Carol:
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the People for Leadership Podcast.
I am so excited today, because we have a special guest whose work is very much aligned with the People for Leadership framework, and I had the privilege actually of being a guest on his podcast, Inspire Greatness, and our conversation actually on psychological safety, which I saw has been viewed over 18,000 times on YouTube. And I'll definitely drop a link to not only the episode, but to the YouTube clip. So if you want to watch that, you can dive into it. But after chatting with Matt and reviewing his book, I knew that I wanted to have him on the podcast and to share about the book, and the work that he's doing, and he graciously said yes. So I'm excited to welcome Matt Tenney to our podcast. And I just want to share a little bit about who you're going to hear from today.
Matt envisions a world in which all leaders and workplace cultures consistently make a positive impact on the well-being and growth of team members. He is the author of three leadership books, including Inspire Greatness: How to Motivate Employees with a Simple, Repeatable, Scalable Process, and that's what we're going to get into today and his inspiring TED Talk, Why the Best Leaders Make Love the Top Priority has been viewed over a million times. Matt has delivered programs that help develop world-class leaders who improve engagement, retention, and performance to hundreds of clients, including companies like Salesforce, T. Rowe Price, Marriott, and United Airlines, just to name a few. And with that, Matt, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Matt:
My pleasure, Dr. Carol, it's a pleasure to be here.
Carol:
Before we jump into the book, I would love for you to talk a little bit about your background, what got you into leadership development, and fill in the blanks of that incredible story and bio that I just read.
Matt:
Sure. Well, yeah. So I have somewhat of a background in mindfulness training. I've actually lived and trained as a monk for some time, and I was running a nonprofit in Florida, where I founded the Florida chapter of a now international nonprofit called Kids Kicking Cancer. And that work involved helping kids in the hospital who were dealing with very serious diagnoses, lower their pain, and using mindfulness, and breath work and other science backed tools. And was while I was doing that, I was asked by some of the staff in the hospital if I could do some training on mindfulness to help. It was actually a nursing unit was the first one that asked, they wanted to help the nurses to be less stressed, more effective. They were hoping it would not only improve their well-being, but also reduce medication errors and things like that. So I said, "Well, that would be great. I'd love, that's my passion, is sharing mindfulness."
So I did that, and then that led to another training and led to another. And before I knew it, I was doing mindfulness training for leaders, but I realized that there was this gap where, yes, I believed leaders, all leaders can benefit from mindfulness and emotional intelligence training, but I noticed that there wasn't a huge demand for it. And it seemed to me that there was a lot of leaders that were still very kind of in the command and control mindset, and they didn't really think that it should be a top priority to develop skills like emotional intelligence. So I kind of took a step broader and I don't claim to be an expert on servant leadership, but I'm a passionate practitioner of servant leadership. And as I started doing more work with leaders, I just started trying to encourage leaders to practice servant leadership and try to make a good case for why it's a great way to lead, not only from the standpoint of finding work more fulfilling, but also it's really good for business, particularly over the long term.
And so, that was what led to the first book, Serve to Be Great, and then doing a lot of work with leaders on servant leadership and then offering mindfulness as a way to kind of help it. Okay, if you believe in this, if you want to be a leader who serves and takes good care of team members, here's some really practical ways that you can develop these skills.
So that's how I got into leadership development, and it is just been a fun ride and I've really enjoyed, I think not only do I enjoy making an impact, but I enjoy learning. I've worked with so many different organizations, where I feel probably I get more out of, I think working with some of these organizations than maybe they get from what I have to offer. But it actually, with each new client that I work with, it adds more value, because I can share these learnings from so many Fortune 500 companies and world-class non-profit organizations, and just great leaders who have done it for decades. So yeah, it's been really fun. I think I've gotten as much or more out of it as the people I've worked with and probably people who've read the books.
Carol:
I love that. And so, you were a monk for, how long were you a monk? That is so fascinating.
