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The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!
Hey, Sean. How are you?
Shawn:Hey, Scott. Nice to see you. How are you?
Scott:Yeah. I'm doing great.
Shawn:Fantastic.
Scott:Great. Just, yeah. Just sliding into another weekend here in Seattle in rain. So, yeah, doing good. What's on your mind?
Scott:What's going on in your world?
Shawn:Well, I came in sort of ready, at the ready for us today, Scott. As you know, I'm still running a nonprofit organization here in the DC area, and we have great work, and I'm grateful and blessed by that. And one of the things though that I feel like as a leader or sort of a manager, whether that's in the CEO context or in the sort of project management, you know, program management context is I may have had sort of stumbled upon an epiphany or a realization of sorts that would have been amazing to have known a year ago or even earlier, but better late than never as they say. So I'm gonna lay it on you because this is, I feel gonna be right up your alley, like in your full wheelhouse to kind of absorb and give some feedback on. And if I could just kind of set the scene a little bit for you is I working on a project with a consulting team and it's a small team, just three of us.
Shawn:And we've been hired by another entity here in the area to do some work for partners abroad. We've I won't go into too much detail about that because it's not as relevant, but suffice to say that this partner has been a good client, it's a good client to work for. But as with everybody, they don't always do things perfectly. And so we have been subject to a little bit of extra pressures and chaos and sort of shifting sands where it's like the goalpost keeps changing on us. And to be fair, like we were supposed to be done with this gig at the end of October.
Shawn:So now we're eating into time that it's taken us through mid December. We didn't really, you know, we had made other plans, right? Like, so we're now trying to get this work done in the context of other work we had committed to do so in a way where, I'm not saying we're doing them a favor, but we're having to make some adjustments and all we keep kind of getting is tighter and tighter deadlines and expectations. And as you can imagine, it's causing some consternation on the team. And so, one of my partners was very understandably distraught and feeling a lot of anxiety.
Shawn:And I think as professionals, we engage with lots of people who react to things in different ways. Some people don't ever show you their emotional hand, some people show you a lot of it. And so for me, I'm somebody that I like to say I'm an emotional sponge. So I absorb whatever the person on the other side of the conversation is throwing. Now that sounds a little like a of a get out of jail free card in terms of accountability that, you know, if I'm just reacting that nothing's ever really my fault, but, you know, and that's not what I'm trying to say, but certain types of input that I receive will impair me because I care so much and because I don't want people to be suffering and struggling.
Shawn:So in this particular case, I started my day, I was super fired up, I was ready to go, I was like coffee in hand, computer at the ready and I was gonna do like type, type, type, type, eight or at least seven to eight hours of hard productivity, but it was derailed pretty quickly by, you know, kind of another instance of this client sort of throwing a wrench into the plans and increasing expectations and not really being fully mindful. I don't think nefariously, but just, you know, absent mindedly, I don't think they really appreciate the impact that it's having on us as the providers of the service that we're trying to give them what they need, but they keep asking for more and they keep changing the game plan and so that becomes very difficult. So I spent about two to two and a half hours dealing with like how to deal with this, right? And coming up with the right responses and hopefully trying to manage expectations. And what I realized, I kind of sat back at one point in the middle of the like, you know, the image that comes to my mind is there's this cute little meme that goes around, it's a little cartoon dog and he kind of is wearing like a little hat, like it looks almost like a private investigator hat, you know, he's a little black and white dog, he's sitting at a table having a cup of Joe and like, there's just flames around it.
Shawn:And he's just like, it's fine, everything's fine. And that's how I felt. I was just like, okay, this is fine. When I, I, I, this kind of image popped in my brain and and so this is what I want to talk to you about and see if this resonates with you which is that a human being has a certain amount of capital every single day that they're going to be able to bring to the workplace, right? So, let's assume you work a normal eight to five job or nine to five job in an eight hour day, seven hours if you factor in lunches, breaks, etc.
Shawn:So, okay, let's say you're dealing with a seven hour sort of capital pool that is finite. And when I say capital, I mean the capital here is my work, my productivity. Immediately, it occurred to me that that capital could actually be broken down in two types. And there may be more. And and this may be an an artful expression.
Shawn:So I'm just going to give you my Roth thoughts on it and then you can tell me all the ways that it could be better, which is there is sheer productivity or intellectual capital. Like, you know, what are you producing? What are you creating? And then the other type of capital is emotional capital. And I say that specifically as emotional because that is what I felt like I was spending a lot of today in dealing with this issue.
Shawn:Because the work that I was doing for those two, two and a half hours wasn't producing anything. It was managing a situation so that everybody could avoid a meltdown and so that we could preserve the relationship with the client and still be able to look ourselves in the mirror that we were not like sacrificing our professional integrity or or ethos. Right? You know, by giving a bad product because we were making too many concessions. So
Scott:I I want to interject really quickly. Absolutely. Because we just to make sure that we have all the context for the folks that are listening, sometimes we just get in the aircraft, take off and jump, and sometimes we talk a little to begin with, and on this one, full we talked a little bit as we were going through our admin piece, and I want to make sure that everybody understands that out of this interaction with the client who was, you know essentially they were missing deadlines but wanted you to stay on deadline kind of stuff. Some of your team members had a difficult time processing that or became angry, emotionally frustrated. They were frustrated.
Scott:They were processing the stress outwardly instead of inwardly. And I want to make sure that I understand and everybody listening understands that that's what you were burning your time on is dealing with that rather than the do outs and the content. Correct. Is that?
