How to Actually Develop Confidence in your Employees

I want you to think of a time when you were in total zone, the most confident you would be whether it was a project, a family event, sports team. Just take a minute and think about when you were in flow. Now imagine feeling like that all the time. Imagine if your staff felt like that all the time. That's what we want and what we do in organizational psychology and companies. And what HR does is we make it the company's responsibility to produce that. The company has a responsibility in that, but it does not own the responsibility. The responsibility belongs to the employee. Right. How to create that in people is not just you coming up with, you know, empowerment programs and ice cream socials. And it's not going to happen. It's going to happen when people find their voice. I'm going to go through the elements of this in a minute. I'm not an HR expert. You are, but I am an expert in organizational development. I've been doing this, I've been thinking about this stuff since I was 16 years old, coaching thousands of people, you know, tens of thousands of conversations. I kind of have a vibe on what people need. I hear the same thing over and over again. I'm not confident about something. I'm afraid to talk to somebody. This person's not making me feel safe. It's the same stuff over and over again. And my job as a coach is just to listen to them and find their empowerment, try to try to find their way, you know? So that's kind of like where we're going to go. I'm going to talk a little bit about where we came from and where we're going, and then I'm going to switch to what I think HR can do right now regarding this, what kind of things you guys can think about. So what is agency? When I think, when I say productive agency or professional agency, I'm talking about people moving towards self actualization. We all know what that is, right? We don't necessarily have it, but we know what it is. Moving towards self actualization through self determination. It's not your job to make me self actualize. It's not my wife's job. It's not my boss's job. It's my job to find. It's my determination that's going to help me get self actualized. Yeah. So this is the pyramid, right? This is how our organizations have built since. This is how we built the Titanic, this is how we built companies. It was the pyramid. And we all. My guess is you all have charts at your organization, right? And what we try to do is, in today's world, we've gone from the people working in the mills with their twelve year old kid next to them six days a week, 12 hours a day. That's where we came from. And why did people work then? They worked because they needed to feed their family. That was the motivation. Today we have people talking about quiet quitting, four day work weeks. What is that? Because people want to be self actualized. So when we look at this pyramid, I have to think that maybe it doesn't work anymore. So when I think about. So then, you know, through the years, we come up with new systems. We've got the matrix organization, which really just, you know, folds over the pyramid. We have the flat organization, we have the consulting organization, and so on and so forth, right? But what we try to do is we try to layer engagement over that pyramid. In that pyramid, there's a president, a vice president, a director, a senior manager, a manager, a supervisor, and finally, a workforce in a big company that you might have that as an example. Who do I call when I call in sick? I call my boss. Who do I call when I have to ship parts? Do I call my boss? Maybe not. What happens if I have the ship parts today and I have to make a decision and the boss isn't around? So what we try to do is we try to put these cultural initiatives laid over the pyramid. It doesn't necessarily work. So I was in a graduate course early, a long time ago, and I was studying organizational development, and the professor put up, drew a circle on the board and said, this is the future of the organization. And what it is is everybody's sitting in a circle. It's like the emphasis of team, right? Makes sense to us, right? We can kind of get it. We're all peers. There's no rank. We can all talk openly, right? It's a great idea. I've been waiting 20 years for that to come true. Now, it does come true in some companies. Some companies are practicing as well. But I actually had a company hired me to come in and said, here's the chart. He shows me the chart with everybody's name around a circle. I'm like, awesome. Just like the professor said, right? And I said, well, like, so how does this work? And then he pulls out another chart that looks like a pyramid, right? So you see, he's trying to fit. He's trying to fit these concepts into a box that it doesn't fit. This is what our organization looks like today, right? Who's your customer? If you think about your customer, your customer HR, your customers, the senior leadership team, it's maybe all the divisions, it's outside vendors, it's customers list goes on, right? And we're living in an organization where, I mean, sitting here for half hour, I'm gonna get 100 texts or 100 emails, most of them junk, but I'll get ten emails. That'll be good. That's ten emails a day. I mean, in an hour, this is what happens. We have to be dynamic in that. So we can't necessarily wait for the whole circle to agree on something. It doesn't work. It works to a point where it becomes dysfunctional. I had a senior startup medical company making success. They were just getting FDA approval. They called me in, there was eight of them. They were all phds or senior, senior people in their staff. They started this company in a bullpen, a room like the size of this, right? They all had a cubicle. They could talk to each other dynamically. They were in the circle, right? Customer