Matt:
Well, I was unofficially a monk for about three and a half years, where I kind of just lived and trained as a monk due to my own aspiration to really go as deep as I could with the practice of mindfulness. And then I did actually live in a monastery for a short time, and I almost ordained to become a monk for the rest of my life. But then I realized I think I could be of greater if I lived out in the "real world" and had a job, and did all the stuff that everyone else does, because then it makes the practice more relatable. I think as much as I think the monastic path is a very noble one, it's very inspiring, it's very worthwhile. I think if there's maybe one gift that I have, I do feel that I'm an okay teacher. I'm not the best coach. It's something I'm still working on.
I'm not the best at asking questions and helping people find their own answers. I'm continuing to grow in that area, but I do feel like I can teach pretty well. I can understand the essence of something and help someone else understand the essence of something relatively quickly. So knowing that, I realized I think I could be more relatable as a teacher if I wasn't a monk, because if people say, Well, of course you're happy, you just do nothing, but sit around and meditate all day." It's like they take everything you say maybe with a grain of salt. Whereas if you can really practice in a deep level while running a business, while having a family, doing the things that everyone else in the "outside real world" is doing, I just think it makes it more relatable.
Carol:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that.
Matt:
Not ordaining.
Carol:
Yeah, what a great story and what a great foundation, right? I think that's great, particularly for mindfulness. I mean, if anyone knows how to do that well, I would think three years in a monastery would actually help you to do that well. Yeah, great story. So I'm curious, because you talked about some of the challenges that you saw that leaders face in terms of embracing emotional intelligence and moving away from that command and control, and you wrote your book Servant Leadership, and now you have this great book, Inspire Greatness. What were some of the challenges that you saw in working with these Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, with leaders that led you to want to write this book? What were some of the things that you saw that were still being problematic for them to delve deeper into emotional intelligence, and to move away from that traditional hierarchical approach to leadership?
Matt:
Yeah. What I noticed more and more was that people actually want to, people want to be leaders who are not seen as that boss that nobody wants to work for. I don't think any manager wakes up in the morning and says, "Yeah, I want to go in and be a jerk and just treat people like commodities,, and run people into the ground, so that we can make more money."
There might be a few people that still think that way, but I think there are, it's very, very rare. Most people want to make a positive impact on the lives of the people that they lead. But there's a trick or there's an obstacle to this, which is we're under all types of pressure, especially people with middle management. Oh my gosh, you're getting it from every direction. But there's all types of pressure and a lot of it's driven, especially in publicly traded companies, it's driven by short-term financial goals that what happens is there's, even when we want to lead in a way that brings out the best in people, we face pressure to hit short-term numbers that almost, it's like it's compelling us to do the things that we don't really want do.
It's like, I imagine most of your listeners have heard or have read Atomic Habits by James Clear, but my favorite finding from his book was that of all the people that he's researched on his own, of all the meta research that he's done on all of the research on habit formation, he has never found a person, regardless of how much self-discipline they have, how much willpower they have, that if you put them in the wrong environment, will consistently succeed and maintain good habits. It just doesn't happen. And conversely, you can find people who maybe aren't naturally high willpower, high achievers, if you put them in the right environment, they do succeed. So I realized that, look, there are some systemic issues that are creating environments where it's very hard for people to break out of the conditioning of, "Hey, we got to achieve, we got to drive, we got to do, do, do all the time."
And so, I realized without having a really strong system to counterbalance those systems, we're not going to really make much progress. So you've probably noticed this, a lot of organizations will hire someone to come in and do a leadership training, maybe a half day or a full day. And after about six years of doing this, I finally woke up and I said, "I'm noticing that there's not a whole lot of change happening with a half a day of training or a day of training." So I started asking clients, "What's your plan for follow-up? What are we going to do to take information that you get in a half a day and then turn that into new behaviors that actually last, and become lasting habits?" And there's just very little appetite for that. And I realize it's because it's hard. It's a lot of work to think about how are you going to not just think about a one day of training, what are you going to do for 12 months to gradually turn information into new behaviors that make an impact?