Shawn:Yeah. That's a fair and and and I kind of left that hanging, which is like the point about me being an emotional sponge is that I absorb that energy that people are throwing down. So if it's really good, positive, like problem solving energy, I'm gonna match you. I'm gonna mirror you on that. But if it becomes like kind of a little bit more on the sort of, you know, frustration unchecked, not unchecked frustration, because I don't wanna be unfair to the person who is having a hard time with this.
Shawn:You know, this person has been raising flags for a while that this project is presents a lot of complications, you know, for her personally and for us as an organization, I think. But we yeah. So but that is a correct summation. Like that is I then became kind of overwrought, you know, because I was like, I was just I was demoralized and I was like, you know, I started looking inward. I'm like, Okay, I haven't done a really good job managing this because we shouldn't have gotten to this point where it's this far.
Shawn:So then, you know, it starts a lot of self, you know, kind of chastisement and just like, okay, like now this person's upset, now I'm upset and now I have to deal with this and do something, but it's probably all my fault to begin, you know, so you just go, you spiral, right? And that's and, you know, whereas if and again, other people are not responsible for my reactions. I just wanna caveat that nor are any of us, But what it made me, the bigger epiphany that I was having is that this was, how was this time being spent and how does it impact your overall work productivity? The two things I realized are one, it is a very real thing and I'm just going to put it out there. I think women deal with this more than men because I think women tend to do what I did in that situation and or do what my colleague did in that situation, right?
Shawn:Like so.
Scott:Yeah.
Shawn:Maybe a unique to women thing at least more frequently anyway, statistically. And then to look at what does that do to your finite hours in a day? Well, now I go from seven hours of high octane intellectual productivity or creation to again, four and a half hours. You know what I mean? Or five hours.
Shawn:And and that other two and a half hours is is emotional capital that has been paid to the ferryman and spent, but it didn't get me any closer to the to getting the job done that needed to get to getting the job done, which needed to be done. And so the second piece to this is then that it isn't just the fact that that capital, that finite capital has now been inefficiently carved off. And so now I have even less time to do the same work, but it also impairs at least one or two of the hours of capital that I intellectual productivity capital that I'm now gonna expend because I'm in a bad mood or because I'm distracted because I'm I keep thinking about the other, you know, kind of emotional capital stuff that I had to deal with. And so yeah. So so those are in terms of, you know, what like, you know, you or a Mark Cuban or people who do business care about, what I would want to be looking at as a business professional, an owner, an entrepreneur, like somebody who manages staff and people and resources, I would want to be looking at how that capital is spent by my people every day.
Shawn:And what is it that we can do in the workplace to understand it better so that we don't misinterpret that or underappreciate what's happening. The last thing I'll say, and then I'll kick it over to you because I know you're gonna have lots to probably say about this is that I did experience this in a broader context in a previous project last year where, and again, I hate to say this, but we had a lot of women on that project and I felt like there was a lot of that emotional capital, like spend expenditure happening, but I don't think we we didn't understand it. We understood it instinctively, but I certainly, and I don't think anybody else would have been able to characterize why it was so debilitating. And in retrospect, if what I experienced today is like a little microcosm of that, when you then expand that to such a huge scale such as that project, which had like a million dollar project and it was all female, everything, like the clients, the consumers, the partner, everybody's female. You end up basically like spending yourself out of productivity and quality because you're trying to deal with all of the sort of like emotional management of this situation.
Shawn:And then it's like a snowball going downhill because then the more that you have to do that, the less time you have to do the productivity, the less the lower the quality. That productivity, at least as we've seen today, like an hour or two, at least each day gets impaired, multiply that times multiple staff, multiply that by multiple days and months and years. And all of sudden now, now you have a real productivity problem and a morale problem by the way, and business relationship problem because nobody's happy. The staff's not happy, the client's not happy, the consultants aren't, nobody's happy. So I really saw it as an epiphany for me on, wow, now I have something, I have a way to frame this and now maybe in the future I can avoid that happening again because now I know what to call it and I know how to identify it and maybe we can improve things.
Shawn:Over to you to the guru to tell me what you think because
Scott:So I just listening to you, I can tell that you had a high level of frustration with this. It's hard. Like all leaders and certainly like all great leaders, you care a lot about productivity. You want to get things done, but you deeply recognize and acknowledge that none of it gets done without the people that are are doing everything and so you you hate being derailed but you want to push through that and and get things done while still sort of recognizing that people feel the way that they feel. So I want to address a couple of things which I think are the red herrings here, and the first is men and women absolutely are different.
Scott:A person raised on North America is very different than a person raised in Europe, and those two people are very different from a person raised in Africa, very different from a person raised in Asia. And so the things that we recognize that sort of generally correspond to a person's gender, a person's ethnicity, a person's religious belief, a person's religious practice, the the physical environment, you know, did it come from a hot place on the globe? Do they come from a cold place on the globe? All of those things are true, and all of those things are real, but they're sort of irrelevant when you're talking with a person in front of you, because you can have a person who, because of their gender and ethnicity and place of birth, you expect to behave in a certain way, not behave that way. And so the reason it's a red herring is these general things that correlate to classes of people, even though they have a tendency to be accurate, don't inform you when you are interacting with another individual.
