***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***
[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Misha Gruberman, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.
[00:00:05] Misha Glouberman: Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.
[00:00:07] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to learn more from you about communication strategies, , managing conflict, driving change, before we get to that, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, Misha, whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact who you've become?
[00:00:21] Misha Glouberman: I grew up in Montreal. I've lived in a few places in between in the U. S. and in the U. K., but I'm back in Canada now in Toronto. I remember in grade school, like second grade, third grade, something like that. And I'd be in the classroom and the teacher would say something and there would be a student who didn't understand what the teacher said, and the student would raise their hand and ask the teacher to explain, and then the teacher would give an explanation to the student that didn't make it clear to the student, and then the student would be confused and ask something back.
I remember when all that was happening, time would just stop for me and I felt like I could see. Each level of misunderstanding. I could see why the student didn't understand what the teacher said. I could see why the teacher didn't understand the student's question.
And I could sort of see all of that happening. And at some level, the application of that skill is a big part of what I do for a living now is help people not do the things that make them talk past each other.
[00:01:09] Mahan Tavakoli: In both our personal lives and organizations, we do talk past each other. A lot. . Now you say that most organizational problems are fundamentally human problems and a lot of those human problems are communication problems. What are the reasons for that, Misha?
[00:01:27] Misha Glouberman: I don't know why people are bad at this. It's hard for people to raise difficult issues. And then more surprisingly, it's hard for people to notice when they're not doing it.
But very often people will come out of some conversation and think they did a great job of listening. But once you investigate it, you realize they didn't, or they'll think that they raised the issue. But once you investigate it, you'll see that what they actually did was say something close to what they wanted to say without actually saying it. . So I think asking for feedback, so if, for instance, you say as a leader, well, what you want to do is create an environment where it's safe for people to speak up and talk about difficult issues would be something.
And maybe most leaders say, Oh, I'm really good at that. One way that you can get better at it, or to notice if you're not, is to say to your reports, Hey, listen, what I want to do is create an environment where people can speak up and talk about difficult issues. What are some things that I do that make that hard? guess that for most leaders the people you're asking have an answer to that question. They may or may not feel comfortable enough to tell you that answer. , , but asking that question is a first step. That's one way to notice. So asking people for feedback,
say, one of the things I really want to do with you is I want, I want to really make sure that you feel heard. Are there recent times when you felt like you haven't felt heard in our conversations? Could you let me know going forward if you haven't feel heard? So asking for that feedback, being open to that.
And if when you hear that you think, well, I don't want to do that, that's an example of being bad at listening, right? So there are things that I don't, I don't want to do that because there are things I don't want to hear. Well, if there's things you don't want to hear, That's what it means to be bad at getting feedback.
, you don't want to ask a yes or no question.
Are there things I do that get in the way it's a yes or no question., it puts more burden on the person you're talking to, to say, yes, there are. Whereas they might think, well, no, there's one or two things, but they're not really a big deal. So I'll say no, but if you say, what are the things that I do?
, they're free to say, oh, there are no such things, but yeah, the assumption should be that there are. And I would say that that's probably a safe assumption that even if be someone who's really great at getting feedback, there's probably some things that you do that make it hard for people to do that.
And I think, that's part of it too, is having that sort of mindset of growth, that mindset of, you know, even if I'm good at this, I can still get better.
[00:03:25] Mahan Tavakoli: , part of what else it takes that you speak about. Misha is there needs to be trust and that trust plays a critical role in communication
what are some practices that help build the kind of trust that enables that communication to take place? A
[00:03:42] Misha Glouberman: lot of it's iteration, right? , when you think of trust, what are you thinking of? What do you mean by trust?
[00:03:47] Mahan Tavakoli: The willingness to say things as you see them.
There's a filter in many of our minds that filters what we say. From what we see to how we express it. And trust plays a big role in how willing we are to share it exactly as we see it.
[00:04:08] Misha Glouberman: So , , a lot of it is like iteration. If what I want to do is create trust in people that I am saying things honestly as they appear to me.
A really good practice is to not lie to them and to not conceal things and to say things, honestly. There's a lot of things that people often do that you know, when your boss is telling you and you know that what they're saying doesn't seem true. To act as if there's no problem when everyone knows that there's a problem going on would be an example.
To act as if everything's fine when everyone knows that things aren't fine. When you do that, , it diminishes trust. So making it a practice of talking about things, to name when you've made a mistake to name when you think something isn't going well. But by doing all those things, people start to understand that you're honest that you can talk about those things as part of it.
Probably harder or more important is creating an environment where the people around you can do that. And I think the way that you do that is by encouraging them to do that and rewarding them for doing it, and certainly not punishing them for doing it, right? That example I gave earlier, what are things that I do to make it unsafe?
That's an example of soliciting negative feedback about yourself. What are some things that I did running that last meeting that you didn't like? What are ways in which you think I could be better as a manager? What about your job? Do you really enjoy? What parts of your job do you not enjoy? have this idea for a project, what I'd love to hear from folks is what do you think about that, what are some of the strong points, what do you see as the weak points about my idea, and then when people do that, you don't punish them for doing it, you reward them for doing it, and bit by bit as you do that, you can build trust, and you can't do it magically, like if you've been doing the opposite of that for a long time, you can't automatically come in and make people start trusting you. So I guess there's two parts. To make yourself seem trustworthy, the thing to do is to be honest and to encourage that sort of honesty in the people around you, the thing to do is solicit it and then reward it when they actually act on it.
[00:05:42] Mahan Tavakoli: You gave a lot of great examples of questions and the way they can be asked to solicit the kind of interaction. Part of the challenge that I see in some of the executives I work with is that they are so focused on The priorities and conversations around those priorities that they don't necessarily take the time to get the kind of feedback that you're asking for beyond the once a year engagement survey or whatever else is done.
[00:06:10] Misha Glouberman: Yeah, and they do so I think at their peril, because I think usually when you talk to those guys, what you'll also find is that they have frustrations. And if you ask them what those frustrations are, very often those frustrations are frustrations about people, and then what they do with those frustrations typically is not name them, or not work on them. thing I want to emphasize is that For many companies, a really critical thing that stands between them and reaching the goals that they want to reach is the fact that the people working together on those goals aren't communicating with each other as effectively as they could, and that if those people communicated better, that company would be much, much better , at achieving whatever goals it is that it set.
So I think very often they're seen as a trade off between like, well, we can't work on this touchy feely communication stuff because what we really have to do is reach our goals. And the thing that I very strongly think is that if you think that the way to reach your goals is to assume that the people who work around you are perfectly rational robots who don't need help on this stuff.