wants this. What are we going to do? How are we going to do that? They could do that. As they grew and became 100 people, well, we got to get organized. So they called in a consultant who developed an.org chart, right? And they tried to create all these protocols and methods for people to speak to, like process maps of decision making. And they call me in, and these are really professional, great, smart people, right? Like you would think they would be dysfunctional. These are the best. These people have great intentions, they have this great opportunity in front of them. They say to me, we can't make decisions. We're not being strategic. I'm putting out crisis every day. I'm dealing with drama. We're not getting along, we're missing shipments, we're missing deadlines. So these are the best people with the best intentions. And I'm like, well, do you trust each other? I'm not going to go into the whole dynamic of that, but the point is that they were trying to work like this again in a bigger organization, but how are you going to do it? So even when I say I don't even think this works, right? This whole, like, you know, free of information coming at you all the time, trying to make decisions quick, it's just not going to keep up with the world. The world's going way too fast. So the question becomes, you know, what is, what is the method? I'm going to go over this quickly. These are just a couple of people that inform me over the years that I think about, as I think about this subject, Mary Parker Follett, any of you know her? She was like a rock star in the field. These people were all consultants like I am. She was a rock star. Her whole thing was creating energy in people. Let's create energy in people. But again, how do we create energy in people? Right? Charles Handy came after her, and he basically said, well, what if we were to get rid of the employee and make them a portfolio worker? And what he meant by that is a contractor. So don't get alarmed. But, you know, the idea was, if everybody was a contractor rather than an employee, would you have as much drama? All right, I can't go to a client with 20 questions. When a client asks me something, I got to go to a client with an answer. How many times does somebody walk into your office and ask you three times if they can do something? Right? Well, they sit in a meeting and they don't have any. They come in with a problem with no solution. Now, I'm not saying his ideas were right, but his premise was, let's motivate people through their own psychology. Let's motivate people by having them be responsible for themselves, by creating their own portfolios. Everything they do goes into the portfolio. If they have a bad behavior to, meaning it goes into portfolio. If they have a good result, it goes into the portfolio. And the idea is, if everybody's accountable for their work, that'll motivate them to be better. So in Maslow, I'm not going to go over. Right. We're all seeking sub actualization, and that's where kind of, you know, that's where his thinking was. And so I think about that, and I think about this organizational dilemma, and I say, well, what's the answer? And so the answer to me is the professional agency. Now, I'm going to go back, I'm going to go forward a couple slides and then come back to this. So this is the formula for agency, or as I see it, right on the right, you want to be self actualized. That's the goal mindset. Well, being successful, that's what we're all seeking. And some of us are on different parts of that journey. And some of us, by the way, I don't think you would actually ever achieve it, but it's just something to strive for. It's something you want to do to get there. The agency has to take place. That's the individual person. The individual has to own these, right? So you can say, well, and I'll go through these. Self trust. Right? What is self trust. It's trust in my ability to learn, trust in my ability to operate. Do I have trust in my own abilities? Do I have trust in my capacity to learn? If you tell me I'm dumb, I have my own. I shouldn't accept that. But what we do is we're all coping. We're all trying to get an a in the paper, and we take input, we take feedback, and it rocks our world. It makes us a little nervous. We're not sure. We might fold. But if we have trust in our own ability, if we have trust in our own knowledge and our capacity to learn, we're going to be successful. Self expression. I mean, I get this all the time, right? I'm in the hall today listening to some of the other speakers. Oh, I got to do my speech yesterday so I can relax today. You think these are professional speakers? They wouldn't be nervous, right? Well, you're putting yourself out there. So you're sitting in a meeting and you have an idea, and you're sitting with the executive team, and you're thinking, well, this doesn't smell right. Something's wrong here. But you don't say anything. Or your people go to a meeting and they clam up. Right? They don't have a voice, or you don't include them in collaboration, you don't include them in strategic decision making. People want to express themselves. And I can go on forever about these introverts and extroverts, different personalities. And I'm not saying that none of that is bad. You know, if you don't want to talk, that's fine, but when you need to, I need to hear your voice, right? And what's happening is people are afraid to express themselves. People come, I want to. I want to get a promotion, but I'm afraid to ask the boss. What? Are you kidding me, right? I think that there might be a new product development, but the board doesn't like it. Like, okay, so what do I do? I say, well, what's it look like? If you talk to them, and I'm telling you, 99.9% of the time, if you have a problem and you go talk to somebody, it's most likely going to be resolved in