Scott:And so what gets you around the red herring is deal with the person that's in front of you. And I'll do a little shameless aside because I had a partner named Lisa Garber. Look her up on LinkedIn. She's wonderful. She's a cybersecurity expert and an attorney, and we wrote a book together on how to hire people for the cybersecurity world.
Scott:And one of the things that we talked about when you're evaluating somebody to determine whether you should hire them for the role that you have opened is to be very careful of the stereotypical things. Old people are on time and young people aren't. You may have a flaky old person, you may have a young person who cares a lot about being on time, and so if you stick with the stereotype, you're going to trip, and if you evaluate the person that's sitting in front of you, you won't. So that's one thing. At the same time, and this is the juxtaposition, and here comes the metaphor, because I'm going to pull a thread on this side, I'm going give you a metaphor on this side, If you're building a soccer team, you can't succeed if you have 11 goalies.
Scott:You need one goalie, and that is a personality type. You need three midfielders or four. That's a different personality type. You need one or two strikers and so, you need all those different personalities and so while that is going to tend to push you in this direction of not having all men, not having all women, If you end up with the team personalities and what they call the soft skills, which I hate, it's the personality skills, it's the optic. If you have the team with right, processed section of optics, you're going to tend to end up with a mixture of genders, ethnicities, religious beliefs, practices.
Scott:You're going to end up with that mixture because you need all those different people. It is theoretically possible to end up with those varying perspectives, you know, with an all white female team. Could happen. Yeah. But I think that just from a probability standpoint, it's rare because you need different ways of looking at the world.
Scott:And so that as the context for how if I was your leadership consultant and you were a client and you were bringing this to me, the the first thing that I would say is, well, let's go back to the beginning and the beginning is, where does leadership begin? Not what is leadership? That's not a useful question and I could spend the rest of this hour talking about why it's not but we're not going to go down that hole. The the the useful question is where does leadership begin? And leadership begins when you, Sean Baker Garcia, have more to do than you can do by yourself.
Scott:It's great when you are in that column of subject matter expert, you know, writing curriculum, agendas, doing the work that you love, and not in this, you know, dealing with people, dealing with people who are frustrated and upset, and regretting every minute or part of an hour that you're dealing with this because you're not producing things. But part of leading means you can't do it all yourself and so you need help. And that leads to, well, I said there were a couple of red herrings. Another red herring is you recognizing that dividing your time in those two categories works for you. But be careful about presuming that everybody else understands the world that way and it works for them.
Scott:You need to speak in terms of that because that's you sharing yourself with the people that are helping. But you need to also recognize that it's not that it's lost in translation, it's that it's translated. And each person that works for you is different. That's sort of the second red herring. But it leads us to one of Scott Olsen's rule of leadership, which is once you understand that leading means you have more to do than you can do, so you need help, it leads you to this notion of most leadership behaviors, most of the things that leaders do are things that you shouldn't have to do.
Scott:You know, at a visceral level. You shouldn't have to sit there and hold the hand of the four people on your team that are really pissed off today. But if you have more to do than you can possibly do, and you need everybody on that 10 member team to help you, then your job, because nobody else can do it, this is Peter Drucker, your job because nobody else can do it is to hold the hand of these four people, help them to understand that being pissed off and frustrated is a luxury, so they need to work through that so that they can get back to work. Because why? Because you need their help.
Scott:If they are off spinning on these I'm pissed off because this isn't the it way should be, then you need to have that we live in the world the way that it is, not the way that we wish it were, and let's talk for a few minutes about why you're pissed off and how much it sucks, but we need to work through that so that we can get back on the team because our team is functioning, rule number two, shared intention. And your job as the leader is to foster shared intention. All of us need to be pulling the traces on the dog sled. So that's the lecture component, and I got threads to pull. As I was listening to you, I actually thought about James Clavell's great novel Shogun, And you know, for anyone who doesn't read, read, anyone who hasn't read Shogun, it's a wonderful novel.
Scott:And you're not going to see this dialogue in the movie, but at one point the two main characters, John Blackthorn, who's the British guy that comes to Japan, and Lord Torunaga, who's the main Japanese protagonist, they are talking, and they're actually talking about leadership. And Blackthorn is asking Torunaga about why he keeps a certain subordinate around.
Shawn:And
Scott:what stuck in my mind about that is Toranaga says, well, I keep this guy around because he's like a hawk. If I have a target, like a hunting bird, I can fly him straight to that target and he'll kill it. He's not a falcon, he's a hawk. He goes straight and he kills. You send up a falcon, the falcon is going to go up high, circle around, take some time, figure out, and then dive on that target.
Scott:So the hawk is more thoughtful but takes more time and then hits with thunder. The hawk is going to go, oh, you want me to go kill that? Boom.
Shawn:Just
Scott:thoughtless obeying the master. What I think you can draw from that is, here is a character, Lord Torunaga, who understands that he has differing needs, and he has identified in his people the differing characteristics that correspond with his differing needs. What And Blackthorn is able to do by asking the question and listening to him is to begin to understand, okay, this is why his retinue, Toronaga's, has all these different people in it. They're not uniform, they're different because the character understands that in order to get done what he Toranaga needs to get done, he has all of these different needs, and he has different personalities to plug them in. So, I've got a lot more to say, but I want to push this back to you, and see if that's shaken anything loose for you, just in terms of your understanding of who you have on your team, and the the people that struggle with frustration are those people really good as a consequence of having the drive that comes from frustration at doing things that nobody else on your team can do.
