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Setting Ego Aside to Achieve Exponential Growth with Johnathan Grzybowski

Episode 95

Andrea Wenburg interviews Johnathan Grzybowski of Penji about setting aside ego and exponential growth. They also talk about getting good graphic design at affordable prices.

Johnathan Grzybowski is the Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji was named “Top Start-Up to Watch” by Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and INC. Prior to Penji, Johnathan founded multiple marketing-related start-ups and worked for Apple. He is also the host of the Blind Entrepreneurship podcast. In this episode, Johnathan discusses why he started a graphic design service he says he’s the “least qualified” person to do graphic design work, what he believes helped Penji take off so quickly, what it’s been like to grow his company to nearly 50 team members in such a short period of time, how he helps his team members adopt the company culture, how he came to realize he needed to keep his ego in check, the two questions he always asks during the hiring process, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Johnathan Grzybowski Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

The Penji Process

As mentioned by Johnathan, Penji is an on-demand graphic design service. It offers unlimited graphic design, which means you can submit as many requests for design as you can. They also provide unlimited revisions to ensure that you get the exact design that you need.

And all that for a flat, monthly rate. You don’t have to pay for each project you need. Their plans are inclusive of the designs and revisions. Their design team consists of professional web designers, illustrators, app designers, and many others ready to take on a design job you may need.

They have made their design process straightforward. In just four easy steps, you can get your design anytime between 24 to 48 hours. Here are the steps:

●    Create

When you sign up for any of Penji’s affordable plans, you’ll get access to their platform. This is where you’ll submit your design requests and communicate with the designers. You’ll be asked to write a brief description of your project. You can attach references to let the designer know what you have in mind.

Your request will then be automatically assigned to the best designer for the job. What this means is that your project will be given to the designer most capable of creating that specific design.

After the turnaround time, you’ll get your first draft. You’ll be sent email notifications about the progress of your project.

●    Review

You’re then asked to review the draft and send them for revisions if you’re not entirely happy with it. Penji has a unique point-and-click revision tool that allows you to tell your designer exactly what to change. They have made their system simple so that you don’t have to go through a lot of back and forth emailing with your designer.

Wait for 12 to 24 hours for the designer to make the revisions.

●    Download

Once satisfied with the design, you can download it directly from the dashboard. You don’t have to wait for emails to come with your design. In addition, you get full ownership of the designs and use them whenever and however you want.

Who is Penji For?

Johnathan tells us that Penji is ideal for agencies and marketing companies. But they also cater to individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples of who Penji is perfect for:

Agencies

A majority of Penji’s clients are agencies that are focused on creating strategies. They’d rather give the small tasks to Penji to give them more room and energy to do just that. When they have an overflow of work, agencies will benefit from Penji as they no longer have to hire additional staff. When the workload is manageable, they won’t have to let go of people.

Marketers

People in the marketing industry will understand how important graphic design is to get ahead. For marketers that need a constant supply of design, Penji is perfect for you. You don’t have to pay for every design that you’ll need, Penji can create them for you. From social media graphics to promotional print materials, you can send requests for it.

Bloggers

Almost everyone you know today has a blog. What used to be a hobby has now become a full-time endeavor. And to stand out from the crowd, stock images won’t do anymore. What every blogger needs are eye-catching images to emphasize their content and make them more relevant.

But as we commonly know, graphic design can be expensive. For bloggers, Penji is a dream come true. You can have amazing graphics for each blog post—all for a fixed monthly rate.

Startups

For startups that need effective branding identity as well as design assets, Penji is a smart choice. Hiring an in-house designer can put a strain on its limited resources. With Penji, they can get all their branding visuals without breaking the bank. They won’t have to rely on websites that create templated designs that look similar to everyone else’s.

Penji Pricing

Penji has three available plans. These are:

Pro Plan

For individuals such as bloggers or independent marketers, the Penji Pro plan is a solid choice. For $399, you’ll be getting unlimited graphic design and revisions. You and another team member can use it and have a daily turnaround. If you pay the subscription rate per quarter, you’ll only be charged $359 per month. A yearly payment will get you a 15% discount, which means you’re getting the service at only $339 per month.

Team Plan

For medium-sized companies and organizations, this is the plan for you. Penji’s Team plan includes all of what the Pro can offer and more. You can send requests for web and app designs, as well as custom illustrations and infographics. You can add four additional users for a total of five. The Team plan is $499 per month, but if you pay quarterly, it will be down to $449, and $424 if paid yearly.

Agency Plan

As the name suggests, Penji’s Agency plan is created specifically for agencies. It is ideal for businesses that require no less than 10 hours or more of design work per month. For $899 per month, you’ll get all that the Team plan offers and more. You will have two designers assigned to you, plus ten users and prioritized support. This gets you double the output, which is excellent for crunch times. You’ll also get discounts if you pay quarterly or yearly. You pay only $809 per quarter or $764 per year.

Penji Services

Penji covers a wide area of design categories. Take a pic from the list below:

  • Digital and print ads
  • Web and app design
  • Logos
  • Magazines, books/eBooks, newsletters
  • Social media content
  • Business cards
  • Brochures
  • Billboards and other outdoor advertising
  • T-shirts
  • Catalogs
  • Custom illustrations
  • Postcards
  • Restaurant menus
  • Banners
  • Landing pages
  • Stickers
  • Leaflets and flyers

 

If what you need isn’t on this list, don’t worry. They can custom create them for you. That’s how versatile their graphic designers are.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have Jonathan Grzybowski with me and I’m so excited.  We just have been chatting a little bit beforehand; you’re going to really enjoy him.  He’s the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji and on demand graphic design service that is fast, simple, and affordable. Penji has been named as “top startup to watch” according to Philadelphia Magazine and has been mentioned in major publications like Success Magazine, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Inc.  Prior to Penji, Jonathan founded multiple marketing related startups and worked for Apple.  Jonathan is also the host of Blind Entrepreneurship podcast.  

Andrea:  So Jonathan, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, thank you so much for having me.  Excited to share as much value as I humanly possibly can.

Andrea:  Oh my goodness.  Ok, well, we better get started.  So why don’t you tell us first of all, a little bit more about Penji?  What is it?  How did it get started?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  Well, to get started thing has been like a freak accident to be perfectly honest with you.  Penji is an on-demand graphic design service.  Businesses hire us to do all the graphic designs that they need.  Some companies hire us because they need some type of ancillary design team.  Maybe they have designers in house, but they just have so much work that they just don’t want to do it themselves anymore, or maybe they have some of the projects that are a little bit above them, so they give us kind of the dirty work so to speak.

It’s expensive to hire a graphic designer, and it’s really hard to hire a good one.  It also takes a lot of time.  So, what we want Penji to be and what Penji is, is we want people to go on our website, feel, I guess enough trust that we’re able to do the work, and then we need to be reliable enough to complete it. 

So, you sign up for Penji, you get access to our team of designers that are all in-house.  We don’t freelance or outsource.  They’re all in-house graphic designers, and you can submit a design project and receive it in under 48 hours.  And you could do that as many times as you like throughout the course of the month.

And when it comes to actually finding it, we were an agency for several years and we had our ups and downs, lost clients, gain clients.  But every time we lost a client, they always said, “Hey, you’re not able to deliver results, but your design is kickass, and it’s really good, and it’s something that we really regret that we’re not able to work with you because the marketing side of your business sucks.”  Or “the development side of your business isn’t good.”

So, we explored that a little bit, and then we started testing it out and saying, “OK, this person said it and that person said, and more people said it, what’s the problem here?” 

So then we started interviewing our closest friends, interviewed close to about 200 people, and we asked them the same question.  We said, “Hey, what is the biggest problem that you’re having in your business today?”  

“OK, well, it’s graphic design.” 

“Alright, well, let’s figure that out.  If we built this type of service, would you buy it?” And there’s a bunch of other questions that we asked too, but that was kind of like the main ones.  “What is the problem that you have and if we built this, would you buy it?”  And the problem overwhelming, believe it or not, the people that we talked to, they all had a problem with graphic design or some form of variation of marketing. 

And then they said, “Well, if we build it, would you buy it?”  And again, that answer was yes and then we use that as like the basis of our initial customers.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, so were you a graphic designer in the first place?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  If you asked me to design something, it would be the worst possible graphic design you will ever experience on the planet.  The answer is no, I’m not a graphic designer.  However, I was an agency owner that did all the graphic designs, even know he knew that he was awful at them and I did it for years.  And it wasn’t up until we started to grow when we really found some really good graphic design talent.

But for the most part, I did the graphic designs, all of the graphic designs for our business for years, and I’m the least qualified person to do so.  So feeling that internal struggle that I had and being able to translate that to like an actual business alongside my co-founders, it just was the perfect marriage and the exact business that we were meant to build.

Andrea:  So what was the agency before that?  I mean, what were an agency for what?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  We did SEO.  We did social media marketing, advertising management, web design and development, and app design and development.

Andrea:  Yeah, stuff like that.  OK, gotcha.  Alright, cool, so what you realized was that this was the big, big huge need and you’re just going to fill it however you had to fill it.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Andrea:  Wow!  Yeah, interviewing 200 people is a lot too.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I think you have to if you really want to like there’s so many startups out there that are just like have this idea, and I need a $100,000 to do so.  And then my first question is how many people did you talk to in order to make sure that this is a valid idea?  

“Oh, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.” 

OK, well, I don’t even want to talk to you until you start putting any effort because if you get discouraged at like let’s just say 50 people and they all say that your idea is crap then how are you going to be able to see this idea to fruition?

Andrea:  So true.  Alright, so you guys got started with Penji then and from what I understand it took off pretty quickly.  How and why?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I think, to be perfectly honest, I think luck is definitely on our side for sure.  I definitely think it has a lot to do with our skill as well of course.  But I think it was solving the problem.  

We’ve created something that had a huge need in the marketplace, and we are at the right place at the right time.  We started, as I mentioned before, our initial customer base was the people that our friends, like the people that we interviewed.  And a lot of them said, yes, that they need it, and then we kind of just grew from there.  

We said, “OK, well,” and this was before we even had software, by the way. So this is like two years ago, two and a half years ago.  We had no software.  We just knew that like this is something that we thought we could do.  So we had like 10 customers.  We’ve got those 10 customers pretty quickly and they’re paying us like I think it was $2.99 at the time.  And so we’re like “All right, we got ourselves some stuff here and the service is not what it was.”  

So, it was like a diet Coke version of what it is now.  And then we got our initial customer base, and then we asked for referrals that we built this awesome platform that now allows us to communicate and scale our business. And then fast forward, we used variations of like cold outreach.  

We were heavily connected.  I know you’re in Nebraska, heavily connected toward geographic region, which is right outside Philadelphia, so like a 30 mile radius of Philadelphia.  I can confidently say that there’s a large majority of people that are in our tri-state region that know what we do and know who we are, and we’re completely OK with them just knowing it, even though we have customers all over the world. 

But we’re trying to dominate our local sector first and then figuring out how to do it and then being able to scale it in other cities later on and in advertisements in SEO.  To some people that are maybe listening and think that SEO is dead, they couldn’t be more wrong.  A large majority of our traffic is generated and conversion is generated through SEO, which is higher ranks on Google.

Andrea:  Sure.  OK, so when you’re growing that fast and you’re having to put together a team, how many people are on your team at this point?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I’d say like around a little under 50.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, 50 people really quickly.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  We’re hiring more people, so it’s like 45-50.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  And you continue to have to hire I’m sure as you grow.  So what’s been one of the biggest challenges in the short period of time in recruiting and then also just getting everybody on board with your whole process, your company DNA and that sort of thing?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, it’s a great question.  When it comes to hiring, I don’t think we necessarily had an issue when it comes to that.  We’ve partnered up with a lot of great organizations that are in our area, one of them, particularly, is Hopeworks.  We’re in a technically an underserved community, which is a Camden, New Jersey.  And they help kids, youth, students, and residents kind of teach them job-related skills in the world of tech.  And so, we’re able to work with that organization in order to help these students and residents obtain jobs and we hired them.  So that’s definitely one area.

Andrea:  Really cool.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  We’re really proud of it.  We are definitely a community conscious organization, and we consistently believe in our community, and we believe in our people. 

But when it comes to our scaling, I think we’re a cash flow positive business.  We’ve never received an ounce of funding.  We don’t need funding.  We don’t want funding at this moment.  When the timing is right, maybe we’ll think about it, but we don’t need it.  So why go after it?  With that in mind, when you’re growing this by yourself, you have all these systems and processes in place that work really well for yourself because you’re the only one that’s doing it, you’re the only one that’s looking at it.

And then when you actually have to hire people to do the job, you really have to think about it like, “OK, if somebody has no idea even what the English language is and they’re learning it for the first time, would they be able to understand what it is that I’m trying to say to them?”  And being able to cookie cutter it for that individual that is for that job that was probably one of the hardest things to do just because you have so many processes and systems in place that work really well for you.  Now you have to be able to amplify that times a million.  That’s definitely one of them.

And then the last thing would be leadership.  I think it’s incredibly difficult to lead a team without having to ever really led a team before.  This is like my first “I’ve only had really one another job outside of this.”  So you really have to rely on reading, interviewing, talking to people and then just trial by fire.  There’s a lot of mistakes that we made, but I’m really proud of where we came from.

Andrea:  Wow!  OK, so, yeah, leadership.  Leadership is huge.  I know that you’re not the only leader at your company.  What is the leadership structure?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  So, I’m the CMO.  I do a lot of the sales and lead generation for our business, and I get the message out there as much as I possibly can.  We have my co-founder, which is a CEO, and he does the day-to-day operations in order to make sure that everything runs smoothly and is cohesive, but it’s safe to say that my job, in particular, is the lead generation and sales.

Andrea:  Gotcha.   So when it comes to making decisions together, and I know you co-founded it, when you’re working like this and you’re working so fast on something that’s growing so fast, and you’re with somebody else, you’re bound to come up against things that you disagree with each other about.  I mean, is that safe to say?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, all the time.

Andrea:  OK, so how do you handle those things so that you can move through it and come to decisions?  How do you actually decide?

Jonathan Grzybowski: You really have to just completely check your ego at the door, and that is like so freaking difficult because you’re an entrepreneur because you feel like you have some form of ego that you could do it better than somebody else, right?  That’s always like the stature why you start a business or at least like, long story short, it’s ego, right?  You have to be able to check your ego at the door.  You have to be able to understand that, you know what, this person has put in this place for this particular reason.  And even though you may not agree, write down the thing that you said that you want to push forward, and it may not be right now, but make sure that you at least remember the decision that maybe like your co-founder made and be able to reach back out to them and say, “Hey, you know, I see here that the thing that you tried to push a couple of weeks ago just isn’t working correctly.  Do you mind if we give this thing a try instead?”

I think that has worked really well, but there are tons of disputes that we have even on like a, not so much anymore because we just have more dialogue and conversations, but at the very beginning, it’s just like, “I want my idea to go through.”  And he’s like, “I want my idea to go through.”  And now we’re butting heads.  

But I think at the end of the day you also have to understand that each of the ideas that are being presented are coming from a good place.  But I think where a lot of things butt heads with partnerships is that reluctant attitude of, like, always being right.  You constantly want to be the right, and you want to be like, I guess the star that comes up with the silver bullet so to speak. And I think, personally, it’s like giving him full reins of “This is the company that you’re leading, and you need to be able to do that. And as a co-founder, yes, I do have a say but this is why you’re in this position.  You focus on your job, which is leading the company.  I’ll focus on getting a crap ton of sales and growing the company through sales.”  And having, too, clear defined roles, I think is also very challenging to maybe do at first.  But you really just have to understand, like, what your strengths and weaknesses are.  He can’t do some of the things that I can do, and I can’t do some of the things that he can do, and I’m OK with that.

Andrea:  Was it pretty obvious to you when you started who was going to do which role?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I would say, yeah.  I’d like to say that, like, I’m a millennial, so if you couldn’t tell.  And I would say that I’m, like, to give a millennial reference, I am like a level 19 Charmeleon that is on the path to becoming a Charizard.  To put it in layman’s terms, I’m just not there yet when it comes to my intellect and my ability to lead.  And I think that he is incredibly intelligent in particular, and I think that he’s just the better suit.  So I’ve come to terms with that. I’m OK with that.  And there’s going to be a time where, you know, maybe he takes to X degree, and I’d be able to come in, and I’d be able to help with the latter half.  So again, it’s just that open conversation and that transparency you need to have with your team.

Andrea:  Yeah, I love that.  I mean, it’s a hard conversation.  It’s a hard thing to figure out when you first getting started, there’s so many big bumps in the road.  Was there like a certain point in your life when you just really realize that, “Oh my gosh, my ego is getting in the way.  I’m done with this.”

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Oh yeah.

Andrea:  What was that for you?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  It’s not done with it because, like, you still have to have it, you need to have some type of backbone.  But, you know, I just think of like self-reflection is really important, like why do you constantly get into these silly arguments and you really have to like think about like what started it, right?  And then once you’re able to determine and have that conversation with yourself and look at yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “You’re the reason this argument started because your damn ego.” It takes a really long time to understand that and you really have to be OK with it and I think that’s why a lot of relationships fail.  Beyond this business is just relationships in general.  They fail because you’re not able to look at yourself in the mirror in the right light and then you end up just destroying whatever the good things that you have because you just want to be right all the time.  I’m OK with that.  I’m OK with not being right.

Andrea:  Yeah.  That was a hard thing for me too.  I think that is something that you kind of figure out sometime in your 20s probably.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.

Andrea:  It’s just not the end of the world to not be right.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  And then is it right to like if you think about that, like at the end of the day, say you’re right.  Like “OK, what are you gonna get out of it?  Do you feel better about yourself?”  Maybe for a little bit, but I don’t know, I started asking myself really serious questions, like, “What is the point of this?  You know, what is the point of this argument?  Where does the point of this conversation?  What is the end result going to be?”  Large majority of the times these conversations are just there to destroy the relationship and if you see that going down that path, you need to be able to have the foresight and to say like, “Hey, like this isn’t going the right way that I wanted to, like I need to stop.”

Andrea:  OK, that’s great.  I like that.  I’m still kind of in awe of startups and how you have to grow in scale so quickly.  I’m particularly interested in how the people that are working, you know, for the company, how they’re dealing with customers, how you are making sure when they are dealing with customers that they’re using, you know, the voice of your brand and that sort of thing?  Is that something that has been a challenge that you’ve found a certain sort of solution for in your company?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  So the question was more so along the lines of how are you able to have a consistent brand image throughout the entire organization?

Andrea:  Yeah, especially when it comes to, you know, the frontline people working with customers.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I’ll be honest, I don’t think we had that much of an issue with it and this could be _____, I’m not sure.  But at Penji, we’re a really tight-knit family, and we don’t call our team members employees, we call them team members, as I’m saying.  We don’t necessarily say that I’m the boss.  We discourage them from calling us bosses even though they do it as a joking matter.  But we just are a very well-oiled machine.  We don’t let our ego get in the way when it comes to leading.  And that, I think, has transpired in the way that we’re able to communicate with our customers, with our members. We have guidelines that we give our team, and it’s up to them to figure out like what their voice is.  And I’ll give you, like, an example.  We have a call every time somebody becomes a customer of ours.  We call them up and we say, “Hey, you know, welcome to Penji, welcome to the family.”  And like my swagger in doing that is going to be completely different than somebody else.  And so you kind of have to just say like, “Hey, this is the goal that we want to obtain from this particular conversation.  It’s up to you to make it your own.”

