Episode 11: Liz Wiseman
Navigating Organizational Culture and Unwritten Rules with Liz Wiseman
Episode 11: Show Notes
Understanding and adapting to unwritten rules and organizational culture is a continual process. It's essential to strike a balance between fitting into the existing culture and bringing in new perspectives to drive positive change. In today’s episode, we sit down with Liz Wiseman, a management expert and CEO of The Wiseman Group, to discuss the challenges of controlling idea flow and the problems it might cause in leadership roles. Liz is a renowned researcher and best-selling author who empowers global organizations with her groundbreaking insights on leadership development. In our conversation, we cover a range of topics, from leadership challenges to the use of AI in idea generation, and the importance of recognizing, owning, and addressing critical, unassigned issues within an organization. We unpack understanding organizational culture, identifying impact players, the role of context in performance, and maintaining an impact player mindset within different work environments. She also shares insights into the challenges faced by idea-rich individuals in leadership positions, the importance of leaders asking questions to enable problem-solving by the team, the concept of "hot spots" within an organization, and much more! Join us as we unlock the secrets to thriving within the complex tapestry of organizational culture and harness the power of the unwritten rules with a legendary management guru!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Controlling the overflow of ideas she generates and its impact on her role as a leader.
• Her approach to channeling ideas effectively.
• The power of shifting from offering answers to asking questions as a leader.
• Examples of using questions to draw out creativity from a team.
• Clarifying the difference between hard opinions and soft opinions.
• Developing multiple solutions rather than settling for the first idea.
• Learn about AI’s impact on idea generation and the quality of solutions.
• Steps for identifying the job that needs to be done and “hotspot” areas.
• Why you should take ownership of unresolved or unassigned problems.
• Making important issues for your team a personal priority.
• How to learn about the unwritten rules as a new or remote worker.
• Why understanding a company’s culture is so crucial.
• The power individuals possess in shaping their work and environment.
• Tips for identifying impact players when hiring.
• Essential takeaways that Liz has for listeners.
Quotes:
“My love of the creative process and considering alternatives and what-ifs was really distracting to people. It was diminishing to people because now they're confused. I've had to do a lot to make sure that my need or desire to generate doesn't create vibration in the organization.” — @LizWiseman [0:04:56]
“[Leadership is] about moving from being the fountain of ideas to being maybe the gardener and the cultivator of ideas.” — @LizWiseman [0:07:41]
“Your value as a leader is not to come up with the ideas, it's not to give the answers, it's to ask the question, to get other people to find solutions to the problem.” — @LizWiseman [0:13:02]
“We find that the most influential people are the ones that step out of the confines of their job description. They ignore swim lanes and workflows and levels and hierarchies. They go do the job that's needed.” — @LizWiseman [0:24:30]
“Sometimes a change of context is just what people need.” — @LizWiseman [0:37:22]
“The best leaders maximize intelligence, innovation, idea flow, [and] ownership in other people. If we want other people to go big, sometimes we have to play a little bit smaller.” — @LizWiseman [0:45:19]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
S3E7: Judging The Experiment Not The Outcome with Dr. Astro Teller
EPISODE 11 [TRANSCRIPT]
[0:00:03] JU: What's crazy to me are relative to my expectation, because, of course, I expect GenAI. It's like, you can tell it to come up with a thousand ideas, it'll do it, right? It says, no fatigue, whatsoever. If you compare the control group, which doesn't have AI, with the research group, the research group systematically, at least so far, generates less ideas. You know what's crazy? If you ask the problem owner to grade ABCD, the solutions that the team generates, there is a broader distribution of grades in the non-AI group than in AI group, where the bulk of the grades are in the AI group is in the B category.
[0:00:47] JU: You're listening to Paint & Pipette. I'm your host, Jeremy Utley. I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Thanks for joining me to explore the art and science of bringing new ideas to life. Let's dive in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:10] JU: All right, everyone. Great to see you all here today. Welcome to another episode of the Paint & Pipette Podcast. I am joined today by legendary management guru, Liz Wiseman. Thank you for joining me today, Liz.
[0:01:22] LW: Oh, my absolute pleasure to be here.
[0:01:25] JU: I am so stoked to have this conversation. I can't wait to dive in. I wanted to start with something you said right at the beginning, while we were just warming up here, warming up our vocal cords. You said you've spent the last 15 years trying to control your idea flow. For anybody who's a part of my community, you know that's a topic obviously near and dear to my heart. Tell me what you mean by trying to control your idea flow. I got to understand that more.
[0:01:51] LW: My mind generates ideas and it grabs onto problems. When you talk about idea flow starts with quantity and not quality. I don't have a problem with the quantity side of this. I'm the person who, I remember in college, I was given the brick exercise in a class. What could you do with the brick?
[0:02:13] JU: Well, tell people what that is. If people don't know the brick exercise, what is it?