Shawn:It's I I don't funny. So like for me, the primary thing that I was thinking about when I kind of articulated in my own head earlier today as I was thinking about how my day it was really a more of a self assessment about how I like what occupies my time. Because, you know, when you work from home and, you know, I have this job as my primary job, but I do things on the side like I did this podcast and we, you know, and I, you know, take care of the house and all the things. I'm responsible for the animal management for the most part. I was just trying to think about how do I get so sidelined?
Shawn:You know what I mean? Since that was the first thing is is me just trying to like understand a framework of like how I work and how my work is either, you know, what what leads to a successful productive workday and what are some of the things that derail me and then like diminish my productivity and then taking a serious look at that and saying, is there a way that I can predict that or manage it better? And, you know, and so when I'm hearing you talk now, what I'm realizing is that, you know, and again, I didn't mean to totally lean into, like, you know, I don't ever want to say that, like, oh, you should never have an all, you know, an all this or that kind of a team. I I think where I was going is like, I see females as being more inclined to like, I don't want to say complain, but they are they express themselves, in my experience, in a more consistently emotional way where it's like they got to get it off their chest, They've gotta, you know, and I'm the same. I'm not putting myself above or outside of that category.
Shawn:Right? Like, I which is exactly why I was emotionally derailed. Now, a man who had been in my position may have just been like, okay, well, you're mad about it. That's fine. Like, you know, it's it is they are doing things that are frustrating the situation.
Shawn:But, you know, it is what it is. And we're going to, you know, we're going to move on. We're either going to do it or we're not. And that's it. We just, you know, I think it's the agonizing over it part, right?
Shawn:That is hardest for, and probably what most men are not inclined to do. You know what I mean? I think men are pretty decisive and it's like yes or no. But before we go into that, I'm gonna say one more thing before we go down the gender hole, because I don't really wanna go there. That wasn't really what I wanted to discuss.
Shawn:It is important and it can be discussed. But I guess what I was going with it is that like, we're a small team. We're almost like a consultancy, right? It's not like we have tons. I do have a couple of junior staffers and program officers and stuff, my colleagues for the most part, if I'm dealing with them at a lateral level are all very senior.
Shawn:I mean, are all ex retired government officials and like, really have current day jobs. So they do this as a side hustle because they enjoy it, not because they have to do it or in their retirement. I think that, you know, but what it makes me wanna do hearing you talk about, you know, some of the points that you were raising is really kind of looking internally, like looking at myself in the mirror and saying like, you know, is there also, so really what we need is a, or what most leaders would need, if you're leading a team, in this case, a consultancy team, what do I need to make me an effective leader of that team? Because we do by default have to share the burden, like, because there's some things I cannot do because that is their expertise, etcetera. But I'm kind of the interlocutor.
Shawn:Like, I'm the leader of the of the SMEs, the subject matter experts, and I'm also the base for the client to communicate my team's needs to them and vice versa. And I think what I recognized in myself was that I think I could do a better job at managing the situation proactively to minimize the blowback. Because I think that this person had been throwing red flags for a while and it wasn't that I didn't take them seriously. And this goes back to something you said earlier, which is we're all gonna react or respond to things differently. What this person may see is something really problematic or really like earth shattering.
Shawn:In my mind, I'm just like, well, that's, to me, I don't see that as a big deal or as a big problem. You know what I mean? So you do have to be able to recognize that in other people though. And like you said, not make the assumption that they're seeing it the way that you're seeing it or you know what I mean? Because that is going to end up derailing you big time because then as we came down to it, I still didn't think it was as big a deal as the other person did.
Shawn:When the new criteria came down or when the new thing, but again, it was partially because I was just like, I wasn't holding myself to the standard that I think this person was. And that is a very honorable, noble thing because that person was holding themselves to a really high standard. They're like, well, we can't have four new sets of people because like we haven't done the research for those locations. Like, we don't, whereas I was just like, most of our content is pretty general. And yeah, I mean, I always air on the side of the client.
Shawn:If you're asking this, they have to know that we're not going to be able to do that given the time constraints, right? So that's my initial reaction to it is your words I'm taking as more of a self reflection for me and lessons I can learn to like be a better leader to the people, to the teams I'm leading and my organization, but also as like just a general partner. You know,
Scott:yeah. So that's a great place to start, you know, be a better leader, be a better boss. But that's like saying, oh, well you got It begs the question because, okay, that's the what, but you know, where's the how? How do you become a better leader? And most people don't know how.
Scott:And I have sort of three things of tiered out for you, just to offer you food for thought. The first is, I want to set my teeth a little bit into, since you're a woman, you responded to the emotion with emotion, and a man would have just said, let's not worry about that, let's move on. Has not been my experience with men in leadership positions in forty years of being employed from you know, the the time I was a camp counselor in the Boy Scouts to when I was in middle management with the FBI. My observation with how men deal with somebody who is frustrated or having a difficult time is to basically just to tell them, Stop. What you're doing is wrong.
Scott:Get yourself together. A lot of the bureau language was get with the program and what it would be was a senior executive telling somebody in middle management like me, you know, you've got a supervisor or, you know, individual contributor that isn't productive because he or she is getting wrapped around the axe about something and you need to tell them to get with the program. And that's the other side of the spectrum, which is instead of getting on the emotional train and riding it, you're blowing up the tracks and letting the person crash. And neither one of those things is good. But there is a way and the way gets us a little bit into Peter Drucker and I kind of need to back into it.