Andrea:  I love that.  I really do.  I love that.  We do a lot of work with customer service in helping customer service teams own their voice and that sort of thing.  And it’s so great when you come up, and you find a company that is so willing to let their people have a voice and own their own voice.  There’s something really significant about that.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, I mean, the reason why you hire people to take over a particular job is because you believe that that particular individual is better than you or they could at least do just as good, if not a better job than you can.  And so, like, who are we to just shun that particular individual from being able to accomplish that?  It’s as simple as that.  We had a conversation about this.

In Philadelphia right now, there’s a thing called Philly Tech Week.  And my business partner and myself, we’ve had opportunities to speak.  We didn’t even realize it until like a couple of days ago, like the core message that we’re talking about is like we’re treating humans like humans.  It sounds so silly to say that out loud because you’re like, “Oh yeah, duh,” but it’s really difficult.  People don’t do that.  People don’t treat other humans like human beings.  They treat them as employees.  They treat them as sales.

Every time that we interact with people, we treat them as they want to be treated.  Do you want to receive a cold email?  Hell no.  Do you want to receive an email that says, “Hey, I really noticed that you love to Philadelphia 76ers, and they just won yesterday, amazing!  That’s awesome!”  You’d probably want to have that conversation versus like a sales call, and then maybe you can open up a conversation about sales or maybe you don’t.  It’s completely up to you.  

But I think that at the core what we do, and I think that what makes us successful and separates us from faster, I guess, startups that are able to succeed than others is that we’re really understanding of, like, who the people are that we’re working with and what their strengths are and what they bring to the table and letting them run.

And I just want to throw one more thing out there that I think could be really good to the audience is every time we hire somebody, there are times where we aren’t a good fit for this particular individual.  And there’s a time where they’re not a good fit for us.  And what we do is every time we bring on a new and new team member, we asked them two questions, what is your dream and how can we help you get there?  And there are times where we just can’t help that individual, simple as that.  There are times were like “This is the perfect fit, and this is exactly who we’re looking for.” And those two questions, in particular, give us a great understanding of what motivates that individual.  Do they want to make a $500,000 a year?  OK, well, you know, maybe that might be a little bit unrealistic, but let’s see what we could do.  And then maybe they just want to be able to provide a better life for their family, then that’s great.  We could definitely help with that, but at least we have an understanding of what motivates that individual from the beginning.

Andrea:  Yeah, those are really great questions, and I can imagine that it gives you a sense of who they are, what they care about, also to make sure that it’s in line with what you care about.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Exactly.

Andrea:  So what does the company care about?  I mean you said being human and treating people as humans, do you have a mission?  Have you actually outlined these things for your…

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, we have.  I would say that like if I were to give like a mission/vision statement, so to speak, it would be helping those who help others.  We have a lot of initiatives that help our community and that helps those who help others.  I just think that that is, like, the core philosophy at the end of the day, it’s just helping those who help others.

Andrea:  That’s very cool.  So then you probably get a sense from the beginning then on if your team members or potential team members would be able to resonate with that, if they care about that, and if they’re in line with that?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, absolutely.  And we ask questions specifically around that too.  If they don’t care about their community, then there’s a strong chance that we may not be a good fit for them.  And that’s OK, like, they can go and be successful at another company.  It’s just they may not be successful with ours.

Andrea:  So, who are some of the big influencers that have really spoken into your life, whether that be, you know, people that you’ve read or YouTube videos or whatever, like, who are some people that you’ve followed that have really influenced you, and your style, and, yeah, your voice of influence?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  I have been asked this question quite a bit, and I have never figured out a good enough answer for this question.  My family, my mom, and my dad are very blue collar individuals.  My mom is a lunch lady.  My Dad is a truck driver, and so you can probably put the two together that I didn’t come from money.  I grew up in a relatively poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.  And so, I don’t necessarily can look at those particular individuals as like inspiration because, you know, they worked really hard, but they’re not where I want to be.

And so, like, a lot of the things that inspire me, believe it or not, is kind of just like a self-motivated underlying tone of just having a better life for the people around me and having a better life for my future family, if that even comes up.  That’s kind of like the thing that motivates me.  

There are books that have inspired me, but I really try my best to kind of have my own voice and my own style. I definitely think early on in my career, there are people that I watched and listened to that I kind of just took everything from them, and I became like a carbon copy of those particular individuals.  But now, a little bit older, I’m realizing that, you know, I need to be my own self, and people need to either like it or love it or hate it.  That’s fine.  But at least I’m me at the end of the day.

Andrea:  Hmm, cool.  So Jonathan, is there anything in particular that you would want to encourage Voice of Influence listeners with?  Any kind of parting words of wisdom that you believe are really important when it comes to somebody wanting to build their voice of influence?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah, I would say, you can be an influencer, you can have a voice of influence, it could be to those people that are very specific and near and dear to your heart, which is right around you.  Or if you want to be more, so like a voice of influence to a general audience, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror and have a good understanding of what are your goals, and what is the plan that you want to take in order to become whatever it is.

In the very beginning for me, I thought to myself like, I want it to be the center of influence.  I wanted to be this like thought leader when it comes to millions of followers and all this and all that.  And I realized that like, you know what, if that comes, so be it.  If it doesn’t, I’m totally OK with it.  I don’t need that.  

What I do need is to be the voice of influence to the people that are trusting me with their lives, which is being a team member of a startup.  Startups are risky to work with. I definitely think that we’ve broken that path of riskiness now, but you know, there is a point in time where it was risky to work for us.  And I think that if you’re able to just have a conversation with yourself and have a better understanding of what you want to accomplish once you’re on your deathbed and be able to, you know, not to be morbid, but be able to look back at your life and be like, “You know what, it was all worth it.  All those risks were worth it.”  I think that’s how you could be the center of influence.

Andrea:  Awesome!  If I remember right, you have a deal, or what should I call it?

Jonathan Grzybowski:  Yeah.  Deal is fine with me.

Andrea:  Sure, OK.  You’ve got a deal for the listeners.

Jonathan Grzybowski:  At the end of the day, anytime you’re able to share your story, you have to be able to ask for a sale, and I think that’s the most important thing.  And so, this is our ask for a sale, if you like, whatever it is that I said, if you need any form of graphic design support, we want to be your go-to solution for graphic design.  So if you could head over to penji.co, enter the coupon code podcast15 and you’ll get 15 percent your first month of Penji.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for being here with us, Jonathan.  This is a really delightful conversation.

Jonathan Grzybowski:   Yeah.  Thank you so much!

Posted on

How to Conquer Busyness with Kathy Bourque

Episode 93

Kathy Bourque is the author of Conquering Busyness: A definitive guide to stop the overwhelm, get intentional and accomplish great things. In this episode, Kathy discusses the inspiration behind the book, the difference between being productive and being effective, the roles your mindset and values play in being an effective leader, why we shouldn’t be people-pleasing perfectionists, her tips for owning your processes and priorities while still maintaining the responsibilities required of you and your position, what an “excuse clause” is, the a-ha moment about the story she was telling herself that changed her life, the importance of getting your fears out in the open, how decision fatigue impacts our daily lives, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Kathy Bourque Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me my friend Kathy Bourque who just wrote a book called Conquering Busyness.  And so, I’m really excited to talk with Kathy today about her book and learn more about what she does.  

Andrea:  So Kathy, it’s great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Kathy Bourque:  Well, thanks for having me.  I’m so excited to be here and to talk with your audience.  I love this!  Thank you!

Andrea:  Oh, you’re so welcome.  So let’s start with Conquering Busyness.  What got you interested in writing this book?  Why did you write this book?

Kathy Bourque:  Well, a few reasons.  The long story is I was in business for myself for 18 years, owned and operated a franchise.  And about five years in, my husband and I realized that it wasn’t breaking even as quickly as the franchise people told us it would.  So fast forward, several years, and I find myself in a bigger organization working with a lot of leaders and managers, and it just made me realize that everybody struggles a lot with what I was, which is the stories we tell ourselves and how we think we’re so busy all the time.  And so that’s why I titled the book Conquering Busyness.  It really is so much more than productivity.

Andrea:  Yeah, you mentioned a difference between productivity and being productive and being effective, can you talk about that?

Kathy Bourque:  Right, right.  I’m in healthcare right now and so we constantly measure productivity.  But when you find yourself running around in circles, whether you’re an entrepreneur, whether you work for someone else, many times, you can be super productive and still be running around in those circles.  It’s because you have these things bombarding you on a daily basis that you need to really work with your mind and figure out, “OK, what’s important?”  And when you’re dealing with people, especially so as a leader or manager, how to have those conversations that are crucial and serve you and really digging deep to figure out what it is that you want to stand for and accepting only those things that serve you and move you ahead.  Does that make sense?

Andrea:  Yeah.  I mean, I even wrote down this little sentence that you said, “To be effective, your actions need to be in line with your thoughts and values,” which sounds like kind of what you’re just saying.

Kathy Bourque:  Oh, absolutely.  I tell a story in the book, which is just hilarious when I actually give it in speaking, but it’s like if I’m sitting here thinking, “OK, I’m gonna be a runner,” you know, because I’ve always believed in that Van Gogh quote that “If you hear this voice inside your head saying you’re not a painter, then, by all means, paint in that voice will be silenced,” which is true to a point and I’ve lived my life by that. But if I’m sitting here telling myself, “OK, I am going to go run tomorrow a 5k.”  And if I can walk, most people, if you can walk, you can run.  It’s just moving your legs faster, right?  But if your mind sitting there telling you “What are you doing, you can’t run, you’re gonna kill us,” you know, stuff like that, you’re never going to be successful.  So, you really have to work on your mindset, which athletes know.  So, I’m just trying to bring that same kind of thing to leaders with mindfulness and working on their mindset.

Andrea:  So, what is it about these thoughts and values and mindset having all that in place that help somebody be more effective rather than just being productive?

Kathy Bourque:  Values will really help you create the foundation to be more confident in what you’re saying and what you’re doing and therefore, you’re not being a people pleaser, which is another thing.  I call myself a self-recovering people-pleasing perfectionist so that you can say yes to the things that are going to help you be more effective instead of just saying yes to everything and taking too much stuff on.  And then that’s where, again, you might be able to kick it all out.  But if it’s not in line with what you want and where you want to go, even as a department in a company or as an entrepreneur, then you’re not being effective.  You know, it’s kind of like, are you spending your time on the right things?

Andrea:  And I think this is a really important point because when you are a people-pleasing perfectionist, that P3 that you called it in the book, I thought that was funny.  You talked about this, but it’s almost like you have this force acting on you to do the things that you feel like you should do or to just sort of respond to people instead of doing what you intend to do.  Is that kind of how you put it?

Kathy Bourque:  Absolutely.  Being intentional is the key to the effectiveness piece when we are in that constant state of reaction, your intentions fly out the window, right?  It happens like almost every Monday.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Kathy Bourque:  On my drive to work, you know, I commute and on my drive to work, I’m sitting there thinking of all the things I’m going to get done.  And my husband and I talk about this all the time and he works from home, but he still has the same thing.  You know, you get a phone call, you get an email, all the dings and dongs that we face every day and then your intentions go right out of the window.  So it’s being very, very firm but flexible, I guess with yourself that you realize, “OK, this is a big deal to me and I need to kind of shut out everything else so that I focus on this.”

Andrea:  Well, how do you decide what is the most important thing to focus on?  How do you choose your priorities rather than having them placed on you?

Kathy Bourque:  Well, for personal purposes, and that’s why this goes back to your values.  Definitely defining your values and making sure that they’re your values, because I talk about how a lot of people when I work with them on values will start saying things that they’ve either been told they should value their whole lives.  And we don’t even know this.  We don’t realize this because, you know, you started at young age just kind of learning from your family, from your culture, from maybe your religion, any of those things, what you should value. And so many people don’t even stop to ask themselves, “Hey, do I really value this?”  And I think once you do that deep work of being OK with, you know, this is what I value.  So one of the things I struggled with when I first had my son, I was a late in life mom and I really was struggling with the whole work-life balance.  And one of my friends said to me, she’s like, “You know, you have to take care of you first so that you can be a better mom.”  And it’s that whole airplane analogy, right?  Put your face mask on first before you put that on others because if you’re not alive, you’re not going to be able to help others.

Andrea:  Right?  So, in other words, part of the, part of the process of prioritizing has to be, who do I have to be in order to do what I want to do to help other people.

Kathy Bourque:  Right.  Absolutely!  And one of my favorite quotes in the book is, “you think your problem is from out there, you’ll try to solve it from out there, but take the shortcut and solve it from within.”  Because when you are on that hamster wheel of pleasing everybody else and then also wanting to do such an amazing, you know, that’s the perfectionist piece when you want to do a perfect job all the time, which I am a huge believer in doing things the right way.  But if you’re taking on too much and then you add that on top, what you do is you keep grinding and you keep hustling and there’s just so much more to it that you need to do to be truly effective.

Andrea:  I think it’s really hard though to decide what you can sort of put to the side or how you can prioritize even though you have…maybe you’re in a job and you have people that are in charge of you, or you know, that are looking to you for help all the time and you feel this constant need to be there for people to provide what they want.  Do you have any tricks that you use with clients or thoughts that you have about how one could still sort of own their own process and their own priorities in the midst of still really needing to still do the things that other people are expecting them to do?

Kathy Bourque:  Oh, well, yeah for sure, and you know, it is hard.  I’m not going to sit there and say, “Oh, I’ve got it all figured out.”  Well, I think I do at times then I struggle with this.  You know, they say you teach what you need to learn the most and that’s definitely me because I struggle with this every day.  But the way I handle it, is for one really, and this was a bad one for me, Andrea, I’m not going to lie.  I always think I can do things much much quicker in a very short amount of time.  And in my position right now, we put on a lot of events, and I think I drive my administrative assistant crazy sometimes because I’m like, “Oh, that’ll only take a day or so,” and it takes us five, you know. So, I think being very realistic on timeframes, how long it takes you to do something so that if your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, I need this and I need it today by noon or whatever,” you can realistically give an answer “I’m, you know, more than willing to help and I understand how important that is to you, but realistically I can’t get that done by noon.  Can we look at by 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning?”  Or “What else are you wanting me to take off my plate in order to get this done?” And so many times, so this is again where knowing what you value, the crucial conversations that we need to have, people are afraid to have them because they don’t want to be perceived as mean.  But you can have these conversations in a very kindhearted, loving way that still sets really good boundaries for yourself.  So just being very honest about what you can handle, how much you can take on that sort of thing.

Andrea:  You know, it reminds me of another point that you brought up in the book about imposter syndrome and that sort of we’re trying to portray this sort of persona of whoever it is that we’re wanting to be.  And that when we do that, we have that sort of, “Oh, they’re gonna find me out, they’re gonna find me out.  Try to hide it, try to keep that from anybody from being able to see it.”  And then I want you to tell us what you said in the book about how to deal with that and how that totally relates to what you just said.

Kathy Bourque:  Well, I’m not sure what part you’re pointing to, but imposter syndrome is huge for high achieving people because we always have big goals, right?  And so, my whole mantra has always been, “step outside your box” and I’m great at saying yes to something and then I just internally scramble going, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how I’m gonna figure this out.”  So one of the things I do talk about is using the excuse clause. And in the book, I talked about this signup for a golf tournament and it was with a bunch of hospital executive leadership when I sat on the board of directors, and I really wanted to play this course and really wanted to see what it was like because it’s up in the Sandhills.  And after I said yes, the entire time up until like a week beforehand, I had been trying to talk myself out of it, “You can’t go.”  “People say you can’t golf,” you know, all these things. I finally just said, I’m doing it the day I go up to one of our chief nursing officers and she’s, “We’re talking about it.”  And I said, “Oh my gosh, you know, when I golf, I only golf with my girlfriends.  We don’t keep score.  We only golf like nine holes at the most.  I don’t know if I can even make 18.  I’ve got only twice this year.”  And she’s like, “Wow, you just got all your excuses out of the way.”  And I’m like, “Uhh.”  And then once I did, I just enjoyed it for what it was and had such a blast that day. So, I think just getting all of your excuses out there, if you verbally have to say them like I did, it works because once you’ve said it all, you know, “OK.”  And that’s why procrastination is such a big thing for high achievers too, right?  We wait until the last minute so that if it flops, we’re not to blame, right?  So the same for the excuse clause, it kind of gets you off the hook if you don’t do as well as you are wanting, but you’ll find that.  Then once you do it, whatever it is, that’s how you grow in confidence, that’s how we do achieve those big goals.

Andrea:  Yeah.  It’s like there’s a barrier in the way and it has to do, it’s dark.  It’s something that you don’t want to tell anybody, but then once you finally do, it sounds like what you’re saying is that once you finally do kind of just call it out, then you’re able to move through it.  You’re more free to be able to move through it.  And I guess what I was thinking was when you were talking about actually admitting to the person or your boss or whatever, who might be giving you something more to do when you actually say, I need more time because this, this, and that, or when you actually are honest about it.  It’s sort of a similar concept of calling it out and being able to say, even though it’s saying, look, I’m not able to completely get it done, but let’s figure out how to, you know, how we can do what you’re wanting me to do without having all, I don’t know…what am I trying to say?  Yeah, I mean, it’s being honest and through that honesty, you’re able to actually have that conversation that’s going to get you to where you need to go.  So, anyway, that was the connection that I was making in my head anyway.

Kathy Bourque:  So, as you were talking, I remembered than probably more of what you were talking about with the imposter syndrome.  There is some sort of freedom that comes from letting it out, getting your fears out in the open.  They just lose their power.  It’s amazing.  And for the imposter syndrome, specifically, when I owned and operated my franchise, I did that.  So I’m a late in life college student.  I had went for two years back in the 80’s when I graduated from high school, but then I dropped out because I was in a restaurant position and they promoted me to management right away. And I tell you, once you start making money you’d think, “Well, what do I need to go to school for?”  So, fast forward, you know, 20 years later and I want to, again going back to step outside your box, I had ran for the board of directors for our hospital because I was very involved in our community here.  And, you know, it’s one of these things if you know a hospital, everyone is pretty well educated.  And here I was a college dropout and it was a huge story for me that was holding me back. And then working through that leadership development class, I was complaining about something and not speaking up.  And my mentor said, “Hold on, wait a minute, you know, you’re the one holding yourself back.  There’s a reason they asked you to be on there.  You need to get over that story.”  And it was the biggest a-ha moment I have ever had.  So, now when I speak with leaders and do workshops, I’m always like, how do you want to show up because it doesn’t matter anything else.  How do you want to show up?  How do you want to be seen and how do you want to be heard in the world?  So, yeah, that was one of my biggest ones. And quite honestly, at the time, the CEO knew I was going back to school and he said something in front of all the board and was like, “Well, how’s it going with your college classes?  And I was like, “Oh,” at the time I was mortified.  I just wanted to crawl under the table and curl up in a little bowl.  And about a week later, the administrative assistant came to me and she’s like, “You’re going back to school?”  And I said, “Yeah, I am, you know, I dropped out the first time.”  And she’s like, “Oh, I’ve thought about that.” And it’s amazing now when I did go back and got my degree, how inspiring I’ve been to other people.  There’s like three or four people just in my direct vicinity that have gone back to school and finish their degrees.  And so, it’s just a lovely, lovely thing when you can get those fears out in the open.  And it’s hard.  It’s hard for me too to ask for help, which was what you were alluding to.  It’s hard for me to say, “You know what, I don’t think I can do this right now.”  You know, I’ve always been a go-get-them type of girl and goes back to my whole.  I need to be more realistic with what I can do.