You're operating , in a kind of wishful thinking , the stuff that I do can be seen as in conflict with the stuff , that's more practical. But to me, the most impractical thing is to operate your organization on a model of human behavior that you know is false.
[00:07:12] Mahan Tavakoli: I think one of the biggest challenges that I see that feeds into that is the lack of recognition of it being an issue.
[00:07:20] Misha Glouberman: Almost everybody could stand to get better at Working with the folks around them and at least in some context in ways that be enormously beneficial to them I mean, I've been working on this in my whole life and I still keep working on it think , I'm the greatest athlete in the NBA I don't need a coach.
I don't have to go to practice that's how you become the greatest athlete in the NBA is by getting coaching by getting practice by watching what Other people do by learning , and when you talk about how that process goes, , it's our job as coaches, as consultants to enact the same skills that we want leaders to enact with the people working with them. So what we can't do is sort of go and wave our fingers at them and say, listen, you need to communicate better. And I know better than you.
And that's the answer. Cause then you're doing the exact same thing that you're telling them not to do their people. Right. So what you need to do is as much as you want them to approach their people with empathy and with curiosity and with transparency, you want to approach them with empathy and curiosity and transparency.
So you might say, you know You know, so get that it's hard for them to work on this stuff. That's the empathy part, the transparency and curiosity. There's also like, maybe you're wrong. Like, , I look at people and I'm man, that person needs to fix X, Y, and Z, maybe I'm wrong.
And so what it is to have transparency and curiosity, and these are the values that I use is to sort of say, you know, it looks to me like, , this problem might better if you worked on your communication skills. And again, you're leading with their problem. So they come to you with a problem and say, I'm having a conflict with this person.
How can I work on this conflict? , then you work with them on it. And one of the biggest things I find is that , ideally, you're getting people to act in alignment with their own values and with their own principles. You're not trying to bring other values and principles to them. So for instance, Most leaders who get awards. I think if you were to say to them, you know, as a leader How do you feel about learning?
I think very few of them would say learnings for chumps or people who aren't good at stuff I think that what they would say is a value is you know probably lifelong learning is something I'm committed to and you might want to say ? How do you think you should interact with other people in different interactions and probably what they say is in principle You should be empathetic, and you should listen to them, and you should be really clear about what's on your mind, and you should not be manipulative, and those are probably what get the best outcomes.
You say, great, if you act in alignment with your own principles and with your own vision of what works, too, and I want to stress these aren't just principles of what you think is right, they're principles of what you think actually is effective.
that what's effective is to be a lifelong learner, what's effective is to be a compassionate listener, what's effective is all those things. So if that's what you really believe, the thing you might want to say too is like, you think it's hard for people to do this sometimes. Like, yeah, yeah, I really do.
Okay, great. So , here's my suspicion. I think this is one of those situations where it would serve you well to listen better and doing that might take some learning and it might be kind of challenging. Does it look to you like this might be one of those situations? Then you see. So you're presenting your view, which is being transparent, you're checking whether you think it's right, which is being curious, , you're working with their own values, which is sort of being compassionate and empathetic.
And you're not trying to make them do what you know is right. You're trying to really help them do what they think is right while also having your own beliefs. , you have to remember that you're there to help them reach their own goals.
[00:10:18] Mahan Tavakoli: Misha, I love. The process that you just went through, because it also serves as a great example for managers , when they're having coaching conversations with their people.
Now one of the other things I wanted to touch on Misha is I know you spending some time on gatherings and a lot of the organizations that I interact with the value and the importance of gatherings have gone up for them.
What are some of your thoughts with respect to how to do gatherings well?
[00:10:47] Misha Glouberman: I have a simple thought, get rid of all the presentations and talks. So when people do gatherings, there's a number of most common mistakes that people make. One common mistake is that people don't know what their goals are.
Or they know what their goals are, but they do things that aren't in support of their goals. So being able to say, why are we having this gathering? What would it look like if this went well, what would happen afterwards? What would it be like? So as an example, if what you say is. The reason we're having this gathering is everyone works remotely.
And what we really want is to get people to know each other better. That's our number one goal. You say, great. So your number one goal is for these people to get to know each other better. Yes. That is our goal. Okay. What are you doing first thing in the morning? We're having a 45 minute talk from the CEO about trends in the industry.
They're like, okay, how does that bring you any closer towards your goal? It does not. Okay. Take that out of the agenda. And then what you do is Do things that instead get people to know each other better. There's a million different facility exercises you can do.
You can run an unconference, you can run an open space meeting, you can run a world cafe. I mean, those are also things that get work done too. You can do all sorts of, networking exercises. You can even just , go kayaking, go for a walk in the woods, have a karaoke night, like any of those things. often say is if you had 200 people in a room and you wanted to stop them from talking to each other, the way to do it is to give one of them a microphone and make the other 199 sit down in chairs. So every moment that you're spending in presentations is a moment that you're spending Not meeting each other and specifically stopping people from meeting each other and almost all of that information That's all the stuff you can do over zoom over the internet.
So don't waste your time So that's the main thing is that if your goal is to get people to meet each other don't spend time doing things There Antithetical to people meeting each other.
[00:12:23] Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't agree with you more on a couple of elements. One is that purpose and Priya Parker also talks about it in her, outstanding book, daughter gathering, having that clarity of purpose is really important and presentations don't lend themselves to that.
Now I was having a conversation, Misha, on this specific issue last week with a and part of what they were saying is. We understand what the purpose is, but can you have a series of objectives? So part of it is for people to get to know each other. Part of it is to do some training. How much can you fit in in the umbrella of a purpose?
You can absolutely have
[00:13:04] Misha Glouberman: multiple purposes. And that's great. If you have multiple purposes to pursue those multiple purposes, that's what I would say doing some training to me isn't actually a purpose. It's a activity. So the question is, why are you doing training? What's the purpose of the training? And again, why are you doing it? in this particular moment. So if it's like we want to train people on how to use the new IT system, maybe you can do that remotely. If you're a hybrid organization, you're bringing people together.
It's like, well, what do we uniquely want to do during this time that we can't do during other times? So if I had a client and they said, you know, one of the purposes of our retreat is to train people in the new IT system, I would say great. see whether that actually makes sense in this context.
And I think partly it's because it's harder to see like when someone gives a talk you kind of see what's happening.
It's easier to see and easier to control and even though it doesn't serve your purpose, you can sort of see it happening and so for the organizers, it feels comfortable, whereas if you have people talking to each other in small groups, you can't really see what's happening, doesn't feel as good, so very often you're seeing something it's measurable, but it's not useful.
[00:14:04] Mahan Tavakoli: That's a great point. There's a lot less control in that second format than the first one where you have the agenda filled with. Speaker after speaker which there's a lot of control.