Scott:But the way is continuing to understand your people. And one of the things that you said I think is really important, is before the people in your organization who got frustrated became frustrated, you saw the flags. You saw that they were going down that road.
Shawn:And
Scott:I think it's the role of the leader. If you're keeping everybody on track, when they start getting off track a little bit, you nudge them back, you nudge them back, you nudge them back instead of it's not a problem, it's not a problem, it's not a problem, oh now it's a problem, now I have to spend all this time getting everybody all the way back on track. It's being aware of who your people are and why you have them and that the how, the structure that I think is useful comes from Peter Drucker, which is if you're the boss, how do you decide what you do? And so for you, I would say, how do you decide what you do in those hours that are your contribution hours, your something about our expert hours, and what do you do in those energy hours, the emotion stuff, the energy stuff. And the Peter Drucker rule, which I agree with, is truly successful leaders, truly successful executives, really senior people, understand that their job is the small subset of things that only they can do.
Scott:Everything else is not delegated. It's not delegated because it's not the executive's job. It's somebody else's work. So your job is to keep the people that you know next week are going to be frustrated on track so that next week they don't get frustrated because nobody else can do that. Your job unfortunately is to not write the first or second or third draft of the materials for the conference because you have other people that can do that.
Scott:Your job is to approve the final version, but your job is not to write. Even though you love writing, your job is not to write. And so when you understand that system, that you're only going to do the things that only you can do, now your work has two components. Continuing to think about, is this stuff that I'm doing only stuff that I can do or can somebody else do it? Can I find somebody else to do it?
Scott:And that's how you grow an organization. When it gets big enough that somebody else can do stuff and no longer is your work, it cascades down to somebody else and you now are only doing the work that you can do. Keeping people on track is always going to be what you do, and I got to flush this one out because it's it's part of what's going into the pot on the stovetop we're cooking here. I had the the great pleasure of actually hearing Dick Winters speak. So Dick Winters is the the leader of the platoon and band of brothers.
Shawn:And
Scott:before he passed away, he actually came to FBI Headquarters and packed the auditorium and we got to hear this guy speak. He was this grumpy old man. He was just wonderful and he was sitting because he couldn't really stand for that duration of time. I don't remember the question, he said, got to understand that the people you have, in his case the men that I had were all different, and I didn't really get to choose them. But he said I knew who they were, and he said I had like two or three guys that were killers, and all they wanted to do was was kill other human beings and and I didn't like that, but I needed those guys and so I knew that when we were not in combat they were going to be trouble.
Scott:All my job was when we were not in combat was making sure that those guys didn't get thrown in the stockade because when we went into combat, I knew that I was going to need those guys. And when I went into combat, all I did was identify the critical components of the enemy that needed to be done away with and I would send those guys to kill those guys.
Shawn:The hawk, yeah.
Scott:Yeah, the hawk, exactly. And then you said, you know, were other guys that were, you know, support. It's the guy you, you know, send to get the ammo, the guy who could, you know, fix the machine gun when it was broken, all these other things. And I don't remember the details beyond the killers because that was the high impact. But what he was talking about was what we are talking about, which is he understood that it was his job to conduct the combat actions that he was ordered to.
Scott:And what he had at his disposal, because he couldn't do it by himself, was this group of guys. And it was very important for him therefore to understand which of these guys would do what. Yeah. Because if a guy's gonna cower in a foxhole because he's scared, you can't order him to go forward. Yeah.
Scott:If a guy is gonna go forward and jump into a spray of bullets, need to figure out how to not have him do that. But it helps you now to understand what do I not do and how do I keep the folks as they're beginning to go off the rails back on the rails because you actually see it. And it's not that you don't see it, it's that you're conflating whether it matters to you with how it matters to them. I think your job as a leader is to make sure not that you agree that the things that matter to them are important. It's not that.
Scott:It's not that you agree that what's important to them is important. It's that you recognize that what's important to them is important to them and you get in front of it before they derail. And that brings you down into you know, to sort the, of where the wheels are touching the rails, which is you gotta tune everything. You gotta be aware and you gotta tune everything, and that now becomes the beginning of the answer to, okay, I got up, I'm properly caffeinated, I got my computer, what do I do today? What are the things that only I can do that nobody else can do?
Scott:But part of it, even though it's a small piece of machinery, it's listening, where are the vibrations? And is it a normal vibration or is it a vibration that is going to get progressively worse and then tear the machine apart? And if it's that, then you either need to identify what it is or find somebody that is good at the machinery to identify what it is and go, Oh, we need to replace this bearing. Yeah. Instead of just waiting until it breaks.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:What's resonating with you? I'm doing a lot of things and I'm doing
Shawn:a things because I just
Scott:I can't tell you how much I love this.
Shawn:This is your this is your your game, and I love that. You know?
Scott:Wonderful for me. I
Shawn:just Yeah.
Scott:I hope it's wonderful for everybody else. But what do you think?
Shawn:It's an interest no. It's it's an important topic. And I think it's also like a multifaceted one because for me, I'm a very efficiency tuning type of person. I love efficiency, I'm obsessed with it. I just love it so much.