[0:02:16] LW: The brick exercise is if you had a brick, what are all the things that you could do with that brick? People start with, you can build a wall. You can throw it at someone. You can grind it up. I was watching as – I'm madly writing things down, I was watching other students in the class scratching their heads. I just can't write fast enough. Ideas just flow from me. I love ideas. I, like you say, brainstorm. I'm in idea flow. I want to be part of it.
It's posed some challenges for me, not as a creator. It's an incredible asset as a creator. Part of my job is to create. I'm a researcher. I'm an author. I'm a teacher. As a leader. Oh, it can create some problems.
[0:03:08] JU: What kind of problems do you see it create for you?
[0:03:10] LW: Here's the use case. This would be a typical problem. I spent the first half of my career as an executive at Oracle. I had this sweet corner office. There's a lot of traffic and people would – I ran a fairly large function there. I ran all of the education, the university functions. People would pop into my office with like, “Hey, Liz. Guess what? You know that probe we've been working on? We just ran a pilot.” Or, “Hey, there’s this new campaign.” People would pop in to give me progress. I would get excited by it. Okay, great. Have you thought about this? Have you considered looping this person in? Or what about this? Or how about this? I would notice that they would come into my office, sparkly, and they –
[0:03:53] JU: They will leave flat, so to speak. Like a carbonated water and then just let all the fizz out, kind of a thing?
[0:04:01] LW: Yeah, and it's that and confused. It's dazed and confused. It's like, what just happened there?
[0:04:07] JU: Am I supposed to do all of that now? Or –
[0:04:09] LW: Am I supposed to do that? Am I supposed to create a task force, or consider this, or that? To me, I'm just having fun. I'm excited. Let's ideate together. They're now confused. This didn't happen once or twice. This happened all the time. I started to notice this. Eventually, I put a big sign on my door. My door wasn't supposed to be a whiteboard. But if you're a creative thinker, anything that could be a whiteboard becomes a whiteboard.
[0:04:42] JU: Totally.
[0:04:43] LW: I just took a big whiteboard marker. I had written our three top priorities as an organization. Then I put a big block letters, “Ignore me as needed to get your job done.”
[0:04:55] JU: That's so good.
[0:04:56] LW: My love of the creative process and considering alternatives and what-ifs was really distracting to people. It was diminishing to people because now they're confused. I've had to do a lot to make sure that my need or desire to generate doesn't create vibration in the organization. It doesn't create confusion. I've adopted a whole bunch of practices so that I don't become the idea fountain that drowns out everyone's creativity. It's actually one of things that I've tried to really study when we look at leaders who have a multiplying versus diminishing effect on others, and the ways that we end up accidentally diminishing.
One of them is the idea fountain, whose idea rich. They've got so much of this idea flow that nobody else needs to. Their ideas become anchor points. Their ideas end conversations, not start conversations. We can become very ideal lazy around people who are idea-rich. I've learned, what you want is you want max idea, flow, and creativity on your team. What that means is that the leader doesn't get to maximize her own.
[0:06:20] JU: Right. Yeah. You have to be willing –
[0:06:21] LW: A very different role.
[0:06:23] JU: That reminds me of something that Astro Teller said. He was on a few months back. He talked about at Google X. He always requires teams to bring five ideas, not just one. They have to have five solutions. He said, a lot of times they think they can game the system, they bring their pet idea and then four dummy ideas. He said, what happens is half the time, one of their dummy ideas is better than their pet idea and they don't even realize it. The flip being, he puts the burden for alternative generation on the team. It's not about his alternatives. It's about their alternatives.
I think that's actually one maybe reframe. One of the things that I found with a lot of leaders is there's a tendency to think they have to be the answer gal, or the answer guy. Especially if you're an idea generator like yourself, it's not even a burden. It's a gift, right? To be the answer gal. It's like, I got lots of answers, right? To shift to being the approach guy, or the approach gal is a very different mindset.
One thing I'd be curious about, if you think about even your own organization now, you've got a team that's looking to make as magnified impact as possible, how do you, one, check your own impulse to generate? Then two, simultaneously actually cultivate the team's ability to generate alternatives.
[0:07:41] LW: Yeah, it's about moving from being the fountain of ideas to being maybe the gardener and the cultivator of ideas. There's a bunch of things I've learned to do differently. One is I've learned to shift out the mode of giving answers and operate in the mode of asking questions. I think this is perhaps, the most important shift that leaders make as they mature is to realize that if your job is to dole out answers to the organization, it means that your team can only solve problems that you yourself have solved previously.
[0:08:18] JU: Right. Right. Exactly.
[0:08:20] LW: Which rules out most of the work that we're doing today. I remember the moment, actually when I made this shift. It was actually not a bad day at work. It was, I'm at work and I'm processing not a bad day at home, but a bad era. I've got three young kids at the time. They're like, six, four, and two. I've got this big job at Oracle, but I've got a bigger job at home with young kids. I happened to tell my buddy, Brian, I'm like, “Man, I don't like feel I'm being a very good parent right now because I am bossing orders. I am constantly barking orders, telling my kids what to do. It doesn't feel good.”