some way. If you handle it, if you. If you do it professionally, right. Self control of my destiny. You have self control of your destiny. If you think that your career or that life or your situation is pure luck, then what's the point? You won't be motivated to do anything. Right? I've seen executive assistants become presidents of aircraft companies. How is that possible? Right? She took control of her destiny. Now, she had some help along the way. She had mentors, she had probably coaches, right? But that happens all the time. If you go look around most of your companies, if you think about the person that's running your company, in some cases, they might be. If it's a CPA firm, they might be a CPA. But if you're running some kind of company, most of the time, your executives are not from that field or that they don't have that domain knowledge, because it's not the domain knowledge that got them there. It's their people skills. This ability to control, to have influence on other people. And if we believe we have influence on other people, it's going to be. It's extremely powerful. Excuse my voice. Safety, psychological safety is critically important. We have nothing without that. We have nothing without feeling safe in a room. And that's what coaching does. What coaching does is they come in, they feel right away, they say, I'm not going to report to the boss. I'm not going to tell secrets, you know, which really doesn't matter because no one ever tells me anything that's really like that bad, right? But it's like they feel safe. I create a space for them to feel safe. Hold that space for them to feel safe. If I can do that in a meeting with people, with my team, with my executive team, or with the off site, if I can do all those things, I'm going to. Beauty is going to come out of that. But people have to be responsible for their own safety. And what do I mean by that? This happens, and I don't. I gotta be careful at the time, but this happens so often where I have, you know, hey, listen, we want you to come in. We got a couple, some, you know, two executives or two directors that are squabbling, and one of them said they didn't feel safe. Okay, so hir red flags, again, I'm not an HR expert. Hir red flag's gonna go up, right? Like, this is important. We have to deal with this. So I go in and I speak with the people individually, and I said to the person, so what made you not feel safe? And then she, by the way, she described it as bullying. Okay, that's another word. Bad, bad. And I'm not advocating this at all. Right, so describe bullying for me. Can you define it for me? And she says, well, it wasn't really bullying. He was direct and gave me feedback, and I didn't like it. And I think it was his place to give me that feedback. So the next thing I do is I get the two together and we have an open conversation about this. I've done this 50 times, and the problem gets resolved. And what I try to teach them is that you're responsible for your own safety. If she didn't feel safe in that discussion, she should have said, listen, I don't feel safe. You're making me uncomfortable. Right. But we don't. You know, like, maybe for you guys, it's scary to have people running around saying that, but, I mean, that's really important. I don't let, you know, I try to teach my children, don't ever let anybody take away your safety. How you feel about yourself is up to you. And then finally, it's a self accountability. We do not hold people accountable. I bet you everyone in this room has had this conversation in the last month, somebody's not accountable. Why aren't they accountable over there in engineering? Why aren't they accountable? Right? And it's like, we don't hold people accountable. I think that the number one poison to an organization is to have a caustic employee who's been there for ten years and is really good at their job, and everybody gives them a pass because they produce good work, but they're totally disruptive to the organization. Right. They're not held accountable to that. You've got to get rid of them or you've got to put them on a path to success. And if you don't, it's just going to get worse. And you're telling all the other employees how bad. Right? So that's a big example. But another example would be someone doesn't make their deadlines. Well, listen, you need to make your deadlines. So what I'm trying to say here is, so that agency, they have to hold, that's something that they need to own. We can work on self confidence with them. We can work on motivating. We can do things to motivate them, whether it's pay or benefits or, you know, what other motive, you know, what other. Give them the great job that they want. We can motivate them. We can empower them. We know that that's a big word, right? But we could, you know, we say we want to empower people, but when they make a mistake, we get all upset about it. We can't. We got to forgive that. We have to help people learn from those mistakes, and we have to engage them. That's what we can do. And then from there, if they can work on these agency behaviors and we can work on this other stuff, then we're going to be there. Now, how do you work on these things? And so I'm just going to go right to, so hopefully this makes sense to everybody. And I'm not saying anything that, you know, is too far afield. Right? It's not. I know this is stuff that you have heard before and you've thought about before, but my premise is it belongs to the individual. Right. So how do we create an organization that fosters those behaviors? What is it we can do? Right. As a coach for the last 20 plus years? I mean, this is what I do. I sit and have conversations with people every day. And one of the things we do in our leadership development programs that we deliver is we have two sessions of six, a dedicated, well, it's two sessions of