Ways to Manage - Back by Brain Science (with Caroline Webb)

0:00I think that in particular, something that you and I both write about is the importance of specificity. And there are various different reasons for that. But one is that the brain remembers specifics more than it remembers generalities. And that's true on the positive side and on the developmental side. And I think that honestly fixes a great deal of what managers are not doing as optimally as they could in the feedback realm. is they don't understand perhaps just how powerful it is to make a very specific observation and then explain why it matters.

0:38Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott, talking to the authors of the books that have meant a lot to me while the rest of the Radical Candor podcast team is on sabbatical. Today with me is Caroline Webb. Welcome, Caroline. I'm thrilled to have you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Caroline is the author of Leadership Intelligence and How to Have a Great Day and is a wonderful coach. Anything else I should say about you, Caroline? I've been leadership coaching for a long time and I actually live in New York despite my accents. I love your book so much, Caroline.

1:19It is packed with wisdom, and it has a very strong structure. I love a book with a very strong structure. And so what I would love to do is I'm going to actually share my screen so that folks can see your structure of your book, and then I'll describe it for people who aren't looking. But leadership intelligence is about three things, deliberate wisdom, intrinsic inspiration, and reasoned resilience. And there's two parts to each of those two things. So it's very balanced. For deliberate wisdom, you want to widen your perspective where it matters and lighten your cognitive load where you can. For intrinsic inspiration, you want to expand everyone's sense of personal competence and deepen everyone's sense of social connection.

2:13And then for reasoned resilience, you want to make the situation feel manageable and amplify what's meaningful. Caroline, what else is there to say? Thank you. This is my leadership intelligence system. That's what glues the leadership intelligence book together. And, you know, my background is in economics and I'm a behavioral scientist, broadly speaking. And this is my grand synthesis of everything that leaders should know about how the brain works, how their brain works, how other people's brain works. And what that means is the right way to make good choices, motivate great performance in your people and help everybody keep going and build resilience through the ups and downs.

2:57and each of those three is based on fundamental science about how the brain works the deliberate wisdom is based on the science of how the brain processes information intrinsic inspiration is about how the brain processes reward and reasoned resilience is about how the brain processes threat and that's the backbone to the book behind all of the practical advice and it's the great thing about this book is that as you read it you will feel less alone oh that means a lot yeah caroline is she's in your corner um which is important for leaders because leadership and management it's a lonely job um and can feel like a thankless task as well yeah it can be wonderful it you know it is wonderful it is wonderful it's it's a noble thing to be bringing the best out of other people and to doing to enable everybody to do more than you could on your own.

3:51I mean, that is just, it's the most, you know, beautiful human thing to be able to do that. But yes, it is, you know, always harder to bring the best out of many people than just yourself. So, you know, that's, that's why we, that's why we, we think about what it takes to do it better and make it easier to do it better. Yes. Well, so let's jump right in. Let's jump into deliberate wisdom and what you say about widening the perspective. If you had to boil it down, what's the best way for a leader to widen their own perspective? Because I think one's own perspective is often a limiting factor in your ability to lead well.

4:30Yeah, so true. So, you know, your brain has a billion pieces of information coming at it at any given time. And depending which study you read, you know, it's 10 to 100 is actually the capacity for us to consciously processed and a billion is bigger than a hundred let's agree so you've got this tiny amount of conscious attention and i think one of the central um responsibilities of a leader is to be really intentional about where that tiny tiny piece of attention goes and left to yourself your brain is going to try and figure out where should this tiny bit of attention go and it's going to choose whatever is matching what's already on your mind yeah and you know that might be you've got an aim in mind and you're very attached to it so you're going to see everything that confirms that you know that's the right thing to be focused on you might have an assumption that's you know you're going to look for everything that confirms you're right and you know even your attitude is going to shape what you notice um you know we all know deep down and the research backs this up in a bad mood you see more negative things yes so and and the other way around as well i mean in a good mood you see more positive things you might not actually notice some glaring risk that you know someone's trying to get your attention about so a really smart leader notices what's on their mind because it's going to drive whatever there's on their mind now it's going to drive what they notice next and you want to be deliberate about that and specifically when you're doing something that really matters you don't want to just notice what's right in front of you you want to say okay let me take a moment yeah uh i i understand what my point of view is now what what else is there out there what's a different way of thinking about this what could i be missing and you don't and it's easier said than done but actually really helps to have a couple of really simple questions that just remind you okay what's another way of seeing this what could i be missing and you know there's a lot of more detailed advice that you know spins off that but that's really what it is at its heart.