[00:14:14] Misha Glouberman: Plus, you know, how many, you know, how many new connections you've made?
Zero. It's great. It's really easy to measure, I think there's a fundamental trade off. I think when people want to create community, which is very often what people want to do, I think there's a fundamental trade off between community and control.
I think at some level they're antithetical to each other. If what you want is you say, our organization is so siloed. Well, great. Well, that means you have to have people across different parts, talk to each other. And what it means for organization to be siloed almost by definition is for there to be communication in your organization that you haven't officially controlled, that you haven't officially sanctioned.
If all the communication is officially controlled and sanctioned, then what that's called is silos. And it makes people uncomfortable a little bit.
[00:14:51] Mahan Tavakoli: It is uncomfortable, but it is the way that organizations will need to function even more.
[00:14:59] Misha Glouberman: And again, when you ask people, this can be in alignment with people's own values that you say to a leader,
you have to sometimes do things that are uncomfortable. They're like, yeah, that's one of my strengths. I do things that are uncomfortable. Cool. Okay. So remember earlier you said we want to do this thing. Well, that sounds very uncomfortable. Remember earlier when you said that as a leader, one of the things you thought was important was to do things that are uncomfortable.
This might be one of those things.
And again, everybody in the abstract thinks that what they should do is do things that are uncomfortable, but presented with any specific uncomfortable thing, they think they shouldn't. So it's again, that's the thing of getting people to align their individual action with their broader principles.
No one thinks a good principle is always avoiding uncomfortable things, and yet everybody the moment always thinks that the uncomfortable thing in front of them should be avoided. , so a lot of what we're doing in our work is just getting people to act in alignment with their own principles, I think.
[00:15:45] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that and I wrote it down. Misha helping people act in alignment with their own principles, in many instances, there is a disconnect and through the kind of questioning that you've done, maybe you can help the person see that disconnect and therefore address it.
[00:16:03] Misha Glouberman: Yeah. I mean, maybe one way to think about the work that we do as consultants, but especially as coaches is just to help different versions of yourselves connect, like to help, you know, the, the person who you were a week ago that set an intention, talk to the person who you are today, who's tempted to not act on that intention.
So, you know, ideally we're just sort of Sending messages between those different versions of the self of the client we're talking to.
[00:16:26] Mahan Tavakoli: Now, and part of what I appreciate about you, Misha is in our prep conversation, you said feel free to ask people for some challenges they have for us to discuss I asked my network, got a bunch of them and chose three for us to. One of them is an executive feeling frustrated because he said every decision or issue ends back up on my desk.
[00:16:55] Misha Glouberman: Right.
[00:16:55] Mahan Tavakoli: So he's overwhelmed. And in his words, The team lacks initiative and ownership. And this executive was wondering how can communication help shift this dynamic,
[00:17:11] Misha Glouberman: So I want to name a couple of things I'm going to do like a 60 second. overview of every decent communication book you've ever read. Any decent communication book you ever read is basically ways of operationalizing a few ideas that I've mentioned before, but I want to say them now specifically, which is the idea that it's about being transparent.
Which means naming what's going on. So you have to name what's going on. You have to be curious and listen to other people. You got to bring some empathy to it. You want to be collaborative and you want to have some accountability.
Those are the things. That's five things. It's a lot, but that's it. It's only five. You want to name what's going on. You want to be curious and listen. You want to be compassionate. You want to be collaborative. You want to be accountable. , a lot of this comes from a great writer named Roger Schwartz who writes about this stuff, who's amazing. Almost all the answers are just going to be, those things, which again are things that most people want to be.
Most people, mostly you're saying, yeah, of course I want to be accountable. Of course I want to be clear in what I say. Now, one thing I really want to name is part of the accountability part in general is to that if you're in a problem with other people, the starting assumption should be that you had at least some role in creating that in most cases, and you need to do something differently. So one thing that I would just notice right away with this guy, is that there's a problem on his team and his perception is somehow the problem is those other people.
Now this is his team. This is a team that , he's created, he's hired these people, they report to him, he's created the culture in which they operate. So that's something to notice that in terms of accountability, you might want to work on that. So a conversation that I might have with him as a start is like, you know, are there things that you feel that you might've done that contributed to this might be a question that I would ask him, he might or may not say but one thing I would say is to say, you know, if you want to be transparent and curious and collaborative with the team, you might get them together and you might say, Hey, listen, want to tell you about some things that I'm perceiving.
I'm curious how it feels to you. It feels to you guys, transparent, curious. It feels to me that lots of stuff that I think should be your responsibility ends up back on my desk and I end up kind of overwhelmed. I'm curious if you feel that way too. That's the first thing. And then the thing you might say is . I wonder if there's anything that I could do differently that would make things less like that. Now I can almost guarantee you, I have a very strong hypothesis, that if this guy has a team where everybody is a low initiative thing, there's only two basic possibilities.
One is, by chance, he has only hired low initiative people. Or the other one is, he's doing something that's creating an environment , where people behave in that way. The first one seems very unlikely to me. And the second one seems more likely. So if he's able to do that, he could start to find out and they could start to have that conversation.
And then now it's not to say that he has to believe every single thing that they say, but if his job is to be curious, there's an enormous amount of data that he's missing, which is what is their understanding of this situation? And it seems. Pretty clear that like that data would be helpful in solving the problem. What am I doing that makes it this way? First of all, see if they share that perception of the problem. They probably do, but their perception of that same story is probably different, right?
Their perception of the story is something like, we don't feel trusted to make decisions on our own, or we feel micromanaged, or we don't feel safe to make mistakes, or something like that, , and so part of that is
make them partners in solving the problem, because it's a problem that you're in together.
[00:20:21] Mahan Tavakoli: What a powerful way of also showing that growth mindset and being an example of the growth mindset, Misha, with your team. If, and when you are willing to have this kind of conversation, then it's much less likely that they will close up and not be open to feedback or soliciting feedback from others.
So it's a great way to set the example as well.
[00:20:47] Misha Glouberman: And that said, in reality, what will happen is, you know, if this were an actual situation, I'd be very surprised if this particular person was able to turn around and have that conversation with people the next day , because that's a hard conversation to have if you haven't been operating that way for several years.
So the real world situation might be that it takes. It takes that person few weeks to be able to get to the point to have that conversation. And then also when he has that conversation with those people, it's not like they're magically going to open up because they've also have years of experience of not doing that.
So it'll take everyone a while, like the conversation you had had, you and I had in 90 seconds, that might take place over weeks. You know, or months.