[0:09:02] JU: My daughters are 11, nine, six, and three.
[0:09:05] LW: I love that. I love the way your face lights up when you mention that. I'm in that phase. They're six, four, two. Life at home is chaos. I'm telling Brian. I'm like, “Man, I feel like I’ve become this bossy, this bossy mom.” He said, “Oh, you don't seem like the bossy type.” I'm like, “Brian, let me describe bedtime at my house.” You probably know how this goes. Now, it might go differently for you, but for me, it was like, “Kids, kids time for bed. Put that away. Leave her alone, get your pajamas on, go brush your teeth, go back. Use toothpaste this time.”
[0:09:41] JU: Why is your toothpaste in your hair? Why is there toothpaste in your hair?
[0:09:45] LW: Yeah, get that toothbrush wet, okay. Then it's story time. Get a book. No, not five books. No big books. Give me a little book. Okay, done. Story time. Say your prayer. Into bed. Not my bed. There's no yelling. It's just barrage of telling. Telling them what to do. Brian said to me – so he offers us a little bit of coaching. Brian has two young daughters of his own. He said — of course, I wasn't looking for coaching. This was purely recreational complaining. Purely. But he offers this little tidbit of coaching. He says, “Well, why don't you go home and just try asking your kids questions.”
Now, he claims he never meant this to be what I took it to be because I call this the extreme question challenge because I took it to its extreme. My first reaction was, impossible. That's not going to work. They're not going to go to bed for me asking questions. No past data would lead me to believe this. Then I decided, that's interesting. Could I actually only ask questions? That night I get home, I summoned the courage to go inside my house. It wasn't hard to get through dinner and playtime afterward. Now it's bedtime, the witching hour. I'm having to figure out like, how would I guide them through this? At first, the questions aren't coming. I started with like, “Okay, kids. What time is it?” Your 11-year-old knows what time to go to bed.
[0:11:25] JU: Totally.
[0:11:26] LW: Then it was, “Okay, who needs help getting their pajamas on? Who's going to be the first to get their teeth brushed tonight? What story are we going to read tonight? Who's turn is it to pick the story? Who do you want to have read the story, Mom or Daddy? What do we do after story time?” “Well, mom. We say our prayers.” I'm like, “What?”
[0:11:44] JU: Wait, I didn't have to bark orders at you? This is incredible.
[0:11:47] LW: Yeah. Then my final question was like, “Okay, who's ready for bed?” Then it became this contest, who could get in their beds first, and they got in their beds. They went to sleep on their own. They stayed in their beds. I'm left alone wondering, what just happened? What's happening to my kids? Of course, it was nothing that was happening to my kids. It was entirely happening to me. I'm wondering, how long have they known how to do this?
[0:12:20] JU: Right, exactly. Why have I been taking this up? Bring this into the workplace for a second, because you say, that flip from answers to questions. What's an example of maybe a current project where you've taken the approach of asking a question instead? Because I mean, by the way, it's all the more poignant in the home. I'm already thinking about it in my house. What kind of challenge is someone coming to you with right now, where responding with a question actually draws out someone's creativity?
[0:12:51] LW: Well, this challenge changed me as a parent, of course. It really changed me as a corporate manager and it changed me as a leader. It helped me see that your value as a leader is not to come up with the ideas. It's not to give the answers, it's to ask the question, to get other people to find solutions to the problem. It's asking the questions that crisp up the problem statement for other people to solve.
I used to be the leader who would toss out a few ideas to get the conversation going. Jeremy, you of all people know the danger of that. They become the anchors to those conversations. They're good enough. The boss already is okay with it, so let's just go with that. I really shifted to it like, let me ask the question that defines the problem we're trying to solve. I've done this hundreds of times. I've seen hundreds of people do it. I've seen thousands of people say like, “This has changed me as a leader.”
I think it was one example of actually someone that was in a class I taught at Stanford. He went back and started practicing this Ph.D., chemist who leads an organization that's running a massive project to clean up a toxic waste dump on the East Coast. It's the project that's a multi-year, multi-decade project. When I saw him last, he was so excited. He said, “You know, these ideas and learning to ask the questions and not give answers.” He said, “We just shaved.” I can't remember exactly. Eight is the number coming to mind. “Eight or nine years off our project.”
[0:14:39] JU: No way. How long was it going to take?
[0:14:41] LW: It was like a 20-plus-year project. They were like, we just found ways. It comes when the leader doesn't tell people what to do, but this is the problem we're trying to solve and engages the intelligence of everyone on the team. I've learned not to toss out the first few ideas. I've learned to sharpen up a question, define a problem. I've learned to offer my ideas and clarify the difference between hard opinions and soft opinions.