6:29Yeah. So let's just like double click on that. Yeah. What am I missing? Wait, what were the two questions? See, you said them and I've already forgotten them. What am I missing? What's another way of seeing this? Yes. What's another way of seeing this? And another one in the AI area is how could I test that? How can I check that? Right. You know, because you're getting work presented to you or, you know, information delivered to you and you're like, okay, yeah, that looks great. And you've got to do that step back and say, okay, how do I test this? How do I check this? So I like those three questions as a trilogy, you know, for keeping your attention going where it needs to go.

7:06Yeah, yeah. I think another thing that you talk about, and another great way that resonated well for me about widening your perspective is, and asking those two questions is soliciting feedback. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, because we can't see everything at the best of times. And the thing we can see least is ourselves. So I 100 % agree. Yeah, yeah, that's the best way of being self aware is to invite the people around you to hold up a mirror. And what about what you write about the causal map in the driver tree? Can you explain the difference between those and and how we can use that understanding to broaden our perspective?

7:52Yeah, sure. So, you know, I'm a big advocate of, you know, getting beyond your first assumption, getting beyond your first impression, doing a little bit to test by talking to your mentors and saying, please kick the tires on this, or talking to your team and really inviting challenge and ideas from them. Okay, then you've got a lot of information. Maybe you've even done some benchmarking. and you know right yeah okay a lot of information and your brain's got a small amount of conscious attention so how do you use it really well and the way that you can make better use of your limited attention is to actually look for connections between uh so if you've got a list of 20 things and you start to organize that list and look at what causes what you've got a map that gives you more of a sense of where are the real drivers in this uh in this whole system and you You know, funnily enough, it's less strain on your brain to have everything written down in a map than have a long list that just feels totally unwieldy.

8:55And it's an evolution on the driver tree because I think many of us, you know, have learned how to do driver trees where you break down a KPI and you look at all the things that drive it. Right, right. And the challenge is that a lot of things that we look at as managers and leaders, they're not linear. They're complicated, messy. And so a map really helps in that way. And I would say even people who are not visual, you know, you don't have to be doing this as a sort of beautiful piece of art. It's just, you know, scribble on the back of a piece of paper and just start to kind of map. OK, well, I think this causes that.

9:31And then usually you see new relationships and new possibilities when you see, oh, actually, that causes five things. I think that might be the place to intervene. Yeah, yeah. And the causal map looks less hierarchical than the driver tree. Right, exactly. And life really is not as hierarchical as we imagine it to be, I think. So true, so true, yeah. The other thing that you wrote about that I found really helpful was disagreement. And what happens when you wrote that when people feel they're not being listened to, it can trigger a defensive response that impairs their ability to reason. So why is that?

10:09And how can we have the kinds of disagreements, both as leaders, but also foster disagreements between people that help them feel listened to rather than ignored? Yeah. Well, jumping off where we were just at, you know, if we all have this tiny amount of conscious attention, we're all noticing and experiencing the world in a different way. So you know how you come out of a meeting or you come out of a conversation and you talk to someone, you think, were we even in the same? Yeah. Like, how do you I mean, maybe you see a movie with, you know, with your spouse and you're like, I have it was a different movie for me because we each perceive our version of reality.

10:53And it's driven by what's on our mind to start off with. So I think, you know, having a good debate in the workplace actually starts with that understanding that actually you may not have the whole picture. You know, I remember when I was a management consultant, I got a clue on this because I noticed that however good my idea was, I noticed that whenever we sat with the team, it got better because of other people's points of view. so I think it starts with that acknowledgement that actually you you probably are going to get to a better answer if you can listen to where each other is starting from but there's no doubt someone's disagreeing with you it can challenge your sense of competence it can feel like it's a sort of existential threat if it feels like it you know it's not controllable I need them to believe what I believe and you know that can be a classic stress trigger but the more you bring it back to okay we we have plenty of common ground most likely and you start from that common ground you list all the places you agree you have a very different type of conversation because then you can focus on oh where do where is it that we disagree what's driven that difference oh that's interesting yes because you saw this go horribly wrong one time and it's never gone anything but perfectly for you oh okay interesting let's learn from both so i do think there are ways to uh you know acknowledge the differences and make the most of them in the workplace it helps to have a little you know run sheet of okay i'm going to start with where we agree not with where we disagree and then you're much much less likely to get the defensive response yeah yeah so starting with uh you know if if it's a venn diagram you start with the overlap and then explore the two or it's a Rogerian argument where I take your side and you take my side well yeah in fact so the you know I think the pro approach here is exactly what you say where you start with um you articulate the other person's point of view in a way that's so brilliant makes them sound so fantastically smart that they couldn't argue you know that they would just they They would just feel, wow, you really got it.

