlate with high performance. So the best teams have a high degree of psychological safety, the worst teams have the lowest degree. And so that's kind of our proxy for outcomes. And then we developed a derivative of the FIS, which I mentioned, the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills, and we're calling it FISM, for Facilitative Interpersonal Skills for Managers. And it's more or less the same thing. And we're gonna assess whether or not there's a correlation there because we believe there is, we believe those with high degree of these, quote unquote, interpersonal skills are going to naturally facilitate more psychological safety. So it's an empirical question and we're asking it, and we're gonna have more data to find out soon enough. However, even, you know, without that, we can go through the eight dimensions of this inventory of interpersonal skills and determine just anecdotally, do we think these matter for a leader or manager? And when I do that, I think by golly gee, these are exactly the same skills. And maybe here's why. I think this is a critical reason because you said, oh, well, as a leader, I need to make tough decisions or whatever. Well, I think the reason is because the key word is facilitative. These are facilitative interpersonal skills. So if you're a counselor, what are you trying to do? You're helping the other person on the other side of the table do something that's really hard for them to do. As a leader or a manager, what are you trying to do? You're trying to have the people on the other side of the table do something that's really hard and challenging to do. It's the same thing. And we're humans, right? We're all humans and we're all operating in an interpersonal environment, where, guess what? Relationships matter. And as a leader and a manager, you need to foster great relationships to build trust, to build this belief that, hey, we can do this together. You know, these are interpersonal dynamics that are true in every environment, in my opinion. Like interpersonal skills are interpersonal skills, whether you're trying to, you know, get a date on a Friday night, or save someone's life in an emergency, it's all the same thing.
Yeah, it's, I absolutely agree with that. And I think that we, the world of business has devalued is the word I was looking for there. A lot of these, quote, soft skills and interpersonal skills for so long as the, like, well, those are the nice to haves, but if you can't do X, Y, Z, that doesn't really matter. And I, with the way that work has changed, not only in the past couple of years, in the past, you know, 15, 20 years, I think it's become more and more clear that those soft skills, those interpersonal skills, are a game changer for great leadership, for that psychological safety, for people wanting to stick around, for wanting to work for and with people. And I'm happy to see that happening. And I'm also, I find it really frustrating how many people are still like in that world, well, you know, it's more important that we do this over that, as opposed to how do we find this balance of both things matter, all of these things matter, and it's not a negative to have these skills and to help people, and to want to help people and to want to see other people thrive. It's not a self, it's not this, I know what it is, this is what this just came to mind. I think in business, when you're not a helper, we often demonize that like selflessness, as opposed to, it's not really selfless. This is a everyone wins situation. Does that make sense?
In other words, someone might, someone in business might perceive a helper profession as someone who's being selfless, and me in business, I'm not being selfless. So that's the key distinction. Is that what I'm hearing?
Yeah, like it's, I think that yes, you summed it up much better than my thought was trying to get to, what is the word I'm looking for here? But yes, and I think it's why we've demonized, and I'm not saying it's across the board, it's not everyone obviously, but it has been kind of, not even demonized, but diminished at the importance of these interpersonal skills, the importance of these things that we assign to helpers, or you know, they're not as important. They've just been diminished, the value, they've been devalued. And I think my observation would be, I think that's a piece of why is like, well that's not, that's what they do. That's what selfless people do. So people who don't wanna be successful do, or whatever that garbage is that we sometimes hear.
It's an interesting perspective you offer. I think I look at it a little bit differently.
Yeah.
I think by and large, most people in business would say things like, culture matters. When you say most people in business would say, yeah, it matters, and I don't know what to do about that. You know, like it's this big amorphous thing that everyone talks about and I can agree with it, and yet I have no idea how to influence culture.
Yeah, I mean, I work in cult. A lot of the work that I do is in culture and, you know, team dynamics, and I think that is, I hear that all the time. We care about culture, culture matters, and then that's not actually the actions that they are doing. And it is the, you know, it's like the cool language to be using right now. This is the thing we're supposed to be talking about, so we're talking about it.
