Transcript
Speaker: Shawn, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Yeah, thanks. I'm so excited to be on. I'm in Menlo Park, California, working on the final stages of getting a new piece of work in the world and the stress that comes with that. But ah really happy to be alive and excited to be having this conversation.
Speaker: I'm glad that you are feeling good and positive. And I hope that that work is going well and appreciate that you've made the time to talk to me. Would you mind telling me a bit about yourself?
Speaker: I got three boys. The youngest is 21, 22, and 24. So they're all they're all out of college or beyond college. um Love um skiing, love outdoor sports, and and work. I spend my time studying leaders. and And just environments. How do you create environments where people can do their very best work in thinking? and It seems like everybody...
Speaker: wants to use their talents to use, you know, i mean, that's what Gallup found anyways, that all their research, everybody wants to use their God-given talents to do something awesome at a job and everybody needs a good manager. And so for the last 10 plus years, I've been studying leadership development and what do great leaders do and um and have ah kind connected myself to several pieces of research and have this new piece of research coming out this fall.
Speaker: So you and I got connected, at least in part, because you've written a new book and you have that coming out. Your book is called Pause. Can you tell me about your book?
Speaker: Yeah, Pause was trying to get into, there was two parts to the research. The first was this recognition of a problem. We were we were trying to figure out what are the what's the difference between extraordinary contribution and good contribution. And part of that, we were asking people, what holds you back from doing your best work?
Speaker: and And a really consistent answer was, I just can't get deep. I'm being asked to task switch all the time. the the priorities are always changing. ah and and we wanted to know, whoa, I thought, man, that's interesting.
Speaker: What do the best leaders do to address this? Are there leaders out there that create space for deep focus versus leaders that I'd work for, for sure, that just amplify distraction, make it very difficult to to get in deep into a few meaty priorities that we care about? So we we created this research question. What are the best leaders do to create space for deep work, and and what do leaders do, maybe even unintentionally, to that where they amplify distraction. And that led us down three-year research path where we interviewed people to explore their experiences working for both
Speaker: leaders who created traction for them versus distraction. um And we had a you know whole slew of questions. We were analyzing both. And then when we found leaders that scored really high as somebody who created space for focus, we would interview their entire teams at to tease out what is the mindset, their beliefs, and what were the behaviors that they did. We took all that data and charted out the observable behaviors that we can see. You know, the kind of behaviors where if you close your eyes, you could so imagine them on a movie set or on stage.
Speaker: And we were looking at both. the behaviors that showed up and scored the most frequent and had the biggest impact that helped people focus versus the behaviors that showed up the most that were distracting.
Speaker: Put those all on a board and tried to ask, what's the news here? And the news was that these leaders who create space for focus, all of the top 12 behaviors were a form of slowing things down just a bit to get clarity, to create space, to remove distractions so people could accelerate on priorities versus All of these 12 behaviors that people said were ultra distracting were all a form of speeding things up or ignoring signs that the team was unclear or struggling or distracted. And so it was that was interesting. So we we decided, okay, yeah, this this deserves to be written about. We wanted to highlight what these leaders that created Space for Traction did and what they believed about work.
Speaker: And so that's the hope in this book. You got into a little bit of what you learned here in, in a couple of ways, but one of them is one of them was about, you know one positive aspect, I guess, is around slowing things down versus speeding things up or ignoring things. So can you tell me a bit more about what you learned in your research?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, I learned that I had a serious problem. Because i have a tendency to be driven and I'm quick to commit. i love ah i love i'm'm I'm a fool for a good opportunity. And and you know in any company that has you know been around or has a few clients, there's a lot of opportunities to make a difference. And so it's pretty easy for me personally to be so you know in a hyper-connected world where there's, you know, you can go really fast and there's all sorts of tools to take on projects and you're expected kind of to be on, or at least somebody's on at some point in the world. I tend to be moving very quickly. And I, I was, the revelation for me was I,
Speaker: I've always wanted to be a good leader. I've always wanted to create space for people to do great work. But I couldn't see until we did this research how I was ah i had kind of a form of attention blindness. You know this idea, John Vervaeke writes about this idea, I think he's ah um up at the University of Toronto. Well, he he writes about this idea that you know when you're super focused on something,
Speaker: and you have ultra you know hyper attention looking for that at that goal or whatever, then you're unaware of everything around you. And you have a form of attention blindness. you know By giving one thing your attention, you are unaware of the things around that. And I didn't realize that oftentimes my desire to get things done fast and to focus on things made it to where i was unaware of how I was over committing my team or moving so fast that they were unclear on things that I was clear on and that actually a lot of the things that I did were distracting to them and they were struggling to do deep work themselves. So the first kind of thing that i learned was a lot about myself by by studying these leaders who had this assumption that
Speaker: that it was impact over action, so they had a bias towards what's the outcome. They wanted to make sure that they weren't rewarding just activity, but being judicious about the activity that would lead to impact.
Speaker: I realized that I had a tendency to have a bias towards action, that I was quick to commit and to get into activity and focus on getting things done rather than getting outcomes, and by default, I was at times really distracting my team and making things unclear. So I learned a lot about myself, which was awesome. um And then the other thing that I learned that was really interesting in this is I've always been a fan of of personal productivity. You know, as ah as a young professional, I was one of those kids that was always buying the next productivity book. And I remember when Getting Things Done came out and I loved this book and and tried to ah implement everything that I could. But, you know, I was always looking for those types of books.