[0:15:17] JU: Yeah. Unexpected. One thing I’d say is, I think it's actually not dissimilar from the challenges people have with generative AI. It seems like a tangent, but it's totally not. I've been doing a small, not your scale research study, which is statistically significant, etc. But I've made it through 14 years in academia without ever doing research. Now, I got a friend at Harvard who's wrote me into this research project, where basically, we're studying the impact of generative AI on collaboration and teamwork. We've conducted a couple of studies, control group not using AI and then research group using AI. We've done this in a couple places. We have a couple more lined up. But you can't say results, because it's still early days.
Liz, you'll be maybe not surprised at all to know, one of the things that we see happening, like some of the things we're measuring on the outcome side of the equation are how many ideas are people generating to solve the problems? What's the quality of the ideas people are generating and how do they feel about generating ideas, about the task of solving a problem with a team? What's crazy to me are relative to my expectation, because, of course, I expect GenAI. It's like, you can tell it's come up with a thousand ideas and will do it, right? It says, no fatigue, whatsoever.
If you compare the control group, which doesn't have AI, with the research group, the research group systematically, at least so far, generates less ideas. You know what's crazy? If you ask the problem owner to grade ABCD, the solutions that the team generates, there is a broader distribution of grades in the non-AI group than in the AI group, where the bulk of the grades are in the AI group is in the B category. It has fewer A's, fewer D's, which by the way, I think is a problem, you probably know that, but a lot more B's.
We've been wondering, why is that? I think it is related, all that to come back to your point. I think AI gives good enough solutions early enough that the team goes, “Well, why add to that? That's good enough.” Now we have three pages of documentation. Let's just do this.
[0:17:26] LW: I'm no AI expert, of course. But based on what I know, it's working with knowns. Things that have already been established show not as good at things that don't exist. That's where you're going to get your A ideas, which is combining things in a way that don't exist. I guess, maybe another analogy from AI is like, the answers are only as good as the prompts.
[0:17:52] JU: Let’s get back to the question. Yeah.
[0:17:54] LW: Yeah. I think that's what I've learned is, if you want a team that generates good ideas and goes through this process that you and Perry have laid out, it's like, the leader has a very different role than just a team member. You become the one who decides what we need to take to that process. You have to be a framer of this. You've got to be more like the framer than the painter. You're the one that stretches the canvas and says, this is the size of it. This is what we need. You assemble the paint brushes. You get people going, but you are not the chief painter of it. Otherwise, you get solutions that look like the kinds of solutions you've already had.
It's funny. When I started studying these multiplying versus diminishing leaders, what I saw were these leaders who were diminishers, who look like power mongers. Tyrannical, narcissistic, bully, know it all. I have the answer. I have the way. What I found is that actually, it wasn't that people were diminishing others, slowing down innovation and creativity, because they were power hungry. It was because they didn't understand their own power. They didn't realize how much power they wield.
[0:19:19] JU: How much room they're taking up, it sounds like, probably.
[0:19:22] LW: Oh, yeah. That they're taking up a lot of space conceptually. That they don't realize that a comment from them can translate into a command.
[MESSAGE]
[0:19:38] JU: Research is clear that our first idea probably isn't our best idea. That's true for you, me, as well as your organization. But that first idea is an essential step to better ideas. How do you improve your idea flow? That's my passion and the work I do with organizations. If you'd like to explore how I can help your organization implement better ideas, let's talk. Check out my website, jeremyutley.design, or drop me a line at jutley@jeremyutley.design. Let's make ideas flow better.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:20:14] LW: I would see this from executives all the time, where they would learn that there was this task force that was doing some. They're like, “Yeah, you told us to do this.” Well, no. I just mentioned that we might want to think about that. They're underestimating the ripple effect of their power. I had to go through this myself because ideas come too easily to me. No, that's not the job. The job is to get the numbers working for you. You've got a team of 10 people. Do you want a bunch of ideas from one person? Or do you want everyone generating 10X on 10 people and then 10X in that? Then you get to the numbers that you talk about.
[0:20:56] JU: Which is table stakes, right, to ultimately succeed. One thing I've been curious about since digesting impact players, without getting into the broad specifics too much, or broad framing too much, but it's related to this. I found for myself, as I was interacting with the framework, a slight tension, I would say, between one of the principles that you put forth is they do what needs to be done, the job that needs to be done, right? An impact player doesn't just do their job, they do the job that needs to be done, which I love. There's a tension between that.
Then also, I don't know if it's impact players, maybe it's multipliers, too. But I remember somewhere in the back of my mind, you've talked about how managers often aren't the people who know what needs to be done, right? There's a value to a beginner's mindset, to a novice mindset, to someone who isn't jaded by the past. I would love for you to speak to, maybe start from an individual contributor perspective. Not the manager perspective, but the individual contributor, because you've spoken quite eloquently in impact players about do what needs to be done.