13:07Yeah. And if you're a leader and you've got disagreement in your team, sometimes you have to be the one that summarizes each side and says, okay, well, you think this because of that and you think this because of that. But it's even better with a team if you can say, okay, so could you just articulate his point of view as if you really liked it? And can you articulate her point of view as if you really like it? Wow. Wow. Now that's you're in a very different place and then list all the things that you agree on and then talk about, OK, what's driven the disagreement? You know, yes. So I 100 percent agree that that's the pro the pro move.

13:44I love that. So let's make a commitment to each other. Let's try to do that at least once or twice in the course of this. You got it. OK, fantastic. There's so much we agree on. It'll be hard, but we can find some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing you talk about in terms of building sort of widening your own perspective and your team's perspective is in discussion to try turn taking instead of allowing one person to dominate. Why is that so important? Well, there's really good research. I mean, you don't even need the research. you just need common sense to say actually teams that let one person dominate or you know maybe it's all the extroverts that speak and the introverts that that don't uh do do not do as well as teams that bring forth the intelligence from everybody that's around the table whatever their style is and so yeah i think it's it's it's so it's so simple and yet actually a lot of managers don't do it they don't say i'd like to hear from everybody that's all you have to say I'd like to hear from you can go around the table, you know, for things that are really important.

14:53But just setting the intention that you actually want to draw people out is is such an easy thing to do as a manager. And it brings so much more intelligence onto the table. Yeah. Yeah. And this is another place where I have a lot of ambivalent feelings about AI note takers. But you can ask your note taker to hold you accountable to say how many people were in the meeting? what percentage of time should I have talked and what percentage of time did I talk? Yeah, yeah, I do think that's a really, really useful aspect of the tools. I agree because, you know, the people that the people that do talk too much, if you ask them, were you intending to dominate the meeting?

15:36Did you hear from other people in their minds? I mean, no one I mean, most people are not badly intended. Most people would say, yeah, yeah, I know I I it was a good conversation yeah they're shocked when they see the data and that's why it's I don't recommend that as a manager you create a dashboard and rub people's noses in the data but ask people to collect their own data because yeah they'll learn something from it no it's smart it's smart yeah I also want to talk about because I think turn taking can be taken to an extreme There was one team that I was advising, and the CEO of this company, who was wonderful, had really gotten, he had read the memo on making sure that everybody.

16:21But as a result, the conversations, nobody was ever allowed to interrupt anyone else. And so you had to wait your turn to disagree with what somebody said four people ago, and it stifled. so when is interruption good and maybe as an inveterate interrupter it's great kim it's great no i i think i so first of all i think yes you don't want to be mechanical about it because there are some topics where you do not need to hear absolutely everybody's point of view though i will say you know the things that you should be talking about in your team are generally the things where there are multiple points of view that are going to be useful.

17:05Otherwise, you should take it offline. You know, there's no point kind of using everybody's time on something that isn't really interesting to more than two or three in the room. That aside, yeah, I don't think it has to be, I don't think it has to be too mechanical. But I do think that it helps to know what your personal pattern is. And, you know, I think, you know, really smart teams at some point do do some kind of discussion about okay what are my strengths and you know what are my blind spots and if you've had a conversation with the team it's like yeah I interrupt a lot I worked once with a still a good friend deep introvert who wasted a long time he would just sit and ponder and everybody would just jump into the space because they couldn't believe that he He really wanted that amount of time to reflect.

17:58One of the wisest people I've ever known. And so, you know, we have a conversation about it. Okay, so, you know, this is David's pattern. And this is my pattern. My pattern is to talk quite a bit. You know, I'm more towards the Kim end of the scale. And let's talk about how do we handle that. And if you have the explicit conversation about it with your team, then it's so much easier than to say, oh, you know, Kim, you're doing that thing. just mentioning or saying, okay, David, if you want to take, you know, take a moment and think about this, let's just do some admin in the meantime or whatever, you know, you can have a sense of humor about it.