Speaker: i i I was able to, I learned through these leaders that productivity, so often the reason why it fails, the reason why I failed at personal productivity is that it's a social problem.
Speaker: the That when you work in team environments, you are wired to succeed with your peers, with your boss, with and with the people that report to you if you're a leader, and your clients. And that your Deep inclinations and tendencies and wiring to win with each other, they trump personal productivity hacks like so fast. And so it helped me understand why a lot of the things that I had intended to do personally and from a productivity perspective failed.
Speaker: And that what I needed more than anything was... I would have needed in an environment where I had a leader and a team that was collectively crafting an environment where we could really get into focused work and personal productivity.
Speaker: But without it, you really don't have much of a chance. and And that also was another revelation for me that the productivity problem is really social if you work in a tribe. why is it that individual discipline is not enough? You know, you've already spoken about if you're buttoned up, I'm using different words, certainly, but if you have things buttoned up, then that will be overpowered in some respect by team standards or by a boss or something like that. But at some point might...
Speaker: individual discipline have a positive impact, like shift a team dynamic or help influence your boss or something like that? Or is it simply, it's just in reality, it's just not enough in most cases.
Speaker: Of course, you know you'll have these times where you'll learn productivity as part of your discipline to become very individually productive and to make sure that you can get clear on things and to stay on task and to push your cognitive abilities. you know We learn a lot of capabilities naturally to work with other people to negotiate space for us to be able to do our best work. And so i think part of that, you just get into ways to you know work smart with your boss and manage up or your peers. And and so i do think that individual discipline can lead to so, you know, you can claim so much space and you can get a lot of focus done.
Speaker: But how many people have you met that are just dogmatically committed to being personally productive in a distracting environment?
Speaker: You know, let's maybe we do like a, you know, an 80-20 rule and these people are out there and they are tremendously successful. and And they will be able to quickly articulate to you as I interview people like this, because I was interested in this too. What about the outliers? you know, the people that are just insanely focused in the most distracting environment without a boss that's doing this.
Speaker: You know, they they can quickly articulate to you all the frustrations that they have and and that they wished for more of an environment to help encourage these things. And that they could have even done more with their cognitive resources and ability if they had a team and an environment where that that really supports this. As a matter of fact, there was one fellow that I remember interviewing for the book. His name's Tareef. He leads a company called Posit.
Speaker: And he's really into concentration and deep work practices. And there's a few stories about him in the book. and And one of the things that he shared with me, he said that you know Even though he was so committed to, he was a coder and scaled a software company, to doing his craft well you know and found ways to scale that to a large degree within his company and with the people who's working with, he he said, but a man, I just wish more people were aware of the challenge of getting deep and that more people were on board with crafting environments to make this possible. And then he just said, that's why as a leader I have, I've dedicated a huge part of my leadership to creating an environment where other people that really want to focus deeply can. And so I think you, to answer your question, you absolutely can get so much real estate out of your own discipline.
Speaker: but but but But even in that scenario, a lot of us would wish for a more thoughtful and supportive environment to do deep work. And then for those people that are not avidly disciplined about getting in deep and so and using their cognitive capabilities to do something awesome, I would say that they that that they will struggle to rise to the level of their ambition and oftentimes rise to the level of the workflow around them.
Speaker: um And so there's hope to be sure in discipline, but man, there's something magical when you have a leader who is trying to curate an environment, craft an environment with the team where you can create these productivity bubbles, where you can activate all of that good work and and to really help people focus.
Speaker: I'm really curious, Shawn, if you encountered this situation in all of your research. So it sounds to me like a common situation might be that someone has some, you know, work practices or mental discipline or whatever it is that allows them to be productive and organized and do deep work to some extent that maybe is greater than the average, but then their boss changes or they join a new team or company and they in in one way or another sort of regress to the new mean and or the new average there and
Speaker: that I felt like I read that in the book a little bit, but also that you're sort of saying that. But I'm wondering if you've encountered this scenario. So more than 10 years ago, now that I think about it, I worked at a place where...
Speaker: I, at almost everyone worked remotely. And so, you know, you couldn't just come and knock on the door. You couldn't walk by somebody's, you know, cubicle or whatever and interrupt them.
Speaker: And at that time, Slack and other things were being used, but they weren't quite as active as a lot of Slacks or Teams or whatever are in my experience nowadays. So you didn't quite get interrupted in that way or distracted in that way like you might.
Speaker: today. So it was a little bit harder to just interrupt someone. yeah If we use just interruption as one example of breaking up deep work or productivity.
Speaker: But still, you know, I would do things like I had my email scheduled so that Outlook would check it. I don't know. it was, I think, 9 a.m. every morning and then at maybe 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
Speaker: and I would only manually refresh my email if I knew that there was something important going on. And I told everyone that I worked with and, ah you know, I think it was even maybe in in my email signature. If it's really important, you should just call or text me.
Speaker: You know, if I don't respond on Slack or whatever, then just go ahead and do that. And it's really interesting, actually, almost nobody would What at least for me, it resulted in was I recall my boss telling me that I have this sense or i have this reputation, I guess, of being very aloof, not just slightly, you know, but I am off completely disconnected.