And so, that was the big realization, was that it actually came from both sides, which we can go into in a moment if you want, but what really, for years, I was aware of this issue that if we don't have a follow-up plan for giving little bits of information with lots of time to practice, behavior doesn't change. So if you do a whole day of information exchange without any real world practice, things just don't stick very well. So I'd been aware of that for quite a while, but it wasn't until I realized that when we gather information around how well are we doing as leaders through employee engagement surveys or employee satisfaction surveys, that's a very similar issue where we tend to do large surveys, we get a lot of data at once, and it's hard to then respond to that data with meaningful action, because we've gathered so much of it. We don't know where to begin.
Sadly, in some large organizations, it's three months before the data is finally all calculated after a survey ends and there's some meaning made out of the data, then it's another three to six months before action plans are rolled out by managers. And sometimes, this is not a joke, and I hate to say this, but one client I worked with, they were literally just finalizing their action plans from the previous year's employee engagement survey, the week before the next annual survey was supposed to go out.
This is, I know we're laughing, but there are probably many HR professionals who are crying, because they realize this is such a challenge. It's so hard, especially in a large organization, it's like herding cats to get all this stuff happening. So that was the big insight for me, was that both of these issues or both of these elements of how we run an organization, like how we're getting feedback from employees and how we're training our managers are suffering from the same issue, in that we're trying to do a lot of stuff at once instead of breaking things into manageable chunks. And then it clicked, the other thing is that they're not integrated. If we're not integrating feedback and synchronizing it chronologically with training for managers, then we're missing this huge opportunity, where we can get feedback, give managers something to work with, and then that allows them to immediately show action, meaningful action in response to that feedback. And that's what led to the process that you read in Inspire Greatness.
Carol:
Yeah, I love that. I love that, because the subtitle How to Motivate Employees with simple, Repeatable, Scalable Processes. I think you're right. That has been my experience in that those hit-and-run kind of trainings and those opportunities, where you go in and out. I mean, we already know the rule in terms of retention, that about 80% of even what they heard that day is lost within the first month or week, if they're not having an opportunity to implement them, to have little micro moments of how do I actually engage with this work? How does it show up? How do I take it on in everything else that I have to do?
So I'm curious, in terms of some of the things that you talked about. I know you broke this down into things that people can do. Could you talk a little bit more about how people can integrate this into their day-to-day practice? What are a few practical things that they can learn and actually be able to find the time to do it? Because as you said, people are so inundated and they're so results oriented to get things done, that sometimes the habit doesn't stick. So if you could talk a little bit about how you explain the ways to do that in the book, that'd be great.
Matt:
Absolutely. And before that though, I do want to just take a step back, and I don't think you were saying this, and I want to make sure it's clear that I didn't mean this. It's not that there's not value in a day of training or a half day of training. There's certainly value there, particularly for, I think a good leadership development program has to have context. This is kind of one of the issues that we face with leadership development. A lot of times it's done a la carte, where all of a sudden, "Hey, everyone, we're going to do a training on listening skills."
And you probably got three quarters of the managers, and there're going, "I don't need that crap, I'm God's gift to listening. I don't need that."
And then, you're not getting engagement, because people, they think they're already good. It's not that we shouldn't do these things, it's just that I think, one, it's helpful to have the context. So what is it? What's the primary job of a leader? And that's actually why the program that we created and the title of the book is Inspire Greatness, because I think every leader can agree that you really, even if you're the CEO, even if you're the founder, CEO, the most senior person, you basically have two jobs as a leader. Your job is to create a vision of the future and a strategy for realizing that vision. And your second job is to inspire people to execute on the strategy for realizing the vision, right?
Carol:
Right, right.