Andrea:  Yeah.  It also makes me think about this idea that if we were to own our humanity, the fact that we can’t do everything, the fact that we can’t be everything to everyone then it seems like the P3’s, the People Pleasing Perfectionist of the world that it’s really easy for them, for us to want to look like we’ve got it all together, that we want to look like we can handle it whatever you give me.  But when we own our humanity, there’s something different that happens.  It opens up a whole new way of living that can be more free.

Kathy Bourque:  Oh yes, and it helps you, you know, I’m always looking at through the lens of how it helps you deal with other people because I am very passionate about helping leaders.  But when you can own your own humanity, it’s that power of vulnerability that Brene Brown talks about.  It is an instant connector.  It helps you instantly connect with your people and with anyone that you work with on a team to be more collaborative because the minute they know that you’re human, it’s just like it opens a door.  It’s so funny. So, you know, before the show we were talking about, I went to a conference last weekend and there was a speaker and she was kind of like, she even called herself like the cruise director of the event.  And so she came up and spoke several times and then she also had a couple of bigger like learning sessions and I just was kind of turned off by her and I don’t really know what it was.  But then she stumbled in a speech and she kind of made fun of herself and started joking and it was like that moment just flipped it for me.  I was just like, “I love her.”  There is something that we love about knowing that everybody puts their pants on the same way we do.  So owning your humanity is big.

Andrea:  Yeah, totally.  I think that has to connect back to this idea of conquering busyness, this idea of we’ll shoot if we want to.  To be able to conquer busyness, if we don’t want to just run around doing what everybody else’s expecting us all the time and that sort of thing, we have to really own who we are, own our humanity, yeah.

Kathy Bourque:  Oh yeah, for sure because that whole grinding and hustling, it’s what’s creates the overwhelm with people is “You know what, I will take that on and I will get it done, and I will stay late, and I will come in early and I’ll work through lunch.”  That is just burning people out in my generation for sure.  So, you know, your listeners know I’m 50 and there used to be a commercial back in the 70’s or early 80’s that was Enjoli, which is a perfume.  And it was that, I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and take care of my man type of thing. Yeah, so we grew up with this very much wonder woman stigma or idea that I can have my kids and I can still work and I can, I can, I can, I can.  And that’s when I first came across the values work is when I felt like I was doing the whole circus with so many plates, you know, on my sticks and they all had to be at the utmost level, you know.  So they all had to stay at a 10 and that’s just not realistic and you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Alright, so you mentioned also…I want to get to this idea of white space and decision fatigue.

Kathy Bourque: Oh yeah.

Andrea:  So this is something that I definitely relate to just the idea that decisions themselves, that there can be a limited amount of decisions our brains can handle on a certain day.  Tell me about decision fatigue.

Kathy Bourque:  There’s some true science behind it and I’ve read about it quite a bit before, but there are times where I think, “OK, I am going to go into my closet tonight and I’m gonna lay out my outfit for tomorrow,” because I tell you the time I waste trying to get ready in the morning because I try on so many clothes and it’s ridiculous.  But if I’ve had a long trying day, I can go in my closet and have you ever just stood there and you’re like, “I just can’t do this right now, you know.” So it’s really with not only like how much are you taxing your brain right now and there’s a lot of science in marketing behind this too that you make the path very easy for your customers.  You make it easy for them to say yes because our brains can’t handle all that is being thrown at them right now.  We are on overload constantly.  And so if you do have big decisions to make, making sure that, you know, what time of day works best for you or doing them earlier in the day that sort of thing.

Andrea:  Yeah, that’s good.  And I liked this quote; the brain is what you’re referring to, “When it is too tired to think a new thought, it will always choose a familiar habits,” what does that mean?

Kathy Bourque:  Yeah, there’s a friend of mine that likes to say that’s one thought then, and so many times when we are too tired to think that new thought, we automatically just go to, however, we think all the time.  So our brains are on autopilot so much at the time and thank goodness they are, because it’s what runs our whole body in our systems.  And it’s the fact that you don’t have to think how to tie your shoes every single day, because talk about decision fatigue if you had to do that, you would be spent by the time you got to work. But definitely that…I lost my train of thought there, what did we say?  What was the question?

Andrea:  We were talking about decision fatigue when it’s too tired to think a new thought, it will always choose a familiar habit.  So you’re saying that you know because you don’t have to…

Kathy Bourque:  Right.  Yeah, so think about, and I don’t know if you’ve done this, but I am a habitual dieter and I’ve tried to get more to where I just eat healthy.  But for me, one of my big things is if I just come out of public speaking, public speaking takes a lot out of me.  I love to do it, love, love, love to do it but it takes so much energy that when I would come back to my office, because I have to speak a lot at work, when I’d come back to my office, the first thing I do is grab a piece of chocolate.  So it does not matter how well I’ve done on my diet or eating healthy or the no-sugar thing, it was like this habit because my brain had just expended all this energy and I was just done. So that’s where you just need to create the surroundings and the habits that really serve you, which again comes then from, you know, back in the beginning, finding out your values, finding out how you want to show up, how intentionally you want to be, and then setting yourself up for success.

Andrea:  I love it!  OK, so Kathy, this has been a very quick conversation but it’s been fun.  Well, first of all, I want to give you a chance to share any kind of parting thoughts that you would have with our listeners and then we’ll give them some information about how they can get in touch with you.

Kathy Bourque:  So the new direction I’ve been working on for a few years that I think made it to the book very briefly, but it is the fact that thoughts become things and you can think about it in any way you want, whether it’s you’re driving home at night and you’re thinking about what you’re going to make for dinner, or it’s the bigger decision things, “Should I move across the country for that new job?”  Your thoughts literally become things.  So in order to conquer busyness, in order to become super effective in everything you do, whether you’re running your own business, whether you’re working with others, you have to be super intentional and you just have to put some of the time into it to figure out how you want that to look. So I have a really good worksheet that I can give people if they want to go to my website, it’s kathybourque.com/voi for Voice of Influence we will give to your listeners.  But it really helps you in a quick, probably 20 minutes session where you just start to write out some of those guiding values and principles that you want to live your life by.

Andrea:  That’s great!  We love core values here at Voice of Influence.  So that sounds like a great resource and we will make sure that link in the show notes in case anybody has a hard time figuring out where those are.  So, Kathy, thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with us at Voice of Influence.

Kathy Bourque:  Well, absolutely, I love the podcast.  I love what you’re doing.  I love what you’re putting out in the world.  That’s what it’s all about, right?  What we’re putting out into the world.  So keep up the great work.

Andrea:  Thank you!

Posted on

It Isn’t Bragging

Episode 92

This week’s topic of bragging is a subject I see come up quite frequently when I speak with people about who they are, their identity, and how they show up in the world. In this episode, I talk about what bragging really is, why it comes up so often in my conversations, why being self-deprecating isn’t ideal either, why we should strive to project humility instead of bragging or self-deprecation, the different between bragging and honestly sharing your excitement about something that is important to you, how we need to change the way we generally handle compliments, the importance of valuing the gifts of others as much as you value your own, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast where we talk about leadership, human dynamics, and service.  I’m really glad that you’re here with us today.

We are tackling a subject that I’ve seen come up quite frequently when I’m having conversations with folks about who they are, their identity, and how they show up in the world.  And that is the subject of bragging. OK, so what I often hear when we start to have conversations with folks about who they are, what they’re all about, their personalities, when we do the Fascinate Assessment or StrengthsFinder or the Kolbe with people, they tend to look at those and then come back and say, “Oh gosh, I don’t really like to talk about myself, and I don’t like to brag, but this really does kind of nail it.” And I was kind of chuckle inside because it’s really cute that people feel like it’s bragging to talk about themselves in an objective kind of a way.  

But there’s a reason why we do this and I want to suggest that it has to do how we view and what we value in ourselves and in other people.  So usually what happens is __, but first, let’s define bragging. 

Bragging is really about the attempt to make yourself bigger, more valuable, better.  And then there’s the other side of that and that’s self-deprecation. Self-deprecation is also tends to be something of pride.  There’s something prideful in it because it’s really about making yourself smaller or cutting people to the chase.  So I’m going to put myself down before you can put myself down, you can’t put me down, or I’m going to put myself down before you can put me down.  That’s what self-deprecation can tend to be about.

Now, there are times that leaders or speakers can use self-deprecation lightly in order to get a laugh.  But I always cushion that folks really shouldn’t do too much self-deprecation, that’s putting yourself down or making fun of yourself, because what does ends up doing is it puts in the mind of the listener that you’re also doing that about them, that you’re also looking down on them.  And so, you really get to treat lightly on self-deprecation.

But bragging is really about the attempt to make yourself bigger; self-deprecation is about making yourself smaller.  Now, what we really want to be shooting for as leaders, as people who want to have a voice of influence is humility.  And humility is really about being honest.  It’s about not really tying of value to your treats in comparison to others.  So because I’m like this, I’m better than, this other person who doesn’t have that quality.  So we don’t do that when we are using humility.

Humility is about showing up to offer the best of who you are and maybe considering how you’re being perceived which is a loving thing to really consider other people in what they’re thinking but not worrying about what other people think of you or your offering.  If you were to do that, then that would be more fear-based and if you’ve been around very long at the Voice of Influence podcast, you know that love and fear is one of those dualities that we talk about a lot.

So if you are acting out of or if your motive is based out of fear, then you’re not going to be able to be the best of who you are for others. Instead, you want to have a motive of love.  And we talk about this a lot.  I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in the podcast.  So if you want to learn more about that, you can go back to that one.  It was the episode 90, about High Stakes Conversations; you can go back to that if you’re willing to learn more about love and fear.

But anyway, so humility is really about being honest.  It’s about reality, about being clear, that’s different than bragging.  That’s different than self-deprecation.  In fact, someone with humility can celebrate and be honest and celebrate with others and say “Join in celebrating, I’m so excited about this.”  Sometimes that happens, and I’m one of those people that, I’m just kind of a sharer.  Obviously, I have a podcast, so I tend to share a lot.  But I also share a lot of things that are even personal things that are exciting to me or concerning to me, and I do that sometimes on social media.  And when I do, I have to be careful to figure out “Am I bragging, or am I being deprecating, or am I being honest?”

One of the most things that we can do is celebrate in just out of the moment that that happens inside of ourselves.  Like the other day, we found out that Voice of Influence got a registered trademark.  This is something that can take years, sometimes, to achieve and it’s not really an achievement.  I don’t think, it’s something that you’re able to get, but once we’ve got this registered trademark and we get to use the little ‘R’ with the circle behind the Voice of Influence, oh my goodness, I was so excited.  In fact, I was overcome with the emotion, and I just kind of started crying, happy tears, because I think it’s just surprised me, but I really felt this sense of both joy   and excitement, as well as the deep sense of responsibility it is to be able to utilize this praise as our own, _____ in United States. So, this sincere sense of celebration and joy just came out of me.

And like I said, I’m a sharer, not everybody is.  I’m not saying everybody should do this, but I would call it honest and humble.  And not everything I do is, but I would call it this because it was simply me wanting to share our joy and invite other people to share in our joy because we have had so many people along the way who have helped us and who have encouraged us even from when, you know, we were younger. So, even on Facebook, you know, your parents, friends helped you grow up and they’re watching and they’re paying attention.  They feel invested in who you have become and I know that about myself.  So when I shared this, I just was like “Oh I just wanna share this fun, exciting news,” and I want them to share my joy.  And they did, and we had such a response, just people congratulating us and all this sort of thing. 

Honestly, it didn’t really feed my ego.  It was an opportunity, instead, to just rejoice with others, to enjoy this moment with other people.  It was a chance for me to connect in that sense. And I really believe in connecting, especially to do it authentically, especially when it’s honest, when it comes out of you and you just want to connect with folks, or you just want to share something.  That is honest and true and not necessarily bragging. 

Somebody could look at that and say, “She’s bragging.”  But I can’t control how they perceive my post.  I can’t control how they perceive me.  I can consider it.  I can think about that and say “You know, if I say it like this, it might sound a little bit more like I’m bragging, so I need to be careful how I say it.” I’d very carefully choose the word, ‘share in our joy,’ and it was just this sincere kind of celebration. 

Well, that is different than saying, “Look at me, look at us.”  “Make us feel great.”  “Like and share this with others,” or whatever.  It wasn’t that.  It was just a sincere sense of celebration.  That is just a quick example of what humility can look like when it might be perceived as bragging to somebody else.  You really cannot control how other people think about you.  You cannot manage what other people think about you. What you can do is you can be honest.

So you know the subtitle of my book UNFROZEN is “Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You,” and I would say that that moment of sharing my joy about the registered trademark was a release of the real me.  I wasn’t holding back because, “oh no, what if I say this and somebody thinks this or that of me.”  It wasn’t at all.  It was, “I’m willing to share, because that is me.”  Again, I’m not saying that this is all about sharing and everything.  You don’t necessarily need to do that.  But if you do, if you were to talk about something that you’re excited about, that’s not bragging.

I think of people in my life in the past that I remember, like my mom having a conversation with a friend or whatever and they’re talking about their meal.  And “Oh, this was such a good meal,” they would tell my mom.  And my mom used to be so consumed with and just joy-filled with the idea of hosting people for meals because she loved to be able to cook exactly what other people love.  So she would pay very close attention to what people ate or what people drank and she would be sure that she had it on the table the next time or had an option that’s different the next time depending on if there was something that they like or didn’t like. And she took so much care in providing that for other people and then she would have somebody say to her “That was such a great meal.”  And she “Oh, it wasn’t that great.” 

You know what I mean?  I mean, haven’t we all done this?  I certainly have.  “Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal,” or “Oh my goodness.”  Sometimes I do this, and it is the most offensive thing that can be because people are trying to give you a compliment and then you shut them down with “Do not tell me that I’m good at that.”  And I’ve done this a lot, so trust me, it’s everybody.

But we don’t want to feel like people are bragging on us or that we are bragging.  We don’t want to be perceived as a person who is bragging, but what if it really was a good meal?  What would be the humble way to talk about that?  If somebody were to give me a compliment and said…I used to do this all the time with singing and someone might say, “Andrea, that was a great job singing,” you know this and that.  And I would have such a hard time accepting that answer, and so I would either just kind of duck and say thanks or I would “Oh yeah, I messed this up,” and “I messed that up, but thank you, and I still kind of struggle with doing this sometimes.” When people are trying to offer you a compliment and tell you something that is true about yourself, what we should do instead of, you know, putting ourselves down or making sure that they understand that we know that it wasn’t as good as it could have been, we need to simply say, “Thank you.” 

It’s not bragging to say thank you.  It’s not bragging to admit the strengths of your personality, the strengths that you hold inside your gifts that you’ve been gifted with.  It is not bragging to admit that you are good at something.

So, when I’m going through an assessment with someone and they start to read it, they start to say “Oh my goodness, I don’t like to talk about myself and brag, but this is true,”  then that gives me a hint that maybe they actually really value that thing that they’re good at, and they don’t value the thing that they’re not good at. 

Don’t we all do this as well?  That thing that we’re particularly good at even though we might not recognize it, you know, there are possible that you don’t recognize what you’re really good at and you don’t see that as being a big deal. 

The truth is that you want that quality, that you want everybody else to have that quality too, so someone who is particularly stable. One of those people that’s like a bedrock in the community or a bedrock of strengths and stability in your company, you know, those people tend to feel like everybody else needs to be a rock as well.  And they provide everything they can, and they give, and they give, and they give, and then they start to realize that not everybody else is doing everything that they’re doing.  Not everybody else is taking care of everybody else like they are. 

Mom does this all the time, “Not everybody else is taking care of the house like I do,” or “Is caring for people like I do.” You know, when my sister and I were growing up, we were the ones that would have people over or invite people to do things.  Not everybody else is doing that.  “Do they not like me?”  “They’re not inviting us to go do something.”  “Why am I the one that always invites people over?” 

We value, we care about that’s what we’re really good at.  And the fact of the matter is that not everyone else is as good at it as you are.  In fact, most people aren’t.  You are a sliver of the population that’s really good at what you do, at what you are good at.  And everyone else, they have other things that they have to contribute, but it’s not the same thing as you. And the problem lies when we don’t value what everybody else has to offer because then we think of ourselves as being better at this one thing, which means we’re better in general because we value that more than we value what they’re good at. 

So you have to be careful when you start to realize that this is what you’re doing, and we all do this at times.  We really do think that we all do this.  But when you see yourself thinking that you’re bragging when really you’re just being honest about what is true, then maybe that bragging sense is not what everybody else perceives, but it what’s actually going on inside of you, because you actually believed that you’re better because of this thing that is true about you.

And what I want to suggest is that if you can see how other people contribute to you, and to your team, to your experience, and if you can value what they bring to the table, then you’re going to more freely give what you have to offer.  You’re going to have the opportunity to say “You know what, this is what I bring to the table and not everybody else needs to bring that.  In fact, I’m going to provide what I’m gonna offer what I do, what I bring to the table.  I’m gonna offer it.  I’m gonna keep offering it, and whenever everyone wants to partake, they can have some or they can enjoy my offering.”

But that also means that we need to accept the offerings of others.  And when we start to view each other not on a scale of “You know, I’m a 9 and they’re a 7 at this, so I’m better,” or “I’m consistent with this thing and they’re not, and so I’m better,” “My personality is like this and this is how I act in the world.”  And “Gosh, that feels really good because I really think that that’s important.”  “Too bad not everybody else is like that.” 

But we’re able to say “No, no, this is what I bring to the world and it’s fantastic!”  But this is what everybody else brings to the world.  These are the other things that people around me bring to the world, not as just as important.

There is no way to quantify the gifts that we bring.  There is no objective measurement of how important you are.  If we try to put an objective measurement on how important we are as human beings, then we’re going end up with this sense of bragging.  We’re going to feel like some people are bragging, and other people aren’t, and we’re not going to know what it’s like to be truly honest and authentic because we think that it’s all about bragging or not.

Now, there are times, there are people who get paid more to do what you do, or they have more benefits, or you might see objective things that are happening that would seem to value what somebody else brings to the table more than you.  But you need to take that out of consideration when you’re talking about this stuff. 

Instead, you need to go to a human level, on the human level.  What we bring to the table is all valuable and important.  The question is, are we bringing it or are you letting fear cause you to keep from bringing it because you’re afraid that other people will perceive you as bragging?