Speaker: And so rather than me being pulled into less productivity in some sense, I felt more like I had an inability to integrate.
Speaker: And I'm not saying that there was any punishment, at least intentionally. But at the end of the day, i think everyone else felt like it was hard to work with me. And actually, I felt like it was hard to work with them. And so long story short, did you run into anything like that?
Speaker: Yeah, it is a reality. a lot of scenarios where people would report this. where they would say, I've worked so hard for my craft to make sure that I can, how, you know, even people would say, I push myself to see how many deep work sessions can I get in in a day? You know, maybe it's, they've come up with a routine, a protocol where they can do, you know, 90 minutes twice. And that's burly, man. If you can do 90 hardcore minutes a day, that's twice. Some people say oh no, I've figured out how I can get three of those sessions in per day, you know? And and so, yeah and they would say,
Speaker: But sometimes it's really isolating because no one on my team is this way. And so I've been labeled as you know, a good teammate, but disconnected or a little hard to work with.
Speaker: Or I just get the sense that there's this feeling that because I'm not willing to check email at night, and that's okay, that's accepted here, or I'm not willing to slack at all, and everybody else is slacking, this was really common, but I stick to email, and that I'm just not as supportive of the team and felt that maybe I didn't belong as much.
Speaker: Whereas some of those people would even say that, but then when they worked for a leader that said, hey, we would like, I'd like to make it possible for everybody to feel like that they can disconnect in the ways that they wanna disconnect. And I'd like to put some infrastructure in this. I'd like to communicate to my boss and to my peers.
Speaker: And clients use my reputation, if you will, to sponsor your ability to do your thing in the way that you want to. So let's talk about that. Those same people said, oh, what a load off.
Speaker: I went from feeling like an outsider that was maybe a little difficult to work with, but still accepted because I delivered really great work to being celebrated in two ways for the work that I delivered and also the way that I delivered that work.
Speaker: And so, you know, that was people would say that was cognitively and emotionally difficult for me to be on the outside and a little distracting, if you will, that worry that maybe they were being perceived the wrong way. And I think the word they would use is difficult.
Speaker: that I was seen as just a little bit difficult. ah and And you know, most of us don't love that. I mean, I certainly don't love to be difficult, even though I know that I can be. i think I was difficult in the opposite way. for I was leading software developers for years and years and years. And there was this one software developer that would say, man Shawn, every time you come in my office and just start talking to me like that, it's like you throw a rock through a stained glass window I've been working on a train of thought for like an hour, and then you come in and just start talking at me and wanna rip me out of that. And that was good for me. though that that kind of he was very He gave great feedback. he was very um
Speaker: He didn't hold back, I think that was the key. And that helped me over years recognize that I needed to be thoughtful to him and we we should arrange times to meet. But he too would even say to me, man, sometimes I just feel a little misunderstood here and that people think I'm jerk, but I'm actually just trying to get things done here. So I think that word difficult is the way we feel. Whereas if we if we work in an environment where a boss is aware of people's desires and inclinations to get deep and they help orchestrate a system that encourages that, then you feel a lot more belonging, um you know even though you're doing the same amount of deep work.
Speaker: In the first three or maybe four chapters of the book, I felt like a couple of the things that you were talking about came back to not not just simply one thing, but that they related to one thing and in one way or another. And that was prioritization, whether it's how a manager prioritizes or how you respond to a request and then maybe an inability to prioritize a new request against an existing set of priorities.
Speaker: And so you might tell me that I've misinterpreted, but the the first few chapters or issues I felt like related to prioritization in one way or another.
Speaker: And so assuming that I'm not incorrect. The first four chapters were dedicated to aspects of this that we saw. Okay, perfect. I'm i'm glad that I'm not way off here. I paid attention in my reading, thankfully.
Speaker: So one, yeah it there are a number of different aspects that we might talk about in terms of how I set priorities, how it affects other people when I send out a request or you know whatever it is, when I Slack them, who knows why how they receive it and they prioritize and so on. But Why is prioritization for an individual or a team, a manager whatever else so difficult? And then I'm also really curious, Shawn, about do you think that an inability to prioritize or sort of keep first things first is getting worse over time?
Speaker: Yeah, that's really good. And I wish I knew the latter question. I'm going hit that real quick I'm not sure. i don't have like the benchmarks to know. so I will just confess wonder there.
Speaker: um I mean, we could, I don't have any data that's like in my research that suggests, and I'm probably just not, you know, apprised of the latest research that shows an answer for this. So while I don't fully know if it's getting worse, what I do know that I was stunned by how few people were able to communicate that they were clear.
Speaker: I just, what's the most important thing for you to work on in your career right now, in your team right now, even this week, even today. i was stunned by how few people were able to say yes to that.
Speaker: And tragically, i was also stunned that so many professionals said to us in the interviews, I've never worked for a leader that I would explain to you as somebody who really made the priorities clear.