seven dedicated to coaching skills. Why? Because it's like rather than that person going to HR and complaining, they don't feel safe. Right. What if they just said that to that person? So they could have went to that person and said, have a coaching conversation with them about, listen, I didn't feel right in that meeting. Is there, you know, what's on your mind? And the guy would say, well, you know, you sent that thing out wrong, and so what can I do differently or what is it you want for an outcome? Like, you could ask these questions and it'll be resolved. The problem is, is that we're, first of all, we don't think it's our place to do that. And second of all, we're afraid to do that. There's a peer in this room that has to have a conversation with somebody. And every time I see her, I give her help for not having that conversation because she's afraid. It's like a wild animal. I don't know what's going to happen. Will they quit? Will they be mad at me? Will they make me feel bad? They'll take my safety away from me. Right. But there are basic skills that you can teach people. You don't have to go to a 200 hours training program. You don't need to get a degree. All you need to do is follow five simple steps. Five simple steps. And you can teach these people. And I'm telling you, if people practice these five steps three times, they'll be walking around the organization trying to solve problems. They'll be looking for conflict. They'll be looking for crisis because they know that they have the skills to be able to solve them. And I'm not look, I'm not, you know, I'm at the other end of my professional career. I don't need to create a bunch of business. This is my message. My message is, yes, hire me for the big things. But in your organizations, if you taught your staff, if you have a company of 100 people, you teach 20 people or 30 people how to coach, including the people that have problems, have struggles. Right. You just created this profound change in your organization. And what's going to, as they model it, other people are going to model it. It feels good. After I coach somebody, you cannot help but feel good. I've just made progress on something. I've just resolved something that's been bothering me. So create a coaching culture is critically important. The other thing to do is you really need to create facilitated strategy in play. Now, what I mean by that is, listen, every time I do a 360 on an executive, it always comes back and says, they're not strategic enough. The executive's not strategic enough. Right. So what is this strategy? Well, why aren't we talking about new product development? Why are we not doing. Because the employees know this. They have a sense of it. I get called by a rather large insurance company. We're having problems with a new system we're implementing. It's not going well. People are. We were afraid they're going to amass with torches and burn the place down. Like, we're really worried about this. Russ, can you come in and do stuff? So I created some focus groups and what am I doing? I'm doing strategic play, you know, what do you think the answer is? What would you do? And I'm listening. I'm independent. It's a safe space, right? I'm not talking to the CEO. It's an independent safe space. And they tell me everything that I need to know. So then I go back and I say, we need to create a facilitated offsite strategy in play room like this. We had all, the whole company, all the different departments, right? And there were easels, and we gave them each. We had them facilitate a discussion about the subject, had them go to the easels and start breaking down, doing strategy on the subject. Now, this is a little consulting trick. It doesn't matter what they work on. They're working together. They're thinking through problems. They're coming up with ideas, they're getting to know each other. They're building trust, right? So that's like my little side goal. And then what they do is they produce these amazing ideas. And in this particular session, I'm talking about I have the executive team sitting at one table over there. I wanted to integrate them, but they were afraid to. So I have them sitting at one table and I told them, whatever you say, you can't say anything's a bad idea. And they legitimately came back and said, oh, my God, this is amazing. Right? And then they did it again. A quarter later, they did it again. How are we doing? What's the follow up? And the executives had to report back what they're working on. What are you doing? You're creating strategic play. It's not about having an ice cream social. It's not about going to a bar after work. You can do that stuff, too. What it is is get them to roll up the sleeves and work on stuff. That's what people want to do. It's going to be play to them because it's not their everyday job. And what you're doing is you're creating accountability, that they're part of the solution. They can't complain about that system anymore. How can they complain? They created a solution for it. Right. And so that's something that's important to do. We have to give honest feedback in the moment. Now, by the time things get to you, they're pretty much out of control. Right? They could be out of control. But not even saying that. Imagine if you went through life without having any feedback because people were afraid to talk to you or they didn't want to give you that feedback. And by the way, we also have to accept that feedback. We need to learn to accept that feedback. I was in a meeting with a company, people all around the table, and I was going over something. I don't know what it was. I was going through, you know, the drama triangle, or I was going through some philosophy, and a woman looked like she was upset. I called on her. Don't call on me. I had a bad day, you know, I don't know why we're doing this