Yet, I find myself often, not necessarily opposite, but I find myself telling novices, “Your perspective is valuable because you see something nobody else can see.” How do you think about managing that tension? Does it strike you in any way? I don't know. Maybe it's a false dichotomy, but it's just something that was coming to my mind as I was reading the book.
[0:22:23] LW: Okay, so this is a fun, delicious question for me because it combines three different research projects that I've done. Three different books. Here's what we found about the impact player. The study we did that led up to this is we wanted to know, what are the most influential, impactful, value-contributing people doing differently than other people? In this study, we looked at the ordinary contributor, who's doing a rock-solid job.
What we found is that the difference is really how they deal with the messy stuff, and particularly five areas, like messy problems, unclear roles, unforeseen obstacles, unrelenting demands, and moving targets. I call these the everyday challenges because in the modern workplace, these are the kinds of things we're encountering every day and everywhere. We found that the impact players really handled these daily, tough things differently than other people. The first is how they handle these messy problems. What we find is when a problem lacks a clear owner. It's not your job. It's not in your job description. It's not my job description. It's not that department’s job, it's not this. It's that messy stuff in the middle.
[0:23:43] JU: It's the jump ball. It’s the loose ball.
[0:23:45] LW: It is. It's a loose ball. It's something that's annoying the customers. It's ill-defined. Our org structures inside of organizations, all the job descriptions, it's all built for the past problems.
[0:23:59] JU: Right. Everybody can look at that thing and go, “Not it. Not my problem.”
[0:24:04] LW: Not mine. Not mine. Those org charts are built and workflows are for how we handle things in the past. This is stuff, problems of the future. What we find in this situation is that the ordinary contributor, they do their part. They do their job. They do their job well. In some ways, it's like, they're doing their job so well. They're heads down doing their job that they don't see that there's a job to be done. It's nobody's job.
We find that the most influential people are the ones that step out of the confines of their job description. They ignore swim lanes and workflows and levels and hierarchies. They go do the job that's needed. To do this, you need to understand what is the job that's needed?
[0:24:53] JU: That's actually one of my questions here is, how do you identify the job that needs to be done? I've heard you give the example of your boss saying, “Liz, we need this program. Do it.” I would say, that's a gift. If a boss has the wherewithal to say, “The job that needs to be done is blank,” then you're probably in a very special class. To me, a lot of times, the job that needs to be done isn't – you probably don't have the gift of a boss who says, go do this. What you do as an individual contributor when nobody's telling you what to do?
[0:25:21] LW: Yeah. Early in my career, I learned this lesson, because I had this – I was advocating for this job I wanted. I wanted to teach leadership. I'm interviewing for this group that runs these technical boot camps. I'm making this case. “Oracle needs a management boot camp and I'd love to build it.” He's like, “Yeah, we think you're great, but your boss has a different problem. We have to figure out how to get 2,000 technologists up to speed in the Oracle technology stack over the next year. What would be terrific, Liz, is if you could help her figure out how to do that.” In some ways, he gave me a little slap on the –
[0:25:57] JU: What would you if you don't have the person giving you the slap, right? How do you discover the job that needs to be done? As you said, sometimes it's a jump ball, or it's a loose ball. Nobody even realizes the thing that we need to do is blank.
[0:26:07] LW: Right. Well, first of all, and I repeated that because I had to pay attention to what – he never said, “Don't do that. This is what we want you to do.” What he just said is he pointed to a hotspot. He pointed to somebody else's problem. He said, “Your boss has a different problem.” I'm like, “Oh.” What he was essentially saying is like, look around and make yourself useful, which is this two-step process of figuring this out. What it trained me to do is to look for hotspots.
[0:26:40] JU: How do you define hotspots?
[0:26:42] LW: Hotspots. Hot topics. What are the things that are getting talked about in the hallways, in company-wide emails, and in townhalls? What are hot projects? Projects that are getting funding, projects that are getting resourced? What are hot buttons? What's your boss grumbling about? My daughter worked at Stanford in a lab and she told me, she said, “Mom, my boss was saying like, when we do these blood draws in this research lab, why aren't we using VR technology?” Her boss just kept mumbling about that.
It wasn't like, I need you to go do this. It was not on a project. She just noticed that her boss kept bringing it up and was angsty. It was not my daughter's job. But she's like, “Mom, I think that's what you talked about, the job that's needed. I think my boss was –” Again, my daughter didn't get asked. My daughter, Amanda didn't get asked. She just said, “You know what? I'm going to go and investigate how we can use VR technology to distract the youth that were going through this study at Stanford, these young people who were going through this study, to distract them during the blood draws and this.” She said, “I just went to talk to this person and that person. I put it together.” Can you imagine her boss's reaction when she came back and said, “I noticed you were talking about VR technology. I just took it upon myself.” It's just like, the comment her boss made was, “This is what leadership looks like. This is initiative.” See, the most important problems rarely do we get handed on a job platter.