18:39If you understand where everybody's, everybody's preferences are. And of course, there are really pro moves that you can put in place again to have, you know, for example, you know everybody reflect for 10 seconds 15 seconds make a note or two before speaking and then that brings everybody to the same place in the conversation yeah yeah i love that give david you know at least six seconds but six i mean so long but we've all got our quirks and you know i think great teams really you know surface that stuff and understand that it's not coming from a bad place that we're all well intentioned yeah yeah and learn how to adapt to each other we all have different quirks you know some people need you know are so uncomfortable with the silence so when david understands that you know it's cruel and unusual punishment for me to give him six seconds but i'm willing to do it because i care so much about him and i want to hear what he says like then we all get together yeah yeah and if you say at the beginning of the meeting i'm going to ask everybody to think about this topic you know uh when we get to that point in the agenda oh what a gift to everybody you know give people a heads up yeah so the other part the other part of deliberate wisdom in addition to widening perspective is lightening the cognitive load which i love i feel like the breakthrough in my career came when i decided that i was going to throw away my to-do list, that my brain was pretty good at prioritizing tasks.

20:13And I was, if I forgot to do something, awesome. So that probably wasn't exactly what you had in mind about lightening cognitive load. What's a better way to lighten one's cognitive load? I think, first of all, everyone is different. I love that you notice that you are feeling overloaded because I think that's where this starts. So back to this point, small amount of conscious attention processing capacity so if i'm asking you to widen your perspective on things that matter well hold on you've just told me caroline that you know i don't have much attention to go around my perspective is actually pretty narrow right so you've got to save your attention where you can and i think so many of us fritter our attention across whatever's incoming you know that ping that you know interruption that there's so much going on and we're not that attentive to the fact that yes actually our working memory is quite small and if we fill it we're gonna make poorer choices we're gonna make it much harder to do the i'm gonna step back and check my perspective and test what's in front of me so i'm i'm i think it's just as important to be really smart about that and that means you know single tasking where you can rather than multitasking because you know as we know, right?

21:30Multitasking makes you make many more mistakes and slows you down. So that's one thing. Being really aware of what matters most so that you don't fill your mind with, oh, I've got to put, I've got to do the grocery shopping. And I mean, we've all got stuff, we've got life stuff to do. Right. So having a process for dumping that so that it's not getting the way of your ability to to think about what really matters and and then just being aware that the more tired you are the harder it is to bring your attention to what matters and so i really think you know sleep brings it nudges its way into this part of the part of the book because you have to think about how you're getting enough rest um and you know sleep is of course the best type of rest but even just breaks in between being more deliberate about that is really well proven to sharpen your thinking and help you see a new solution so yeah yeah now I remember what the first time I ever quit my job to write a book I was for the first time getting enough sleep and I was astounded at how much my memory improved and how much more clear my thinking was it was There you go.

22:43It's remarkable. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So sleep is a great way to lighten your – I mean, that's what sleep is. It lightens your cognitive load. It clears out the cruft. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. So there we go. Widen and lighten. Yes. All right. So let's talk about intrinsic inspiration. So this part of the book is about competence and connection. why are why are these two things competence and connection so important for intrinsic motivation well the brain's reward system is the is the engine of motivation it's it's the the combination of brain areas and neurochemicals that makes you want things want to move towards things want to do things want to do them again want to repeat and so we have to have our reward system and that of our colleagues firing if they're to feel like putting in the effort and feeling really engaged and trying hard so it's it's really interesting looking at the research I mean there's all sorts of different strands of research and what engages the the reward system and of course money and extrinsic rewards like that do but only temporarily and so if you're looking for something that's lasting and unlimited in supply you look at the intrinsic rewards hence intrinsic inspiration and you know the everything that you know is relevant in the workplace i think ends up coming down to do i feel good about my competence my ability to do what i'm doing and you know okay if i don't feel confident right now am i at least learning and growing does it feel like i'm getting there right right right right right and then you know and and And as part of that, you know, autonomy is really important because we don't feel very competent if there's someone leaning over our shoulder telling us what to do.

24:35And then, you know, there's a whole cluster of research that goes under that. There's a whole cluster of research that goes under social connection. And by that, I mean, not just connection to your immediate team, but also connection to humanity sort of writ large. You know, do I feel useful to either the people I can see or people more broadly? and you know am I feeling respected and included and do I feel that I in turn respect and feel like including or trusting the people around me so that's you know pretty much everything that you really need to keep in mind as a leader she says heroically I really did feel like okay if you can just if you can remember those two things you're going to get to a lot of what drives motivation and engagement and therefore performance in your colleagues and in yourself actually.

25:29Yeah, no, 100 % agree. And there's some things in these chapters that might feel surprising to people. For example, you say that employees who say they get all the feedback they need are five times more likely to say they feel engaged by their work. And I think that one One of the big mistakes that a lot of managers make is they don't give feedback because they're afraid that it will demotivate people. But it's actually the silence that is demotivating. Absolutely. What's going on there? It's fascinating. I mean, there's other research that says that people think they're getting less feedback than managers think they're giving.