anyways. So it was like a really lot of, you know, turmoil. And I just said, listen, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And, and afterwards I went to her and said, listen, what was that? You know, what's going on? And then she starts talking. And I listened to her for ten minutes, and by the end of the ten minutes, it was, it was kind of resolved. But that's what, that's what we have to do. We have to give people. If I'm in a meeting and somebody feel, I feel like some true story people, you, you know, it's not unusual for women to be disrespected in companies. They're sitting at the boardroom, but they still get disrespected. Deal with this a lot. I mean, I'm a man, so I'm careful about how I approach this, but basically say, what should you do? And then she learned, a senior vice president learned to say, excuse me, I'd like to finish my point right now. That sounds rude, but everybody's on notice now that she's going to say what's on her mind. We got to be careful about what you say. You can't walk around and do that. People don't mean to do this, by the way. People are just coping themselves. Right. So we have to have honest feedback. And that means that if your performance reviews are doing, that's great. The feedback and the performance reviews should not just be about, again, I'm not an HR expert, so I don't know what you can do. The feedback should not just be about performance. It should be about behavior. How are you adhering to the culture of the organization? How are you adhering to behaviors? And I know that sounds like grade school, but, you know, I think it's something that we need to practice on. So there's one more thing that I think is important, and that is I don't have a slide for it. I apologize, is I really feel as though you have a good time. I really feel as though dysfunction hides in secrecy silos and competitive controls. In other words, when issues emerge and they're not transparent. Right. They turn into drama. Right. I really feel as though we have to stop, like, secret things. And I don't. Again, I'm not an HR expert, but I have seen damage done when someone goes to HR and makes an anonymous complaint. Complaint about somebody else. Right. Who? Who that? Who then? Now it's in their HR file. And I sit with them. I was like, so what do you want to do? I don't know. What did I do? I'm not even sure what I did. I don't know who said it. I have no context for this. And there might be a little bit of hint of context and they can kind of figure it out, but it's disarming. How is that person going to improve? What's that person going to think? And it doesn't help the person that had the problem in the first place. Now, I'm not saying you can't use discretion. I think there's critical issues. Harassment. You know, there's lots of things going on in the organization that you have to use but I would say that a majority of these things can be resolved pretty quickly. You can't. I think, you know, the approach would be, let's put people in a room. They agree to sit in a room and have a conversation about it most of the time. That will go away with, by the way, some basic coaching skills. Right. You can't just do it. You can't just sit there and say, well, what happened? And have them tell the story. No, no, I didn't want to hear the story. What is it you need from each other? How do you want to work together? What kind of outcomes do you want to have? So, and we have to remove the competitiveness. If I'm on a team of people and I'm responsible for marketing and companies are designed, those of you that might not be in manufacturing are designed to make engineering and sales like, hate each other. Right. Sales wants to build the product. An engineer doesn't want to put three wheels on it. I mean, this is what goes on and then there's fighting and that tension is built in. It's built into the pyramid. But what happens if sales and engineering really get together and try to figure this stuff out? Not in a silo, not in secrecy, not in competition. So this is the punchline. And then I'd love to have some discussion with you and collaboration with you. As I said, you're the expert in HR. Really would love to get your thoughts on some of this stuff. We have to focus on building the individual. We have to focus on building individual confidence in people. We have to focus on them defending their safety. We have to focus on allowing them to trust their mind and find their voice. If we do that, we're creating agents of the organization that will create really happy employees that will produce a lot more with a lot less drama. So that's the message. So I told you to have questions. So hopefully some people have questions. Yes. Thank you for participating. What were the five points maybe you shared that I just listed. But creating a coaching culture, I didn't say those things, right, because there's only so much time. But I'll tell you what they are. You create safety with people. That means we're sitting together. This is the space. Let's spend some time. Do not walk around giving advice and coaching people without their permission because it will not go over well. Right? You want to talk about this, right? That's what you do. You create safety in that. Right? You, you ask, you have them set their agenda. What do you, what's going on? What's or I notice something. What's going on, right. Use a little emotional intelligence, right. And you be quiet and you listen. And as you listen, you hear things like contradictions. You hear them contradict themselves. You hear them. But you just said the other thing a minute ago, or you, or you're curious that I really want to know, like, what this is. And you ask those powerful questions. It takes a little bit of training to understand that. But you ask powerful questions. Right. And then, and then what you do is