Don’t hold back out of fear.  Offer who you are, bring the whole you to the table.  We need you.  You are not the same as me.  I am not the same as you and that is a beautiful thing.  We need each other. 

If you want your team to feel like this, if you want your team to value each other, talk to me.  Send me an email, my email is andrea@voiceofinfluence.net.  I’d love to hear from you, so schedule a conversation.  Let’s talk.  Let’s help your whole team value one another so that you can work better together in service to others because your voice matters.  Let’s make it matter more!

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How to Master the Inner Game of Leadership with Daniel Kimble

Episode 91

Daniel Kimble is an executive coach, keynote speaker, motorcycle road race winner, and a 30+ year veteran of Silicon Valley. He is also the author of Unshakeable Influence: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership and the CEO of Resonance Executive Coaching; a global executive coaching firm. In this episode, Daniel talks about the importance of mastering the “inner game” as an executive or leader, the difference between having a short-term mindset and a long-term mindset as a leader, the common symptoms leaders might experience if they’re not focusing on the inner game, why he believes we need to slow down so we can go faster, how a mindset focused on the wrong things limits our performance and the performance of those around us, the importance of the language we use when we speak to ourselves, his advice for helping leaders navigate the lonely road of leadership, and more!

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Daniel Kimble Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Daniel Kimble who is an executive coach, keynote speaker, motorcycle road-race winner and 30+ year veteran of Silicon Valley.  He’s also the CEO of Resonance Executive Coaching, a global executive coaching firm.  He holds executive MBA degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, an executive coaching certificate from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree in computer science from UC Santa Cruz.

He lives with his wife, Marianne and son Indiana, in the San Francisco Bay area.  And Daniel has a new book out, and I’m so excited to share that with you today.

 

Andrea:  So Daniel, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Daniel Kimble:  Yes, thanks for having me.

Andrea:  So tell us a little bit about your book.  What is the actual title?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s called Unshakable Influence:  Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.

Andrea:  Okay.  So, Daniel, tell us about your book Unshakeable Influence:  Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.  Where did this come from?  Why did you write this particular book?

Daniel Kimble:  That’s a great question.  It came from my years of experience helping leaders be the best version of themselves and really understanding what it takes to be the best version of yourself.  And the inner game of leadership in my view is the most important aspect to being an influential leader.  So you really need to focus on mindset and heartset in order to be influential and be the most effective leader you can be.

Andrea:  Yeah, sure, mindset and heartset.  So can you dive into that just a little bit more, because I love this idea of the inner game of leadership?  I certainly believe it’s important, but maybe you could share with us a little bit more about why, why does it matter that an executive leader is able to really master this inner game?

Daniel Kimble:  Who you’re being on the inside has the biggest impact on how you influence other people.  So the way you show up, the way you carry yourself, do you have compassion for others? Do you show up with discernment versus judgment for example, meaning that you care about them but you’re still discerning between different skill sets, et cetera?  And are you showing up in a way that inspires other people and brings out the best in them?  I mean that’s really mostly an inner game versus an outer game.

Andrea:  Hmm.  But then it shows up in the outer game.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s so much of what we experienced with other people and especially the leaders in our lives as nonverbal.  Approximately 60 to 80 percent of our impacts on others is nonverbal, and so we need to pay attention to who we’re being to maximize that aspect of how we’re showing up and how we’re impacting others.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I really enjoyed your book.  First of all, I loved your personal examples and you use a lot of models and other examples.  And it seems really practical but really speaks to the inner game but it’s bringing into that practical level.  And I know that you even started out the book with really a business case for why it matters and why people should focus on it.  And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit about why, you know, obviously it’s a big piece of what we’re doing but, why does it matter that someone actually invest or a company actually invest in helping their leaders with this inner game?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I tried really hard to make the book practical and hands-on.  It’s a gap, I would say, in the marketplace in terms of books that actually show you how to be a master of inner game of leadership in a very practical kind of way.  And there’s so many missed opportunities if we’re not doing that as individual leaders and as a leadership team.  For example, people when they leave a company, it’s most often that they leave their boss or a poor relationship with their boss.  It’s the most common reason why they leave and it’s very costly when someone leaves the company.  It hits the engagement, hits the morale, productivity, et cetera.  It really_____ on leadership more than anything else.

Andrea:  And I know that that part of what you’re talking about in that section was had to do with the difference between having a short-term mindset and the long-term mindset.   What is the difference between having a short term and a long term mindset?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  Sort of what I touched on there is that it’s easy as a leader, especially in today’s world with investors, either public or private, putting a lot of pressure to meet short term financial metrics.  Definitely, I want to meet the short term metrics but sometimes the short term gets maximized and the medium to long term gets overlooked, I would say.  And the best results come from a medium to long-term focus.  And then if you’re doing that right there, the short term results would show up but it can be easy as a leader to focus too much on the short term, not enough in the medium to long term.

Andrea:   Let’s take a minute here and go back.  I want to hear a little bit more about your personal origin story.  We might even plug this in at the beginning, now that I’m thinking about it, because I don’t want to tell your story.  You tell your story in the book and that’s so important.  But can you share with us what got you into the leadership game in the first place?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, it’s a very personal thing for me where, for all of my life, I’ve really been just sort of wired that way where I notice what’s happening inside of people, what’s happening between people, what’s happening in terms of what makes a great leader, what makes a great team, what makes a great culture.  I could see the issues as well as the things that were working well, like very, very clearly from a very young age.

One of my earliest memories as a kid is actually noticing my mom and a friend of her having a bit of an argument and I could tell exactly, at the age of five or six, what was going on in that conversation.  I just didn’t know how to articulate it to them in a way that could help.  But I could see that they were actually miscommunicating.  They didn’t really disagree.  They just weren’t able to communicate effectively.  And that’s been a key part of who I am for forever really.  It was always a natural draw for me to be on this line of work because I’m just wired that way.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So you noticed even in that conversation with your mom that they were not communicating appropriately.  They weren’t actually communicating.  What did you see?  You weren’t sure how to articulate it or how to help them, but you could just see that they were not, you know, tell me what you mean by that?  What do you mean by they weren’t communicating?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s like the words that they were using versus what they were really trying to say were two different things.  And those gaps between what they really wanted to say and the words that they were choosing was the root cause of what was happening versus them actually disagreeing.  And I see that again and again, like in leaders, teams, and cultures that such a common challenge we all face.  And again, for me I can so quickly notice that and now I have tools to help people quickly address those gaps and on how they communicate and shift to they’re being in such that they come across in a different way and be more influential and have less differences with other people because they’re communicating more effectively.

Andrea:  What do you suppose led you to that place where you started to be able to articulate and be able to help people in those situations?

Daniel Kimble:  You know I like that question.  I don’t know if I could point to any one thing, I would say it’s a lifelong journey for me.  I’m really seeing the gaps and then over time doing a lot of reading, a lot of practice, a lot of trying different things, helping other people try different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work and just honing it over time is what I would say.

Andrea:  Hmm.  OK, so let’s jump back into the book.  What problems have you seen come up with your clients when they’re really not focusing on that inner game of leadership?

Daniel Kimble:  The problems or the symptoms that tend to be talked about are things like other people are not so keen to work with them or they, maybe, will say like he or she doesn’t understand me or doesn’t work well with me.  Some hits to engagement, some hits to maybe attrition or maybe some people are leaving the company given how this leader is showing up.  Those are the kind of the external circumstances that tend to show up in terms of why someone would start to work with me in the first place.

Andrea:  And do they recognize that like the leader themselves, is it hard for them to see that in themselves or what do you hope for when they start working with you in terms of their own awareness?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I think a lot of times it is hard for people to see their own limitations.  That’s the one of the biggest challenges we, as people, have.  I do talk about that in the book as well.  You have to be willing to be vigilant, with yourself, honestly in order to be the best version of yourself.  And I would say, that by the time someone agrees to work with me, they have enough awareness to see the need and go forward.  The ones who don’t have enough awareness, probably, wouldn’t go forward.

Andrea:  Sure.  And do you have any suggestions for people when, maybe, they have a leader or they see a leader who is probably causing problems with the way that they’re leading and they would like somebody, like you, to come in and work with them, but they’re not sure, you know, how do they bring this to that leader’s awareness?  Do you have any suggestions for that person?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s a tricky thing to manage because I’m a big believer in that we need to be the change that you want to see in the world first.  And so my first answer to that question is to look inside of ourselves and ask, “Well, what can I do differently to help this leader be more effective?”  Or “How can I work better with this leader by showing up differently myself?”

Andrea:  Yeah, I love that.

Daniel Kimble:  And then the other piece of that, if you want to have a conversation with that leader, which is definitely under the right circumstances, probably a good thing to do if they’re having a significant negative impact, you want to be mindful of how you approach that.  So, I would say over time, establish a stronger relationship with that executive and get to know them, it’d be would be better.  Give them a chance to get to know you and slowly over time give them some feedback about how they’re impacting other people and see what the response is.  And hopefully, there’s some openness now or they could become some openness overtime to hearing it and doing something about it.

Andrea:  You know, I know that one of the things that kind of comes up for folks is they feel like they’re already so busy.  Why add something else to the plate?  But one of the things that you said in your book, and of course this is something that I hear or have said before as well, but it’s so important and I’d love to hear you talk about it a little bit more and that’s the idea of slowing down so that you can go faster.  What in the world does that mean?  Tell us more about that.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  First of all, this saying comes from motorcycle racing that’s when I first heard it.  I used to race motorcycles and ended up being very good at it, and I share a lot of stories throughout the book and map that to leadership and that’s a sign that comes from that arena.  What it means as a motorcycle racer is that you need to slow down in order to go faster.  You need to learn the right lanes on the track, meaning the fastest lanes versus the ones that are the shortest distance in order to really grow the fastest you can go.

As a leader, it’s the same thing.  Maybe leaders feel like they’re going as fast as they can go but they’ve probably chosen the wrong lanes.  If you actually have learned how to lead in a different way, you can go faster.  We have to slow down in order to do that. If you slow down and evaluate what you’re doing, how are you doing it, and who you’re being and then change those things to maximize your leadership, now you can go much faster in a much more compassionate kind of way.

Andrea:  And have you seen that really play out with the leaders that you’ve worked with?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  When I’m coaching someone one on one, typically about three to four months into the process, they really start to feel like it’s paying off now.  They’re actually getting the multiplier effect.  It does slow down initially because any new thing that you’re learning, you do have to slow down to learn it.  But once you get that far enough along that learning curve, you get your time back and then overtime it multiplies.

Andrea:  And when you’re doing your coaching, I know that the book is full of so much, you know, even your coaching clients will be able to get a lot out of it on its own. But how much of the content that you share in your book tends to work its way into the coaching process?

Daniel Kimble:  All of it.  Everything in there is based upon my experience.  And definitely going forward, now that the book is published, it’ll be required reading for people I work with as a starting point and will start from a higher foundation, if you will.  And the coaching can go that much further but everything in there is based on my work.

Andrea:  Sure.  Do you incorporate all of it into every coaching situation, do you think?

Daniel Kimble:  Oh yeah.  There’s a lot in there.  So we wouldn’t necessarily cover all that territory with one individual executive but we pull the right pieces at the right time for that executive.

Andrea:  Sure.  And so it’s just based sort of on their needs and what they’re experiencing and that sort of thing?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  What they’re needing at that point in time and there’s a lot more stuff they can do overtime in the book too but wouldn’t necessarily do everything.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm. OK, so how does a mindset focused on the wrong things limit our performance and the performance of those around us?  I really liked the way that you put that “That mindset that’s focused on the wrong things limits our performance and the performance on those around us.”  Can you share both why it impacts us and why it impacts the people around us?

Daniel Kimble: Yeah.  It’s another thing that I pull from motorcycle racing, a saying called, you go where you look.  In racing, it means that where you focus your vision is where your bike will tend to go.  So if you’re focusing on the apex of the next corner, which is where you want to go then that’s what the bike will tend to do.  If you’re focused on the concrete wall on the side of a truck, it will tend to go that direction whether you like it or not.

And the same thing is true in all aspects of life to where we focus our mind is where we tend to go.  So as a leader you want to focus more and more on relationship, more and more on inspiring others to do their best work versus getting stuff done yourself.  Individual leaders oftentimes get promoted based upon their ability to get stuff done.  Now, they need to scale themselves as a leader by doing stuff done through others.  That’s a key transition and you need to focus on that versus getting stuff done yourself.

Andrea:  And so when you’re focused on the wrong things then they’re going to end up being drawing themselves to those things as well because that’s where you’re headed.

Daniel Kimble:  Right.  So for focus as a leader, for example, a common challenge for people who did get promoted up in the ways that I described, they’re often focused a lot on control.  And as a leader, you don’t have direct control over much of anything anymore.  You have to accept that.  So if you’re overly focused on control, you’re going to drive people towards burnout and maybe leaving the company.  Whereas, if you’re driving towards or focusing on inspiring other people by focusing on relationship, now they’re wanting to do their best work versus feeling like they have to do their best work.

Andrea:  Hmm.  I like that.  And I like your focus on this relational component and how important that is.  I know that you’d mentioned kind of page 67, 68; you’d talked about an exercise that you use called the bestfriend exercise. And I know that so many leaders really end up, I don’t know, being self-critical and it’s really difficult for them to not hear their own voice criticizing themselves all the time and beating themselves up because we should be better, “I know I could be better.”  So would you mind sharing with us a little bit about that bestfriend exercise that you do?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s really a focus on changing our inner self-talk to be more positive and more supportive of us being our best self.  We will, by default how we’re wired as well as conditioning over the years, tend too much towards the negative.  We all have a negativity bias in us.  It goes back to our need to survive and also, to significant degree, the way we we’re conditioned as children, oftentimes, and if the exercise is intended to shift that mindset to be more positive.

So, imagine if you have a presentation coming up and you want to really do great on this presentation.  How you talk to yourself makes a big difference in how you show up.  If you’re telling yourself you have to do well versus I want to do well, it’s a very different way to think about it.  So what I ask people to do is to look at from the perspective of, if you were talking to your bestfriend, what would you say to them to support them in that moment versus what your inner critic would automatically say and then change your self-talk to match that bestfriend dialog.

Andrea:  Could you give us an example?

Daniel Kimble:  So for example, just going the one I said, if you have a presentation coming up, you’re telling yourself I have to do well, I have to nail this.  If I don’t, I’m going to be in really bad shape and that kind of stuff.  Instead say, it’s a constant learning curve.  I’m getting better all the time and how can I best do this presentation in this moment given who I am at this point in time, right?

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, it’s so tempting to be hypercritical, I think. And, you know, we ended up comparing and then feeling bad about ourselves and all that.  This idea that we would be kind to ourselves as though we were being kind to our bestfriend I think is a really, really powerful one.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  It’s based also on a self-compassion versus self-esteem.

Andrea:  Yeah.  Go ahead and share.

Daniel Kimble:  Self-esteem is kind of understood.  I think it’s a widely accepted term these days, at least in the United States, I think probably are everywhere else to some degree too and there’s some challenges with that kind of framing of it.  Self-esteem tends to be more conditional based upon how you perform at any given day.  If you believe that you did well that day, you tend to feel good about yourself.  If you think you didn’t do well that day then you tend to feel poorly about yourself.

Self-compassion is about treating yourself well no matter what.  Again, bestfriend exercise, how would you talk to yourself as if you’re your own best friend?  And it tends to create better results is the interesting thing.  So, inner slave driver doesn’t actually work.

Andrea:  Sure. Why shouldn’t we put people on a pedestal?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  That’s a rich topic.

Andrea:  Yeah, it is.  I like it.

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah.  I highlight some of those things on the book.  But it’s about if we’re putting other people on a pedestal or putting ourselves beneath that person and thereby letting ourselves off the hook, for me, not our best self.  Like that person or that set of people that we put above us they’re somehow superhuman and we’re not is what we’re telling ourselves.  But yet, they’re human just like we are.  They’re just as flawed as we are.  They just, maybe, have some skills or experiences that we don’t have, but we can definitely get there if we want to.  So, we actually give ourselves an excuse not to try harder to be our best self by putting other people on a pedestal.

Andrea:  I think that that is really fascinating.  I see it a lot and I like the way that you talk about it because it’s something that it can get in the way of so many things, like you said, being your best self. But then also you turn it around as well in the book and you talked about, what about when people put you on a pedestal?  And I’ll just read a little quote from the book if you don’t mind.  Is that okay?

Daniel Kimble:  Sure.

Andrea:   You said, “As we get better and better at mastering the inner game of leadership, we will become more prominent and more influential.  As a result, we will attract more people who will put us on a pedestal.  We need to be as weary of anyone putting us on a pedestal as we are putting others on a pedestal for the same reasons.  Elevating us to an exalted status will likely prevent them from being totally honest with us.  They will struggle to own their personal power while in our presence and as a result, they will be less effective.  And at some point they may find a reason to tear us down from that pedestal and suddenly go from believing that we can do nothing wrong to believing that we can do nothing right.”  I absolutely love that paragraph.  Where have you seen this happen?

Daniel Kimble:  It happens all the time in life, really, and in so many aspects, you know.  Bring it back to leadership in the business world; it’s easy to put a senior executive if we’re not a senior executive ourselves on a pedestal.  It’s easier if we are a senior executive, we will attract more and more people who will have a tendency to put us on a pedestal and then they won’t be fully candid.  They’ll be worried about saying the wrong thing.  They’ll be less effective because, again, they don’t know their power in our presence.  So it’s not good for anybody, whatever direction it goes.

Andrea:  I really love it because you’re speaking to the idea of helping other people find their voice.  So how do you keep them from putting you on a pedestal, I guess?

Daniel Kimble:  It’s a mixed thing. First of all, there’s only so much you can do because they have to own their own mindset, right?  But you can also influence them by helping them.  If you’re that senior executive for example, help them feel more at ease.  Your role by itself, no matter who you are as a person, isn’t intimidating to a lot of people.  So recognize that and try to meet them where they’re at as much as you can and put them at ease.

And the last thing you want to do as a senior executive is to in any way, especially, with your body language, your nonverbal communication, communicate that anything that’s “bad news” is something you didn’t actually want to hear.   You want to welcome that as much as you possibly can because so many people will not share that with you and you need that information.

Andrea:  OK.  Say that again because I think that’s really important.  You’re saying that that when other people have something to share that they don’t think that you want to hear that you should welcome that.  That’s kind of what you’re saying, right?

Daniel Kimble:  Exactly, because as decision makers in an organization, we need to have timely accurate information or else we’re making decisions based upon untimely and inaccurate information and then that’s how strategy decisions go wrong.  That’s how all kinds of bad decisions end up happening based upon and/or untimely information.  And so, people are conditioned, again and again, to be concerned about looking bad, feeling embarrassed saying something to a senior executive that might add some personal repercussions, you know, “bad news.”  But as a senior executive, we need to make sure that we are welcoming that because, otherwise, we won’t get it.  And then we’re making decisions based upon untimely inaccurate information.

Andrea:  So, essentially, don’t shoot the messenger

Daniel Kimble:  In any way, you know, your words matter of course, but who you’re being, your nonverbal is more important than that situation.