[00:21:22] Mahan Tavakoli: And I go back to a point you made earlier, Misha, there has to be intentionality behind it as well. , part of what people are doing is the meetings are filled with agenda items and their days are filled with emails and meetings and everything else.
And. They don't work on some of these friction points that get in the way of achieving those objectives and those goals. It requires a discipline to actually do that.
[00:21:54] Misha Glouberman: And again, all of these things , should be in alignment with the leader's own principles. Is it important for you work on the important things and not get stuck in all the day to day weeds? Yes. Is it important for you to work on the points of highest leverage that are going to have the most impact on your team?
Yeah, of course. That's important. Do you need to be working on the important non urgent stuff? Yeah, of course we do. So again, it's, probably an alignment of people's stated values.
[00:22:16] Mahan Tavakoli: Another scenario, this is presidency of a college that has a couple of the senior team members that. Have lots of conflict. , therefore the question is what role can the CEO play in managing conflict within the team? These are competent, capable individuals that have risen up through higher education to be at this level within the college.
[00:22:49] Misha Glouberman: , if you have a few people among you who have high conflict between them, I would, again, ask the question, , as a starting point.
Is there possibly something in the environment that you're creating that does this? So very often , an example, a thing that creates a lot of high conflict is rule on clarity. So I think one thing you might want to do for a start is to ask them ,
is there anything I can do to make it easier? So things like role clarity or unclarity of who has to do what or creating a stressful work environment. . I guess in any situation, the easiest thing for me to do is to work on myself. It's a lot easier for me to make changes to myself than to make changes to other people.
If you have a bunch of people who report to you who are having high conflict and you want to do something about it, before you try to change or fix them, you see if there's anything you can change about yourself. Or things that you can control. So I might ask them individually, , are there things that I could be doing differently that would make this be a less conflict ridden environment?
That's part of it. Then I think the question is, , how and whether they want to resolve the conflicts, how they feel about those conflicts.
Then the other thing, is if they want to work on it, bring in someone who helps people work on this stuff, but then that's work between them. It's not his job. I think it's hard.
For him to be the person who does the conflict resolution in that way. I think he can create an environment that's less. Conflict driven. But if they're a point of really high conflict I think you want someone who does that for a living. And then , with all this stuff, the thing is that what you need is you need people to work on a goal that's their goal that they want. Let's say it's three people who get along poorly with each other. The question is like, how do you guys get along? And the question is, how would you guys like to get along? What would it be like if you got along better? . Do you know the idea of motivational interviewing?
, the idea of motivational interviewing is that when there are things that are hard for us to do, I think it comes from medicine, it'd be things like quitting drinking. And quitting drinking is a great example where there's often a disjoint between sort of in principle what you want to do and what you do in the moment.
So , in principle what I want to do is quit drinking, but right now when there's a drink in front of me what I want to do is drink that drink. And so a lot of what motivational interviewing is about getting people to really clarify the long term goal they're excited about so that you can then figure out what steps they need to take to reach that.
In this case , when you're in conflict with other people, what you want to do is like show that other person that he's a jerk or, you know, undercut him or whatever. But probably the big term goal to investigate might be, probably is, but you don't know, with that group to say, probably better if we got along well with each other than got along poorly with each other.
Then if you set that goal, , if you can get them to name that, say, well, , what we'd like to get along, what would that be like? How would that make your job better? Oh, , I wouldn't come home with headaches every day. I wouldn't be up at night worrying about how this other guy screwed me over.
And I wouldn't be, you know, taking out on my wife and kids when I come home. be more effective in my job. Great. So that's all worthwhile. So now you can say, what would it take for us to be able to get along better? What do we need to do once you've set that goal? And so working on that kind of stuff is stuff that you can do.
And also, I think , if you're the president doing that, then you also say, and what are things that I can do to make this easier for you?
[00:25:29] Mahan Tavakoli: I love both pieces to it, Misha. Part of what you keep circling back to and it's very powerful is that in every one of these situations, we play a role and we need to reflect on what is the role that we play in it as well.
It is not just an other's problem or issue,
[00:25:51] Misha Glouberman: it is a thing I see so much in leaders where people will be like, Hey, can you train my staff to be better at, you know, giving difficult feedback to their, higher ups in the organization. And if everybody's bad at giving feedback to the higher ups in the organization, you probably have a systemic problem in your organization or you've created culture.
It's hard for people to do that. And training isn't going to fix that problem. But , all of us as human beings, the problem is always the other guy. It's just kind of how our minds work.
[00:26:19] Mahan Tavakoli: The third scenario is a middle manager who said she feels stuck between senior leadership demands and the team's demands.
In this specific instance, the manager is being asked by senior leaders to have their team on site at least three days a week. And many of the team members, including some that work in it, say, I don't really need to be in the office.
I can get my work done from anywhere. Why do I need to drive an hour and a half? Some of these folks live way outside of the city. Why do I need to drive all the way in?
[00:27:01] Misha Glouberman: . I think that there's a couple of things. Senior leaders aren't just trying to make people's jobs harder and shittier for no reason, there's something they're after.
We call this interests versus positions, to get at the underlying interest, , the position is we want them to come to work. I'm putting a lot of technical language in here. This is like negotiation talk. The underlying interest is why? And very often when people are at opposite positions, when it feels like they want opposite things, the way to get it is to understand the underlying reasons why they care about it.
So if, for instance, they say, well, you know, We want to be able to monitor how much work they get done. Again, you can come up with other ways to do that. Whatever the issue is, , you might be able to come up with ways to solve it,
[00:27:37] Mahan Tavakoli: love the thoughts and I appreciate you also sharing some of your ideas on the scenarios. It helps in a couple of different perspectives. One, the scenarios are slightly different, but in reality, the way and the approach in addressing them is very similar. So I'm sure listeners can relate to some of the challenges they're facing and how they can apply your insight to those as well.. So If the audience wants to find out more about you, Misha, where would you send them to?
[00:28:13] Misha Glouberman: I am Misha Globerman. No matter how you spell it, I'm the only person on the internet with a name remotely like that. It's Misha Globerman. You'll send it in the show notes. It'll be up there. You can go to my website. There's stuff about what I do, helping teams and leaders function better. There's stuff about what I do, making events and conferences better.
there's a form where you can book a call with me, which I'm really happy to do. Get like a quick call and talk about what's going on with you.
[00:28:37] Mahan Tavakoli: I really appreciate the conversation, Misha, as well as your curiosity, which also comes across in the conversation as well.
Thank you so much for joining this conversation. Misha Gloverman.
[00:28:50] Misha Glouberman: Great to talk to
[00:28:51] video2038702664: you.
[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Misha Gruberman, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.