you summarize and then you make them accountable. So accountability might look like I'm going to follow. And by the way, I don't give people homework. You don't have to give. You don't tell them what to do. You want to go talk to that person? Go talk to that person. You say, I would say at the end of the coaching, which any of you can do. So what do you want to do about it? And you'll say, you know, I really should talk to this. I should really have a con. I'm going to have a conversation with my boss about it. Awesome. I'm going to see you next week at that thing. I'm going to ask you about it. Right. I'm holding him accountable. It's not up to me to solve the problem. I'm not going to go create drama. I'm not going to go talk to people. I'm just going to, by the way, unless it's, like harassment or something really serious, something that requires a level of discretion or importance. But if it's pretty much I'm annoyed with John and accounting or Sally's been here for 20 years and she doesn't want to change those things. Oh, there is one more element, too. I actually think that we have to create a tolerance for people's personalities. In the next room, they're talking about Dei, and I got to spend some time talking to him about that. We judge people on their personalities. If someone's an introvert, we think, oh, they're shy. That's not true. And I could tell you stories about this, but it's not true. Or John is too direct or Kathy is too direct. Well, she's direct, so why does that. So you know her. In my company, we have a phrase. There's two russes. There's business Russ and fun Russ, because as I'm running a business, right, I mean, I want to be fun and I want to. We're all coaches, you know, we want to talk to each other and we want to help each other. We enjoy that. But what? I'm worried about making sure everybody's got a full plate of work, or I'm worried about, you know, invoices, or I'm worried about something else that's going on. I might get very serious and very direct. I might say, okay, so what are we doing with that? Right? And you can say, oh, Russ is scaring me. He's mad at me. I'm not mad at you. I just want to know. I just want to move on to the next answer. Right? Accept me for who I am, appreciate me for who I am. We don't do that. We judge people because they rub us the wrong way. You know, if somebody is bothering, you know, we have to. We almost have to create a tolerance for appreciating each other for who we are and not expect some crazy behavior. So I want to just tell this one story because this is important. I worked for a company, manufacturing company, and they wanted to be a better team, and there was about 20 on the team. And they said, everybody I talked to, I went one on one meetings with them. I don't do that anymore so much, but I had one back then. I had one on one meeting. Everybody said, oh, have you talked to Mike yet? I'm like, no, what about Mike? Oh, he's in engineering. You're gonna meet him. I'm like, okay. So, like, half the people had warned me about Mike. I get Mike in the conference room, and he's like this deep, spiritual man who cares so passionately about the company, who it's like, I did see the abruptness, but I saw this other guy, right? So I went back to the. So I'm sitting with the executive team, and I said to them, so why don't you guys just accept Mike for who he is? You guys have been working with Mike for ten years. Do you think we're going to change Mike? And they basically all went, you're right. One more on that, just because I think it's important. I was working for the CFO of a major financial institution. I was coaching her. And in the coaching process, when we do 360s, we have a debrief where she has to go meet with the executives and share what she learned and what she does well and what she needs to work on. And in her 360, it came back and said that she was very. They want to hear her voice. She was very introverted. They were worried about that, right? So I met with her for coaching sessions in between, and she says, I'm deathly afraid. I do it, but I'm deathly afraid to speak in front, even with my peers. I'm a clinical introvert. I'm like, so bad. So we go to the meeting with all the executives, and I processed this with her. I actually went off and read a book on it because I wanted to make sure that I could guide her properly. We got in the room with all the executives and she says, yeah, I need to work on. I know you want to hear my voice and I want to hear my, you know, I'm going to work on that. What's it look like to you to hear my voice? And all the other executives went, I don't think you need to. I think you speak up just fine. Yeah, we get what we need out of you. We love working with you. We love the fact that you're frank about stuff and we don't have to. So they go on. So I finally said, then why did you all criticize her on the 360 about her being quiet? The answer was, we were afraid for her. They're afraid that other people are going to judge her for being an introvert. Let that sit for a minute. Right. We just got to accept people for who they are. And all too often we're trying to, you know, we're all trying to get people to be in a certain mode. So that was a great question. I hope I answered the question. How about another one? Yes, I guess you're bringing up this introvert, and from an HR standpoint, how can we encourage those maybe introvert supervisors and directors to be more present, to come out of their office, to come out, set more of an example? So I am a pretty bad introvert. How? Because that doesn't make any sense. I'm talking to people all day long. I enjoy the intimacy of intimate conversations, and I've gotten better at being with groups of people, and I get better at doing this kind of stuff. It took a long time to do it. So you can train yourself to speak up and you