Hmm. Yeah, so I think part of the challenge is not that it's devalued, I think the challenge is that it's amorphous and hard to tangibleize. That's the whole like, it's, they're called soft skills. And in my opinion that's a misnomer because they're not soft, they're actually hard. We can measure them, we can observe them, they're observable behaviors. And that's I think, the distinction. And so for us, I think the opportunity is to educate people on what these tangible skills are, what they look like when they're used accurately, and well, and being able to distinguish. So for us, the way we assess these skills is we give people a stimulus video of a challenging moment in a team, and then they respond and they record their response. And then when we code their response, we can look for these behaviors. And when we observe them, we give them a high score. And when they're not there, we give them a lower score. Or if they're misusing or using a skill poorly, then we give them a low score. So there's sort of low scores, neutral scores, and high scores. And that's how we rate people's responses. And those scores are then correlated with their outcomes. And, so we can concretely measure and assess those. And I think artificial intelligence is coming along, and we'll get to the point where it's much more accurately being assessed 'cause it's sort of like an impressionistic point of view right now with humans that are fallible and not always completely consistent. So technology will eventually replace us human coders. And what I think is so fascinating about it is just that, we can measure them and assess them, and hopefully educate people on them so that they can practice them more concretely. It's sort of like, if you look at sports, I don't know if you're a sports fan, I happen to watch, I'm a good Canadian kid, I watch a lot of hockey and I also played hockey as a kid. And I see the coaching that's happening now versus the coaching I experienced 20, 30 years ago, and it's night and day, right? We've taken this complex exercise of playing hockey, and breaking it down into skating, skating forward, skating backwards, skating with pressure on, you know, someone leaning into you, skating, you know, all these micro skills are now being taught independently so that in a game you use them all in this complex, in a complex mix, an array of skills. And so we can do that with interpersonal skills, we can break them down, we can practice them, and we can have people improve those skills over time.
So I have a question for you about the, I understand, I recognize, I'm gonna say, I recognize, you said you're in the data gathering stage of this and you know, putting, you have a hypothesis and you're working on proving or disproving it, probably proving it is my guess at this point, but through this FISM that you've created. At this point, are there, if someone is hearing this, this is a question. If someone is hearing this and they're like, that sounds really interesting, how would I even like, you know, I'm not part of this study, this data's not complete yet, they're working on it. Where would I even start with this? What does that mean? Cool, what does that mean for me?
Hmm. Well I think what it means for you is for, well I think the first step is assess your own skills. Like take our assessment, complete our assessment and see where you stand and what we find in our limited dataset thus far, when we assess people for their skills and then debrief the results with them, it goes, oh yeah, that makes much, a lot of sense. What it does is it articulates for them their own knowledge of how they're lacking interpersonal skills, right? Like, oh, that makes sense. I'll give you an example. We have a leader who has a very difficult time giving challenging and direct feedback to their direct reports. This is, I think, a common problem for many leaders.
So common, yep.
Right? Especially in Canada where we're all very polite and don't wanna upset the apple cart.
Because we're all apologizing. We're apologizing to things that haven't even happened yet here, so yes.
Right. So, but that's a disservice to the people around you. And maybe that's also part of the misconception around being a helper and being selfless, like, oh for us, when you have a high degree of interpersonal skills, you can approach, and this is probably one of the core fundamental skills, is you can approach conflict and potential ruptures within a team dynamic in a positive manner, without further causing damage. And you're not just sweeping it under the rug, pretending like that didn't happen. Well that was really awkward. Oh, I'm gonna, you know, so that got, that was a sidetrack. Where was I going before that? What was the question you had asked? I'm sorry, Céline.
No, no, no, you're fine. I'm all about the sidetracks here. I had asked, you know, if I hear about this and I'm a leader and I'm like, okay, cool, but like, so what can I do about it?
Yeah, so like I said, get the assessment and then we will, we could debrief the results with you. And then what we're currently doing is we are running a bunch of pilots. So these pilots are training programs that are designed specifically for an individual or groups of individuals to help them with the areas of improvement that they're looking for, or need to improve upon. Like for example, we now have a program to help leaders who have a hard time giving direct and challenging feedback. And so these are training programs that we are currently developing. There's a small handful of them that we have now, but we're looking to develop more. And so if you're interested, if there's some specific interpersonal challenge that you wanna overcome, like if you can fill in the blank to this statement, as a leader, I wish I was more, fill in the blank. We wanna develop a program for that, because what we see as the future goal for our business is one in where no matter what interpersonal skill challenge you have, you can come to our business, come to our app and solve that problem. Like similar to like our vision for our company for Skill Setter is a kind of like Duolingo for interpersonal skills. So Duolingo, you go on there and if you know, you know, conversational French, you can go into the app, they assess you, they assess where you're at, and suddenly you're given French lessons that are appropriate for you. They're not gonna say, you know, the dog, the chien, like they're gonna introduce training that's appropriate for where you are.