26:16Now, that's wow. OK. So not only do people want more feedback and, you know, not only does it drive, does it does it drive in great engagement? And not only is this about negative feedback as well as positive feedback is about developmental messages and support and so on. In fact, actually, you know, the research seems even stronger on that front. So not only that, but also, you know, there is this this gap. And I think it's so much the perception gap between the amount of feedback managers think they're giving and the amount of feedback that employees think they're getting is because it's not done very well.

26:55You know, they haven't read your book deeply enough. So, you know, I think that in particular, something that you and I both write about is the importance of specificity. And there are various different reasons for that. But one is that the brain remembers specifics more than it remembers generalities. And that's true on the positive side and on the developmental side. And I think that honestly fixes a great deal of what managers are not doing as optimally as they could in the feedback realm. They don't understand perhaps just how powerful it is to make a very specific observation and then explain why it matters.

27:36again whether it's you did this and it was you know and wonderful and because it had this effect or you did this and not so good because it had this effect I you know I think I think that you know there's still so much further to go on that so more work for you and me to do yes yes yeah and there will be for a long long time right I mean I think that the I forgot who said it but the The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has happened. Right, right. You know, yes. And if you think you've communicated, but the other person hasn't heard, you haven't communicated. There are all sorts of, right, exactly, these sorts of summaries.

28:17But yeah, I think, you know, if I think about the leaders that I coach, I would say that feedback and the importance of giving feedback and really drilling down to how they're doing it comes up even with the most senior people. that I'm working with and there's really nobody that it hasn't been a topic with yeah because it is so none of us want to hear it really I don't want to hear especially criticism I mean I do want to like I want to I want to want it but I don't actually want it you know if you know what I mean and then I also know I should give it but I really even though I wrote a whole book or radical candor on giving feedback i dread it i don't want to do you do you oh well i think it's nice for people to hear that i mean i so i have a model called factual feedback yes which nestles very neatly within your radical candor quadrant um and it does start by articulating that you have a positive intention for the conversation you know that you you're actually so let's talk about developmental feedback because i think that's what you know people often find hardest is to say i care about your development your work's important so i really want to raise this with you um and then specific observation very very precise uh not generalizing not interpreting and then owning the implication this makes me feel concerned because blah and it matters because and then invitation so tell me what was going on yes because we so often you know I think we so often think that we're being smart by making assumptions about what's happening and yeah smart people like making patterns and seeing connections and so we jump we jump we jump and you know the person didn't uh didn't send the report out on time because they're perhaps lazy and not good at time management oh no actually maybe there was a catastrophic failure of the you know of the email system that day and they should have put their hand up and actually the thing that they should you know maybe get some coaching on is hey tell me if something's going wrong you know tell me if something rather than you know actually you're lazy and you can so easily solve the wrong problem so that's those are my five steps uh intention observation implication invitation and collaboration is the end say how could we do this better how could you do this better and how can I help you yeah so yeah I love that we call it we we have a similar sort of acronym it's called core context so in the meeting observation when you said um every third word the result R is for result is it made you sound stupid explore next step is uh you know go visit the speech coach or whatever there you go there you go and it also applies to praise core.

31:15Yes. Which is, you know, in the meeting, context, observe. And by the way, that's a good reason to have the conversation right away. You don't have to remind. Six weeks ago, you know, the context can be complicated. The observation, when you shared both the pros and the cons, the result, you earn credibility, explore next steps, do more of that. But I think the thing that's missing from core is intention. I like stating your intention to be helpful is really important yeah yeah well thank you it's more or less the same there's a little bit more focus on inviting them to do some analysis yeah I think that's the other you know because you you're actually it's funny I was coaching a CEO a few weeks ago you aren't talking about this and he said you know I've just realized this is actually making them work really hard.

32:11And I said, yeah, because the invitation of saying, okay, so tell me what was going on. Why do you think that happened? You know, how do you think now about this? If you're like, oh, that's, you know, that's them solving the problem to an extent themselves. So I think that's the other little bit that I've seen be very useful. All right, I'm sold. We had a small disagreement and you taught me something new. So thank you. Oh, thank you. That's an honor from you. My goodness. The other thing when you when you write about connection, you're really talking about praise, public praise. You have the four H's, one of which is heroes and public praise.