[00:00:05] Misha Glouberman: Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.
[00:00:07] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to learn more from you about communication strategies, , managing conflict, driving change, before we get to that, we'd love to know a little bit more about you, Misha, whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing impact who you've become?
[00:00:21] Misha Glouberman: I grew up in Montreal. I've lived in a few places in between in the U. S. and in the U. K., but I'm back in Canada now in Toronto. I remember in grade school, like second grade, third grade, something like that. And I'd be in the classroom and the teacher would say something and there would be a student who didn't understand what the teacher said, and the student would raise their hand and ask the teacher to explain, and then the teacher would give an explanation to the student that didn't make it clear to the student, and then the student would be confused and ask something back.
I remember when all that was happening, time would just stop for me and I felt like I could see. Each level of misunderstanding. I could see why the student didn't understand what the teacher said. I could see why the teacher didn't understand the student's question.
And I could sort of see all of that happening. And at some level, the application of that skill is a big part of what I do for a living now is help people not do the things that make them talk past each other.
[00:01:09] Mahan Tavakoli: In both our personal lives and organizations, we do talk past each other. A lot. . Now you say that most organizational problems are fundamentally human problems and a lot of those human problems are communication problems. What are the reasons for that, Misha?
[00:01:27] Misha Glouberman: I don't know why people are bad at this. It's hard for people to raise difficult issues. And then more surprisingly, it's hard for people to notice when they're not doing it.
But very often people will come out of some conversation and think they did a great job of listening. But once you investigate it, you realize they didn't, or they'll think that they raised the issue. But once you investigate it, you'll see that what they actually did was say something close to what they wanted to say without actually saying it. . So I think asking for feedback, so if, for instance, you say as a leader, well, what you want to do is create an environment where it's safe for people to speak up and talk about difficult issues would be something.
And maybe most leaders say, Oh, I'm really good at that. One way that you can get better at it, or to notice if you're not, is to say to your reports, Hey, listen, what I want to do is create an environment where people can speak up and talk about difficult issues. What are some things that I do that make that hard? guess that for most leaders the people you're asking have an answer to that question. They may or may not feel comfortable enough to tell you that answer. , , but asking that question is a first step. That's one way to notice. So asking people for feedback,
say, one of the things I really want to do with you is I want, I want to really make sure that you feel heard. Are there recent times when you felt like you haven't felt heard in our conversations? Could you let me know going forward if you haven't feel heard? So asking for that feedback, being open to that.
And if when you hear that you think, well, I don't want to do that, that's an example of being bad at listening, right? So there are things that I don't, I don't want to do that because there are things I don't want to hear. Well, if there's things you don't want to hear, That's what it means to be bad at getting feedback.
, you don't want to ask a yes or no question.
Are there things I do that get in the way it's a yes or no question., it puts more burden on the person you're talking to, to say, yes, there are. Whereas they might think, well, no, there's one or two things, but they're not really a big deal. So I'll say no, but if you say, what are the things that I do?
, they're free to say, oh, there are no such things, but yeah, the assumption should be that there are. And I would say that that's probably a safe assumption that even if be someone who's really great at getting feedback, there's probably some things that you do that make it hard for people to do that.
And I think, that's part of it too, is having that sort of mindset of growth, that mindset of, you know, even if I'm good at this, I can still get better.
[00:03:25] Mahan Tavakoli: , part of what else it takes that you speak about. Misha is there needs to be trust and that trust plays a critical role in communication
what are some practices that help build the kind of trust that enables that communication to take place? A
[00:03:42] Misha Glouberman: lot of it's iteration, right? , when you think of trust, what are you thinking of? What do you mean by trust?
[00:03:47] Mahan Tavakoli: The willingness to say things as you see them.
There's a filter in many of our minds that filters what we say. From what we see to how we express it. And trust plays a big role in how willing we are to share it exactly as we see it.
[00:04:08] Misha Glouberman: So , , a lot of it is like iteration. If what I want to do is create trust in people that I am saying things honestly as they appear to me.
A really good practice is to not lie to them and to not conceal things and to say things, honestly. There's a lot of things that people often do that you know, when your boss is telling you and you know that what they're saying doesn't seem true. To act as if there's no problem when everyone knows that there's a problem going on would be an example.
To act as if everything's fine when everyone knows that things aren't fine. When you do that, , it diminishes trust. So making it a practice of talking about things, to name when you've made a mistake to name when you think something isn't going well. But by doing all those things, people start to understand that you're honest that you can talk about those things as part of it.
Probably harder or more important is creating an environment where the people around you can do that. And I think the way that you do that is by encouraging them to do that and rewarding them for doing it, and certainly not punishing them for doing it, right? That example I gave earlier, what are things that I do to make it unsafe?
That's an example of soliciting negative feedback about yourself. What are some things that I did running that last meeting that you didn't like? What are ways in which you think I could be better as a manager? What about your job? Do you really enjoy? What parts of your job do you not enjoy? have this idea for a project, what I'd love to hear from folks is what do you think about that, what are some of the strong points, what do you see as the weak points about my idea, and then when people do that, you don't punish them for doing it, you reward them for doing it, and bit by bit as you do that, you can build trust, and you can't do it magically, like if you've been doing the opposite of that for a long time, you can't automatically come in and make people start trusting you. So I guess there's two parts. To make yourself seem trustworthy, the thing to do is to be honest and to encourage that sort of honesty in the people around you, the thing to do is solicit it and then reward it when they actually act on it.
[00:05:42] Mahan Tavakoli: You gave a lot of great examples of questions and the way they can be asked to solicit the kind of interaction. Part of the challenge that I see in some of the executives I work with is that they are so focused on The priorities and conversations around those priorities that they don't necessarily take the time to get the kind of feedback that you're asking for beyond the once a year engagement survey or whatever else is done.
[00:06:10] Misha Glouberman: Yeah, and they do so I think at their peril, because I think usually when you talk to those guys, what you'll also find is that they have frustrations. And if you ask them what those frustrations are, very often those frustrations are frustrations about people, and then what they do with those frustrations typically is not name them, or not work on them. thing I want to emphasize is that For many companies, a really critical thing that stands between them and reaching the goals that they want to reach is the fact that the people working together on those goals aren't communicating with each other as effectively as they could, and that if those people communicated better, that company would be much, much better , at achieving whatever goals it is that it set.
So I think very often they're seen as a trade off between like, well, we can't work on this touchy feely communication stuff because what we really have to do is reach our goals. And the thing that I very strongly think is that if you think that the way to reach your goals is to assume that the people who work around you are perfectly rational robots who don't need help on this stuff.