Right.
And so that's what we see, and of course you can learn French, German, Spanish, Swahili, whatever, you name the language. And so that's what we see as the vision for our business is one where no matter what interpersonal skill you're trying to prove upon, come in, you get assessed, you have appropriate training given to you based on where you're at. And then you can practice on a regular basis. So that's the vision. We're not there yet, but in the short term, I wanna work with people who are keen to improve their interpersonal skills, have a specific issue that they wanna resolve, and we will design and deliver a training program for you.
I appreciate, and you know, there will be all the links to in the show notes for this, for people to check you out. I do appreciate that. 'Cause I think there will be people who hear this who think, cool, and I think knowing for, you know, where they can go and what you're up to, definitely will help them do something. Take an action, take an action in the right direction for all of these things. I do wanna go back to something that you said when you were talking about feedback. When you were saying that, you know, leaders, we all know leaders who are really, who find giving that direct feedback really challenging, because yes, I mean I think societally in general, most of us are taught, at least in, you know, North America, there's other places as well. But we are taught to avoid conflict more than how to step into conflict. And feedback, while we call it a different word, is a form of conflict. It is, conflict is neutral, I'm not saying this with judgment, but like it's a form of conflict because there's an opportunity, something didn't go the way it could have gone, or a behavior was problematic. That is a form of conflict whether we like it or not. And we're so taught, like, you know, avoid, get more information, I'm rolling my eyes if you're not watching the video 'cause it's a constant point of frustration for me is how avoidant we are about direct conversations, about having a just clear and to the point conversation, not only for the people, the leaders who are stepping into it, but for the people receiving it. We're also not taught the skills of receiving those conversations, and hearing what's being said. And I think that is problematic in a one-on-one setting, let alone when do you get into a team that comes together and something happens. And I saw this not two months ago in a team where there was a group and something happened in the room, and out of the, I don't know, 12 people that were in that room, 11 of them, maybe not 11, 10 of them, 'cause there were two people involved, kind of looked away and were like, oh, well we're not gonna talk about this. And watched two people have a conversation and step into something, one person specifically. And it was, and then afterwards, you know, it was like, well that shouldn't have been done in that way. And there was all this judgment around it when in fact it was a great model of stepping into something, directly owning pieces of this and resolving a conflict in the moment. And I'm curious about how you, well I'm curious your thoughts on things like that based on the research that you've done, and the skill, you know, the work that you've done around this in Facilitated Interpersonal Skills, what can people do about this? How do we change, what are your thoughts on this? 'Cause I just think it's such a huge piece of problems in any environment, especially a work environment. And I think it created a crisis. And I think that's also, I think those things lead to and create more crisis that's unnecessary.
Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. And I think the problem is that it's partly around our mental model and our beliefs around how to operate in that environment. And I think so much of the time people feel a little bit paralyzed because they don't know how to approach this situation. So what they're trained or know of is being able to avoid it. That's one strategy. Or you approach it by calling someone out. And we see that a lot on social media, right? We're calling people out for certain behaviors now, right? And vilifying them for whatever the behavior was. And it sounds like to some extent, there was a little bit of that in this example of 12 people in a room, and two people having this conversation, and others observing it, going, calling them out, right? Vilifying them for what they did and how they approached it. So what we trained folks in is this middle ground of what we call calling in, not calling out, but calling in. And that, if there's a spectrum, and on one hand you have avoidance, and on the other you have calling out, now you have calling in. And what is calling in? Calling in, what it requires is for a leader or manager, I mean it could be anybody in the room. Most of the training that we do is for leaders and or managers. And more specifically, we often work with like a senior leadership group. And so they wanna be a cohesive team, and they're all managers of their owns, right? If they go into their own departments or divisions of the company, they're also managers. And yet on this team, most of the participants are team members. And what they need to be able to do is what we call, go from the dance floor, up into the balcony kind of thing. It's, or if we use a sports metaphor, while there's all this action on the field, they need to remove themselves from the field and sit in the stands looking down, observing what's happening on the field, and then just shine a light on what you see. So the strategy there is to provide a perspective of what's going on in a non-judgmental way that brings curiosity to what is happening. So if, for example, a team is debating how they're gonna handle the upcoming budget forecast or budget deficit, you know, like there's some sort of matter that they're dealing with, and what you're noticing is that two people are just warring and the other eight are observing. Well, you can come in and just point that out in a non-judgmental way saying, look folks, I know we need to resolve this issue of the budget. And what I'm noticing is that we have two people that are basically on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of opinions. And I don't see us reaching a middle ground. And as one of the observers here, one of the eight that are observing, I'm noticing that I'm getting a little bit frustrated or perhaps I don't know, whatever I'm feeling internally, either that's called a self-involving statement, I might wanna use a self-loving statement, and maybe others are feeling the same way. So how, and then ending with an open-ended question, like how might we resolve this? How might we resolve this budget issue as a group, as a team? So that was a bunch of skills that I was kind of modeling there for you.
Yeah.
The first is making a, what we would call a process comment. So pointing out, what are you seeing on the field? The next is making a self-involving comment, which helps diffuse the situation, and also points to some of the emotion that might be in the room in a way that you're not assuming other people are feeling the same way as you, but it, you know, you might be feeling some tension, right? You might, it's palpable in a room. So point that out, like, hey, I'm noticing there's tension in the room here and maybe I certainly feel it, I don't know about everybody else. And then the third thing is open it up with an open-ended question, one that involves the whole team. Like, how might we resolve this together? So those are three skills, pack them all together, and that's embracing what we would call the bystand position, this, you know, that person up in this stands. How does that sound, Céline?
I mean, I love that. I would really like more people to be able to do that, have that awareness, have that skillset, especially when they're not the two or however many people are directly involved in whatever the, quote unquote, conflict is as an observer, to be able to step in and use those skills, I think is really important. I love the language of self-involving comment because I think people are often, there's a level of vulnerability in saying, I feel this way, or I'm noticing this thing, or this is about me and I'm sharing this thing about me. You might be feeling something different. It's not an assumption that you are, but I'm gonna share what I'm, there's a vulnerability inside of that that I think people are often so hesitant to do a lot of the, a shocking amount of the conversations that I have with leaders are around, how do you say that first, be the person that says, I am feeling or noticing this thing and be okay with it because it feels so vulnerable, and there's so much resistance to it. And I think having language, like self-loving statement neutralizes a lot of that, I hope.
Well, it's so interesting, right? Because I think if you were to ask 100 leaders one of the greatest qualities of a leader, and or if you suggest that, you know what, one of the greatest qualities of a leader is courage, think everybody would say, heck yeah. High five on that one. Well, so this is, that's just a demonstration of courage, isn't it? To demonstrate vulnerability, because that does take courage.
Yes. I am 100% on board with, I agree with you in every way, shape or form. And I think when it comes to feelings, anything that involves a feeling or about me sharing first, that's not where we think, it's not where leaders wanna think courage comes in. Courage comes in to making that hard decision. Courage comes in when you're like assessing risk. Courage, I think that's where so many leaders have created this divide for themselves, when the truth is that there's actually a lot more courage in being vulnerable and sharing first than in making that hard, no offense, leaders, but in making that hard decision.
Hmm, well I think what that points to is adaptive leadership. Have you come across that term before, Céline?
I've heard it before, but there's gonna be a lot of people listening who probably have not heard it. So please do share.
Yeah, well I'm by no means an expert in it, and yet it seems relevant to this conversation. Ron Heifetz is the individual who coined that phrase, and he's a leadership author and researcher, et cetera. And so adaptive leadership, what is it? Well, what he recognized within the role of a leader is that often there are two types of problems. Well, almost always, there's two types of problems. There's a technical problem and there's an adaptive problem. And I'll give an example of a doctor, 'cause that's what he does. He gives an example of a doctor, a surgeon, and a surgeon will, let's say someone has a bad knee, right? He'll go in, they'll, she'll go in, they'll go in. I don't wanna get trapped into this idea that all doctors are men. You know, there's, that stereotype is ingrained in our brains, I think when we were young, but it's starting to change. So trying to bring awareness to that.