Matt:
And I would argue that if you can't inspire people, if you can't bring out the best in people or your managers can't, then you have the best strategy in the world, and it's not going to be nearly as effective as it could be, or it might completely fail, because if you're not able to inspire the best in people. However, if you have a halfway decent strategy, but everyone's fully engaged, I mean, the strategy is probably going to improve on its own without your intervention and the strategy will get executed well.
So that's really, I think every leader, if we pause and think about it, we agree that yes, okay, I can see that my primary job is to bring out the best in the people that I lead, help them be and do their best, and that includes thriving. So I think that context is really important. So it's not to say that you shouldn't have a day of training, it's just that day of training should really set the context for what does great leadership look like, what's a path for becoming a great leader? And then over a course of a year or ongoing, actually, I mean, leadership development should be an ongoing thing. How do we consistently make 5% improvements every month, or 3% improvements every month? As long as we're always improving, moving in that direction of that ideal we have for being a leader.
Carol:
Yeah, I completely agree with you. Yes. What I'm speaking about or what you were speaking about earlier, where it's either a one and done, it's out of context, it's a checkbox to say that we've done something, but it's not part of a larger strategy, and it's not part of an ongoing process, because Rome wasn't built in a day, and you can't be able to shift culture, shift ideas, shift perspectives, and shift behavior and habits through one particular offset of a training, or on a particular topic. And I've definitely been in those rooms, where people are like, "Why are we talking about this? I know this. I'm good at this," right? If it's not built into a context. So thank you for explaining and clarifying that, and going to depth, because we're on the same page with you for sure.
Matt:
Oh, great. That's great. Yeah. So once that context is set, now I mean, just to go back to the example of listening skills, if I understand that my primary job is to bring out the best in my team, then it's not a far leap to see, well, if people don't feel heard, they're probably not going to be their best, right? Especially if there's some team dynamic that needs to be addressed and people are frustrated. If you can't listen well and people don't feel heard, their frustration doesn't feel heard, you're not going to bring out the best in people. So now everything, every aspect of what it means to be a good leader falls under an umbrella that makes sense to people, so we can connect the dots. So with that kind of as a backdrop, we offer, what we suggest people do is following a four-step process.
And the first step is really important, which is we need to continually work on the mindset shift of moving from I'm the boss to I'm a coach. And that again, that comes back to that systemic thing. There's so much pressure on us to hit numbers, to move fast. I mean, just a simple example, what's easier? If I'm a manager, is it easier to take 15 minutes to teach somebody how to do something, or is it easier in the short term to take one minute and do it myself? Obviously in this short term, it's way easier. So if we're always in this fight or flight mode, this reacting to outside pressures mode, then that's what we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives as leaders, and it's unfulfilling and it's stressful.
But if we can start making this shift to, "Wait a second, my job as a coach," and part of my job is to develop people to grow them, so that they become self-sufficient leaders in and of themselves. Now, yes, it takes more time in the short term, but man, what an investment. If you do it well, after a year or two, here's the dream for a manager. You should be able to go on vacation for three weeks and come back, and not only has nothing broken, but things are going better than when you left. That is the sign of a great leader. Now, I know a lot of junior managers get scared of that, because they think, "Well, if I can go away for three weeks, it means they don't need me. Am I going to lose my job?"
Well, maybe if you're in some of these cutthroat organizations, you might, but the marketplace loves talent, so you won't be out of work for long. But in an organization that understands what good leadership looks like and is not just slashing jobs to make their balance sheet work every quarter, they're going to realize, "This person needs more responsibility. This person is an amazing leader. We need to give her more responsibility."
So to make that shift, now this is going to sound a little cheesy, but I want to preface this. It's not the secret. You can't just recite a mantra and you're going to just magically change. But what I recommend is that people write out a new job description as leaders, because usually the job description for managers, they're pretty dull. There's lots of jargon in them, and it's important for them from an HR standpoint, it's important for all that to be in there. And I'm not saying you need to get rid of that, but just to have a concise, almost like a vision statement, rewrite your job description. So it reads something like, "My job is to help the people I lead to thrive by serving as a coach."