Speaker: I was you know taken back by that to be quite frank. I was like, no, come on, really? like You've never had a boss that made things clear? like They were like, well, what's clear? Define it for me. So we we defined it as three things. We said, okay, that you knew what was the most important thing or a few things that were more important than others, you could explain it. That was number one. Number two, you could clarify what the success measures were. So we knew when we arrived,
Speaker: And we're ready to get on the podium, if you will. And then the third thing was that you knew what actions to invest in or avoid. And they were like, oh, yeah, for sure. I've never had a boss that I've worked with that's been crystal clear. It's always been fuzzy goals.
Speaker: So that was ah a big surprise to me. I've had the fortune of working for people that make things crystal clear. and But a lot of people had it. And that was tough because it meant that we had to interview more people to find out what leaders did to to help people get crystal clear.
Speaker: So so we did ah we had to do an extra couple rounds of research because we found so many people that could only explain distraction, but not the clarifying process. So we put a lot of energy to understand that. So I would say that...
Speaker: While a lot of people have not experienced it, they do know when they're not clear. And it's extremely distracting because you don't know how to lean into the work. It's kind of like trying to board a moving bus, you know, in a hailstorm.
Speaker: So I think that this is um that this is a reality for people. The reason why we made this issue the first portion of the book, and I want to make sure that I'm really answering your question because I know i I don't have a great answer for the previous one on um on, you know, is this getting worse? But one of the things that occurred among the people that said that they had experienced an environment where they really could focus, they all said they were crystal clear on what the priorities were and they explained what that looked like. They knew where to place their big bets.
Speaker: And their leaders did this in an assortment of ways that we could talk about and should, but this is what they had. They knew where to place their big bets. They knew they could explain what was more important than something else and why they knew how it was measured. And they, they they had an idea on how to, what should they be doing on a daily basis to get there.
Speaker: And so We tried to report on that and the ways that leaders did this in this whole section. And it it came and and one of the things that I was most excited about, and then take me back this to make sure that I properly answered this question, but is they were awesome at exp exposing the hidden workload. So they would clarify priorities. Here's the top three things we're working on.
Speaker: But now we've got those clear on the board. I want everybody to put all the things on the board that you are currently working on that you cannot just forget about that are not one of these three priorities.
Speaker: And now all of a sudden they're working together as a team to figure out how they're going to deal with that too. you know Are we going to kill things? Are we gonna shrink things? are we going put things on hold? Are we going to have to add a fourth thing instead of just three things? Because we just, we can't let that go. So exposing the hidden workload was a surprise to me. That was something these leaders were very good at. And then as I practiced with those techniques in my own team, I was i was ah excited about how quickly people were able to share things that I didn't know about that they were working on, but it made sense to me.
Speaker: Oh, I see why you've held on to that. But now all of a sudden they felt like that they had a place to talk about the truth, the reality of their lives. And instead feeling like that the priorities were a little disingenuous, if you know what i mean, like that they they didn't capture the experience that they were having. Okay, so I'm to pause there.
Speaker: did it Did we get to you the answer to your you're the first part of your question? Yeah, you definitely did. And, you know, Shawn, as you were talking, a light bulb went off, in not in the sense of I had an insight necessarily, but more that I had a question. And I may ask you to speculate a bit here, but it occurred to me that you know, we've had quiet quitting, we've had increasing dissatisfaction with jobs, you know, and and over the years there it's been attributed on average to different things. You know, people don't quit a job or a company, they quit a manager and any number of things.
Speaker: Yeah. Compensation, who knows what, but the The light bulb moment for me was, I wonder if in some increasing percentage of cases that the bait and switch that some people feel or the sense that yeah I was sold on a ah new job, that that the reality is is not what I was sold on, is due to the fact that The company doesn't have a priority. They don't know their priorities, so they don't actually know what they're hiring for.
Speaker: And you may not have encountered that, but I sure would love even just your speculation on that might be ah a growing percentage of cases. Well, actually, that came a lot in the research. There's um there's a little bit that we call be your team's agent.
Speaker: When you read that chapter, it will not be clear to you that we were writing about what you just said. Partially because it was really hard to frame that way in a way that we thought would be useful to the reader. But the essence of the idea was that Leaders who are really good at understanding their team's superpowers and then fighting for work that is both important to the company and also well aligned for their team's superpowers would create this deep satisfaction on their teams because they would help expose the company's priorities and clarify those to their teams and then look for the priorities or the projects that they knew their team could crush it on. So then now all of a sudden the team wins twice because one, their leader was trying to understand their superpowers. And then two, so that's then that's fulfilling. we We want to use our superpowers to make a difference at work. And you know that's an easier way to get into a flow state, et cetera, as you know.
Speaker: But then to know that that's going to be, that your leader is going to fight for the right work to point those superpowers at means that you're going to excel in your career and be recognized and be fulfilled simultaneously. Well,
Speaker: The leaders who didn't do this well, we call those distributed work distributors. Instead of being their team's talent agents to make sure that their talent was utilized properly and leveraged, instead they would just distribute any work that came to their team regardless if it was a fit. And so often, it was not just a case of them not understanding their team members superpowers, it was also a lack of prioritization. So the the teams would be hired with a general sense of what was going to be done, but then so often the work that would come wasn't the story that was told, it was a shifted priority, the priorities weren't clear in the first place, and then a different line of work would come to that team, and you'd have an unsatisfied individual that was also not leveraging their superpowers. And so I actually think this happens all the time where companies are shifting at light speed.