Andrea:  Hmm.  And you go on a little bit later to talk about giving people emotional gifts and I feel like that really ties to that, “Giving people an emotional gift when you interact with them.”  So can you tell us what that means and what it would look like in even that situation?

Daniel Kimble:  Really, yeah, there are many ways you can do it.  The one that comes to mind right away is body language, be open with your body language, make warm soft eye contact, smile a little bit, show openness with your arms and your legs, don’t cross your arms, et cetera.  Try not to frown.  Some people, by default, will just kind of have a frown on their face.  It’s not that they necessarily intended that but be aware of that if that’s your default, you know, facial possession and try to pick something that feels more warmth to other people.

Andrea:  OK, so I want to close this little piece.  This is a difficult one and this is that leadership can be such a lonely road.  I always had a mentor that would tell me that.  What advice do you have for leaders to navigate this potential loneliness?

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, it’s interesting, almost a paradox.  But the more effective we are as a leader, the more lonely we are likely to be because there’s fewer and fewer people who appears to us in that sense of where we’re at in the organization.  And so what we want to do is to consciously, throughout our career, throughout our lives, be cultivating relationships with people who we do feel are good peers for us, ideally, outside of our organization.

Because we’re not necessarily likely we can trust somebody fully that’s in the organization, especially, for in a very senior role.  And have those kind of coach-mentor-peer relationships outside the organization that we felt like we can really share openly, candidly exactly what we think and feel and be willing to say in those settings like, “I don’t know what to do here, tell me some of your experiences to help me out.”  In a leadership situation, you don’t necessarily want to say that to people because you want to make sure that you’ve got the air of confidence, if you will.  You only want to be transparent of course, but you also want to be confident in what you’re doing.

So having those outside relationships goes a long way towards solving that loneliness problem.  As you become more and more effective as a leader, you get more lonely, you have to have other relationships to rely on.  If you don’t have that, the risk is that you’ll lose touch.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Is there any last thing that you would want to say, a piece of advice that we might have missed in your book.  I know there’s so much in there.  It’s so good, guys, you really need to go out and get it, Unshakable Influence.  And you can tell us where to get it here in a minute, but as far as, you know, is there any one more thing that you would want leaders to hear from you today?

Daniel Kimble:  I would say there’s so much in the book, but the key thing I want to leave people with is to try to view everything in your leadership life as a mirror back to you.  So whatever you’re experiencing, how can you influence that situation for the better because you have the most control over yourself?  And always look to how you can improve yourself to improve the situation versus trying to change other people. That’s the first place you want to look.

Andrea:  Very good!  OK, so Daniel, where can people find you and your book?

Daniel Kimble:  You can find me on my website resonanceexecutivecoaching.com. The book is on Amazon, it’s called Unshakable Influence: Mastering the Inner Game of Leadership.

Andrea:  Alright.  Well, thank you so much for being on the Voice of Influence podcast today and sharing more about Unshakable Influence.  We appreciate it!

Daniel Kimble:  Yeah, thanks for having me.  It was a great time.

 

END

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How to Take the Pressure Off High-Stakes Conversations

Episode 90

Why do high-stakes conversations always feel so intense? Is it really necessary for these difficult conversations to feel like they’re really so high-stakes? In this episode, I discuss the two questions above, what makes a conversation a high-stakes one, three questions to help you be prepared and ready to create the best outcome we can, the importance of understanding how you handle stressful situations and conversations, and more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  This is where we talk about the intersection between leadership, human dynamics, and service.  And I’m really glad that you’re here with us today.  We are going to talk today about high stakes conversations.  Why do they always feel so intense and do they need to?  Is it really necessary to feel like these difficult conversations are really that high stakes?  What makes a conversation a high stakes conversation?

There are times when there really is a lot on the line, when you’re in negotiations, when you have to make a change and confront somebody about making a change.  There can be high stakes conversations, no doubt about it. But I do believe that after observing and being a part of so many different kinds of difficult conversations, they are quite often not nearly as high stakes as we make them out to be.  Sometimes, we build those high stakes conversations up so much in our minds that we end up showing up to them in ways that really aren’t helpful.

So, today we’re going to talk about how, to not necessarily lower the stakes but, to be prepared in such a way that those high stakes conversations actually turn out so we’re prepared and ready to create the best outcome we can.  The first question is what is really at stake?  Now on the surface level, there are going be things that are stake.  As we mentioned before, negotiations; it could have to do with money.  It could have to do with a deal.  It could have to do with whether or not you get the sale or whether or not you’re able to convince someone to get onboard with your idea so that you can move forward. 

So what is it on the surface level that is at stake?  What is this conversation about in an objective sense? Think about it in terms of chips, like poker chips.  You might be holding a few poker chips.  The other person might be holding a few poker chips.  There might be some at stake on the table and the question is where will these poker chips end up at the end of the game?  It’s important to know what exactly those poker chips are. So before you head into a conversation, think about what are the objective things at stake. 

The next question is what outcome do you want?

Now, this may seem obvious on the front end, but if you think about it, sometimes we’re not exactly sure what we want to happen.  So, we might have an idea of where we want those poker chips to end up, but the real question is why do we want them to end up there?  If you end up with all the poker chips, for example, if you end up with everything that you want, what will happen to the relationship or what will happen to the company or what will happen with buy-in?  What do you really want?  Do you want everybody to do what you say, or do you want the company to move forward?  Do you want your initiative to move forward?  Do you want your relationship to move forward? 

So, this is where we take the idea of those objective things, those poker chips.  And we say, OK, those are the things that are at stake, but just a layer beneath that is a sense of what the goal really is.  What is the ultimate goal of the game, to win?  What does the win look like?  So, get a clear picture in your head of what the win really looks like.  What does it feel like?  What do you want to accomplish out of this goal, out of this conversation?  What do you want to accomplish out of this conversation?

It’s really amazing to me how often people are really not sure what they want.  They have a sense of what they want.  They kind of see on the surface of what they want, but there’s so much more going on inside of them that they’re having a hard time clearly picturing a positive outcome.  So, get very, very clear on what would be a positive outcome, what are you willing and then think in terms of options.  If this option were to happen, what would that mean for the situation if option B were to happen?  What would that mean for this situation?  Think those things through.  Think through the different kinds of outcomes that could take place and what you’re OK with.

You might have an ideal situation, but you might also have a situation that you’re OK with.  So, make it really clear in your mind what is it that you want out of this situation but then also what are you willing what else would be a positive outcome even if it’s not the ideal?  Alright, so we have a sense of your poker chips.  You know what you’re dealing with here and then you also know what you want to happen.  

Now the question is what do you really have to lose?

Alright, we’re going to take this from that surface level and we’re going to go way deeper.  So you know on one sense that you have these poker chips or these certain things that are at play that could be lost.  But there’s more going on.  There’s always more going on inside of us because we’re human beings.  We have desires.  We have fears.  We have things that we really care about and so we have to kind of look down a little deeper to find out what it is inside of us that is at stake.

This really gets to a sense of your ego or that sense of value and purpose and identity: What do you really have to lose inside?  So, here are the two things that often come up.

  • Rejection
  • Failure

“If I am rejected, if somehow or another this thing that I’m offering or somehow in this situation I am rejected,” then some people are going to feel an intense sense of lack of value that they’re not enough.  They’re going to feel like they are being rejected as a person, not just because not just their surface kind of poker chips being rejected, but their whole sense of self can be wrapped up in the fact that they’re offering something or in the fact that they are having this conversation and they don’t want to be rejected by the other person in some kind of way.

So is it a sense of rejection that could bother you or is it a sense of failure?  Is it, “If I don’t accomplish my goal then I fail and if I fail then what does that say about me as a person and my value?”  Both rejection and failure have to do with our personal sense of value, and whether or not we believe that other people believe that we’re valuable or that we believe that we are valuable.  So it’s this sense of our own personal value that is at stake when these things happen, “If I’m rejected or if I fail,  what is the point?”  “So who am I?”  “If I’m rejected or if I fail, what am I really worth?”  “What do I have to offer?” “Why does it even matter?”  These sorts of questions are deep, internal questions that you may not even realize you’re asking on your thinking about your high stakes conversations, but you might know that they are present if you pay very close attention to how nervous you are or how intense you are in the pursuit of getting what you want.

One of the tools that I use with clients, either in groups or one on one is the Fascinate® Assessment.  It is a simple assessment, easy to comprehend, but yet super accurate.  You can take it quickly and it can make a huge difference with a small amount of effort.  And so that’s the one of the reasons why I use this assessment.  But this past week I was doing a workshop with a team and we were talking about one of the concepts in the Fascinate® Assessment, which is the sense of double trouble.  And what that means is that each personality is different.  Everybody speaks with a different kind of language, were perceived in different ways and then you put a couple of those different languages together and you come up with an archetype.

It’s sort of your unique way of interacting with the world, how the world sees you.  But if you get super stressed out then you can double up on just one of your languages or advantages is what they call them.  And you can get super, super dialed in on it.  And the way that I look at this is that our personalities are like a super power.  They’re going to show up big, regardless of whether or not we’re using them for good or for evil; or perhaps a better way to put that is whether or not we’re really helping people with our personality and the way that we communicate or we are causing problems with it.

And this particular assessment gives people a real clear sense of, this is what it looks like when you are stressed out and it’s not good for other people.  So, for example, the Innovation Advantage, somebody who particularly thinks outside the box and is creative and that sort of thing.  If they are totally stressed out, they just want to be left alone. It’s like this sense of anarchy like “Just leave me alone.”  Everything feels like chaos.  They cause chaos when they get stressed out and that sort of thing.

Whereas, someone with the Alert personality, which is a little bit more about being detail-oriented and that sort of thing, when they get really stressed out, they could tend to be more like a control freak and wanting to pin people down and get exact on their information in their processes.  And it could be really annoying to other people and it’s truly seemed like a control freak.

Well, we each have these different things inside of us.  You know, we might not have the exact same ones, but we all have a personality.  We all have gifts and talents, abilities.  But these things can also be used for hurting people, for causing problems when we are motivated in the wrong way.  So, one of the helpful things about this particular assessment is that it shows you how your personality can look when you get stressed out.  So when you start to see yourself doing these things, even though you don’t want to see that in yourself, even though I don’t want to see myself as being too powerful or throwing ice like Elsa, I don’t want to see that.

But when I do see that it is an indication that I’m stressed out right now to the point where I am being motivated by fear.  When fear is really stirring up inside of us, you know, you get to that inner brain, the place in your brain where it really starts to work with fight or flight and it takes over the rational brain, the frontal lobe.  It just sort of like become such a big deal, like “I have to get this figured out.” “I have to solve this for myself.”  “I have to get the right answer because if I don’t, I feel like I’m going to die.”  And it’s easy to laugh at, but think about it when you get totally stressed out, do you ever feel like, “Oh my gosh,” like you’re just going to die if something happens?

My example is that when I was younger, maybe early twenties, well before that, I really felt like I needed to be perceived as good, strong, and competent.  Those were kind of the main things that, “Boy, if Andrea doesn’t show up in this way then I don’t know what’s going to happen” because I was really, really concerned that if people didn’t see me like that, they wouldn’t listen to me.  They wouldn’t take my advice.  They wouldn’t want to be my friend, all those things.  And so my sense of identity was this kind of good, strong and competent persona, and I had to be her.  I had to be that Andrea.  If I broke out of that box in any kind of way, if the ideal Andrea turned into, “Oh wait, she’s not so good.”  “She got in trouble for something,” or “she is not so strong, look at her, she’s crying.” Or “She’s not competent.”  “Look, she just made a fool of herself.”  When those things would happen, I would feel like I was going to die.  It was that intense.

I told the story in my book, but one of the times that I really sort of broke me out of this situation was that I felt it so intensely when I was in my early 20’s that I felt like all three of those things kind of burst out of my box all at the same time. And I wanted to literally go dig a hole and cover myself up with all the dirt and hide from everybody because I felt like I was so, not me.  I felt like I’d screwed it up and now that I can’t be me, now that somebody has seen me as not me, like who am I now?  I totally lost my sense of self because my sense of self was wrapped up in the good, strong, and competent persona.  And I really thought that was the real me.

Well, what happens when we get into these high stakes conversations is that all of that is at stake. Whatever it is that is your sense of self, your persona that you believe needs to be there in order for people to like you, in order for people to be influenced by you, in order for people to follow you, and in order for you to succeed; they have to see you in this certain way.  All of that is at stake in these high stakes conversations.

And so my question for you is what is that specifically, for you?  What is it for you that is at stake when you show up to these high stakes conversations and if things don’t go your way, what will happen to you inside?  Are you worried about rejection?  Are you worried about failure?  Usually, it’s one of those two things or some variation on those two things.  When you come to a conversation and your primary goal is to survive and to get what you need to maintain your sense of your persona then everything is at stake.  You’re going to come to that conversation with more intensity or perhaps with more fear or you’ll totally run away from it, but you’re going to be in that sense of fight or flight because you feel like you’re going to die if you don’t succeed.

So what do you need to do to navigate this?  How do we need to handle this?  Well, number one, we need to get really clear on all of the answers to those questions that I just posed.  What is at stake on a surface level?  What outcome do I really want to have and what would I be OK with?  But then also what’s in stake inside of me, because if you go to that level and you’re able to recognize that, “Oh my gosh, I feel like so stressed out.”  “I’m looking like a different version of myself than I really want to portray to other people.”  “I am feeling more intense,” or “I’m feeling more reserved than usual and I’m letting fear and the fear of my own self being rejected or myself failing.”  “I’m so motivated by that fear that it feels like this is a huge deal.”  “It feels like life and death are at stake.”

So many times we put those kinds of stakes on these conversations that would otherwise not need to feel like high stakes conversations. 

So how do we deal with it?  The real question is how do you move toward a motivation that is not fearful but instead is loving?  Now, I’m talking about focusing, turning your focus from yourself and self-preservation and survival and being able to get what I need to feel OK.  Instead of feeling like that to turning it around to what do I have to offer in this situation?  What do I have to offer the person that I’m maybe talking to?  How do I need to show up in a way that is going to be positive and actually contribute and help them?  Because if I show up as my best self, if I show up in the way that I’ve been gifted to show up, then I know that I’ve done my job because the other people need what I have to offer.  The situation needs what I have to offer.

And “if I can focus on offering what I have to offer instead of on surviving and making sure that I feel OK, if I can make sure that I’m actually focusing on the other people and the situation itself and what I can bring to the situation” then you’re taking yourself out of the equation.  You’re taking your own sense of value out of the equation and all of a sudden the stakes are not nearly as high because they’re not life and death like it felt like before.

And here’s how you know that you have gotten to the place where you are filled with love instead of fear in the situation, it’s when you are willing to sacrifice your own comfort. You’re willing to swallow your pride.  You’re willing to do whatever it takes to offer the best of who you are to the situation.  It’s when you actually take those steps, when you actually feel uncomfortable and keep moving forward, anyway, that you know that you are being motivated by purpose and love and that you are here to offer the best of who you are to the other person and to the situation.

And when you know that, you know that you have not, that not only does your voice matter, but you have made it matter more.  

These are some of the things that we do when we work with emerging leaders.  When we do executive coaching, we do training.  Everything that we offer at Voice of Influence has depth to it.  And so if you’re wanting to help your organization, if you’re wanting to help yourself move to a deeper level in a sense of freedom and influence that is beyond what you can imagine, there is a path and it is unexpected.  It is the unexpected path to connection and impact.

Contact us at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net to schedule a conversation about how we can help you, help your team be a voice of influence.

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Help Your Workforce Become Ambassadors for Your Brand

Episode 89

As you likely know by now, I’ve been focusing on customer service for the past several weeks and interviewing my fellow Smart Customer Service conference speakers. Today, I would like to give you my personal takes on customer service. In this episode, I briefly discuss three of the most important aspects to keep in mind while building a customer support team and then I go in depth about the main component that often gets overlooked when working on these three things.

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!  So over the last couple of months, we have been really focusing in on customer service here at the Voice of Influence podcast.  And the reason why we’ve been doing that is that I’m going to be speaking at Smart Customer Service, which is a national conference for customer service in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st. So, I’ve taken this opportunity to connect with other speakers at this event and invite them to participate in interviews for the Voice of Influence podcast for a couple of different reasons.  First of all, to share customer service insights from some of the nation’s leading experts then also to be able to connect with them personally.  I wanted to kind of get to know some of the people that I’d be speaking with and then also to promote the conference.

Well, today, I want to share with you a little bit more about what my take is on customer service.  So, I think that we all know that service isn’t all about the other person.  It’s about connecting with them, helping them solving their problems, making sure that they’re having a good experience with your brand, with your company or with your organization.  You’re wanting to be there for the people that you’re here to serve.  That’s what customer service is really all about. But there are a number of things that can get in the way of really doing it well.  And some of those things have been already talked about in the last couple of months. 

One of those things is branding and brand voice and making sure that customer service agents really know what to say, how to say it, and how to really communicate in a way that is in line with the company or the brand.  So that the person who is calling or the person who is interacting with that customer service agent that they would always have a similar experience and that they would feel like they are really connecting with the brand when they’re connecting with that person.  That’s one really important thing.

Another thing would be the idea of essential skills or the ability to communicate well, the ability to empathize, and the ability to write well utilizing those centralized documents or branding elements and bringing that into how they communicate.  So communication is really another big piece of it. 

And there’s always the issue of “Well, how do you keep people?  How do you keep customer service agents?  It’s a kinda hard job.” If you think about it, there are people who are listening to complaints almost all day long.  Now, there are some benefits, I mean, one of the things that you do all day long is solve problems for people, and so in that sense, there is something that can really be satisfying about customer service. But in general, it can be a really kind of a difficult job.  You’re always putting yourself out there to help out, but you might not always be able to be the one to make the difference.  You might not always be able to solve the problem, and you might not always know what the next thing to do or where to send people.  Or you might be dealing with somebody who’s really upset and they’re not necessarily mad at you, but you’re the one that sort of taking on the brands of all of the anger and frustrations of the person you might be speaking with. So, customer service agents also have to deal with that. 

It’s a rough job; I mean it’s not easy to really do and to do it well.  And so it’s difficult to keep people in those positions.  So companies are always looking for ways to encourage people and to keep them.  And one of those ways can be rewards and recognition, giving a raise, or keeping track of how well they’re doing on things.  So, these are all really, really important aspects of doing customer service and having a customer service team and training them well to be able to handle all these situations and all these needs, and to know how to handle all of the technical things as well. But I fear that we can miss out on something if we just do those things.  If we are giving them everything that they need but they’re not still staying, you know.  Maybe they’re still leaving.  They’re still not sticking around.  The numbers aren’t as high as you want them to be or your customers are still coming back with a lot of complaints.  Customer satisfaction still isn’t where you want it to be. Maybe you’re hitting the status quo and it’s working out okay for you, but you know that there’s another level.  Like you know you could take it to the next level, but you’re not just sure how to do it because you’ve been working on all these different things like centralization of information and rewarding your people and doing all these things that you can to give them the skills that they need to be able to do what they need to do their jobs.