And by thrive I mean people who are doing their best, being their best and who are happy. So if you see that as your primary job, and what I recommend is you start reading that maybe once an hour for a week or so, and then after a week, maybe three times a day. And again, I know this might sound like the secret, but what does happen is every time you read that out loud, you remind yourself, "My primary job is to bring out the best in my team members by serving as a coach who helps people to thrive." Every time you read that for the next few minutes, you're thinking a little bit differently. And you might take some micro actions that say, "Why am I always in react mode? Why don't I have 30 minutes blocked off every day to take actions that move me in the direction of being a coach? Maybe having an extra one-to-one or a few more minutes with a one-to-one, or thinking about our team culture."
And then, what starts to happen is these micro actions lead to real change, where when you actually take action, that's what changes the brain. And before you know it, I mean, it's not going to happen overnight, but over the course of a year or two, you might move from where eight hours a day is in react mode, where you just feel like a chicken with your head cut off, putting fires out all the time to, "I don't have a whole lot on my calendar, other than the meetings that I'm asked to attend. I've developed people who are so self-sufficient, leaders in and of themselves, who are doing all of the work, and I'm giving them work that's challenging for them, and they're enjoying, and is helping them to grow."
You shouldn't have a lot to do. And then, that's when great leaders say, "Man, we need to give this person more responsibility." So that's the first step. Maybe I'll pause there and see if you have any questions or comments on that, or feedback.
Carol:
No, I love that, because it's right. When you create new neural pathways, when you are constantly going down the same road, you have to do something, and what I see this as being what I call a pattern interrupt. So instead of you following the same old practice as usual, engaging in this practice interrupts that way of thinking to create a different pattern and way of approaching, that ultimately when, like you said, you put action to can become a new way of being, and then it helps you to see things through a different lens than how you were seeing it before. So I really, really like that as an example. That's great.
Matt:
Thank you. And then it translates into really clear action. So as you start to develop new skills, like coaching for instance, instead of your habit being when somebody comes to you and says, "Hey, what are your thoughts on..." Or, "How should I do this? I need your help."
Instead of just giving them the answer, because you've just read that job description of like, "Oh yeah, my job is to help people thrive by serving as a coach."
Then, oh yeah, I'm not going to just give them the answer. I'm going to say, "Well, what are your thoughts about how to do this? Can you explain to me the thought process behind the different things that you evaluated?"
You start to develop these little new habits off of that meta habit. So then the second step, which feeds off of the first is the more that we start to operate from this mode that my primary job as a leader is to inspire greatness in my team members by serving as a coach, it helps people to thrive. The next step is very obvious. We need to identify what do people need to thrive? And the good news here is, this is well known, we have decades of research telling us exactly what people need to thrive.
Carol:
Yeah, you list 14 in the book.
Matt:
Right. So Gallup has the Gallup Q12. I think the 14 universal needs that I write about in the book are generally related to the Gallup Q12 and other researchers who have demonstrated that these are what we call universal needs. So basically, anyone in any type of organization, any type of culture around the world for the most part, needs these things to thrive at work. I make explicit a couple of things that are implied in the Gallup Q12, like for instance, well-being is not specifically asked about in the Gallup Q12, but it's so critical. If you're going to work and it's making you sick, you are not going to be a fully engaged, high-performing team member, at least not for long.
This is something that, and sadly, many organizations are not getting this right. The workplace culture is making people sick. So we need to move beyond that. We need to, at a minimum, have a workplace culture that's creating a neutral effect, where people are at least not getting sick. But ideally, the dream workplace culture, where people really thrive and we have an incredible engagement is where well-being is actually enhanced as a result of going to work. People are finding meaning, their physical and emotional health are improving as a result of working for your organization. That is what we should all be striving for. So just as an example, we draw that out as a, we make that explicit. It's implied in the Q12, but I thought it was important enough to make explicit, so then we don't have to really work at identifying what people need from the universal standpoint.