I appreciate that.
So the doctor will go in and wanna fix the knee, right? They'll do whatever they need to do, to do the surgery and problem solve. That's the technical problem. The adaptive problem is, okay, now your patient needs to make sure that they stay off that knee for a certain amount of time. They follow the rehab, they perhaps need to change their diet because maybe they're too heavy for their frame or whatever, right? Like they're, that's the sticky, that's the real challenge. The technical problem is relatively easy to solve. And so as a leader, be mindful of the, any major problem you're facing. There's the technical side, and there's the adaptive side, and the technical side is relatively easy compared to the adaptive side. And most leaders or a lot of leaders get advanced within an organization because of their technical prowess. And so they wanna dive into the technical problem. That's the easy part. That's where it's familiar. That's where you do one thing once, you'll get the same result 100 times over. Whereas with a human and you getting them to change their behavior, my goodness, humans are irrational, you know, the unpredictable, and it's messy. So maybe that's part of what we as leaders or as a leader, you need to just be honest and open about the fact that humans, dealing with humans is it's messy, it's hard, it's unpredictable and it's a reality. You have to do it because until AI replaces all of us and we just have robots in the workplace, we're still gonna have humans having to do stuff, having to work together and interdisciplinary teams to get stuff done.
Well, and it goes straight to the research that you're doing, which is why the interpersonal skills are so important because you're dealing with other people and you're dealing with other people who aren't in your brain and don't share your history, and don't know everything about you, and have their own stuff and their own everything to, you can't know. You can't be in someone else's brain. So unless we work entirely on our own with only a computer all the time, it seems a no-brainer that these things matter.
Yeah, and and maybe I'll offer a more, I guess, optimistic view of it. You know, if we can use the F word--
Are you saying I would be pessimistic there?
Well, I'll offer a little bit of hope for people, because I don't want to have them feel like, oh gosh, this is overwhelming, what do I do about it? I want to, and I don't want to deal with feelings all day. I am not a therapist at work, absolutely true. You know, the F word at work is feelings, I think for some people, right? I don't wanna deal with feelings. Here's the reality. If you don't address them, they're just gonna grow and fester, right? So just naming it, oh gosh, I'm noticing a lot of frustration here. What are we gonna do to solve this problem? That's all you have to say. Like I don't have to sit there and have a therapy session with everyone, just have to notice what emotion is there, name it, and so that we can move on, right? Because if you ignore it and pretend like it's not there, you get out of touch with your people. And this brings me to the very first question you asked me about leading through crisis. I reached out to a colleague of mine right at the beginning of the pandemic, maybe a month into the pandemic. And he's in an organization with roughly 500 managers. So a big organization, they do, you know, not enormous, it's not, you know, no Apple or whatever, but big enough, right? And he informally just started reaching out to all of his managers. And one of the questions that he asked every single one of them was, how is your team doing? Obviously he was asking like, how are you doing? And remember back then, people didn't know, they're all working remotely, they didn't know if their jobs were gonna even exist in a week or two. And so every manager said, I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what the answer is. Is my job gonna be here a week from now? And then to that second question, which is, how's your team doing? He said the answers were shockingly bimodal, and that I had half of the managers saying, how's my team doing? Yeah, they're stressed to the max. And then the other half saying, I don't know, I don't know how my team's doing. How during the pandemic could you not know how your people are doing? Like that tells me you are not creating an environment where people can speak to their feelings, even though they were there 100%, right? People, anxiety levels were through the roof.
Yeah.
And there is no place for someone to say, I'm really anxious and I'm afraid that I'm not gonna have a job in a week. That is not good leadership. That is not good leadership in my opinion. That's not to say a good leader has to sit there and put every one of their team direct reports on the couch and have a therapy session with them, but to have a space for people to just say, I am really stressed, that has to be part of leadership in today's workplace. It just has to. Name it.