Shawn:And so for me, I have this constant struggle because on the one hand, I'm an emotional creature, that's part of my femininity, it's part of how I was raised, it's part of my upbringing, you know, the family that I was raised in and the conditions in which I was sort of grew to be a person, but it's also intention with that efficiency, you know, sort of, you know, the worshipper of efficiency, because I am just like, I just wanna get in there and I wanna solve. I wanna solve, I wanna solve, I wanna solve. And so what I'm trying to take from what I experienced, and again, this is just there was nothing particularly extraordinary about what happened today. I mean, these are the normal kinds of miscommunications or, you know, sort of, you know, everybody is working in a situation at some point in a day or a week or a month where you work with people. So somebody else's priorities, you either don't understand them or they don't understand that they're being weird about it or in this case with my client, that, it baffled me why they came to us with the email they sent, you know what I mean?
Shawn:Which got my team spun up because it was not, particularly after having just had a meeting with them yesterday, kind of level setting and taking stock of where we were in the process of the project, but also with each other as teaming partners. And so it was a little bit of a surprise to get the email because I wasn't, you know, I mean, I had kind of had a sense that they were trying to sneak in a couple of people, but, know, for all intents and purposes, it's not necessarily the country that was the issue because it was the same expatriate community that we're engaging with. So really, from that sense, it didn't really matter, except for the fact if you're trying to teach a bunch of people how to, you know, stay in alignment with the nation's intellectual property frameworks, well then you kind of do need to do the research because you don't know they're going to differ with country to country and even potentially institution to institution. So what I guess I was trying to look at this as like, I need to be more honest about how much of my day gets sucked up by inefficiency.
Shawn:And I'm not saying inefficiency is bad, which is I think kind of, I have an obligation to engage with people and meet them where they're at and understand what's upsetting them. I don't know, I think it's just not foreign. I can do it and I have done it. I think I'm actually pretty decent at it for the most part. I've learned a lot in the last few years, right?
Shawn:About how to do that. Where I think I needed to focus is just figuring out, what is my lesson here from this? Because our organization is super tiny, we're operating really on a lean model and I don't have the luxury, like in other words, it's an indulgence for me to have to be in my feelings about any given situation because I don't have the time. And this is kind of going back to how I was breaking it up. Like I've got productivity capital and I've got emotional capital.
Shawn:And every minute I spend in emotional capital steals from my productivity capital. And because we have such a lean team and because I have so many responsibilities, if I sacrifice any of those productivity, any of the productivity capital and put it over into this emotional capital basket, then I am self sabotaging because I'm not gonna have enough time to get my jobs done. And I say jobs with us, plural because that's where I'm at right now is multiple hats. So for me, it's like, do, diversity of the team is one thing and that's fine. And when I had a bigger organization that mattered a lot.
Shawn:And now we're small, it's really hard. I mean, we have who we have and I love every single person we have. Every single person is capable of wearing multiple apps and that's helpful. But where I'm at is trying to figure out how do I recalibrate so that I'm not knocked off course for two and a half hours, but maybe half an hour.
Scott:Yeah, and
Shawn:Is the challenge.
Scott:Yeah, it's a challenge, but there's a way there. And, you know, it's you have the most difficult kind of leadership job, in my opinion, because you're essentially a player coach. You're big enough that you need help. You can't, you know, one person isn't a baseball team, so you need other players on the field, but you aren't so big that you can just coach. Have to coach and play, and that type of mental energy different, I get that, but I think the beginning of part of the way to get through that is to understand that what players need is for the coach to make the strategic decisions and to take responsibility for it.
Scott:So, it's not the players that say, hey, we need to shift into double play formation, it's the manager, the coach who's saying either shift or don't shift and then the players play the best that they can and so I'm going to take that metaphor into you have a frustrated employee because that you know you're you you have a client who's you know handing you money and has certain expectations and is making it really difficult for your team to perform and so you're going to get some people to put their heads down and grind through and some people who are going to be visibly and vocally frustrated, part of that conversation is coming in and saying, Hey, I get it. I really get it. I understand that you're frustrated. Understand why you're frustrated, but I'm going to take this off your plate. I will deal with them.
Scott:Here's my plan. I'm going to do this, this, this, and this. You got any improvements for me about how to deal with? Yeah, get all that, but if you you're not going to make the stressor go away. Yeah.
Scott:But the reason a person is frustrated is because they don't control something they want to control. And there's sort of two ways that you could deal with it. One is to take responsibility for it. So now. They don't have to feel like they need to deal with this because it's on you as the boss.
Scott:That doesn't completely solve the problem, but it helps, and then the other is getting ahead of it, getting ahead of it, can have it, and for me that is part of the job of anyone who's leading, anyone who has people helping them, is what I call the vibration in the machinery, Yeah. And that needs to be the first thing that you do every day. Not you, Sean Baker Garcia, but if you have people that are helping you do what you're responsible for getting done, listening to the vibrations of the machinery every morning, every day, so that you get ahead of these things and recognizing that just because it's not significant to you isn't the question. Because what you need is the machine to operate. You need to help people through the things that are going to derail them, not things that are going to derail you, and the challenge of leadership is to be in that emotional energy space and draw visceral fulfillment from it, because when you're, you know, creating content, you derive visceral fulfillment from it.
Scott:That's very satisfying for you. Success as a leader comes from these leadership things, which at a visceral level are things that you shouldn't have to do anyways, because people figure it out. People don't figure it out. That's why they're helping you and that's why you need the help. But listening to the vibrations of the machine, getting ahead, keeping of the issue, keeping people tuned in, at the end of the day, when you're looking at the amount of time you spent in that emotion column, that's the energy column for me, the impression column, You should sit back and pour your beverage and go, I had a good day today because machine is not going to blow up next week because I changed that bearing.