There are 14 universal needs people have. There are unique needs that people have, and we can draw those out with high quality conversations during the one-to-ones. But you can start right now with these 14 universal needs, because we already know that people need these to thrive at work. And there's common sense stuff, like feeling appreciated, like having clear performance expectations, receiving frequent helpful feedback. These are just things that are fairly common sense for the most part. The problem is, as we described earlier, common sense, we used to joke about this in the Marine Corps, common sense is an uncommon virtue. So we know what to do, but even the most well-educated people on the planet who are experts in their field often don't do what they know they should. Why? Because of environment.
So if we want to consistently meet these 14 needs, and that's really what leadership comes down to. If you want to consistently inspire greatness in your team, all you need to do, it's a simple, logical path. All you need to do is consistently meet these 14 needs people have for thriving at work. That's it. Much easier said than done.
So the last two steps are we need to get frequent feedback on how well we're meeting these needs, and then we need to have a plan before that feedback goes out for how we're going to respond to the feedback in ways that show that we're continually improving our ability to meet these 14 needs. And as we mentioned at the start, we can't do this all at once. If I told you, Dr. Carol, that let's say you had a client, that you wanted to bring me in to help them, and you said, "Yeah, Matt's going to give a training on habits for meeting these 14 needs, and it's an exciting one-day training." And then I get on my airplane and go home. How much change do you think you're going to see in that organization, right?
Carol:
Yeah, not much.
Matt:
Probably not much. Now, we could have a day of training to set the context, talk about the 14 needs, but then over the course of a year, what we need to do is give managers little micro trainings. And if you're a small team organization, you can do this on your own. You could create your own, read a book. It doesn't have to be mine, but read a book that helps you meet one of these 14 needs, and try to just do one little thing every two to three weeks. That's it. Try one new behavior, set up high levels of accountability. Tell your team what you're working on, tell your boss what you're working on, ask for feedback on how well you're doing. Make it so that there's, just like when you set a goal for fitness, the more people you tell about it, the more likely you are to hit that goal.
So tell people what you're working on. Create systems that make it easy for you to do just this one new little behavior change for two weeks. Now, once you've got that down, now move on to the next thing you want to work on. And that's the key. We can't meet all these 14 needs all in one day, or even in a month or three months, but over the course of a year, we could make 10, 15% improvements on all 14 of these universal needs. Over the course of two or three years, we might make 50, 60% improvement. We can always be growing and moving in the direction of being the leader that we aspire to be.
Carol:
That's really great. I love these steps, and I completely agree with you that micro training, the opportunity to implement, I mean, we all need time to be able to implement or to change any habits. It doesn't come overnight, and particularly if it's a new way of thinking or a new perspective that you haven't had before. I'm curious, have you worked with or dealt with an organization or a group of leaders who are not resistant? To your point, people do want to lead well, they do want to inspire, they do want to have good relationships with their teams, they do want to be great leaders. But you made a comment earlier about the one who is like, "I'm already there. I'm doing that. I'm great."
Even though the evidence may not fully support it, but they think it's still not them, it's someone else. How have you approached or used your work to be able to break through that noise, or when a group of leaders are like, "No, we're good. Everything's great."
Matt:
Well, that's where the feedback is so helpful. Some of the feedback is just objectively on paper, right? You've probably met leaders like this, unfortunately, where they'll reach out for help saying, "Everything's going poorly. We're not able to execute."
And you find out that their annual turnover is 60%. And you say, "Well, what are your thoughts on why turnover is 60%?"
"Oh, these employees these days, they don't know how to work."
That's a sign that, okay, this person's not self-aware. And so, when there's a lack of self-awareness, and you've probably found this in your work too, there's a lot of research on this actually, counter-intuitively, self-awareness statistically declines with seniority and age. And there's a lot of reasons for this. I'm not going to go into all the reasons, you can read about it in Dr. Tasha Eurich's great book Insight if you like, but we tend to actually become less self-aware with seniority and age.