Yeah, I am 100% on board with that. I think that we have such a fear of, I'm gonna use a dirty word here, so I apologize to those who are gonna get offended by this, but I think the patriarchy has created such a fear of feelings in any way that if you say, I am feeling stressed, people think, if you ask the question, how are you feeling, and someone says, I'm feeling stressed, the fear is that that is going to become a thing where I am now sharing everything that I'm stressed about and everything that I'm, and weeping, and it's hours of time. As opposed to recognizing that, look, there's always gonna be some people who once they get started, you're opening a floodgate, but that's not everyone. And those are skills that people can learn to manage in themselves. And not talking about those feelings is part of the reason, that's when it does happen on the rare occasion that that person is going to open a floodgate. But that fear of feelings, like it's this thing that, you know, we can rationalize. I'm rational. I'm not making a decision from my emotions. I am a completely rational actor. Is the illusion that we have created, that has created, that has, you know, continued this fear and avoidance of feelings. And I could not agree with you more in the sense that I think that a good leader, I think the best leaders, good or bad, don't care. I think the best leaders are having those conversations in some way and are not afraid to open that potential door, knowing that 98% of the time, you're gonna get someone who just says, you know what? I'm feeling really unsure of what's happening right now. And it's not then 46 hours of whatever they fear it might be.
Well, isn't it ironic, Céline, that what is driving some leaders, as you described, to avoid people's feelings for fear of a 48 hour, you know, session suddenly, is their own feelings.
100%.
Their own feelings, right? So as a leader, yeah, you might have very uncomfortable conversations with some of your team members about something that's going on for them and you feel ill-equipped to handle it. Well that's where that process comment and that self-involving statement comes in. Right, that's your escape. You can say, you know what? This conversation's making me feel really uncomfortable. I'm noticing that you're opening up to me on matters that I feel ill-equipped to be able to support you and handle. And there is help for it. There is help for you if this matter is really something you wanna put some attention and focus on, and I can help you find a resource. How does that sound, right? No, I'm acknowledging my own discomfort. That again, takes vulnerability. It takes an awareness about my own feelings, what is making me uncomfortable, what feels like beyond the boundaries of what is important and part of my role and work. Those are the skills that we want every manager to be able to have.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, because what happens in that situation usually is they'll get uncomfortable, let the other person speak, and now they're gonna vilify them behind the, you know, right, they're gonna go, oh my goodness, I can't have this person on my team. They're like relying on me for therapy and I, you know, blah, blah, blah.
This person's emotionally unstable, we don't know what, they're unpredictable. Probably not actually the case most of the time.
Yep.
Yeah. I could talk to you for hours. This has been super interesting and I feel like we could go a thousand different ways, but I do wanna be mindful that I've taken up plenty of your time, so I'm gonna ask the question that I always end with, which is, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure we brought up or that you want to emphasize as part of the conversation that we've had?
I think there's one last thing I wanna mention. I think you were really pushing for something like tangible, and I wanna leave people with something they can do, like feel empowered to do in the short term immediately. And I think one piece of advice I'd offer folks is just start paying more attention to what might be causing you, like the types of situations that cause you some stress or anxiety within a team, right, within your work environment. What are some of those topics that just make you really uncomfortable? Just notice, right? Just notice because, and here's why. This is the critical factors. If you're not noticing those, what's occurring to you, then you're just in reaction mode. And what we're looking for is just that micro pause of mindfulness to help you respond in a more productive way. So just start observing, noticing for yourself, what are the topics that are uncomfortable? What are the scenarios within your team that cause you to kind of clench up a little bit, right? Just get, maybe feel a little bit of a knot in your stomach. Just start noticing that and start writing it down. Start noticing the things, and then it's only when you notice it that you can start to do something about it. That's the advice I would wanna leave for everybody here to be a greater, better leader and manager.
I think that's extremely valuable and thank you for stating that. I think it's the perfect place to wrap things up. If you wanna know more about Stephan and the work that he's doing, you can go to noomii.com, that's N-O-O-M-I-I, or skillsetter.com. This will all be in the show notes for anyone who is watching or listening as well. And I wanna thank you for being my guest today. It was a, I always appreciate when people can kind of play in a conversation with me, and you did that masterfully, so thank you for sharing what you've shared. I cannot wait to see the results of the research that you're doing. I hope you'll come back at that point. And thank you for just being so candid and open with me and with the listeners today.
It was a lot of fun, Céline, thank you. And I appreciate the opportunity, it's an honor.
[Céline] 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.