Speaker: There's a ripple effect, a bill of you know goods or a story is sold, the story changes. And that often has a talent misalignment that has an expectation misalignment. And then you get really unsatisfied people. And a lot of times you're going to lose talented people as a result. So I think that that is a huge reality. And and it's true that There's direction.
Speaker: There's like vertical direction for a company. Like, okay, I'm in a SaaS company that does CRM. I'm an AI engineer, an architect, and so I get the sense of what I'm going to do.
Speaker: Okay, so they're not going be surprised you know about what they're working on. But then all of a sudden, they're working on things that are completely different than what was initially discussed.
Speaker: And there's no plan to go back to those other things. And then it changes again and again and again. And pretty soon, the person throws up their hands and says, I'm out. And so I do think that inability to prioritize and communicate priorities clearly and to shift priorities in a way that people can get behind is a big reason why we lose talented people.
Speaker: As I read your book, I thought there are a couple of people that I feel like I could buy this book for and that they, they would feel like it's helping them.
Speaker: But words to some of the challenges that they face, and also they might try one or two of these approaches and, and they really would put the time in it. And, but to have another use case of, Hey, you know, you've had attrition.
Speaker: turnover, you've just had job dissatisfaction. Maybe it's not necessarily new people that I remember the agent and superpower part. I did not connect it to as much to that bringing on new people, which is expensive.
Speaker: And so ah your explanation is really helpful. Thank you for that. yeah and we had a, it was tough because we wanted to extend that that section to do something connected to the bringing people on and even the losing of people.
Speaker: And we tried some and, you know, but it just made it a little too complicated. And so we were worried that we were muddling things up for the reader. um It's still a little bit of a lament of mine because it's something that I think that we didn't deal with to the level that I wanted to So I'm really glad that you bring it up. It's kind of fun to talk about it, even if it's um even if it's a bit painful for me. Sometimes it's hard to like know how many problems you can go after when you're doing a volume of research. um and And I would say that if there's one thing that I learned about people that really want to leverage focus to accomplish the things that they know they're capable of,
Speaker: If the priorities are already shifting and if it's not the story that they've been sold into, but's it's not it's like frustrating for them at a different level than somebody who's a little more easygoing. And that's not a criticism. I i think I'm actually complimenting.
Speaker: mean, these are the types of people I'd look to hire as as as somebody who hired software developers. and They thought really clearly through like what story they want to be a part of and how they believe their talents can contribute to that and why we all need to be flexible and be able to change with things.
Speaker: Poorly managed priorities and visions are almost no excuse for those types of mismatches. And, and you know, I interviewed a lot of people that were just so frustrated in their careers because, um you know, there was just misalignment. um The story that they were sold just isn't what came into fruition. And it wasn't intentional. It was just poor management of priorities and and the vision that comes from those.
Speaker: So pausing up comes up pretty early in the book. I forget if it's the introduction or chapter one, something like that. And then it comes up at the end of, I think, just about every chapter.
Speaker: so what is pausing up? We challenged ourselves to go find from people how you do each of these practices in reverse. So for example, I mentioned that practice of turning out your pockets. So a leader gets clear on the priorities with their team and then they have everybody put all the other things that they're working on on the board too. So now we can expose the hidden workload. Okay, well, what if your leader doesn't ask the team to turn out their pockets. And you just went to a prioritization meeting where four or five things were discussed that you were going to work on for the quarter and you could see which ones you rolled up to. But you also knew that it could be risky for you to just ignore everything else that you were also working on, maybe with peers or you know with clients or whoever it is, or even for your boss. But it wasn't discussed on the board. Well, our question was, how do you help your how do you help your boss turn out your pockets with you if they don't ask for it? So in each chapter, we took the reverse. And we went and found out from people, how do you get your boss to slow down and do this practice with you? And so they're just it's just a page.
Speaker: But we wanted to make sure that we didn't leave out team members that were going to read this book that were working for a boss who, ah by the end of the time they to the of that chapter, they're frustrated, actually. They're a little pissed off because they're like, okay, thanks. Yes, I love this. I will do this with my team, but there's no way Bob's going to do this with me.
Speaker: So how do you do this with Bob? And that was our goal, was to give people really good strategies that we saw work to help them pause up with their boss. And it doesn't always work, but a lot of times it does.
Speaker: So at least twice in there, you said the word ask, and that was one thing that occurred to me at some point in the book. And forgive me if you actually say this explicitly, but it occurred to me at some time that one of the behaviors, I guess, that the makes this problem harder. enabling your people to do focused, deep work and be productive is that a lot of times managers or colleagues are not asking questions and instead they're stating things, whether it's a directive or here's a thought.
Speaker: And so if you did state it explicitly in the book, please tell me, of course, but I'm curious about, you know, being a, an active listener, asking questions rather than telling,
Speaker: How does something like that play into this? I love that you teased that out because we didn't do question a chapter on curiosity and we really thought about it. As a matter of fact, um we we had one lined up in the beginning that we planned.
Speaker: and But the problem was every single chapter is pretty much a set of, has a set of questions that we can all be asking to create space for people to do their, to figure out what's important, create space to figure out how people, you know create space so people can focus rather. And then also to fit find out what is really emotionally bugging people to help get those things on the table so we can deal with them. And in every single chapter, it's just full of great questions to ask that are specific to those things.