So this is where feedback can be really helpful. And then, you also have to have very good coaches, especially if you're managing up to say, "Well, hey, here's some feedback that you got. Did anything surprise you on here? What did you think about this?"
And if you just keep drilling down to like, okay, well, all the fingers are pointing at you as the cause of this issue, you can't tell somebody that, right? Because if you tell somebody that they're just going to become defensive. But if you ask them questions about objective feedback, okay, turnover 60%, your employee engagement's 12%. The typical person on an exit survey is saying they're leaving because of their boss. If you just keep asking people questions about why do you think these things are the case, eventually they're going to realize, "Okay, yeah, there is a problem with management."
And that is always the problem. It's amazing. We tend to think that like, "Oh, well, the problem is some perks and maybe we need a company picnic, or we need a foosball table."
And no, you don't. You need managers who actually care about people and who bring out the best in those people. That's all you need.
Carol:
Yeah, for sure.
Matt:
And as we mentioned at the top, everyone wants to do that. Almost everyone. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions, but people want to do that, it's just the question of how. So that's the key in my view, Dr. Carol, is you can't just tell somebody. You can't just walk in and say, "Well, your turnover is 60% and it's because of you."
They're just going to be like, the defensive wall goes up. You're not going to have a good conversation. But if you can continue to show feedback and have a conversation around it, where they're leading the conversation, they're starting to really think for themselves, "Could it be me?" Then that's where a conversation can begin.
Carol:
Then the door opens. Yeah, because I know you have a chapter in the book about knowing whether or not you're hindering or helping progress, and I agree that that self-awareness, leader awareness is so critical and so key. But what I hear you saying is when you have data, particularly for one who's not aware, because you're right. Tasha talked about that, 85% of people think they're aware, but are not, and that having data and feedback, and support to be able to help to raise that awareness can maybe crack through someone who maybe doesn't quite have that, which I think is great. What advice do you have? We talked a little bit about habits and breaking habits, and creating new habits. What advice do you have in terms of building habits to inspire greatness to help people break some of those old habits?
Matt:
Well, the most important thing is you have to start with what I call meta habits, or I mean, I guess I don't call them that. I do now, but what does Charles Dewey call them? Not meta habits, but I forgot what his term, but a meta habit is fine. So a meta habit is a habit that if you form this one habit, it will help you improve a number of other habits. So that's why I think it's so important to start with that first step of rewriting your job description and reading it out loud multiple times every day, because that is a meta habit that starts to improve all the little trainings that you're doing every other week. All the things that you're learning, it gets reinforced, and it's more likely to be acted on if you're doing that one meta habit.
Likewise, if you're doing that one meta habit that leads to another incredibly powerful meta habit, which is we need to manage our calendars, work off of calendars instead of to-do lists, or just reacting to email. I think the biggest obstacle to most people getting done what they really want to get done, is they have notifications on their phone, notifications on their desktop. The door is always open to their office if they're in person. So this makes us always in react mode.
And if you're always in react mode, you're always doing work on somebody else's agenda. And what tends to happen, I'm sure we've all heard of the quadrant. I think it's the Eisenhower quadrant, where you've got things that are urgent and important, things that are urgent and not important. You've got things that are not important, not urgent. Where all of the impact and all the money is made is in things that are important, but not urgent, but almost no one spends any time there. Why? Because we're always caught up in the urgent not important, and the urgent important. And we need to clarify, well, what is urgent and non-important, and what is urgent and important? Because if it's urgent and important, it's got to get done. There's no question, right?
Carol:
Yeah.