But I tell you, there’s something that is missing and that’s something gets down to the core of a person.  And it hits on a human need that is so, so vital for us to connect with and that is helping your people to truly connect and genuinely connect with your company’s purpose and your customer’s need. So, when I think of customer service and all of the issues that are surrounding it, the struggles, the solutions, the main thing that I keep saying not being present, at least not to the degree that I think it could be is helping the workforce to truly connect with the company’s purpose, with the company’s values, their mission, or their vision to feel like they’re really a part of it.  So that when they come to work every day, they feel like they have meaning, that their work has meaning and purpose.  So they’re not just going to work but they’re going to meet a challenge, to bring the best of who they are to the challenges in front of them.

And my guess is that it if you’re listening to this episode, this podcast; you are probably the kind of person who really does want to see that happen for your people.  You want them to feel purpose-driven.  You want them to have a sense of passion inside of them and care about what their job is.  You want them to have meaning and to feel like that their work matters in the world.

So on the podcast, I frequently ask guests “Why did you start getting interested in your specific area of expertise?”  “Why do you do what you do?” 

Well, let me answer that question for you.  So, Voice of Influence is born out of my background in actually singing.  When I was young, as a child, my family would sing together.  We would go around to different churches in our small community and put on these little programs and I would sing solos and my sister and I would sing duets, and our family would sing all together.  And we had this just little thing going on where we would sing a lot and I sang a lot growing up, and that was kind of what I wanted to do when I grew up.

When I was in high school, I ended up choosing a college that was a big music school, and I was really excited to be able to use my voice.  And the reason why I was excited to use my voice is that I knew that when I got up in front of an audience that they would be moved by what I would sing, and I knew it because I’ve done it over and over again.  I just knew how to connect to the meaning of the song and then invite other people into that experience so that they could connect to the meaning of the song as well.  So that they would feel moved.

Well, one of my college professors, she taught me something about my voice.  You see, voice is something that is really kind of personal.  It’s different than playing the piano or playing a different instrument, because a different instrument, it could go out of tune on its own.  You know a key could break or something could need oiled and that’s something that’s apart from the person who is performing. But a voice, on the other hand, this comes from your own body.  It’s something that arises out of you.  There is a certain natural ability that people have with their voice.  They are able to sing high or low.  They are able to have a certain kind of tone or hear the pitch so that they can make sure that they’re on key.  All of these things are very, very personal because they come out of the person themselves.

And so when I was in college, I had a voice teacher who was sort of different than the ones I’d had before.  Instead of just welcoming me into her room and starting our scales and then working on our technical details that came up within songs that I was practicing, she would start off by asking me how I was doing. 

Now, why would she waste time at the beginning of every lesson to say, “How are you doing?” I asked her this one time and her response was something to the effect that “If people come into my office and they’re all worried about something else that’s going on, they’re not going to be able to use their voice freely.”  And I thought that was so profound. 

I see that and I see how people use their figurative voice, their voice of influence, the one that comes out of themselves in order to be able to have an impact on others. And this voice that wants to make a difference, this voice that wants to help, that wants to serve well, this voice is just as personal as the one that I was using to sing.  It’s personal.  There’s a vulnerability to using it and to practicing it.  It can make a huge difference in somebody’s confidence level and their ability to really use it well.

So at Voice of Influence, we believe that everyone has the ability to have a voice of influence, that every voice is unique.  That we’re born with the ability to do certain things and we’re born with the passion to do certain things but then we can also gain skills.  We can get better in other areas as well. 

We believe that every voice matters on a human level that every voice in your company matters and every voice that calls into your call center or works with your customer service team, that every one of those voices matters. But at the same time, we can do things to make them matter more.  We can grow.  We can become more of a voice of influence, not by forcing technique, not by saying, “We have to push it out.”  “We’re trying to get people to do things.”  “We’re trying to force our customer service team to say it this certain way or to drop people in and not to be forceful but to be influential, because it’s not only our voice that matter, it’s also the voice of the customer that matters as well.”

So if you’re wanting your customer service team to be an influence, to build their influence with your customers, then they need to know what it means to have a voice of influence.  They need to be able to have a sense of their own personal identity and connect to the purpose of your company and really know what it means to be a voice of influence.

Do they need that knowledge?  Do they need to be able to know what it is that your company does and how to help your customers and what their job is?  Of course, they need that. 

Do they need skills to learn how to communicate and to be able to handle the processes and the people well?  Of course they do, but they also need to be able to connect to the purpose of your company. 

They need to be able to awaken their passion and feel like they can be a genuine ambassador of sorts for your company.  You don’t want your people to pretend that they care.  You want them to actually care and that’s what your customers want as well. And if your people, if your workforce actually cares and they really do feel connected to the company, then they are going to be able to connect more naturally, more freely with your customers.  And then soon your brand promise and your scripts, your centralized documents; those are going to become part of your customer service agents.  Instead of having them be an external tool that they use, that they’re trying to put on for your customers, they’re going to become those things so that they truly embody the brand promise.  The things that you really care about as a company, they’ll embody that and be able to be a true ambassador for your customers.

Now, one of the questions that always comes up is, well, if we know that this is what we need to do, if we know that it’s important to build culture, to do a good job of communicating our purpose and our values to our workforce, then why aren’t we doing it?  Or why aren’t we studying the companies that do it really well that they’ve had success? 

One of the answers that I’ve heard and I’ve heard it a number of times is that the executives feel like that’s beneath them.  It’s beneath them intellectually to go down to that personal level and help their people to really connect with their company. But I don’t think that’s the only thing. 

I think it might be to serve this level thing that you might see in some companies, but I think that more often than not leaders wanted to help their people do this.  They see it.  They see that it’s a good thing.  They can acknowledge that at least in their heads.  But deep down, they really don’t think that they have what it takes to pull it off. 

Leaders struggle to think that they can actually help their people and really turn around the culture this idea of connecting.  It may not be something that they’re good at, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t willing to go there.  It’s just that it’s so scary because it’s not familiar.

But let me tell you something.  If you have any desire, whatsoever, to really almost empower your workforce, to help them to embody your brand, your brand promise, to help them really become ambassadors for your company; if you long for that, if you want them to feel purpose and meaning in their work, that is all it takes to start the process.  If you start out with that longing then I’m here to tell you that you can do it. 

You do have what it takes. You may also need to develop skills.  You may need to gain a sense of your own personal identity and your own personal sense of purpose.  But if this isn’t purposeful, if it isn’t meaningful to help your people find meaning in their work to connect with your company in a deep meaningful way, then what it is?  It starts with the longing and then if you really don’t feel like you have what it takes, if you’re not sure what next steps to take, then that’s something that we can help you with.

As I mentioned, I will be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference here in Washington, DC in about a week.  And in that talk, I’m going to be talking specifically about what your people need in their training in order to be able to truly connect with your company and your company’s purpose.  I’m also going to be talking about how to get buy-in, executive buy-in, as well as buy-in from managers and frontline service agents in order to make this kind of transformation.

If you’re able to be at my session, I would love to have you there.  Please tell me that you listened to this podcast, I’ll have a special gift for you.  If you’re not able to be there, then email me at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net.  That’s andrea@voiceofinfluence.net.  We will find a way to share that information with you because just like the people who work for you, your voice matters, and you can make it matter more.

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Customer Relationship Management with Bob Fernekees

Episode 88

Over the past several weeks I’ve been speaking with other presenters who’ll be joining me at the Smart Customer Service conference in Washington D.C. starting on April 29th. Well, today I have a very special treat for you because I was fortunate enough to speak with the leader of the conference, Bob Fernekees. Bob is also the Publisher of CRM Magazine. In this episode, Bob discusses what led him to the customer service industry and why it means so much to him, the work he does at CRM Magazine, how the Smart Customer Service brand came to be, the changes and trends he’s noticing in the customer service field, his thoughts on A.I. and how it will impact the landscape of customer service and brand management, the details of his upcoming Smart Customer Service conference, and more!

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Alright folks, so you know that the last couple of months we have been focusing in on customer service, in particular, in leading up to the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1st.  And today I have with me Bob Fernekees who is the publisher of CRM Magazine and is in charge of this conference.

 

Andrea:  So Bob, we’re honored to have you with us today.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  I’d love being here, Andrea.  I love it!

Andrea:  Alright, so Bob, can you tell us, first of all, tell us a little bit about CRM Magazine and what you do there?

Bob Fernekees:  OK.  Well, I’m the publisher of the magazine and I understand that a lot of people may not know where the magazine is these days.  But it was the chief form of communication, especially in B2B 20 years ago.  We launched the magazine in 1998 actually as sales and field force automation.  Around 2000, we saw that things were changing and we changed the name of the magazine to CRM Magazine.

Sales and field force automation is still a thing, believe me, but CRM has grown well beyond the scope of just sales and marketing customer service.  But I’d say in the last 20 years, the big change has been that the customer service piece has really become huge.  And that’s reflected in the pages of the magazine or website Destination CRM.

And we actually started a second website, Smart Customer Service to support not only the conference, but really to give customer service people a dedicated place where they could get information.  Not much marketing automation or sales type of information, it’s 100 percent customer service focused.  So, we’re still going strong 21 years later, so it’s been an exciting ride and things have changed so much but I’m sure you know that as well, Andrea.  Things have changed, you know, unbelievably in the last 20 years in technology.

Andrea:  Oh, certainly.  So what are some of the biggest changes that you’re seeing now?  

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, it’s funny because every single year, there’s almost a theme of new technologies that are sort of bursting on the scene and really become just all over the place in terms of media coverage and messaging from vendors and things that people are concerned about.  This year, definitely I would have to say artificial intelligence and machine learning is sort of the big buzz.

As with most technologies that especially really large, you know, large life-changing technologies, it will take many years for these technologies sort of work themselves through the system.  And probably in 20 years from now, they’ll kind of dropout of sight almost like when, the turn of the 2000’s cloud computing was a huge change in technology.

It couldn’t even be thought of before that because, you know, in the 1990s, late 1990s, most people were still using dial up.  You just didn’t have the bandwidth or the infrastructure to support real cloud computing.  But now it would be really odd if you heard, end users or vendors touting their ability to kept cloud computing.  It just becomes everywhere and that’s probably what’s going to happen to a large degree with the artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know, in a decade or two. 

Andrea:  So it’ll be so normal that we won’t even talk about it anymore.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely.  I guarantee that that will happen.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And there are many, many different cases of that, but you know, just think cell phones, just think anything. And yeah that’s the way it’ll go but it’ll take a while.  

Andrea:  So do you think that AI will replace customer service to a certain degree or completely?  Or do you think that there’s always going to be a role for human to human connection in customer service?

Bob Fernekees:  Well that’s a really good question and we’ve done lots of webcasts and lots of content around this.  And I could tell you for the foreseeable future, AI, machine learning, you know, all the technology portions of it will do pretty much more of the same which is what the technology does great.  It takes low value interactions and automates them.  So that nobody really wants to talk to a human being, especially if they want to do something that’s fairly simple.

And that will just become, you know, web self-service on steroids where the AI or the machine learning portion of it will just make that so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient voice, which was a big thing 20 years ago is coming back around with all the conversational technologies and natural language, you know, conversion.  So that people will be interacting instead of using a keyboard, especially since everybody is on their cell phones right now, a voice will become huge.

And so all of that self-service that can be conducted through AI or machine learning will be done, but there will always be humans on the other side, especially for high value or really complex or just the out-of-the-ordinary types of questions and issues.  Now, from what I understand is that, that will really make the life of your typical contact center agent a lot more interesting just because they won’t constantly be asking, “How do I reset my password?”  “How do I do this?”  “How do I do that?”  They’ll just be dealing more or less on more interesting, less repetitive types of service issues.

Andrea:   High value, as you said.  Interesting.  I just had a question in my mind, just a second.  So how do you see AI helping being almost like a brand asset more than even just as a quick answer to solve a problem?  Is there a way the AI is or can be even encouraging the brand connection with the customer or is it mostly going to be just “This is the way we do it.  We get it done fast and that’s what we’re offering you here in this moment.”  Is there any kind of way to connect with the brand anymore with AI?

Bob Fernekees:  You know what, I think that really forward-looking business leaders right now are looking at that piece of it, AI and brand, really hard because you know as the old song goes, it’s really, you know, a lot more…well, put it this way, selling on price the old way doesn’t really create value for a brand because everybody can sell at a lower rate up to a given point.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm.

Bob Fernekees  But when you’re using AI, and that’s the other great thing about the industry and the technology piece that we’re in right now, Andrea, is that it’s not customer service and marketing have blended together, customer service and sales have blended together.  So in many ways, there won’t really be those kinds of delineations.  Yeah, there’ll be outreach demand generation and those types of things but building a brand that will be done through sort of a mixing or melding of all three.  So when you’ve got AI into the mix and, you know, machine learning, you’ll really have brand managers trying to capture the essence of what their brand is to a prospect or a customer.

Now, it’s really hard to see when we’re talking about consumer product goods.  I don’t know enough about consumer product goods, I’ll say it right now, but to build a brand around, you know let’s say laundry detergent is really hard for me personally to conceptualize.  To build a brand around mountain climbing equipment, that seems a lot easier because, you know, immediately you can say that, you know, “Hey, delivering high quality content, or somebody climbing El Capitan is something that could really enhance your brand.”  I’m sure you can do that on a laundry detergent side too, but it’s just a lot easier when you think of a brand that’s much more extreme.

So yeah, I think, you know, AI will definitely allow all those things and it’ll be able to do trillions of computations to say that Andrea Wenburg would really enjoy receiving this communication from us and here’s what we think will be her next action and, you know, all those things that you can’t really do right now.  And it’s probably very hard for a lot of people to conceptualize these things right now just because no one else has.  But we’re headed into that territory where there will be lots and lots of clever users that no one has thought of before.  I mean, just think of Facebook.

Andrea:  Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Bob Fernekees:  I mean, you know, everybody knew it’s a great idea just because there was social media before that, but to this extent, probably not literally changing democracy.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  Well, and I was even thinking about Facebook algorithms and how the other day I purchased a Growth Mindset workbook for my kids, OK.  And then the next day on both Instagram and Facebook, I’m seeing ads about another workbook by that same company that’s on resilience now.

Bob Fernekees: Right.

Andrea:  It’s a lot like what you’re talking about in terms of being able to predict what the next step would be for the customer.

Bob Fernekees:  Absolutely, absolutely. Now, I think the way that most companies, and believe me it’s getting way, way, way more complex, especially up to maybe two years ago, I think most companies did that type of ad serving, you know, in a very heavy-handed flatfooted type of way.  So that if you bought a Ford car and signed the deal last month for the next six months, you’d be seeing ads for Ford cars and it’s like “Ohh, I already bought one and I don’t know why I kept seeing this now.”

Now, you know, that’s just a technology in its infancy.  But, you know, now whether or not they predicted the needs of your children to get these workbooks, probably not, but they definitely predicted your likelihood of buying another workbook on a similar but different topic in serving you that ad.  And that’ll just get way more, way more creepy.

Andrea:  You know that’s an interesting way to put it, because I do think that people feel a little like creeped out by things like that.

Bob Fernekees:  Sure.

Andrea:  Yeah, they probably should.  But at the same time, it sounds like we’re going to be not creeped out by that in 20 years is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Well, yeah.  Like I said, I mean, you know, there’s an episode of The Office where Dwight is trying to sell his car to Andy and he keeps saying, “Buy this car, buy this car, buy this car.”  And that’s kind of what we’re getting right now in terms of the immaturity of technology right now.  So, yes, it does sound, you know, it is heavy-handed and not real subtle.  But, you know, possibly in the future there will be targeted offers for things that you really need, didn’t know about but could really use that ad value to your life other than just buying the exact same workbook with a slightly different content.

Andrea:  Sure.

Bob Fernekees:  And, you know, in all the ramifications like how I could figure out how old these kids are and what they’re doing, you know, going along through every grade that they go into from now until they get out of school.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, that’s interesting.  I’m trying to think of what the subtle way of doing that would be, but it would be something less obvious is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees:  Something less obvious but also could be completely, you know, obvious or it could be something like “Hey, you know, you bought a car and that one component of it, you know, that 100900 was bad and it could fail.” Well, you know, that’s just a recall issue but you kind of get what I’m trying to say that there could be some things that are like a lot more helpful to you and of value to you.

Andrea:  You were talking about forward-thinking companies and it sounds like they really do have to be forward thinking.  They really do have to be able to map out the customer experience and journey and what could possibly happen and all those sorts of things, so lots of innovation and forward thinking, like you’re talking about.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, I think one of the things that probably astounds people that aren’t, you know, sort of sitting in our seats where we get to see lots of different vendors and lots of different applications and end users.  So you’ve got a really broad view of things.  That’s an inch deep, but you do have a broad view of the customer service market.

And one of the things that really surprises me all the time is how much real thought, real effort, and real research goes into customer journey mapping and all of the different sort of strategic people process type, definitely the technology too.  But, you know, just sort of encapsulating the whole thing, obviously, you can’t just plunk technology and you really need a strong idea of how you want your customer to progress and all of those other things that go along with great technology, but it’s amazing to me.  And I’ve met such intelligent people that have really devoted a lot of serious research and I’m sure you have as well. That’s the part that is really encouraging to me.

And the other thing, having done this for quite a while and just seeing things progress, is how far people’s expectations have come.  I mean, it’s hard to believe that we used to do things the way we used to do.  It was the best you could do at the time.  But I think 10 years from now, we’ll be looking back on 2019 as a stone age, as how did we ever deal with having to dial a phone or, you know, just the simple things.  So it’s really encouraging and there are a lot of really smart people that have put a lot of time and effort into figuring that out.

Andrea:  So Bob, what drives you in this industry?  Like why did you get involved in the first place and what kind of, I don’t know kind of excites you about it or feels like it’s a purposeful for you?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, OK that’s a fair question.  Basically, I was involved in the professional broadcast video film industry on the publishing side.  I worked for CBS, but I also worked for magazines, you know, magazines that dealt with professional B2B broadcast video and film production.  So, you know, I kind of did that.  Me and another salesman actually split the cost of some sales force automation software.  I got really interested in at that point.

And around 1998, I guess it was, I heard of a magazine that was starting up.  I really liked the idea of it because that just, for whatever reason that’s what I did.  I felt like it was going to be a really interesting area to go into.  Like I said, the sales automation part of it really was eclipsed very quickly by much larger customer service aspects.

Marketing automation, people don’t really probably remember this, but really marketing automation, didn’t really start to take off until after 2010 in my opinion or maybe even a little bit earlier than that.  But you know, it’s relatively new, which is a really exciting piece of it as well but, it’s relatively new.  But that’s kind of how I got interested in CRM.  It was through Sales Force Automation which was the first iteration.

And when we launched the magazine, it did extremely well.  We changed the magazine to a name CRM Magazine.  At that point in time, I think there was only one analyst that was using “customer relationship management” as an acronym, so we kind of see where things are going. And for the last 20 years or so, it’s just been really exciting because there’s different  that kind of die out and the river changes course, and it’s just really an interesting way to just watch for patterns and see what’s coming up.