32:53Tell me why public praise is so important. Oh, well, you know, I hear you talk about the introduction to my book. And, you know, there's a little burst of joy within me because, you know, what you're doing there is actually speaking both to competence. Oh, you're making me feel really good, but you're also making me feel really connected, both to you, but also my standing in the group is supported by you doing that. I feel I'm walking on air, you know. um so you know one little twist on that is you know if you're thinking about that as a leader you need to think about well i i mean to make sure i'm doing that with everybody you know within within reason you know and you know i have clients who kind of keep a list and they're making sure that they're making you know they're being balanced and giving shout outs you know within reason right because you know it's uh um and then i mean the thing that i would say is there's just something so wonderful about the team recognizing each other um and there are all sorts of different practices for doing that you know i don't think there's one right answer but it does really help to do a kind of strengths exercise of some sort or some kind of structured sharing of uh peak moments in your life so that people can you know hear what you're like when you're at your best i think you know these are actually much less hard to do than a lot of people think they have to bring in a you know external facilitator but it's actually you know over a dinner to say you know what's a really peak moment from you know your last five years yeah yeah it's just that's a great conversation you get to reveal something that you're proud of that's a really really nice sense of mutual appreciation that comes in there and I think also creating structure for people to brag about each other as heroes like yeah a simple thing I used to do is bring in a big stuffed uh orca whale and and i would ask people to nominate each other and uh for awesome stuff whatever had happened and then somebody got the orca whale to put on there oh i love that i love that it was like because if you don't give people you kind of need to give people a platform to brag about each other and a reason to do it otherwise it feels like like, you know, I don't know, like patronizing or something.

35:17Yeah, yeah. And I think it also equalizes if you put, you know, some degree of light structure in there. You know, some of the people that I've worked with have an appreciation jam kind of thing, like you do. And, you know, there's one way that I used to do it where everybody would get someone's name in a hat. Back in the day when you could have a physical hat, But, you know, you can do this electronically as well. And then, you know, by the end of this week, you know, send this person an appreciative note. And, you know, obviously you have to have built some trust and some, you know, connection before you do something like that.

35:57But it doesn't take a lot to start to weave this fabric of mutual appreciation in your team if you're deliberate about it. Oh, my goodness. It makes so much of a difference. Yeah. Yeah, gratitude and appreciation, we all know, you know, it's uncommon sense. We know that it's a good way to build stronger relationships. And yet it feels like when I first got married, I was keeping a gratitude journal of the things I, and then I'm like, why am I keeping a journal? I need to just tell him, thank you. Why am I keeping this to myself? I love that. I love that. I did do the, you know, I've done this in all sorts of different ways, but I did do the gratitude letters.

36:41I did. I actually wrote to people, especially after my last book came out. I just had this overwhelming sense of all the people who'd helped me and shaped, you know, shaped my work over the years. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be that big an effort. I think just teaching people, oh, this actually really makes a huge difference. So when someone does something nice, just drop them a line. Say thank you. You know, it's a small thing, but and you can start very small. And if anyone listening to this is thinking, well, I'm not going to get a hat or I'm not going to get an orc or whale. You don't worry.

37:14You don't have to. But you can talk about appreciation, talk about how you appreciate each other more and encourage it and open up space for it. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. All right. Let's move on to reasoned resilience. not that we could not talk about gratitude and appreciation for the rest of the day but yeah reasoned resilience so you write about how the brain processes threats and stress so what's the what's your core insight there well this is one of the areas where there's been perhaps more new research and a couple of things so first of all when you think about what the brain treats as stressful it's a combination of things it's something demanding because it requires more of your brain or your body um it's something that is uncontrollable uh because if it's controllable wouldn't be that stressful and it's also unpleasant because if it's pleasant what's the problem um so it's the combination of those three things and it's not even that this is something that's necessarily happening right now but it's what your brain predicts is going to happen so if it reminds you of a situation that was uncontrollable and so as leaders we've got this opportunity to help people feel it's unlikely that you can make a demanding situation feel undemanding but you can look for ways to make an uncontrollable situation look a bit more manageable and you can often find a way you can't make it pleasant but you can look for things that might feel meaningful you know satisfying a sense of pulling together a sense of humanity and so if you keep manageable and meaningful top of mind um and it's not even that you know as i say it's not even that you're having to rework what the situation is but you can talk to people about what it's going to be and you can change people's expectations then that's an even more powerful intervention in reducing stress yeah i love that i love that and so talk about making things manageable i mean you're not talking about toxic positivity so you're not saying oh everything's going to be okay when maybe it won't be like right i remember shortly after september 11th i was leading a startup i was co-founder of a startup and we were based in manhattan and we were not far from the it felt very off a lot of our customers we had just launched our product to wall street a lot of our customers were in the were in the trade center and the sales sales guy called me in and he said i need you to come and sort of rally the troops rally the sales team and i stood up in front of them and i just burst into tears oh it felt um like such an unleaderly thing to do but they all told me later it was like the best thing I could have done like I sort of sharing with him yes this is hard yeah yes I'm not pretending yes this is okay yes and what I know is you know here's here's what we here's what we can do beautiful you know beautiful and we're here for each other there you go there you go and you know I think that is the core of it is you know you want to acknowledge what feels tough because even acknowledging it actually nudges you a tiny bit towards feeling manageable because you know you're naming what's out there um and i think you know i have a little thing i used to remember is no be do like what can you what can you emphasize here that you know for sure even if everything is chaotic yeah i know you all are sad and i'm sad like yes yes That's interesting.