Speaker: So we decided... to forego that because it was just integrated throughout the entire. As a matter of fact, you know, if you read the book, one chapter called Tune In Before You Jump In is about delegation. And it's the art of me not just coming to you as a leader and say, hey, Eric, can you can you just look at this for five minutes? Which,
Speaker: It's never going to be five minutes, right? Instead, I just gave you like a two or three hour assignment. And I walk away and I've completely torched your day. Versus we we outlined these questions that we called the tune in questions. And it's how do you make, instead of doing drive by delegations, how do you delegate to somebody in a way where you create a partnership? And so the the first question is, hey, I got something from the boss that I'd like to talk to you about. But before we get into it, what are you working on right That's the first tune in question.
Speaker: And then there's ah there's there's four other questions that you can ask, like the a trade-off question, which is, if you say yes to this new thing, what will you be saying no to?
Speaker: And then at the end of the our conversation, if we decide that you should take this new item, I can ask, hey, the lift question, which is, what can I take off your plate to make it possible for you to do this thing? So there's several others that are outlined there, but in that chapter, we just made the how-to in that chapter is just really five really great questions that you can ask when you're doing a quick shift or a change instead of just delegating to somebody and really frustrating them, because you know how this works.
Speaker: If work comes, to it's just as important in the way that new work comes to us than what the new work is. If we feel disrespected, if we feel like that we were just kind of forced into it or we weren't listened to in terms of um what it was that we had on and how that would affect us, that can cause a lot of rumination and a lot of distraction where you're losing people's discretionary effort. So that chapter is literally, there's two chapters that are based around, just completely around ah questions. The other one is called Put Growth on the Agenda.
Speaker: And that's a 10 minute conversation that every boss can have within their one-on-ones about somebody's future growth. and and And this, here's what we learned. If you can't see how your job is gonna lead to the next thing in your life, you're gonna be distracted.
Speaker: You're gonna be worrying, you're gonna be thinking about other pastures, you're gonna be checking LinkedIn for different opportunities. Whereas if your boss asks you just two questions we found. First,
Speaker: what does ah your next wicked job look like? Just some awesome, what's what's the next awesome promotion that you could get here or elsewhere? And if you know the answer to that, then the next question is,
Speaker: What skill and experience do you need from from this job to qualify for that job? and And you're not a career coach in this scenario, but you're making sure that those two questions are simmering and it helps people see themselves and their growth in the work. And that's gonna get access to both discretional effort and it's gonna open up a lot more ability to focus because people can see how this job is gonna lead to something good in their future. And so, um, throughout the entire book, yes, a lot of questions. We tried to bring the very best questions from these leaders who, who are very, you know, are good at pausing and creating space for deep work, which we try to, to expose that throughout all the chapters to these future readers.
Speaker: Do you see AI changing much of this, you know, making deep work, facilitating deep work or making it harder? Yeah, I think both. I mean, I'm sure that you've thought of this as you've worked with AI. i use it all day and work with colleagues on how we can use it together.
Speaker: And I find that on the one hand, I'm tempted to take on things that are not in my wheelhouse and that I'm probably not a great judge on what great looks like. And I find that AI doesn't help me know what great looks like. um you know and and And I know this because when I have AI produce something for me that I'm an expert in, i I recognize very quickly that it's far from what I'm wanting, that it's good for a draft. But we will get there someday. I'm not a futurist, but we're not there yet, at least in the areas that I have more expertise in. So I i find it tempting to just take on more.
Speaker: And i find that to be problematic for my ability to deliver something that's awesome because I'll straddle it a bit and stretch myself thinner than I have in the past.
Speaker: I also worry that there's this idea that you can move faster because we have these tools and that leaders will get in their mind that we need less space for deep thinking. But in my experience, we've need I need more space to think with AI to produce the quality that I think I'm capable of And so I think we're going to need to increase and, you know, recognize my bias here, to be sure. I'm writing, I'm reporting on leaders who are really good at creating space by slowing things down so people can accelerate in the right direction. But so, of course, I've got a bias here. But I, it is in my personal experience that I am needing more time
Speaker: to slow down. and I'm worried that leaders will misunderstand fundamentally what it takes to do high quality work with AI. And they will believe that people need less of it and that we will grow into a place where we have, we give into a higher inclination of a bias towards action at the leadership level, which is already a problem.
Speaker: So this will be a competitive disadvantage. I believe that. I believe that People that work for leaders that understand this will actually leverage the full capacity of AI and they will win in the short run and possibly the longer in which I can't see that far ahead.
Speaker: As of this recording, I think it was three or four weeks ago, i released an episode with Neel Doshi, who is the co-founder of factor.ai. He also is the co-author of a book called primed to perform, which is ah focused on a lot of research around motivation.
Speaker: at work and a lot of his career at I think McKinsey and I can't recall where else in his own company is focused on how is it that people get motivated? How do you keep people motivated and so on? And in that conversation, he told the story. I was talking to an engineer at an organization where we're leading and helping them through an AI transformation.
Speaker: And this engineer said to me, Neel, I haven't talked to a human in like four days. And that's not, and she was really describing how much that that's taking the joy out of her job.