Scott:Yeah. Nobody else is changing that bearing. Why? Because they're shoveling coal in the boiler and they're, you know, making sure that they slow the thing down on a curve and you know that you keep building out the metaphors as much as you want to, but the reason it's not going to blow up is because of you, and finding a way to go, I feel good about that, I think is really important for a leader. Always think of Jamie Dimon.
Scott:You know Jamie Dimon is chairman and CEO of or at least the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. I'm like what does that guy do? I mean when he gets out of his car and walks into the building, what does he do? I mean, there's so much that company does. Just and for the longest time, I just didn't understand, you know, if he got hit by a bus, would the company change?
Scott:If it was somebody else, would the company just what does he do? And what I think he does is he's listening to the vibrations in the machine. Yeah. Getting ahead of any issue with the machinery. He's staying ahead of any issue that is going to derail critical people in his organization and he's he's nudging them.
Scott:He's keeping them on track and it's sitting down with that person or with you know with a group of people that you know are going to be frustrated next week and having that conversation with them and saying hey this is this is what I'm seeing and is this a problem for you yet? I mean I'm I'm seeing a a problem here and these guys are going to come back and do this, that, the other thing. What do you think? But it's and this is the really hard thing, and I'll sort of end on this. The hard thing is this, when a person is frustrated or they're angry, fundamentally they're scared.
Shawn:And
Scott:so many people don't understand that. When they do understand it, they reject it. They don't believe it. I'm not scared. I'm angry.
Scott:Anger comes from fear. It's not in Star Wars, but it's in Star Wars because it's true. It's not true because it's in Star Wars. Frustration is the same thing. It is fear because there's something that you don't control that is materially affecting your success.
Shawn:Or that you think will.
Scott:Or that you think will.
Shawn:Yeah, yeah.
Scott:And so when you're sitting down with somebody who actually is angry or frustrated, the path to disaster is to say, well let's just talk about what you're scared of, because they're not processing it as fear, they're processing it as frustration or anger, and it's not gonna get there. But if you come into that conversation individually with everybody who you think might be frustrated a week from now, because you see how this is going, And start talking to them about, hey, I see we may be getting off track here. I see. Yeah. You know, and and I'm I'm the boss, I'm trying to keep us
Shawn:on
Scott:track here. What what are you seeing? Do you think we as a team are getting off track? What sort of things can we do now to nudge? And what you're doing is you're giving each one of those people the the imprimatur or the the power to say, I'm not asking you to, you know, drink two gallons of water today.
Scott:I'm saying start sipping at this bucket now so that by next week we'll have it all drunk.
Shawn:So I don't
Scott:know if that resonates with you all on
Shawn:that. Sort
Scott:of tactical interaction. But none of that works if you don't have all the rest of it.
Shawn:So yeah, I was kind of just jotting some notes down because, you know, now I actually feel like we're finally getting to my from what I can understand the material takeaway for me from this conversation, which is, you know, well, and I do wanna say one thing before the idea, the analogy or use of the metaphor of player coach, I think really resonates with me that is a powerful one. And also, and maybe this is like for a future conversation to go down that sort of side quest is is looking at small organizations that are largely comprised of player coaches, right? Where there's not as much of a distribution of labor force that you've got, like, entry level, you know, junior staffers, mid program or or, you know, mid level senior. You know, there's not the full hierarchy that a a larger midsize company might have. A lot of small, and maybe this is just a word for startups or for consultancies or whether they're new or old, because I know a lot of consultancies that are very accomplished, but I wouldn't say their management is great.
Shawn:They just stick around because there's enough work to go around it and they can do it. But, you know, the the unifying characteristic of those types of entities are that they're largely comprised of player coaches, and now they all gotta work together somehow even though there's ostensibly a top dog. You know? So that's for, let's put a pin in that because at some point I think that's a whole other episode. But, you know, I think that, for sure, I 100% double down on the fear piece.
Shawn:It's really hard to talk to people about it in those terms because nobody wants to look vulnerable and nobody wants to be like, you know, and it's insulting, right? In our society, at least, maybe most societies, I don't know any society that like, you know, promotes transparency of fear as a virtue because I think it's seen as a weakness for the most part. But it is, I agree, it's largely fear. So what are we afraid of when we're getting frustrated? That's a whole case study I could go and kind of not to Today's little situation wasn't really even a big deal for me, but it just led me to start philosophizing on like how I work, the quality and the nature of my work, the finiteness of my work, and then how it impacts my ability to work in a player coach community.
Shawn:Right? You know? And how successful or useful that is. Because these team players that I was referencing are player coaches. They're also player coaches, right?
Shawn:Like they're in many cases have more experience than I do even, and have been in the field longer. So that fear is key though, because where I saw my situation and I had two examples, I didn't even tell you about the other one that was from last week, which is kind of a consistent theme. I was telling one of my juniors this morning, I told her, I said, you know, the good Lord speaks to me every day. And sometimes the conversations are very clear and very, very, very just direct and sometimes it's like, you know, I'm being mysterious. God, the mysterious, right?