[0:28:20] JU: I love that. I love the tip of what is someone mumbling about? I'll never forget. I thought of this memory from my own career. I started my career at the Boston Consulting Group. I was a summer intern. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, Hook ‘em. I was working in the Dallas office. I didn't have a car. My dad worked in downtown Dallas. I was living with my parents. I ride to work with my dad every day.
By the way, cherished memories. Great. I don't know how he feels. We would drive through McDonald's, get a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit every morning, and just have 45 minutes in the car. I was doing terribly at BCG. I was the worst associate ever. I didn't like the job. There's all sorts of problems. My dad, I'll never forget. I can't even remember the whole context. I was reminded of this story, actually, reading your book, because there's a day where my dad said, “Jeremy, you got to make sure you leave that meeting with the monkey on your back. Don't let anybody else leave with the monkey on their back.” I don't know why exactly because it doesn't map one to one, but there's something about, I have to take responsibility for something that I could easily say isn't my job.
[0:29:25] LW: Right. These messy problems don't have owners. It's about taking ownership. It's figuring out what's important. Pay attention to heat. It's almost like, the impact players move through their work world with a heat map. Oh, hot issue, hot project. Oh, we need a hot take on this. Where is their heat? Then they become a heat-seeking missile. First step, figure out what's important. If you can't figure it out by paying attention, just ask. But don't ask what's keeping you up at night, which is what's something that's on your top priority that you haven't been able to get to? Yeah. How can I contribute? It's figuring out what's important.
Then here's the second step. Make it important to you. I didn't want to teach technology to a bunch of nerds. I wanted to teach leadership. That was what was important to me. What I decided to do, and that was early in my career, it set the tone for so much of how I worked is, you know what? If that's the most important problem, and it's on the critical path of the company's growth, I'm going to make it important to me. I'm going to love that technology. It's saying like, I'm going to take this thing and put it on the top of my list. Something magical happens, when you figure out what's important and you make it important to you, you just start to get more and more responsibility.
Let me give you another example. I was doing some team teaching with someone. This was a community class where teaching is the same for teenagers. My co-teacher and I, we sit down at the beginning of our work together, and I say like, “What's important to you as we start this?” I'm expecting this big vision of what his aspirations for the students were. He said, “Well, what's important to me is that we start class on time and we wear professional attire. We're going to be with teenagers in the morning. They're rolling in in sweatpants.” He's like, “We’re gonna wear suits.”
I'm thinking, if I made a list of 200 things that were important to me, neither of those are going to show up on that list. I decided, you know what? Those two things are important to Eric, my partner in this. I'm going to make those important to me. I'm going to start class on time. I'm going to come dressed to impress, I suppose. You know what's funny? Neither of those that I want to do, but I did them. You can imagine every hair-brained idea I had, like when I decided, “You know what? We had to do a dunk tank and we all let the students dunk the teachers if we get the answers wrong on this.” I'm like, these are wild, hair-brained things that most people would say, “No.”
[0:32:08] JU: Unconventional uses of the brick.
[0:32:10] LW: Unconventional uses of the brick. Every single one of them, Eric said – this is Eric who wants to start on time and wear a suit. He's like, “Let's do it.”
[0:32:20] JU: That's cool.
[0:32:21] LW: When I found that the things that were then important to me, he made those important to him.
[0:32:26] JU: Through your reciprocity. Yeah. Here's a question I have for you, especially for folks who are joining organizations in this remote, or hybrid environment. You've mentioned hearing what people are talking about in the halls. There's another talk of yours I was watching you mentioned unwritten rules of an organization, which sometimes are really important. I wonder if you could speak for a moment to how do you learn the unwritten rules, or the hot topics when you're new and when you're remote?
Because it strikes me that you're somewhat of a disadvantage. I mean, and that doesn't mean you're young in your career. You may be more senior, but you start in a new organization, say it's remote, or hybrid. What are the means by which one starts to learn some of the unwritten rules and learn about the hot topics when you're going to standard ways of doing so, the water cooler, proverbial water cooler, aren't as available to you?
[0:33:19] LW: Well, I like to think of this as like, how do you learn a culture? You look at it, it's like, what's typical here? What do people typically dress like? You think about when you go into a new country and you're unfamiliar with the culture, you're paying attention to all sorts of norms about where do people walk on the sidewalks and who pauses for whom and all of the things. I like to think of it more like a tribe. What's the center of the tribe? Typically, there would be a meeting house, or a hut at the heart of the community. Then what are the boundaries of the community?
I like to think of it like, okay, what's valued here? What gets people in trouble here? Versus, what gets people promoted, or what is it that people do here that causes them to get ahead, or to build influence, or power? That's what's bringing them to the center of that tribe. Then, what gets people tossed out? What would get you kicked out of the community here? I think when you do that, you start to learn the unwritten rules of an organization.