You're operating , in a kind of wishful thinking , the stuff that I do can be seen as in conflict with the stuff , that's more practical. But to me, the most impractical thing is to operate your organization on a model of human behavior that you know is false.
[00:07:12] Mahan Tavakoli: I think one of the biggest challenges that I see that feeds into that is the lack of recognition of it being an issue.
[00:07:20] Misha Glouberman: Almost everybody could stand to get better at Working with the folks around them and at least in some context in ways that be enormously beneficial to them I mean, I've been working on this in my whole life and I still keep working on it think , I'm the greatest athlete in the NBA I don't need a coach.
I don't have to go to practice that's how you become the greatest athlete in the NBA is by getting coaching by getting practice by watching what Other people do by learning , and when you talk about how that process goes, , it's our job as coaches, as consultants to enact the same skills that we want leaders to enact with the people working with them. So what we can't do is sort of go and wave our fingers at them and say, listen, you need to communicate better. And I know better than you.
And that's the answer. Cause then you're doing the exact same thing that you're telling them not to do their people. Right. So what you need to do is as much as you want them to approach their people with empathy and with curiosity and with transparency, you want to approach them with empathy and curiosity and transparency.
So you might say, you know You know, so get that it's hard for them to work on this stuff. That's the empathy part, the transparency and curiosity. There's also like, maybe you're wrong. Like, , I look at people and I'm man, that person needs to fix X, Y, and Z, maybe I'm wrong.
And so what it is to have transparency and curiosity, and these are the values that I use is to sort of say, you know, it looks to me like, , this problem might better if you worked on your communication skills. And again, you're leading with their problem. So they come to you with a problem and say, I'm having a conflict with this person.
How can I work on this conflict? , then you work with them on it. And one of the biggest things I find is that , ideally, you're getting people to act in alignment with their own values and with their own principles. You're not trying to bring other values and principles to them. So for instance, Most leaders who get awards. I think if you were to say to them, you know, as a leader How do you feel about learning?
I think very few of them would say learnings for chumps or people who aren't good at stuff I think that what they would say is a value is you know probably lifelong learning is something I'm committed to and you might want to say ? How do you think you should interact with other people in different interactions and probably what they say is in principle You should be empathetic, and you should listen to them, and you should be really clear about what's on your mind, and you should not be manipulative, and those are probably what get the best outcomes.
You say, great, if you act in alignment with your own principles and with your own vision of what works, too, and I want to stress these aren't just principles of what you think is right, they're principles of what you think actually is effective.
that what's effective is to be a lifelong learner, what's effective is to be a compassionate listener, what's effective is all those things. So if that's what you really believe, the thing you might want to say too is like, you think it's hard for people to do this sometimes. Like, yeah, yeah, I really do.
Okay, great. So , here's my suspicion. I think this is one of those situations where it would serve you well to listen better and doing that might take some learning and it might be kind of challenging. Does it look to you like this might be one of those situations? Then you see. So you're presenting your view, which is being transparent, you're checking whether you think it's right, which is being curious, , you're working with their own values, which is sort of being compassionate and empathetic.
And you're not trying to make them do what you know is right. You're trying to really help them do what they think is right while also having your own beliefs. , you have to remember that you're there to help them reach their own goals.
[00:10:18] Mahan Tavakoli: Misha, I love. The process that you just went through, because it also serves as a great example for managers , when they're having coaching conversations with their people.
Now one of the other things I wanted to touch on Misha is I know you spending some time on gatherings and a lot of the organizations that I interact with the value and the importance of gatherings have gone up for them.
What are some of your thoughts with respect to how to do gatherings well?
[00:10:47] Misha Glouberman: I have a simple thought, get rid of all the presentations and talks. So when people do gatherings, there's a number of most common mistakes that people make. One common mistake is that people don't know what their goals are.
Or they know what their goals are, but they do things that aren't in support of their goals. So being able to say, why are we having this gathering? What would it look like if this went well, what would happen afterwards? What would it be like? So as an example, if what you say is. The reason we're having this gathering is everyone works remotely.
And what we really want is to get people to know each other better. That's our number one goal. You say, great. So your number one goal is for these people to get to know each other better. Yes. That is our goal. Okay. What are you doing first thing in the morning? We're having a 45 minute talk from the CEO about trends in the industry.
They're like, okay, how does that bring you any closer towards your goal? It does not. Okay. Take that out of the agenda. And then what you do is Do things that instead get people to know each other better. There's a million different facility exercises you can do.
You can run an unconference, you can run an open space meeting, you can run a world cafe. I mean, those are also things that get work done too. You can do all sorts of, networking exercises. You can even just , go kayaking, go for a walk in the woods, have a karaoke night, like any of those things. often say is if you had 200 people in a room and you wanted to stop them from talking to each other, the way to do it is to give one of them a microphone and make the other 199 sit down in chairs. So every moment that you're spending in presentations is a moment that you're spending Not meeting each other and specifically stopping people from meeting each other and almost all of that information That's all the stuff you can do over zoom over the internet.
So don't waste your time So that's the main thing is that if your goal is to get people to meet each other don't spend time doing things There Antithetical to people meeting each other.
[00:12:23] Mahan Tavakoli: I couldn't agree with you more on a couple of elements. One is that purpose and Priya Parker also talks about it in her, outstanding book, daughter gathering, having that clarity of purpose is really important and presentations don't lend themselves to that.
Now I was having a conversation, Misha, on this specific issue last week with a and part of what they were saying is. We understand what the purpose is, but can you have a series of objectives? So part of it is for people to get to know each other. Part of it is to do some training. How much can you fit in in the umbrella of a purpose?
You can absolutely have
[00:13:04] Misha Glouberman: multiple purposes. And that's great. If you have multiple purposes to pursue those multiple purposes, that's what I would say doing some training to me isn't actually a purpose. It's a activity. So the question is, why are you doing training? What's the purpose of the training? And again, why are you doing it? in this particular moment. So if it's like we want to train people on how to use the new IT system, maybe you can do that remotely. If you're a hybrid organization, you're bringing people together.
It's like, well, what do we uniquely want to do during this time that we can't do during other times? So if I had a client and they said, you know, one of the purposes of our retreat is to train people in the new IT system, I would say great. see whether that actually makes sense in this context.
And I think partly it's because it's harder to see like when someone gives a talk you kind of see what's happening.
It's easier to see and easier to control and even though it doesn't serve your purpose, you can sort of see it happening and so for the organizers, it feels comfortable, whereas if you have people talking to each other in small groups, you can't really see what's happening, doesn't feel as good, so very often you're seeing something it's measurable, but it's not useful.