Speaker: Like there was a, there was fun in the collaboration. There was a powerful experience in that. And she's saying that the way her company was, was rolling out AI, it was, it was going from, we we are collaborative as teams to now we're just a bunch of individual silos.
Speaker: Where our our information is siloed, our knowledge is siloed, our learning is siloed. There's one side of that where, as it relates to our conversation here, Shawn, you might say, ah the listener might say, well, doesn't that enable deep work or product they're being product productive or whatever, right? But the yeah that one of the things that Neel was focused on in telling the story was But how are you impacted? what How are you motivated or demotivated by feeling like you're not a part of something necessarily?
Speaker: And so i'm I'm thinking about that story. And I'm also thinking about like my experience, for example, coming from a marketing agency background that I think it's fairly common in the marketing agency space for people to feel like, I mean, just about everybody to feel like I'm in meetings all day.
Speaker: And that's a plenty of other companies, but I can speak to it from marketing agency side. And I wonder if there's ah a tipping point that you will find in different types of companies that may very well be determined by the philosophy of leadership, perhaps, that you it maybe they think If it's a developer, if it's a software company, maybe they think, well, you used to have to sit and code because it's complex. And, you know, so you had to be focused.
Speaker: But now, AI, I can do that for you. So I can draw you into all the meetings that I want to. or You know, there might be another company where the thought is like these, there's a term AI vampires that, you know, people, these developers, not just developers, but I've experienced it as well, where your agent or whatever is checking in with you constantly. And I feel like, well, I could be working on four or five projects at a time, but I have to be available around the clock. So I'm ah like a vampire now.
Speaker: And maybe I am getting away from those interruptions, the traditional interruptions, but I'm now being distanced from my company culture.
Speaker: And it's interesting because the I'm just thinking about how these different things, productivity and deep work, but then culture and cohesion,
Speaker: work together and where, how you might have different leadership philosophies, for example, that might push two of basically the same organizations in different directions.
Speaker: There's something that's really interesting there. And that's this struggle comes from a lot of different places, right? We know that it could be from a lack of connection. It could be from too much connection. And what we learned in this research is that when leaders miss the signs that people are struggling,
Speaker: If you miss the signs your people are struggling, you will lose your best talent. First to distraction, not necessarily because you're being interrupted all the time, but there's, think about all the rumination that we go through internally that we, maybe we don't fit or belong, or we're just a little bored or, you know, whatever it is. And then to departure, lots of distraction,
Speaker: the various types of emotional and cognitive distractions, but then to departure. And if you can learn to read what your team is not saying, but showing you, then you can intervene before it's too late. We call this clear your desk. Meaning if you're mindful and you see the things that are changing, that that means you've got to see your team at some level.
Speaker: Or you notice little behaviors that are the ordinary and you tune into that. You try to check into that. Okay, what's going on here? Like, I just noticed that, you know, you're always three minutes early. You're three minutes late every Zoom meeting now. it's What's up, man? Just seeing how you're doing. And then all of a sudden they start sharing with you something significant and you make sure that you, you know you close that Mac rig. You, you know, you're, you're, you're locked in, you're loaded, you're asking questions. But this idea is, here's the idea.
Speaker: If you recognize the struggle and you create space to download that, you don't have to solve the problem. But if you see if they know that you've seen their struggle, their ability to hold the line is going to go up a lot higher.
Speaker: But there's something wild about it. Like if you've ever weight lifted you've observed, I'm trying to think of another, you can help me with better example, but here's the example. So the analogy is this. When you're weightlifting, if you're pushing a bar up and you're you're getting to your max, somebody can just put their finger underneath. Like, so I'm, let's say I'm lifting 150 pounds and I'm pushing it away from my chest and I'm laying on a bench and I'm pushing it up. So you can imagine that. And somebody behind me is sitting there and they just put their finger and I'm kind of shaking and I'm on skin there and they just put their finger on it and just barely lift.
Speaker: It's amazing. Like the bar just comes right up. there's something incredible about the physics behind that, that I, um, I don't understand the, the, uh, the mathematics behind it, but if the opposite is true, if they just push down a teeny bit, you're going to get hit failure point. There's probably another example that you could think of. So it's less, um, ah you know, work out of more business. But the point is If people know their boss sees they're struggling, it's like a little bit of a lift and you can hold whatever line you're trying to hold much more courageously.
Speaker: And so part of you asked earlier,
Speaker: are these leaders more curious and are they better listeners? And the answer to this is yes and yes. And so this is the listening part. When they notice that things are a little off, they look for struggle and then they listen for the struggle.
Speaker: and and And that is critical when it comes to cognitive allocation because if you are emotionally distressed for whatever reason,
Speaker: in too many meetings completely isolated, your ability to to, when you do have time to work on on your projects is is gonna be hampered.
Speaker: And so i think that that's why these productivity pit stops, if you will, these little pausing practices, these micro behaviors to notice things what is stealing my team's attention. You don't need to do all of them. i probably already said that, but we found we report on 12 in three different categories. That's not needed that you do all 12. What's needed is that you figure out what is stealing your team's attention and then try to figure out how can you help them win it back.