You know, we’ve jumped into technologies or different facets which haven’t exactly panned out.  Mostly things don’t pan out and then they come back in five years or so when there were more possible to do.  Like I said, when I started off cloud computing, I mean, there were people trying to do cloud computing in the late ‘90s and it was virtually impossible because they still tried it.  People still bought solutions, but trying to do cloud computing on dial up connections was, you know, hard.

Andrea:  Yes.  I’ve heard that sometimes it’s better to be the second one on the scene after the first person is kind of, yeah, yeah.  OK, so let’s talk a little bit more about the conference.  So what are the different aspects of the conference or the tracks and tell us a little bit more about it.

Bob Fernekees: Sure.  OK, so first of all, we’ve got the conference coming up April 28th through May 1st, Washington, DC.  It’s actually work distinct conferences co-located together.  So it’s a total of about eight tracks.  Now, you know, if you had a Venn diagram sort of the piece in the middle would be customer experience.  We’ve got speech tech.  Speech technologies are used in all sorts of things, conversational interfaces for one. We’ve got some great keynote speakers, which we’ll talk more about that.

But speech tech, huge with contact center, huge in many other different ways.  We’ve got CRM Evolution.  Brent Leary is the chair.  That’s three tracks.  We’ll be covering the breadth of CRM technologies and people and processes as well.  Geoff Ables is doing smart customer service.  Actually, it’s the first year that Brent is doing CRM alone, and Geoff will be doing smart customer service.  That looks like it’s going to be really exciting, super successful, and it’s a great place if you want to come and meet people.

As I was mentioning to you before, we’ve also got a digital experience as well, which is a newcomer.  That’s the fourth conference as well.  But just, you know, to stick with the customer service portion of it, the thing that we’ve done differently with, especially CRM Evolution Smart Customer Service, is that although we have speakers that are aspirational CMO’s of very large companies. We also got people that you actually read on our websites and in our magazine.

So lots of analysts, lots of well-known authors, industry gurus, thought leaders, and you know, you can put a name to the face.  It’s a conference where it’s very easy to talk to these people.  It’s not a large conference where, you know, the session ends and you can’t get near the speaker.  So if it’s a really good place to get out, meet people, and especially meet some of your peers and do some networking on the peer side as well.

Andrea:  Great!  OK, so who would you say it’s for just any company that’s dealing with these particular issues, or is there any more of specificity to the target audience?

Bob Fernekees:  Well, you know, that’s a great question.  We do everything in a broad way.  So we’re like horizontal.  It doesn’t really matter to us if somebody is in financial services versus government applications.  For us, especially for Smart Customer Service, 90 percent of the people that go to the conference are involved in customer service probably at the manager or the director level, really depends on the size of the company.  If we had a VP from Zappos, they’d probably be speaking not in the audience but there could be a VP from a smaller company and that’s kind of how those things go.

But, you know, it’s great for all sorts of call center or customer service or people that are dealing with customer experience.  And like I said, there’s so much research and information out there to go to the conference and to be able to ask the speaker, “Hey, you know, I’m seeing some conflicting information,” or “Here’s my company, here’s our situation.”  And to get some positive feedback with an expert because a lot of the speakers are consultants, analysts, people that seen a wide variety of different types of end users and also have an in depth knowledge of a wide variety of industry solutions and technologies.

So, it’s a great place to come and ask those types of questions.  In today’s day and age, you know, a lot of people don’t like to pick up the phone.  But I still think that, you know, getting face to face and making connections with people is just a great way to go beyond, you know, remove the digital wall and make a human connection and there’s so many different ways things can go from there.

Andrea:  I can definitely attest to the personability or the way that the speakers are ready to connect and help out.  Because having interviewed more than a handful of them, I know that they all really care and they’re sincere and they are smart.  And I just really enjoyed connecting with them personally and so I know that your attendees are going to really appreciate being able to connect with the speakers as well.

Bob Fernekees:  Yeah.  You know, as we were talking before, you know, one of the things that I really liked about this industry is the type of people and professionals that, you know, have made this career.  I definitely like working with people like this and just having them enhanced my life and definitely enhanced my professional life as well.

Andrea:  OK, Bob, so anybody that’s listening, if you’re on the fence, it’s time to sign up because it’s right around the corner here now.  And, Bob, if they can’t make it or even if they do make it, what kind of offerings does CRM have?  Do you have a magazine?  Tell us a little bit more about how they can connect with CRM Magazine and your other offerings.

Bob Fernekees:  OK, so, just right off the bat because I may not have mentioned this is that if you googled CRM magazine, you’d find our site.  Our site is actually called destinationCRM.  So you can go there, you can sign up for the magazine.  It’s free to anybody that’s qualified.  If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure you must be qualified unless you have a strange taste in podcast.  So just go there, sign up for the magazine, either site destinationCRM or smartcustomerservice.

You can sign up for any of our newsletters, any of our webcast.  By the way, we do webcasts once a week on different topics.  You’ll be notified if you sign up for one of our newsletters or promotions of what we’ve got coming up.  People really love those. We’ve been doing them for 20 years back in 1998 when there was no broadband and we were trying to do them live from a TV station through camera shoot when there was no broadband.  So that was an interesting thing.

So yeah, we’ve had some troubles with getting a little bit ahead of the technology.  But, you know, we’ve got that.  We got tons of white papers and we will have a bunch of the content on video that you can watch after the conference is over.  Most of it will be edited down.  So you’re getting more of a flavor or maybe some of the major bullet points, but I think we will have some long format video as well.  So there’ll be those opportunities, but there’s nothing like sitting in the audience of, you know, I’m thoroughly convinced.

Andrea:  Yes, I agree.  And you know what, if you happen to be there on April 30th, I’ll be speaking at 1:45 about transforming your call center from a customer service model into a customer’s ascension model for profit and purpose.  So I would love to see you there too.

So, Bob, thank you so much for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast and for providing this fantastic conference and connecting people to all these really important solutions around customer relationship management.  And we’ll be sure to link everything that you talked about in the show notes on our website.

Bob Fernekees:  Great!  Thanks so much, Andrea.  It was fun being here and I just think you’re doing a great job.  It’s pleasure meeting you.  I can’t wait to meet you at the conference in person.

Andrea:  Great! See you then.

 

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How to Convey Warmth and Competence with Chris Malone

Episode 84

Chris Malone is the Founder and Managing Partner of the research-based consulting firm, Fidelum Partners, and has previously held senior marketing positions at leading organizations such as Choice Hotels, ARAMARK, Coca- Cola, the National Basketball Association, and Procter & Gamble and has consulted to a broad range of Fortune 500 companies.

Chris is co-author of the award-winning book, The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies.  He is also a frequent guest and contributor to CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg TV, Wall Street Journal Live, Forbes and Businessweek.

In this episode, Chris talks about the work he does with his current company, what the warmth and competence human perception model is, what led Chris to study this model and write his book, what we can do to ensure others perceive warmth in us, the role confidence plays in both warmth and competence, how his work relates to customer service, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chris Malone Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

 

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From Interruption Marketing to Differentiating with Service with Stan Phelps

Episode 83

Stan Phelps is a Forbes contributor, TEDx speaker, and IBM Futurist who focuses on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business. He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a certificate for Achieving Breakthrough Service from Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discuss how Stan became interested in the field of customer service, how he believes marketing should focus more on the customer’s experience with your company or product, why he feels you either exceed someone’s expectations or you fall short, why he wrote his “Goldfish” book series and what they cover, the two sides of the customer experience coin, what he hopes those attending his presentation at the Smart Customer Service Conference will walk away with, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

83 Stan Phelps Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! I know you really want you and your organization to have a voice of influence, and I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best for the people that you serve.  Well, I’ll be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st 2019.  If you’re listening to this episode before that conference, we highly recommend you attend.   But over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring interviews with experts who will be speaking at that conference.  And each interview will feature insights related to different aspect of customer service.  So you can find out more about the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net.   Well, today, we have with us Stan Phelps.  Stan Phelps is a Forbes Contributor, TEDx Speaker, and IBM Futurist focusing on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business.  He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a Certificate in Achieving Breakthrough Service, which I’m curious about that, from Harvard Business School.  He lives in Cary, North Carolina with his wife Jennifer and two boys, Thomas and James.  

Andrea:  Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Stan.  

Stan Phelps:  Thank you for having me, Andrea.  

Andrea:  Well, let me just ask what’s in your bio.  What is this Achieving Breakthrough Service?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, it’s a certificate that Harvard does.  They offer it a couple of times a year.  You get a chance to spend a week on campus with some of their top professors talking about how the ins and outs of how to achieve service that kind of catch through the noise and creates differentiation.  

Andrea:  Which is exactly what your area of expertise is in, I realized that.  So why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what you do?  

Stan Phelps:  So yeah, I don’t do much.  

Andrea:  I believe that.  

Stan Phelps:  I am an author and a speaker, so I spend my time kind of looking at the future of both customer experience and employee engagement.  And I’ve been fortunate enough and speaking in 16 different countries.  I spend my time travelling either doing keynotes or workshops on the different areas that I write about.  

Andrea:  How did you get interested in this particular topic?  Were you involved in customer service before?  

Stan Phelps:  You know, really, it’s interesting.  I studied both law and business.  But undergrad, I was a marketing major.  I was always intrigued by marketing.  And that was my first two decades working on both the agency and the brand side doing marketing.  I just realized that the type of marketing that I was doing kind of the traditional tell and sell interruption marketing, I didn’t think it was going to be the marketing of the future.  All I knew from my days of being a brand marketer was I was not part of the solution; I was just a huge part of the problem.   Andrea, I didn’t really know that fast forward and back about 10 years ago, back in 2009, I spent about a year writing about every element of marketing trying to search for this kind of key aspects.  I had, what I call my moment of truth and, decided that marketing should be more about the experience that you provide and how you do that in a very specific way that gets people to come back but also gets them talking about the experience.  

Andrea:  We absolutely agree with you here.  So I am curious what was the actual story of your moment of truth?  How did you figured that out or how did you come to that moment?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I used to live in Connecticut and I was working for an agency that was a New York agency.  And I happen to be in Manhattan about to go in that working event with one of my colleagues and we were in one of these rooftop bars in Manhattan.  It was summer time, beautiful, and I joked, I was enjoying as you only can in Manhattan a $15 beer, if you can even enjoy that.  But it was a crowded place and we’re waiting for a couple of people to show up and I noticed this older gentleman sitting right across from me.   He was by himself, and everyone _____ scanned the room like he was looking for someone and, it becomes obvious to me that he was waiting for someone to show up.  And like a half hour goes by and no one has showed up for this guy, so I just started a conversation with him.  He started talking about the _____ you know waiting and being on time.  And this guy, Andrea, told me something that changed my life.  He looked at me in the eye and he said, “No one in life is ever on time.”  Wait a second, I been on time before, not often, but I’ve been on time.  He raised his finger to me, and you can’t see it but it gave me a kind of Dikembe finger wave and he said “No.”  He goes, “In fact, on time is a myth.”  He said “People in life are either early or they’re late.”   I took the train home that night to Connecticut and I thought to myself I said, “That same reasoning applies in marketing in business with the customers that we serve every day.  No one in business simply just meets the expectations of a customer that they serve.”  In fact, I think if the only goal that you have is satisfaction or meeting expectations, I think that’s a losing battle.  So people, you know, and brands in life you either exceeds someone’s expectations or you fall short.   And literally, I went on a mission that next week to say, I’m going to purposely look for brands that aside to do a little something extra to go above and beyond just the transaction, to stand out and differentiate themselves.  And that was the start of the journey.  

Andrea:  Hmmm.  So when you were back in marketing and you noticed this issue of being an interruption marketing kind of a situation and you said that you realized that you were contributing to the problems instead of helping solve it, was there something about that felt personal to you?  What drives you about this, like why did you end up going in this direction do you think?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean, like the old school thinking was how you measure effectiveness in marketing was through the concept of impressions.  How frequently did you get your brand in someone?  How were you able to tell that message?  Did you get any earned media?  Did you look at owned media, paid media?  And I just realized that “Hey, your brand is no longer what you tell people it is.”  It just isn’t.  It’s what somebody experiences.  It’s what they feel and most importantly, it’s what they tell other people about you.   I just thought that marketing, the paradigm needed to shift and I just realized that I had something to add to that conversation. And my goal was, Andrea, at the end of the day to get brands to think at least as much about the customer that they serve rather than the prospect that they’re chasing.  I think, we’re so concerned with getting people in the “funnel” that we fail to understand that the best marketing that we do is the experience that we provide to the customer that we serve.  

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s so good.  OK, so you obviously have this quality, and I’m talking about you personally, of being a thought leader.  You’re somebody who sees the problem and wants to help solve it from what I can tell.  I mean, that’s everything that you’ve said so far.  Is that a quality that you think you’ve always held?  Have you always have that desire to contribute to the bigger conversation to help solve these problems and that sort of thing?  Is that been something that you’ve always experienced?

Stan Phelps:  Yes and no.  I think I’ve always looked to see what the issue is or where I think thing should go and to try to be part of that change.  But to be honest, if I learned anything through my legal education was, to be able to look at a set of facts, to be able to spot any issue, to be able to understand what maybe the overarching rule or current practice was, and to be able to maybe look at a different way going forward.  But I think you’re probably giving me too much credit as a thought leader.  I saw what I thought was a problem and I wanted to be just part of what I thought the solution could be.  

Andrea:  Well, I think maybe thought leadership is a lofty term.  But at the same time when you’re a writer and a speaker, you’re certainly somebody who is contributing to that dialogue in a very important way and having influence on it.  

Stan Phelps:  What fascinates me and I tried to in all the books, Andrea, and there’s now eight different colors in the Goldfish series but all of them were based on the idea of looking at hundreds and hundreds of examples.  

Andrea:  Can you share with us for a second what is the Goldfish series?  I know what it is but I don’t think the audience knows yet.  

Stan Phelps:  Sure.  So after that moment of truth, I started to look for companies that did that little extra and so I needed a project or like a crowd sourcing name for it and so I called it the Purple Goldfish.  And the Goldfish has a lot of kind of, there’s a lot of plot behind that metaphor.  But just for now, it’s the idea that it’s something that small, right?  And the first three books were; Purple, Green, and Gold and that was a reference to Mardi Gras because the word that I absolutely fell in love with that I felt embodied this comes from New Orleans.   And so Purple, Green, Gold; and now there’s just been a series of books that I’ve tried to tackle of what I think is an emerging issue with an either _____ or the employee engagement side of the coin, which I think you can’t have one without the other.  

Andrea:  Right.  But why is that?  Why do you see that as pairing of both of those?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I think we’re all of the value driven.  A friend of mine _____ like the value zone is the distance between the frontline, you know the front of the brand, that person serving the customer and the customer themselves.  That’s the value zone.  That’s where everything is created.  So you can have this lofty idea in terms of what you think the experience you should provide.  But if you don’t have people that are bought into that on the frontline and that value zone then you’ll never going to be able to make that change.   So what I personally found is the companies that really got it for the customer, Andrea, even got it more so for the employees.  In fact, nine out of ten times they’re actually placing a greater emphasis on the employees and the culture that they want to drive than they are in the customers themselves.  

Andrea:  Sure.  Absolutely, I mean, if the frontline folks, like you said buy in, almost embody the brand in their conversation and in the way that they serve then it totally changes the game.  

Stan Phelps:  Right.  Yeah, so all the books in the series have kind of focused on, and some, I think, the best books in the series have touched both sides of it.  So for example, I wrote the Red Goldfish is entirely about purpose or the Yellow Goldfish is all about happiness.  But here’s the deal, purpose is magical because it catch across both the customer side of the equation as well as the employee side.  And yellow is all about happiness, so it’s about making sure that your customers are happy but, at the same time, your employees are happy as well as the fact that you’re looking at society and should then give back to societal happiness.  

Andrea:  OK, let’s take a look at some more specific around differentiation for customer service.  What are some different things that you talk about that are really important for somebody who wants their company or their brand to be able to have a voice of influence, to be an influence in the world and with their customer themselves?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, you know, so I’ll touch on Purple because that’s what I’m going to be talking about in DC and I hope everyone comes out for Smart Customer Service 2019.  Purple is really about understanding that I think there are two sides of the coin when it comes to customer experience.  The first side of the coin is all of the value that you provide.  And so throughout Purple Goldfish, there are six different ways you can provide a little bit of added value.   The other flip side of the coin is the concept that I call maintenance.  So value is all the things that you do for your customer.  Maintenance is all of the things that your business processes due to your customer.  Meaning, how easy do you make it for them to be able to do business with you?  And so how do you do the little things to reduce friction and improve the experience?  So I think at the end of the day, there’s no big magical answer but it’s about finding the small and little things that you can do that can make a big difference.   You know, this isn’t a Trojan horse, right?  There’s no one big catch all.  It’s a lot of little things that if you can understand your customers and what drives them and you can design these little things and you can deploy them effectively that’s going to be the key to success.  It’s something I called the “3D development.”  

Andrea:  OK, so do you want to take that any further, that 3D development?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean it’s not complicated.  Again, the first ‘D’ is Discovery and understanding who you are as a brand and what your customers value the most, not to over think it, right?  You want to be great to the things that your customers value the most and you want to understand where you want to be in the market place.  Once you understand those two things, you can then go to the “D” of Design.”  So you go from discovery first to design.   And Design is thinking ways that you bring those things to life.  How can you accentuate the things that matter the most to your customers and how can you do the way that reinforces who you want to aspire to be as a brand.  And then third is this idea of Deploy.  So how do you test, pilot, and validate those things as well as how do you make sure that your team has bought into it, that you create a process around it, and that you have the resources that you can do it again, again, and again.  And what do you do once you deploy, you go right back to that first day of discovery.  I say it as it’s a continuous development idea.  

Andrea:  Yeah that sounds great.  Alright, so do you have any examples of little things that you’ve seen companies do that really make that big difference.  Now, I realized that this might not be applicable to every single company that’s out there but perhaps there are some ideas that could spark other ideas.  

Stan Phelps:  So I’ll give you a couple on the value side of the equation.  And so we spend a lot of time on this idea.  One of the categories is first and last impressions and doing a little something extra to make that strong first impression.  You know, there’s this idea of _____,you remember the first thing and typically the last thing we experience and maybe it peak somewhere.   So like the DoubleTree hotel, they’re one of my hall of famers.  That chocolate chip cookie, it’s that warm, great first impression and it’s something that they have down to a science in terms of the consistency of doing it.  I think it embodies what they want to be seen as a brand.  They wanted to be seen as that kind of warm, welcoming place.  And so it’s very well-positioned as a great strong first impression.   Another example in the value category is a category we call sampling.  And so one of my favorite examples is an ice cream shop in St. Paul, Minnesota called Izzy’s Ice Cream.  It’s such a simple thing but when you buy a scoop of ice cream at Izzy’s, they let you pick a second flavor for free and this small little mini scoop and they actually _____, so you can’t copy if you’re an ice cream shop.  But it’s this small little mini scoop and that little mini scoop is called the Izzy.  

Andrea:  That’s cool!  