[0:34:27] JU: That you could learn in coffee chats. Never, I would say to young folks, especially never underestimate the power of reaching out and asking someone for advice, right? Folks in organizations actually love getting asked for advice. You might feel reticent to do it, but it's such a simple way to build camaraderie. If you're equipped with a couple of questions, like Liz is suggesting, you can actually really build your reservoir of knowledge about the organization. I like that phrase, learning culture.
Okay, I wanted to share with you one thing, Liz, and then I want to move to a couple rapid-fire questions because I know we're close on time from members of our television audience. One thing I wanted to mention to you, and I would love to hear if you thought about context at all, I'll just use that word, context, because it struck me that a lot of impact players, it's somewhat agnostic of context. What can you do to outperform? The reason I thought about that word context is a few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a class with Laszlo Bach, who at the time was the Head of People Ops in Google. I think he since moved on to Humu and other places.
One of the things I remember him saying to our class is 20 or 30 MBA students, and he said, they do deep data-driven people operation stuff at Google. He said, “The single greatest predictor of someone's performance, good or bad, was actually context.” He said, “What the implications are is if somebody's a high performer, do not move them, because their performance reverts to the meaning in a new context.” Their studies have shown that a top-performing team of five investment bankers at Goldman, if they get acquired and go to JPMorgan, their returns revert to the mean once they're at JPMorgan. I'm using this hypothetical, right?
Then he said, the flip is also true, that if you take a low performer, he said, what we've learned at Google is always move them before firing them. Because if you move them, their performance reverts to the mean. By the way, the mean at Google is pretty great, right? Rather than fire someone first, move them because chances are, their failure to perform is also a function of context.
Anyway, I would love to know all that being said, how you think about this, the intersection between call it impact players and the stuff that you can do agnostic of context, and the role that context plays in contributing to, or attracting from someone's ability to be an impact player.
[0:36:45] LW: Okay. Well, let me start with maybe the obvious thing. Then I want to move to some less obvious and maybe even a controversial view of it.
[0:36:52] JU: Hot take. Love it. Hot takes.
[0:36:54] LW: Okay. Maybe the most intuitive is we like to talk about the impact players, they find out what's important and they make it important to them. That's one of the five things they do differently. If you can't make that work important to you, you might need to work in a different context. There are certain things, like if you put me in certain environments, I'm like, “Oh, I'm having a hard time getting jazzed about this. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head wanting to be creative.” I'm perfunctory going through the motion. Sometimes a change of context is just what people need.
Yeah, now that ignites my passion, or I have some natural talent, or native genius for that work. I've seen this happen dozens of times where someone was a low performer and you get them into a new role and boom, they just go.
Okay, let me then go to the thing that might be a little bit more counterintuitive is it might not be the content of the context. It might be a fresh start, that people get inside of teams and organizations and they fall into roles, like family dynamics and patterns. Oh, that's the Maverick. Oh, this is the one that can never make it on time. People assume those roles and they get in those well-worn tracks of their roles. Sometimes being able to pop off to a new team, it's not about –
[0:38:15] JU: There would be a chance to reestablish who you are, your identity.
[0:38:18] LW: It's going from your high school senior year to your first year in college is a chance to define a new you. One of the things that sucks about work is that there aren't these semesters and years. Work can just go on and on and we get in these ruts and tracks. One of the things good managers do is they create finite points. Like, okay, we started this, we ended it. Let's celebrate it. Semester’s over. Fresh start.
Giving people fresh starts and projects within a team is healthy. But giving people fresh starts in an organization like, you know what? No one knows that you were struggling in this last thing. This is a chance to rebuild.
[0:38:59] JU: That's great. I want to shift to a couple of questions from listeners. There's two and I'll give you the two questions and you can choose which order. Anna Leyva, who's one of my favorite students, who's become a dear friend of mine as well, from her time at the GSB, and then now we're part of the same church and she's incredible. She asked the question, how do you identify impact players in the hiring process? Okay, that's one question. Then Bill King, who's a former DCI fellow and he's the founder of MOVI communities, an incredible leader and banker, and investor. He said, “We all want to be impact players,” He texted me this question, so I'm reading here. “We all want to be impact players. However, sometimes life gets in the way and we slip back to being a contributor. What mental model, by way of reminder, framing, etc,. do you recommend for us to look through to show up every day as an impact player?”
[0:39:47] LW: Oh, go. I love these questions and you want fast responses on them.
[0:39:51] JU: Call it 42 seconds. I'm kidding. I’m kidding.
[0:39:54] LW: Okay, 42-second time here. Part of the research we did, that we looked at all the traits of the characteristic of impact players and then put them through the lens of some of these are learnable and some of these are a little bit more inherent, like we come to our work with this. You want to hire for some of the ones that are here. If I had to pick the two that I was hiring for, I would pick a very strong sense of agency. People who take charge. Maybe someone who takes charge of the interview process. Okay, who should I talk to next? What would you like to see me? I took the liberty of putting this together. Even border on annoying take charge.