can train yourself to do that. So that would be helpful. But really, it's about the relationship. If that example I gave, she trusted her other peer executives, right? She didn't have to be fancy and funny and cute or anything like, she had to just be. She just be herself. And they appreciated for who she was. So those relationships are really important. But I'm not going to make Mike not be direct, and I'm not going to make her all of a sudden be dancing at a party. It's not going to happen. Right. And that diversity is a beautiful thing. You know, Mike keeps people on their toes and she keeps people being thoughtful about certain things. When I saw this executive, it dawned on me that we had too many times judging people based on their personality. And we, you know, if we were all the same personality, this would be boring, right? Another question. Yes. We talked a lot about agency and individuals taking responsibility for some of the self items that you had listed out. When we're working with employees of varying stages within their career, and a lot of employees will come to us and they don't have that type of agency developed within themselves. But you know that those folks have that potential. How can you foster that? So you can foster it by doing the things that I suggest, that direct feedback, accepting personalities, facilitating coaching, those things. Right. Engagement. All the things that you're doing now are all excellent concepts. But don't think about laying it over a pyramid. You need to lay this into the individuals. And, yes, I can't magically drop. That's what I'm saying. We can't give that person agency. We have to nurture that agency. So a person came to me the other day, says, I have this person. She's really bright. She comes into the office every day. I ask her for project. She comes in six times and asks me questions, right? And then she shows up finally with the result. And it's not what we asked for. It's like, okay. So I said, all right, well, you know, she's not being accountable or she's not. She's not confident. She's afraid. That's why she keeps asking questions. That's why she kind of gets in her head and gets a little off track. I said, the next time there's a presentation, make her give it. Make her give it. That's going to freak her out. Well, you tell her you're going to coach her through it. You're going to support her, right? Let her fall down on the meeting, and then you pick it up and you save her. I mean, you don't want it to be a disaster. You can help her prepare and you're going to help her through it. Right. But once she gets that sense of wow, that was scary, and I did it right, she's going to feel she's just going to learn a little bit more about being able to do that same thing with speaking in meetings. Right. A lot of people come to me and I'm petrified. As HR executive, I don't know if she's here now, but one time she came, you know, was like, I can't speak in meetings. I don't feel they hear my voice. And my advice was write down before the meeting, write down anything that you want to bring up that you think is important, a couple things. And then I want, as the meeting's going on, I want you to write down just little statements about questions that you have as you go through. So you're going to have a bunch of questions. And if you wait long enough, most of those questions will be answered. So you don't have to be, like, the star of the show. You just let people, because people will solve those problems. But something might be left over. That's when you want to say, listen, we talked about this, but we didn't bring this up. They're going to say, yeah, that's right. We forgot about that. It's like now she's developing a muscle of a way of communicating. So I want one more question. Yes. Yes. How do you respond to manager, supervisor, executive, who comes into this type of conversation with just coddling these people? We're just babying them. And what they really need from me is these strong words and these strong actions and strong expectations instead of trying to meet them where they are. All right. So I don't know your company, and I hope you know, but we've got to go back to the 1950s. Okay? That's. That's. That's not. If you. If you. If that's your attitude, I don't know anybody under 40 years old that is going to put up with that anymore. They're just not going to. When I grew up, when I came, I feel like I'm like this really old, ancient person. But I was told, you know, you go to college, you. You get a degree, you go work for a company for 30 years, you get your gold watch, you send your kids to college, you sit on the beach, and then you die. That's what you did. Right? My kids want to be self actualized at 26 years old, and we complain about that. No, don't complain. Embrace it. What do I need to make them feel really powerful and strong? That's what. So, yes, to be quite honest with you, I don't meet too many people that have that opinion that you just expressed. They just don't know how to execute it. They just don't know how to necessarily, you know, by the way, it's like people will say, oh, this is touchy feely stuff. Right? That just makes my spine stand up. Right. Nothing I'm talking about here is touching feely. This is the real deal. This is people. This is having an impact. And we get back in the 1950s, paper went from desk to desk to desk to desk to desk. And people, you know, and it was a process. That's what happened today. Before you leave here today, there's going to be some emergency that's going to come up, that's going to be really important for you to deal with. And then tomorrow morning, there'll be another one. Right? That's the world we live in. We need to champion people, make them feel strong, stand on their own 2ft and grow and be powerful. So that's it. Thanks very much. Thank you.See all