Stan Phelps:   It’s brilliant.  I mean, this is an amazing strategy for the customers that already do business with you, Andrea.  On average, they only know 20 percent of what you can do for them. So with the people that are already customers with you, why wouldn’t you invest a little buck to give them a little taste of something else?  So I think, unfortunately, we most often think of sampling as something we do for prospective customers.  Why can’t we use it for the customers that we already have?  So that’s the value side.  I’ll be giving an example or two on the maintenance side of the equation and so a couple of those over there, one is convenience.   So how do you do little things to be more convenient?  One of my hall of famers there is that company called TD Bank.  They’re on the East Coast open seven days a week.  Some nights there are open till 8 o’clock at night.  Even if they don’t decide to be open seven days a week or open till 8 o’clock, you can take this thing that they do.  They actually open the doors of the branch, Andrea, 15 minutes before what scheduled opening is and they actually keep the doors open 15 minutes afterwards.   So think about it.  Each day, you might have some people four or five customers that show up before the bank officially opens, but what do they do, they open the door and greet those customers as a way of reinforcing that convenience.  And we’ve all been there rushing to get to the bank before it closes; they open the door for 15 minutes for people and that scheduled in, right?  That’s scheduling in a little more convenience to reinforce what they’re all about.   Another great example is what we call an added service to make it easier to do a little something extra.  So, Safelite, when they come and do a repair of your windshield, you know, while that Epoxy is filling that crack and setting, it takes about 10 minutes, they typically will vacuum the interior of your car.  They’ll get glass cleaned or do all of your windows.  Now, that was never part of the deal, but they have that little extra time and they invest that as a little extra buck.  And their front line, I think each and every week, every person on the front line gets their own NPS score at Safelite.  

Andrea:  Nice.  That’s really cool!  Those are great examples.  Thank you for sharing those.  Alright, so Stan, why should somebody attend your specific breakout session at the Smart Customer Service Conference?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I’d like to think there’s probably going to be a lot of people that already understand the importance of providing that great customer service where I would say overarching experience.  My hope is that their perspective might even get slightly shifted and they’re going to walk away with kind of the recipe for being able to create signature differentiators for their brand to create that experience that people talk about, to read about, and post on Instagram about.  

Andrea:  Awesome!  OK, so how can people find you?

Stan Phelps:  A couple of ways, StanPhelpSpeaks is my personal speaking site and then I’ve got about eight other co-authors for these books, so purplegoldfish.com is kind of the Goldfish collective and the think tank.  

Andrea:  Perfect!  Well, thank you so much for taking time to be with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in DC.  

Stan Phelps:  Awesome, can’t wait!

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How to Write with the Voice of Your Brand with Leslie O’Flahavan

Episode 81

As Founder of E-WRITE, Leslie O’Flahavan, is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges who has helped thousands of people learn how to write well. She helps customer service agents write on-brand emails, chat, and social media posts. In this episode, Leslie discusses what led her to create her business back in 1996, why she’s so passionate about helping customer services representatives, the top skills she helped several major airlines incorporate into their customer service writings, how personal connections with your customers offset repeat complaints about the same issue, what a “brand voice” is and how she helps customer service agents write in that voice, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Now, as someone who wants to have a voice of influence or you want your organization to have a voice of influence, I know that you’re pretty highly focused on doing what’s best for the people that you serve. And so in the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with experts who are going to be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at in Washington D.C.  It’s called the Smart Customer Service conference.  And it’s from April 29th through May 1st 2019. So if you are in that area, or if you are in industry where customers service is important to your business then that would be a fantastic conference to come to.  But even if you’re not, we have some really interesting interviews coming up for you.  And the one today is going to be a blast. So today I have with me, Leslie O’Flahavan.  Leslie has helped thousands of people learned to write well.  That’s right, we’re going to be talking about writing. As founder of E-WRITE, she is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges.  She helps customer service agents write on brand, email, chat, and social media post.  And Leslie has worked with several international airlines to update their style of communicating with customer.  She has done so many things.  She’s also an instructor for Lynda.com.  

Andrea:  So Leslie, is it great to have you with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, thanks very much!  I’m really excited to speak with you and thanks for inviting me.

Andrea:  Well, I’m curious.  How did you get started with teaching people about writing?  Is this something that you have always been particularly good at and then you wanted to teach or how did this go for you?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, I tell the story quickly and in reverse chronological order.  So my business is called E-WRITE and you can guess when I founded it by the name.  I founded it back in the e-hyphen era.  I founded it in 1996 and this is when email was just becoming a common way people communicated at work.  And I thought “Well, shoot, that’s gonna change everything.  People who have not been writing email to each other, now they’re gonna be writing email to each other.  They’re gonna need help writing it well.” And that was a little wrong and a little bit early because, you know, it was so trivial and mundane in 1996 when I started the business.  People didn’t really want any help learning how to write email well.  But what they did want was help learning how to write with web content. So, I launched the business in 1996, as I said, and started offering customized onsite writing workshops for people who wanted to learn web content, e-newsletters, and all other kinds of online writing because it really was quite new to them.  Before I started E-WRITE, I was a college writing instructor for nine years.  Before that, I was a high school English teacher.  Shout out to all the English teachers out there, and I did that for nine years.

Andrea:  That’s great!

Leslie O’Flahavan:  So that’s a brief history of my life as a writing instructor.

Andrea:  Love that you taught school.  I was a music teacher as well.  OK, so that’s your brief history as a writing instructor.  So you were teaching for a very long time and then you turn that into a business where you’re helping businesses with this. What do you do with that now?  What are you doing with your business now in terms of teaching people how to write?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, my business is like a nice big dining room table with many, many strong legs under, and that’s one reason that I’ve been able to stay in business for all these years.  You know, essentially, I’m a writing instructor.  I developed writing curriculum and I deliver it.  But it’s way more complicated than that and way more broad. For many years, I did offer web-writing courses for corporations, for associations.  I live in the Washington D.C. area, so there’s a lot of headquarters of nonprofit here and _____ agencies.  But somewhere around 2001, I started to learn more and more about the work life of people who had been answering 1-800 phone numbers in the customer services role. You know, many companies employed them in a hundreds or even thousands customer service agents or customer service reps, and their writing life was getting more and more complicated.  And it continuous to be quite complicated because, you know, back in the days, they answered phone calls and postal mail and then they added emails and then they added life check and they added social media and then they added text. And now they’re doing all those channels supported by a_____, so it’s really, really complicated.  And there’s a workforce, they’re not the most writerly.  It’s not like sitting down with a bunch of PR professionals or with a bunch of marketers.  These are not the most writerly people and they needed help.  They work in a factory of writing. So for about the last 15 years or so, I’ve offered a lot of writing training, custom curriculum, training delivery, and other types of support to large customer service organizations.  And as you mentioned in my intro, since maybe 2012, I’ve worked with, I think 10 or 11 big airlines to help them update the way they communicate with customers and enable their frontlines customer service agents, even their reservation agents to write better.

Andrea:  Hmmm.  Just briefly, I really want to get how you help write to customers in their company’s brand voice.  But what are just like some of the maybe top three or five things that you actually helped those airlines to incorporate into their writing?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, one is the skill of responding with empathy and replacing knee-jerk insincere sympathy with empathy.  So for an airplane when a person emails in and says “I am so angry, I have to sit at Baltimore airport for six hours for weather delay and when I looked out the window, the weather looked fine to me.”  That’s an angry email from a customer. Most airlines are built to respond, “We regret any inconvenience this delay may have caused,” which is just passive-aggressive nonsense. So one thing I do is train the frontline agents and gain support from their managers to have them respond with empathy and, if necessary, to apologize because airlines really needn’t apologize for the weather.  But what they can say is “Thank you for contacting us.  I do understand that travel is stressful and sitting at the Baltimore airport for many hours must have been especially tiresome.”  That’s empathy.  That’s I see your way.  And customers appreciate this.  It doesn’t make the weather delay go away but it does make the airline sincere.  Not only sound sincere, that is a sincere behavior.

Andrea:  Sure.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Shall I give you another one?

Andrea:  If you’d like, that’d be great.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  Well, lots of big customer service organizations airlines or other ways rely on formed letters or formed answers even if it’s not a full letter, they rely in formed answers or prewritten content.  One thing I do is help the frontline customer service reps learn how to customize those contents. So for example, if you have a little snippet of prewritten content that says when you’re open, when your stores are open, you don’t need to customize that if you’re open Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. till 9:00 p.m. that should be prewritten.  But I help them learn how to add a little bit of personal information such as, “So we hope you’ll come in this weekend.”  So the prewritten content doesn’t come across as robotic.

Andrea:  Hmmm.  I love that!  And it really does kind of speak to the personality.  All of a sudden, it’s not just a corporation and it’s not just a company, there’s an actual person behind that and you’re actually connecting with that person.

Leslie O’Flahavan.  Indeed.  That’s it and that’s what customers crave from a practical point of view that personal connection offsets repeat complaints about the same issue.  Because when you’re a customer and you don’t feel anyone’s paying attention to you, you’re going to make a lot of noise, repeated amount a lot of noise and that’s expensive for company.

Andrea:  So what is the company’s brand voice?  Let’s talk about this a little bit.  Let’s talk about first of all what a brand voice is, especially in terms of writing.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  OK.  Well, a brand voice is set of writing choices that support the personality your brand conveys through many means, through its logo, typography, mascot, or advertising campaigns.  Brands have personalities and personalities have a voice. And the definition of what your brand voice might be or what the writing choices you might make to sustain that brand voice.  This is information that is very commonly understood from marketing and PR and graphic designers, and all that community in any company.  But it’s information that’s rarely shared with people who work in customer service and they’re expected to kind of soldier on without it or to write the customers with not much awareness that they’re sustaining the brand voice. So a lot of my work involves taking the brand voice guidance that’s already in the big company and basically showing it to the customer service management.  We have just never seen it before.  It’s the bad byproduct of a siload organization.  They have often just never seen it before. So sometimes, I’ll ask “Can I see the brand voice guidance that your marketing team gives to your ad agency?”  And they’ll retrieve it and I’ll say, “Let’s figure out how are we gonna use this for the person with the headset on who’s answering the phone or the person who is answering your support Twitter handle.  You know, how is this person going to be able to read this guidance and make it real in their own life?”

Andrea:  Oh yeah absolutely.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  We want customers to have the same experience with your brand personality after they have a problem or when they have a question.  If they did before the spent the money with you back when they were falling in love with you.  And that’s why it’s so important that the people who provide support help service whatever you want to call it.  They’re aware of the writing craft that goes into sustaining that brand voice and they know how to make those same writing choices.

Andrea:  So how do you actually translate the document that you got from the marketing team and help the customer service agent to actually be able to write in that.  And whether that be the really big companies or even small companies, how do you translate that for them?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, sometimes I do within the form of customized onsite training or online training.  Sometimes, with the customer service management support, I will write a customer service brand voice guide, a separate reference work.  But mostly, I plant the idea and support the behavior change that enables people to write in their company’s brand voice.  Because remember when customers write for help that’s usually emotionally neutral, but when they write to complain, the people who answers those complaints day in and day out, often become very protective of the company.  They can sometimes become defensive, because all day, every day, people are complaining at them and it’s painful.

Andrea:  And it can feel personal.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  And it can feel personal, and defensive writing is rarely in a brand voice.  Because the more you’re trying to protect your company or insist on a policy or reject the fourth request for a refund, the more you’re trying to say no essentially, the more difficult it is to use that kind of candid a flirty language that we use in marketing.  It’s hard work.  It’s hard work.  But I forgot to say something that’s really at my core and that it sustains me as we do this hard work is, I believe workplace writing is a learned skill. While I completely accept and recognize that there’s some kind of gift involved with poetry, fiction, writing drama, or reading a play; I believe that for most people, being able to perform competently as a writer at work is something they can learn.  And I believe it’s not almost a civil right issue, to me, it is a civil right issue.  If you hire somebody to do this hard job and this person who’s a customer service rep is probably not bringing down the big box either.  If you’re the employer, you’re obliged to provide the training they need to do job well.  Power to the people!

Andrea:  Absolutely.  I mean, there’s so much to that.  I mean for so long, it felt like customer meant sort of like the dark people in the basement that have to deal with all of the yucky stuff.  And we just want you to get it done as fast as you can.  We don’t have to make this go away.  I don’t even want to know that it’s there.  But those people are the most powerful people in the company and they don’t even realize that there’s some definite contradiction there in between what they’re actually doing for the company and the amount of respect and support that they receive.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  That’s really true and really wise observation.  And perversely, social media has kind of blurred the lines between marketing and customer care in a way that some companies are managing very well and some aren’t.  But it doesn’t really matter in the sense that all of these customer communications are coming in through, for example, Twitter. So, some very big companies separate the functions of handling customers’ complaints or questions about purchases or about subscriptions or about account information.  They _____ separately from their marketing in social channels and some smaller companies can’t do that.  So the person who is pushing an offer for 15 percent off coupon or something is the same a person who’s answering questions about why, what to do, how to reload the app when it’s not working.

Andrea:  Right, right.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  And I think that’s actually giving the leaders a little bit more respect and the customer service rep are less like the people in the basement with the headsets on and they very gently chained the ankles to the desk, you know.

Andrea:  Yeah, absolutely.  And I know that there are lots of really great companies that are thinking progressively on that and doing some really good work and obviously hiring people to come in and help with this sort of thing.  So do you have any tips for writing in a brand voice?  For example, if a company’s brand is based on prestige and needing to establish trust with their customer that sort of thing, what kind of things do you suggest that they do or don’t do in order to write in that voice?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Let’s take an easier example because when you’re thinking of a prestige brand like a five star hotel or something like that?

Andrea:  Sure.  You can take whatever example you want to take.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  OK.  Yeah, let me think about that.  Writing in a brand voice has to do with some very easy to describe writing behaviors and some that are more difficult.  So for example, is usually branded language, so part of writing in a brand voice is using the very terms that your company uses for such things that people can purchase elsewhere.  So for example in an airline, do you call it a flat bed seat when it’s in first class or do you call it lie flat feet. So one part of writing in a brand voice is keeping everybody up to date on the term that we use and making sure they use it.  Another part of writing in a brand voice is choosing a level of formality and sustaining it through all your writing choices. So if you’re talking about clothing _____,you’ll notice that a lot of their writing, even the writing in some channels that we would consider kind of playful like Twitter, they’re rather formal.  They don’t use a lot of contractions.  They don’t use as wide a range of emojis this kind of thing.  They stay kind of formal because they’re close are kind of formal.  A lot of times when answering completely casual company will write “Oh no!”  Well, a form of company whose brand voice is formal doesn’t do that.  They’ll say “We’re sorry to hear that.”  Or “This is not good to hear,” these kinds of things. So the first thing is choosing and using the language our brand users, another writing choice is the level of formality in the word you choose or in the structures such as contractions or full form of the word.  Another is the kind of extent of the irreverence you use or the snark or the mock or all of that. In contemporary customer service writing, there’s a lot of irreverence and snarky writing and a lot of brands are built on snarks.  So we have to approve of it because if the brand voice before you purchase is snarky one or sarcastic one then it make sense that the brand voice app you purchased will be the same.  But kind of how much of the brand voice is snarky, that’s an issue or reverent.  I put snarky at one and in reverent at the other. And then I think another quality of brand voice is, I don’t know, how much of the responsibility for the service breakdown are you willing to shoulder?  And that’s come out in your writing.  Some companies by brand are extremely reluctant to shoulder much of their responsibility for the breakdown and others are quite willing to shoulder responsibility for the breakdown. So once that they’re unwilling, they might write things such as “We’re sorry to hear this, please contact us with full details of where you purchased the product and what kind of damage you observed in the packaging.”  But if they’re kind of less standoffish, they might be willing to write something like “Oh no, we hate to hear this happen again.”  Which comes across a schedule but it’s actually a different feature of the brand voice.

Andrea:  Hmmm yeah.  These are all really fantastic tips and examples.  I know that you’ve already mentioned that you care in a sense because it’s almost a matter of justice for you or taking care of these front line people, why do care about these topics so much?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  That’s the Adam and Eve of questions isn’t it?

Andrea:  Yeah.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Well, life work has been to help people write better.  So that’s kind of simple.  You know, I’ve been working in this field a long time and it means a lot to me for that reason.  I think, I’ve seen people grow a lot and that’s very meaningful to me.  Sometimes I help cause that growth, sometimes I was just at their shoulder while it happened.  I do think that having me around helps people believe they can grow and be better writers. I also think that when you’re at work, some of the widest range of skills you have to come up with are ones you exercise in writing, and you’re rarely notified beforehand that you’ll need them.  So if you’re a salesman or a saleswoman, you know you have to be able to give pitch and use it powerfully, you know that.  But did you also know that you might have to write a blog post about a new offering that your company had, maybe not.  But nobody says to you, “I just want you to get ready.  You may have to write a blog post.”  Nobody says that, they say, “Next Tuesday, we need you to do a blog post.” It’s kind of like being the person who picks up the golf balls at the driving range, you know, there’s just all of these things coming at you.  All of these writing responsibilities even something as mundane as a substantive email to your boss is a challenging writing responsibility.  So I believe people deserve the support to accommodate these changing demands.

Andrea:  Absolutely!  OK, Leslie, you are doing a session with another colleague, Smart Customer Service conference here in April 2019, can you tell us just a little bit about it?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  I’ll be glad to.  I’m speaking with Jeff Toister who is a close friend of mine and a much admired colleague in the customer service.  I think over the last five years Jeff has run a survey at least three times to find out what are customers’ expectations for email response time. So, let’s say you have an insurance policy, you have an insurance policy and you have a question about it and you email in to your insurance company asking the question, how soon do you expect an answer.  And it won’t be any surprise to anybody that people are expecting answers from companies via email really quickly, much more quickly than they used to. I believed Jeff did his survey for the first time in 2012 or 2013 and I think response time has shown by half.  So he’ll talk about the results of his survey and the insights he has _____ from it.  And I will talk about how to answer that quickly without using formed letters all the time or without sounding like a robot or a company that just doesn’t care.  That’s what we’ll be doing.

Andrea:   It sounds very exciting and it sounds interesting as well.  Thank you so much for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast.  We will have links to the Smart Customer Service conference in the show notes.  But also, I know that you offer some things as well, can you tell us just a little bit about that then, Leslie?

Leslie O’Flahavan:  Sure!  I’d be glad to connect with anyone who’s listening on Twitter.  And I’m proud to say that there’s no photos of eggs Benedict in my Twitter.  It’s all about writing.  So I’m at LeslieO.  I’m not Leslie zero, I’m Leslie O, and of course, I blog at Writing Matters at my website ewriteonline.com. And I am really open to conversations about what’s bugging you as you write or how you’ve grown.  In fact, I’m the person who wants to hear how happy you are with something you wrote, because I’ll be happy too.  That kind of joy carries over. So if you have questions about how to respond to your customers or you want to show me something you’re using in a newsletter or another publication and just get my feedback, _____.

Andrea:  Oh that sounds great!  And you truly are a joy, Leslie.  Thank you for being here.

Leslie O’Flahavan:  It’s my pleasure!  Thank you for listening as we were talking before it’s an honor to be listened to.  I really appreciate it.  Thanks for the great questions.