40:58Right. And, you know, we don't know when we'll get the news on this, but we do know the timing. We don't know what's going to happen with that, but we do know that the priority now is this. And so, you know, that's something that you can almost always do, even in the middle of really something awfully unpleasant like what you were going through. And I think you can also reconnect people to who they are and who they continue to be. so values and strengths and experience uh you know maybe past past things that you know they've triumphed or at least found a way through and then the do piece is perhaps the most uh you know it's the most obvious but it's it's what can we do even though there's a lot that we don't control so what is there that we can choose it could be that we can choose our attitude um it's often the case that there are some no regrets moves that you can take um and actually one of the things that you can often do is is talk about different scenarios and take the it's not that not that the worst case scenario isn't awful but if you talk about it it takes some of the sting out of it and you say okay and then if that happens then this is what we'll do all right it's awful let's hope we don't get to that but there's something plan yeah right right right you have a great i love a good two by two and you have a great two by two about oh i like a two by two taking action and doing nothing so the horizontal axis is take action do nothing and then the vertical axis is the upside and the downside yes and we tend to ignore the upside and the downside in the wrong boxes so can you walk folks through your two by two yeah well if you if anyone this is for anyone who is putting off doing something um so i'm guessing many of us you know have something everyone listening is procrastinating right it's a tough decision that you just really don't want to make or you know whatever um so what happens is there's two biases that come into play here one of them is present bias and one of them is omission bias so uh present bias is we tend to value and kind of pay attention to what's here and now much more than we do what's in the future.

43:16So something that pays off in the future that you kind of know is the right thing to do, if it involves present hassle or kind of effort, that looms much larger than the long-term payoff. Or even upset, which is the worst. This is why people, you just explained why so many managers wait too long to deal with a performance problem. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, this goes back to something we were saying earlier on about the power of specificity. The reason that being specific in feedback is useful is because your brain is much better at handling kind of concrete, specific things. So, you know, this plays out into kind of procrastination as well.

43:56And then the other bias is omission bias, which is that we often think about the pros and cons of taking action. Should I do this? I don't know. Should I do it? we don't think about the pros and cons of not taking action yeah the downside of doing nothing right the downside of doing nothing and so we miss the upside of doing something we miss the downside of doing nothing and that can get us stuck but once we draw out our two by two and kind of fill in the quadrants uh evenly then you know it doesn't mean necessarily that you should do the thing but it does mean you're going to have a more balanced perspective of whether you You should do the thing.

44:33Yeah. All right. Let's end on what you end with in the book, which is how can leaders amplify what's meaningful? What are the five C's of team resilience? Yeah. I think, you know, we as leaders, we're responsible not just for the energy and output of our team now, but, you know, sustaining it and keeping it sustainable. and and that requires you to think not just about how the team is set up now but what are you doing to create that that that resilience and the five c's if you're curious so the first is the first is conversation which is actually having a conversation about how you do your best work in a sustainable way and you know okay it seems sort of obvious but a lot of leaders will try and kind of fix things on the edges without talking to their team about okay well what does it look like when we're running on empty yes uh how do we notice that more quickly and what can we do to you know protect against it so it starts with a conversation and then there's i i think real clarity about the fact that you know you can have a good calendar and you can have a bad calendar and wouldn't it be great as a team if we had some norms that meant that we were helping each other organize our time manage our calendars in really good ways so that includes being transparent with each other about what our constraints are.

45:50It means, you know, being smart about when are we going to get focus time? What's our mode of talking to each other about? I'm going offline to focus on this, to widen my perspective back to the beginning. And then, you know, how do you give people the right type of flexibility around the stuff of life? And, you know, teams that do that do have higher performance. I think that's really meaningful for people. One of the things that I recommend that teams do is sit down and share with each other what's their own personal recipe for staying centered. What do they need to do? I learned this actually, I spent all of 12 weeks at McKinsey.