Speaker: and And being misunderstood or not seen is a form of serious cognitive distraction. And you can develop a few little practices as a leader to just to catch those. And it can help, I think, in these scenarios where for one person, it may be too much activity and for enough for another person, it might be too little.
Speaker: Earlier, you spoke about some of the things that you learned in this research and you so started with things you learned about yourself. So through this research and beginning to practice some of these things, did you, did you find something in your research that changed how you work and or how you lead others?
Speaker: A lot. and First of all, like for a while, I kind of felt bad about myself, but then I had to give myself a bone because look, we're working in an environment that's hyper-connected. We're expected to go fast.
Speaker: There's pressure to be always on. at least we worry if we're not on at some level, if it's not discussed, that someone's going to be frustrated that we're ghosting them or something like this. And and so there's too much there's too many important pieces of work that any one of us can do. We're all in organizations for the most part where there's too many options, there's too many opportunities. You can't possibly be good at all of them. You can't possibly do all of them.
Speaker: Back in the day, Stephen Covey's example of the first things first, you know, he put these these jars, you remember this, it was these jars, if you haven't seen this for for for everyone who's listening today, two jars on a table, one jar that's empty, another jar with that's half full of pebbles, and then there's a bunch of big rocks that are sitting outside of the jars. And as the demonstration went, if you poured all of the little pebbles end into the empty jar, you couldn't then take the big rocks and fit the big rocks in.
Speaker: But if you put the big rocks in first, and the big rocks represented the the first things or the prior thing or the priorities, but if you worked on your big priorities first, you could put those into that jar and then you could pour all the little pebbles in and you'd have a full jar. Okay, well, here's the deal.
Speaker: Forget the little pebbles. We live in a world where there's way too many big rocks. Like there's so many dang rocks on that table that we all can see even before trying that you can't fit all of those big rocks and in that jar. and that jar represents your capacity.
Speaker: So we have to be judicious in deciding what we will do and what we won't do. Because that's not a matter of is this important and is this trivial. Of course that still exists, but that's not the trouble. The real trouble is picking between two things that are equally as important that you don't have the bandwidth to do both.
Speaker: And so if there's one thing that i learned about myself in this or that has changed the way that I've worked is I am much more serious about recognizing that it is hard to say no to important pieces of work But if we don't, we are highly unlikely to do something that we're really proud of because it's too easy to be distributed, to distribute our attention to too many important things that are genuinely important that you are likely in today's day and age for most people to take on too many important things and therefore have very little to show for it.
Speaker: I didn't take that near as seriously as I am now. i'm a much more I'm much more realistic about prioritization not being finding the most important thing, but deciding what you will make the most important thing.
Speaker: And that that comes at great sacrifice and cost and that you have to face the pain of that um because saying no to very good opportunities or things that are important comes with cost. And in order to get the gains, you have to face the pain. And I don't think that I took that as near as seriously before I started this research.
Speaker: Before buying the book, of course, if someone was to take one thing away, whether it's from this conversation or just a statement that you could make, and you wanted them to remember one thing or to try one thing, do you have something that you feel like this is the most important thing or the the easiest thing to try out or grasp?
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. I'm going to do two things if you don't mind. One is a thought and then the other is the practice. So the thought is, we talked about it earlier, but it might be worth saying again that Productivity problems are social.
Speaker: If you work in a tribe, your brain is wired to fit in, to do well with your colleagues. And in any matrixed organization, we know intuitively, this is written into our DNA, that you're going have to be successful with your peers to a certain level to um to excel in that tribe.
Speaker: And therefore, a huge part of our strategy to get help people be productive is going to need to take into consideration social cohesion. And if you take that serious as a leader, it means that there's a question worth worth asking, and that's the second part to this. if if If everybody that is on a team today or a leader of a team can...
Speaker: Get the team to discuss this question. What's distracting us right now? What's stealing our attention? And follow that up with, what can we do together or as a leader? What can I do to to face that, to grapple with it, to try to give you more time to allocate your attention to something valuable?
Speaker: I think that we've gone a long ways at benefiting from these leaders that we've studied. Where should someone go? When does the book come out? I've got it right here so so people can see it if they're watching the video. what Where do you want people to go after this conversation?
Speaker: ah You can go to pausebook.co. and there's ah There's a fun little quiz out there. yeah How distracting am I? You can take that. We didn't talk about these practices, these little characters that we, the arch archetypes, if you will. We went and figured out the research, what are the eight ways that we distract each other the most in,
Speaker: um the way we work and lead. And so there's these fun little archetypes that you'll get, like the novelist, the person who's always dropping these short novellas in your inbox, and you've got to decode those and then maybe return with a novel and you don't you know know what's expected. So there's these really fun archetypes that you'll you'll find out which one you may be And the idea is to become aware of your digital wake. how How is the messages that you're sending affecting other people's ability to stay in work?
Speaker: um So on this website at pausebook.co, you can take this little quiz, share it with your team. That's fun. um And then also, you know, I'd love to connect with people on on LinkedIn and, you know, is really excited to share ah more what we've learned from these leaders at either place.
Speaker: Thank you. I appreciate you being here. I enjoyed the book. It's it a five-star read on Goodreads in my opinion. Bam! Thank you. Thank you for joining me today, Shawn. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Eric.
Speaker: Thank you.