The second thing I would look for is comfort with ambiguity. I'll give you one of the tips from one of my buddies. I asked him to test out a hiring tool that I had been building. He was going to hire a bunch of impact players. He was looking for people who are comfortable with ambiguity. What he noticed is that when he asked people, like tell me about a time when you had to deal with a really messy problem that was unclear, a lot of uncertainty. Some people would like, “Oh, boy. Okay, let me tell you.” Versus someone like, “Okay, let me tell you.”
[0:40:59] JU: It's almost like, what is the premise of ambiguity to stimulate for the recipients? It's not about the stories. It’s about the visceral response.
[0:41:08] LW: Is it like, okay, I'm going to tell you about my trauma from this. Oh, man. This thing was a delicious mess.
[0:41:15] JU: Yeah, exactly. Is it therapy or a bragging session? Yeah.
[0:41:18] LW: He noticed, it was a leaning thing. If I had to pick two, those would be the two that I was on point.
[0:41:24] JU: No, brilliant. You saying agency, but maybe a super short heuristic, I don't know, but I feel like Adam Grant, or someone mentioned this. One of the big determinants to an engineer’s success on one of his big firms was whether they used Chrome or Safari. When they dug into it, it's that the Chrome users had to question a default. It's not that Chrome is superior, but it's that those are the people they exercise agency. They are installing the browser that works for them, as opposed to people who just accept the default. Maybe they like Safari. Don't mean to throw shade on Safari, but perhaps, they have less agency. Anna, what you could do is you can look and see, are folks using the default applications, or have they upgraded? Okay, and what do you think about Bill's question? Is there something, a frame, or a reminder that someone can invoke to dispel the tendency to slip back into contributor mode?
[0:42:17] LW: I think the first would be to recognize that these are modes, not characters. I did the research. People that managers identified as impact players versus what I came to call ordinary contributors. Yes, there are people who fall into those buckets at times, but they're really modes of thinking and working that we move in and out of. I love his question, because it says like, I've got the heart and soul of an impact player. I've worked this way. But I feel myself having slipped into turning a crank, going through the motion.
The way out of that is to recognize that it is a mode. It's not you. It's a mode you've gone into. I like to think about it as muscle memory. Can you remember a time when you are working a different way? What were you doing differently? Invoke that. Like, “Oh, yeah. This project.” To go back to doing those things. If I had to maybe suggest a reminder, a prompt to oneself, it's probably the thing that if I could stand on a tall building and scream out, I don't know, career advice to people, it would be that everything I've seen in my research is that we have far more power than we think.
We get into organizations where like, “Oh, I'm the new. I'm the intern. I'm the new person. I've been given this. That's not my job.” It's easy to assume that we are powerless. In this research, what I found is what managers want are people who take charge, who don't wait to be told, who figure out what the problem is. “Oh, by the way. I just took the liberty of doing this. Oh, you were mumbling about the VR.” You know what? It is our work. It’s not our boss's work. When we decide that we have a lot of power to decide where we work, what we put our attention on, how we work, it's like taking back that power, it's what actually most managers want.
[0:44:22] JU: Yeah, it's beautiful. I think it's such a perfect note to end on as well because the reality is there are certain even ways of showing up to the day, right? One of the most, and for me, one of the most disempowering ways to start my day is to open my email. Because it's everybody else's to-do list, right? If I want to greet today with a renewed sense of agency, I should start with, what are the things that are important for me to get done today, right? Not one of the things that others have piled onto my public to-do list called email, right? But what do I want to get done today, right? Bill, hopefully, that's helpful advice from Liz.
Liz, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation. I've heard from others about your brilliance, but to get to see it firsthand and experience it firsthand, it's a true joy. I love hearing about your problems with your own idea flow, or your gift and idea flow yourself. It's fun to have a fellow idea connoisseur.
[0:45:15] LW: I'm a junkie.
[0:45:16] JU: It's fun to be with a fellow junkie, definitely.
[0:45:19] LW: The best leaders maximize intelligence, innovation, idea flow, and ownership in other people. If we want other people to go big, sometimes we have to play a little bit smaller.
[0:45:33] JU: Well said. Well said. Thank you for joining us today. Everyone who's been watching live, thank you so much. In two weeks, two weeks, and two days, we've got Kevin Kelly joining us as well. Or no, one week and two days, we have Kevin Kelly joining us talking about his book, Excellent Advice for Living. Tune in there. Until next time, thank you so much. Have a great day.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:45:54] JU: By day, I'm a professor, but I absolutely love moonlighting as a front-row student next to you during these interviews. One of my favorite things is taking the gems from these episodes and turning them into practical tips and lessons for you and your team. If you want to share the lessons you picked up from this episode with your organization, feel free to reach out. I'd be thrilled to do a keynote on the secrets that I've gleaned from creative masters, or put together a hands-on workshop to supercharge your next off-site adventure. Hit me up at jutley@jeremyutley.design for more information.
[END]
One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.