46:28I was just a summer intern there. In that summer on the team that where I was working, there was a guy whose child was having brain surgery. So a lot of stress between Me and him and his wife. And we sat down and we talked at the beginning of the engagement about what each of us needed to do our best work. And he said, I need to take a walk in daylight hours with my wife. And this, I mean, it seems like such a simple thing, but it seems like an impossible ask for a McKinsey engagement. But we were like, okay, we're going to figure out how to make that happen. And if it was 3.30 and he had to drive an hour to get back to home, we would stop what we were doing and we'd say, well, we'll pick it up after dinner on the phone.

47:21I love that. He got his walks. And that helped. I think it helped us more than it helped him, actually. Because when someone's going through something that difficult and you know it, that sort of unspoken guilt is not productive. Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I think he probably made it easier for other people to talk about what was going on in their lives, too. And another thing that sometimes people surface here is, I mean, obviously caring responsibilities, sort of an extension of what you're talking about, whether it's kids or parents and body clocks. You know, I mean, I say this is an extreme night owl.

47:58You know, this was. Me too. OK, great. Fantastic. We're interrupting night owls together. I love it. so that is a really helpful conversation to have because it can be an enormous strength of a team to have people with different body clocks but only really if you're you know talking to each other about it so that you know you're making good use of the time where you overlap and then the third c is calm which is about recovery time because it turns out that everybody's brains perform better when they have some downtime yes you know think of it like a race car you know you have to have pit stops and sometimes those pit stops need to be longer than others so you know thinking actively for your team about okay what's your cadence around recovery time and you know how do you make sure that people are taking breaks how do you role model that yourself honestly you know so that people can see that you know they understand that there needs to be a rhythm that you're not pedal to the metal you know all the time and then cause is about reconnecting people to what's the point of you know what the work is about and when it's very busy you know i do quite a bit of work in health care and you think well it must be obvious in health care obviously the point of the work is obviously to you know is patient care but when people are really stretched and really busy it's still helpful to reconnect them to well hold on what's the point of this and okay all right so it's tough right now let's just stay connected to what really matters this is what we're doing this for yeah and then finally perhaps it sounds you know it sounds less lofty but it's capacity and being really um alert to where capacity is building to the point where people cannot sustainably uh keep doing what they're doing and you have to make you know choices about you know where to reallocate time and that's so often you know a conversation that happens in a sort of crisis it's really helpful if you can decide ahead of time as a leader okay so this is what I'm going to look out for yeah and this is how I'm going to handle it if we have to you know rethink a little bit our priorities and our and our workload the more you can do that ahead of time with any of this the easier it is when you know you're really under pressure to remember oh yeah hold on this is one of the things I needed to to be thoughtful about yeah and different people have such different capacities for work Like there's there was one guy who worked for me who could work 100 hour weeks.

50:26He had a great capacity for work, but then he needed to take two months off and go on a bender. You know, and I was at first I was I was a little self-righteous about that. And I'm like, that's just how he works. It's my job to like make that happen. Right. It goes back to the benefits of actually sharing with your team. Well, you know, what's our quirk? You know, how do we work best? So I 100 % agree. Yeah. And I do think, you know, if if you've got someone on your team who's at risk of of burning out and, you know, that's something we talk about a lot these days. You know, something I see leaders do really well is saying, OK, what could I do to reallocate work temporarily just to give this person a bit of breathing room?

51:08Could it be an opportunity for someone to step up? Oh, interesting. Might even be a development opportunity. so you know yeah i think i think being proactive about this and recognizing that it just because you're reallocating work doesn't mean it's going to stay like that right it doesn't have to be permanent yeah and helping people not get self-righteous about what they need versus what other people need like it's easy for people to say oh you know it's terrible that he's working so hard and it's terrible he's like it's just the way he works you know yeah yeah absolutely You know, we're all different.

51:40And I think, you know, we each bring something really special to a team. And, you know, it's the leader's job to help that specialness come out and to find ways to have everybody complement each other. Yeah. And to help one person's specialness not to not stop on somebody else's special toe. Special toe. That's great. Well, Caroline, thank you so much. Your book is going to help so many people sort of bring the best out of their teams and feel less alone while doing it. Thank you. Thank you. Such a wonderful book. Where can people find you and what's the best way to stay in touch with you? People can find me at my website, which is carolineweb.co.

52:26That's.co, not.com. And they can find all sorts of information about my books and sign up for a newsletter. there's a bunch of free stuff which is downloadable there and then of course you know people can find me on LinkedIn always happy to see people there perfect thanks so much my pleasure thanks so much Kim take care