Matt:
But my experience has been if we can be really clear about can we afford 30 minutes at least, if you can't do that, there's something you really need to rethink how work is going. But can you have 30 minutes on your calendar where you're doing things to grow your ability to lead and/or growing people, actively growing team members? Ideally, if you're a manager, it should be like at least 50% of your time, but just to start, can you do 30 minutes a day, where you've shut off notifications on your phone, you've shut off notifications on your desktop, email's closed, and you're just either thinking about actively learning new ways to better coach, or actively growing a team member, having a conversation that's coaching and developing. And even if you just start with 30 minutes, you'll start to see a change. So this is another meta habit, where little by little, you're actually doing something every day, making progress on the important but not urgent.
And this is the issue. If we don't make time for it, that important but not urgent category, we never get to it, right? Oh, I'll have to do it tomorrow, because today I've got all these things. Tomorrow, what happens the next day? Oh, I'll get to it tomorrow, because I've got all these things. At some point we have to say, "No, I need to put 30 minutes on the calendar," ideally first thing in the morning before you check email, before you do anything else, to do the things that are important and not urgent.
And again, ideally, that should work up to about half of your day. If you think about what is a manager's core responsibilities, it depends on how you divide it up, but let's just make this kind of simple. So regardless of what level of leadership you are, you've got strategic planning of some type, right? You're trying to come up with a plan for the team, a plan for the business unit, a plan for the whole company. But whatever you've got, strategic thinking should be part of your work if you're a leader. You've got individual contributor type tasks. Even if you're a leader, you're personally executing on some stuff. That's another bucket. You've got growing other people, and you've got growing yourself.
So at work, those are the four main buckets, and often, this is one of my favorite exercise to do with people, I'll have them do with self-inventory, like how much time you spending in each bucket? Invariably, people are 80% plus doing stuff.
Carol:
Yep, tasks.
Matt:
As managers, right? I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong, but it's wrong if that's always the way it is, right? There may be a time in a busy season where you need to be doing stuff 80% of the time, but eventually those buckets need to be maybe 25% strategic thinking, 25 to 30% growing and developing other people, at least 5% growing yourself. And little by little getting that I'm executing, I'm actually doing stuff down to as little as time as possible. To start is those two things I recommend. Two big meta habits are reading that new job description every day, and if you can only do 30 minutes, starting with 30 minutes a day to do the things that are important, but not urgent, like strategic planning and thinking, developing other people, developing yourself.
Carol:
Yeah, I love that so much. One of the initial things that I find myself working with leaders around is time management and delegation, right? Because if you can't, and I actually say that it's not time management, it's mind management, right? It is how you think about time, how you think about the way you're supposed to use your time, how you think about what's available to you to be able to let go, to take on, and things of that nature.
So it's shifting your thoughts around how you use your time in order to create space to do exactly the things that you're talking about. Because I often hear, "I would love to do that, but my calendar is so full."
And when I have the conversation about what's on your calendar, really nothing's on it, because to your point, it's all reactionary. They're busy, because they're responding and they're not being intentional about how they're thinking about and utilizing their time, and how they're bringing up other people, how they're bringing up themselves, and the other things we're talking about. So I love the way you laid that out. That was beautifully laid out and very clearly laid out to be able to follow and plan. I would love to just kind of close out Matt, with is there any quotes, other resources or practices that you would like to bring into this conversation? Just as a quick takeaway as we kind of close out our discussion for today, which has been phenomenal.
Matt:
Well, maybe just one last reminder of, because I've phrased it a couple of different ways, but maybe just leave you with that last one, one last time. What is the primary job of a leader? And the primary job of a leader is to inspire greatness in her team or his team, by serving as a coach who helps people to thrive.
Carol:
Beautifully said, thank you. Matt, thank you so much for this. Listen, get Matt's book. Make sure that you bookmark this episode, so that you can listen to it again and again, because there were so many great nuggets that could really help you as a leader to think about not only developing yourself, but developing your people, and to inspire greatness, as Matt talked about the goal and mission, and purpose of being a leader for your team. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.
Matt:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dr. Carol.
Carol:
Awesome. Well, as you heard, there's a lot of great things that you can take away from today. I appreciate you joining me and remember to keep leading people forward. I'll see you next time.