[00:14:04] Mahan Tavakoli: That's a great point. There's a lot less control in that second format than the first one where you have the agenda filled with. Speaker after speaker which there's a lot of control.
[00:14:14] Misha Glouberman: Plus, you know, how many, you know, how many new connections you've made?
Zero. It's great. It's really easy to measure, I think there's a fundamental trade off. I think when people want to create community, which is very often what people want to do, I think there's a fundamental trade off between community and control.
I think at some level they're antithetical to each other. If what you want is you say, our organization is so siloed. Well, great. Well, that means you have to have people across different parts, talk to each other. And what it means for organization to be siloed almost by definition is for there to be communication in your organization that you haven't officially controlled, that you haven't officially sanctioned.
If all the communication is officially controlled and sanctioned, then what that's called is silos. And it makes people uncomfortable a little bit.
[00:14:51] Mahan Tavakoli: It is uncomfortable, but it is the way that organizations will need to function even more.
[00:14:59] Misha Glouberman: And again, when you ask people, this can be in alignment with people's own values that you say to a leader,
you have to sometimes do things that are uncomfortable. They're like, yeah, that's one of my strengths. I do things that are uncomfortable. Cool. Okay. So remember earlier you said we want to do this thing. Well, that sounds very uncomfortable. Remember earlier when you said that as a leader, one of the things you thought was important was to do things that are uncomfortable.
This might be one of those things.
And again, everybody in the abstract thinks that what they should do is do things that are uncomfortable, but presented with any specific uncomfortable thing, they think they shouldn't. So it's again, that's the thing of getting people to align their individual action with their broader principles.
No one thinks a good principle is always avoiding uncomfortable things, and yet everybody the moment always thinks that the uncomfortable thing in front of them should be avoided. , so a lot of what we're doing in our work is just getting people to act in alignment with their own principles, I think.
[00:15:45] Mahan Tavakoli: I love that and I wrote it down. Misha helping people act in alignment with their own principles, in many instances, there is a disconnect and through the kind of questioning that you've done, maybe you can help the person see that disconnect and therefore address it.
[00:16:03] Misha Glouberman: Yeah. I mean, maybe one way to think about the work that we do as consultants, but especially as coaches is just to help different versions of yourselves connect, like to help, you know, the, the person who you were a week ago that set an intention, talk to the person who you are today, who's tempted to not act on that intention.
So, you know, ideally we're just sort of Sending messages between those different versions of the self of the client we're talking to.
[00:16:26] Mahan Tavakoli: Now, and part of what I appreciate about you, Misha is in our prep conversation, you said feel free to ask people for some challenges they have for us to discuss I asked my network, got a bunch of them and chose three for us to. One of them is an executive feeling frustrated because he said every decision or issue ends back up on my desk.
[00:16:55] Misha Glouberman: Right.
[00:16:55] Mahan Tavakoli: So he's overwhelmed. And in his words, The team lacks initiative and ownership. And this executive was wondering how can communication help shift this dynamic,
[00:17:11] Misha Glouberman: So I want to name a couple of things I'm going to do like a 60 second. overview of every decent communication book you've ever read. Any decent communication book you ever read is basically ways of operationalizing a few ideas that I've mentioned before, but I want to say them now specifically, which is the idea that it's about being transparent.
Which means naming what's going on. So you have to name what's going on. You have to be curious and listen to other people. You got to bring some empathy to it. You want to be collaborative and you want to have some accountability.
Those are the things. That's five things. It's a lot, but that's it. It's only five. You want to name what's going on. You want to be curious and listen. You want to be compassionate. You want to be collaborative. You want to be accountable. , a lot of this comes from a great writer named Roger Schwartz who writes about this stuff, who's amazing. Almost all the answers are just going to be, those things, which again are things that most people want to be.
Most people, mostly you're saying, yeah, of course I want to be accountable. Of course I want to be clear in what I say. Now, one thing I really want to name is part of the accountability part in general is to that if you're in a problem with other people, the starting assumption should be that you had at least some role in creating that in most cases, and you need to do something differently. So one thing that I would just notice right away with this guy, is that there's a problem on his team and his perception is somehow the problem is those other people.
Now this is his team. This is a team that , he's created, he's hired these people, they report to him, he's created the culture in which they operate. So that's something to notice that in terms of accountability, you might want to work on that. So a conversation that I might have with him as a start is like, you know, are there things that you feel that you might've done that contributed to this might be a question that I would ask him, he might or may not say but one thing I would say is to say, you know, if you want to be transparent and curious and collaborative with the team, you might get them together and you might say, Hey, listen, want to tell you about some things that I'm perceiving.
I'm curious how it feels to you. It feels to you guys, transparent, curious. It feels to me that lots of stuff that I think should be your responsibility ends up back on my desk and I end up kind of overwhelmed. I'm curious if you feel that way too. That's the first thing. And then the thing you might say is . I wonder if there's anything that I could do differently that would make things less like that. Now I can almost guarantee you, I have a very strong hypothesis, that if this guy has a team where everybody is a low initiative thing, there's only two basic possibilities.
One is, by chance, he has only hired low initiative people. Or the other one is, he's doing something that's creating an environment , where people behave in that way. The first one seems very unlikely to me. And the second one seems more likely. So if he's able to do that, he could start to find out and they could start to have that conversation.
And then now it's not to say that he has to believe every single thing that they say, but if his job is to be curious, there's an enormous amount of data that he's missing, which is what is their understanding of this situation? And it seems. Pretty clear that like that data would be helpful in solving the problem. What am I doing that makes it this way? First of all, see if they share that perception of the problem. They probably do, but their perception of that same story is probably different, right?
Their perception of the story is something like, we don't feel trusted to make decisions on our own, or we feel micromanaged, or we don't feel safe to make mistakes, or something like that, , and so part of that is
make them partners in solving the problem, because it's a problem that you're in together.
[00:20:21] Mahan Tavakoli: What a powerful way of also showing that growth mindset and being an example of the growth mindset, Misha, with your team. If, and when you are willing to have this kind of conversation, then it's much less likely that they will close up and not be open to feedback or soliciting feedback from others.
So it's a great way to set the example as well.
[00:20:47] Misha Glouberman: And that said, in reality, what will happen is, you know, if this were an actual situation, I'd be very surprised if this particular person was able to turn around and have that conversation with people the next day , because that's a hard conversation to have if you haven't been operating that way for several years.
So the real world situation might be that it takes. It takes that person few weeks to be able to get to the point to have that conversation. And then also when he has that conversation with those people, it's not like they're magically going to open up because they've also have years of experience of not doing that.
So it'll take everyone a while, like the conversation you had had, you and I had in 90 seconds, that might take place over weeks. You know, or months.
[00:21:22] Mahan Tavakoli: And I go back to a point you made earlier, Misha, there has to be intentionality behind it as well. , part of what people are doing is the meetings are filled with agenda items and their days are filled with emails and meetings and everything else.
And. They don't work on some of these friction points that get in the way of achieving those objectives and those goals. It requires a discipline to actually do that.
[00:21:54] Misha Glouberman: And again, all of these things , should be in alignment with the leader's own principles. Is it important for you work on the important things and not get stuck in all the day to day weeds? Yes. Is it important for you to work on the points of highest leverage that are going to have the most impact on your team?
Yeah, of course. That's important. Do you need to be working on the important non urgent stuff? Yeah, of course we do. So again, it's, probably an alignment of people's stated values.
[00:22:16] Mahan Tavakoli: Another scenario, this is presidency of a college that has a couple of the senior team members that. Have lots of conflict. , therefore the question is what role can the CEO play in managing conflict within the team? These are competent, capable individuals that have risen up through higher education to be at this level within the college.
[00:22:49] Misha Glouberman: , if you have a few people among you who have high conflict between them, I would, again, ask the question, , as a starting point.
Is there possibly something in the environment that you're creating that does this? So very often , an example, a thing that creates a lot of high conflict is rule on clarity. So I think one thing you might want to do for a start is to ask them ,
is there anything I can do to make it easier? So things like role clarity or unclarity of who has to do what or creating a stressful work environment. . I guess in any situation, the easiest thing for me to do is to work on myself. It's a lot easier for me to make changes to myself than to make changes to other people.
If you have a bunch of people who report to you who are having high conflict and you want to do something about it, before you try to change or fix them, you see if there's anything you can change about yourself. Or things that you can control. So I might ask them individually, , are there things that I could be doing differently that would make this be a less conflict ridden environment?
That's part of it. Then I think the question is, , how and whether they want to resolve the conflicts, how they feel about those conflicts.
Then the other thing, is if they want to work on it, bring in someone who helps people work on this stuff, but then that's work between them. It's not his job. I think it's hard.
For him to be the person who does the conflict resolution in that way. I think he can create an environment that's less. Conflict driven. But if they're a point of really high conflict I think you want someone who does that for a living. And then , with all this stuff, the thing is that what you need is you need people to work on a goal that's their goal that they want. Let's say it's three people who get along poorly with each other. The question is like, how do you guys get along? And the question is, how would you guys like to get along? What would it be like if you got along better? . Do you know the idea of motivational interviewing?
, the idea of motivational interviewing is that when there are things that are hard for us to do, I think it comes from medicine, it'd be things like quitting drinking. And quitting drinking is a great example where there's often a disjoint between sort of in principle what you want to do and what you do in the moment.
So , in principle what I want to do is quit drinking, but right now when there's a drink in front of me what I want to do is drink that drink. And so a lot of what motivational interviewing is about getting people to really clarify the long term goal they're excited about so that you can then figure out what steps they need to take to reach that.
In this case , when you're in conflict with other people, what you want to do is like show that other person that he's a jerk or, you know, undercut him or whatever. But probably the big term goal to investigate might be, probably is, but you don't know, with that group to say, probably better if we got along well with each other than got along poorly with each other.
Then if you set that goal, , if you can get them to name that, say, well, , what we'd like to get along, what would that be like? How would that make your job better? Oh, , I wouldn't come home with headaches every day. I wouldn't be up at night worrying about how this other guy screwed me over.
And I wouldn't be, you know, taking out on my wife and kids when I come home. be more effective in my job. Great. So that's all worthwhile. So now you can say, what would it take for us to be able to get along better? What do we need to do once you've set that goal? And so working on that kind of stuff is stuff that you can do.
And also, I think , if you're the president doing that, then you also say, and what are things that I can do to make this easier for you?
[00:25:29] Mahan Tavakoli: I love both pieces to it, Misha. Part of what you keep circling back to and it's very powerful is that in every one of these situations, we play a role and we need to reflect on what is the role that we play in it as well.
It is not just an other's problem or issue,
[00:25:51] Misha Glouberman: it is a thing I see so much in leaders where people will be like, Hey, can you train my staff to be better at, you know, giving difficult feedback to their, higher ups in the organization. And if everybody's bad at giving feedback to the higher ups in the organization, you probably have a systemic problem in your organization or you've created culture.
It's hard for people to do that. And training isn't going to fix that problem. But , all of us as human beings, the problem is always the other guy. It's just kind of how our minds work.
[00:26:19] Mahan Tavakoli: The third scenario is a middle manager who said she feels stuck between senior leadership demands and the team's demands.
In this specific instance, the manager is being asked by senior leaders to have their team on site at least three days a week. And many of the team members, including some that work in it, say, I don't really need to be in the office.
I can get my work done from anywhere. Why do I need to drive an hour and a half? Some of these folks live way outside of the city. Why do I need to drive all the way in?
[00:27:01] Misha Glouberman: . I think that there's a couple of things. Senior leaders aren't just trying to make people's jobs harder and shittier for no reason, there's something they're after.
We call this interests versus positions, to get at the underlying interest, , the position is we want them to come to work. I'm putting a lot of technical language in here. This is like negotiation talk. The underlying interest is why? And very often when people are at opposite positions, when it feels like they want opposite things, the way to get it is to understand the underlying reasons why they care about it.
So if, for instance, they say, well, you know, We want to be able to monitor how much work they get done. Again, you can come up with other ways to do that. Whatever the issue is, , you might be able to come up with ways to solve it,
[00:27:37] Mahan Tavakoli: love the thoughts and I appreciate you also sharing some of your ideas on the scenarios. It helps in a couple of different perspectives. One, the scenarios are slightly different, but in reality, the way and the approach in addressing them is very similar. So I'm sure listeners can relate to some of the challenges they're facing and how they can apply your insight to those as well.. So If the audience wants to find out more about you, Misha, where would you send them to?
[00:28:13] Misha Glouberman: I am Misha Globerman. No matter how you spell it, I'm the only person on the internet with a name remotely like that. It's Misha Globerman. You'll send it in the show notes. It'll be up there. You can go to my website. There's stuff about what I do, helping teams and leaders function better. There's stuff about what I do, making events and conferences better.
there's a form where you can book a call with me, which I'm really happy to do. Get like a quick call and talk about what's going on with you.
[00:28:37] Mahan Tavakoli: I really appreciate the conversation, Misha, as well as your curiosity, which also comes across in the conversation as well.
Thank you so much for joining this conversation. Misha Gloverman.
[00:28:50] Misha Glouberman: Great to talk to
[00:28:51] video2038702664: you.