Shawn:Like, you know, and eventually, the fog clears and I see what's going on but not always. And this last seven days, like carrying over from last week, I said the Lord was speaking to me really clearly because it was like giving me, presenting me with situations where senior consultants who I know know how to do their job and are very, very good at what they do were acting in ways that were presenting a challenge for me. And even though they did it differently, again, part of my epiphany this morning was like, I sensed, yeah, it might have been a little bit fear driven because but what they were fearing is that I was not giving enough direction, not to them, but just in general. Yeah. And, you know, you may not remember this, but I am 100% certain that in an earlier podcast or episode, or maybe one we'll eventually never release because it was so early, I had referenced a situation with my mom when I was like, I mean, I don't even know if I was five, maybe five, six years old, and she drove a Volkswagen Beetle and she thought she and she was a young mom, you know, so she would have only been probably like 21 or 22 or something.
Shawn:And she thought it would be funny if she like, I was in the seat because this was before like car seats and before kids had to sit in the back. So I was sitting in the passenger side and she's tooling down the road and she took her hands off the wheel. And she was like, oh, look, no hands. You know, because the car steering column, it's gonna take, know cars. People, you all know cars.
Shawn:And, but my little five year old brain freaked. You know what I And, you know, instead of thinking that was a cool magic trick, I was either just a born pessimist or like high anxiety, but I, you know, and so what did I do? I panicked, I jumped over, I grabbed the wheel, which then freaked her out because that's not what she was expecting me to do, I don't think, right? And you know, and caused a bit of a chaotic moment potentially could have been dangerous if, you know, she hadn't responded quickly, but like I likened my reaction in that situation to the two experiences I had this last week, which were professional versions of that, where I think what I saw is them sensing I was not taking control of a situation and then they were kind of trying to fill that leadership gap. And yes, it was probably driven from fear on some level, fear of failure, fear of not 60, you know, same thing, right?
Shawn:Their own success individually is gonna reflect poorly on me as a professional, you know, but it's all connected. You know what I mean? All these themes and sort of the truths that you were speaking to, I think are all very much connected to what I was experiencing. So I think it's a nice way to kind of, well, actually, don't even know how long we've been talking at this point, but I'll let you guide us, be the timekeeper, that is a nice summation for me to take away from this, hopefully for the audience because, I mean, the end, I'm not looking for how to paint, lay blame. Because again, the goal, I think for people like you and I especially, and this is why I think we're such good friends and partners and stuff is that, I'm all about being self aware.
Shawn:Like I want to make this, we got to work together. We're relying on each other to make this ecosystem work And I have to do my part, but sometimes I have to interpret how to do my part by assessing the reactions of those around me, you know, so that I know where the gap is maybe.
Scott:Yeah, I think you're right. And it's, I mean, you've given me I think we are a little over, but I'm not surprised. Yeah, we we should be over on this because it's important. Yeah, not just about how to lead a company. It's about fundamentally how to interact with other people.
Scott:And and part of getting to that place where we we don't think the worst of who we're interacting with. We don't ridicule each other. Is is being open and honest and that that is difficult because when we reach out to another person and say, need your help, that is maybe not as vulnerable as saying, I'm scared, but it is still in Western society at least indicative of a vulnerability here saying, can't do this by myself. Yeah. But that is fundamentally where leadership begins is I have too much to do.
Scott:I can't do it by myself. I'm not a lone wolf. So I need your help. I think that the next phase is almost blends into this concept of what in the military is called commander's intent, which I think is actually misused. It's you know spending a lot of time talking to the people that you work with and that work for you so that when a decision has to be made they can make it because they know what you think.
Scott:I think that is a dry well because if you're asking people to make decisions that they don't have the authority to make, you're putting them at risk. And so I think the way that you get there, the way that you get to better decisions and better understanding is as you're listening for Vibrations in the Machine, you're talking to your people on a daily basis, you're talking to the people that you think are going to go off the rails in the future on an issue. And instead of saying, I think you're going to go off the rails, you're saying, you got a minute for me? This is what I'm thinking about today. I am concerned about this.
Scott:I could really use your insight, your help on how to make sure we don't go off the rails on that and your your signal for you you set the hook on this person. You're you're where they need you to be is when they say, I've been thinking about that and I'm really worried about it. Oh my god, brother. Like, great. Okay.
Scott:I'm concerned about it too. I'm thinking about this. What are you thinking about? What do you think the idea is? And what you've done is you've shared with them that you're aware you're curating a conversation where you're still taking the responsibility for making the decision, but you are giving them the ability to say, I now have control over this thing.
Scott:I now can pay attention to it. I can help. I can make things better, but I'm not on the hook. My boss is on the hook because that's what I need your help means. I need you to do stuff for me, but I'm the one who is on the hook for whatever bad thing happens.
Scott:Yeah. And I think that's the complexity of high functioning leadership, and I think that you're there, I mean everybody needs a sounding board, Everybody needs to keep refining it, and it's hard to stop playing the game. I mean, it's hard to stop being a player coach, and you need to talk about that because that is a whole.
Shawn:Yeah. Well, I love it. We always you know, our content generates content, which is a nice problem to have. So, you know, I appreciate, you know, you taking the jump with me today. That was that was I knew it was gonna be a a one.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:Yeah. Did a halo.
Shawn:Yeah. Yeah.
Scott:Low low open. Definitely.
Shawn:Yep. Yep.
Scott:Awesome. Well, listen. I I look forward to chatting with you the next time and seeing where you are on all this stuff and seeing where we get to on our next jump.
Shawn:Same with you. Looking forward to it.
Scott:Alright. Talk to you later.
Shawn:Till the next time. Thanks, Scott. Bye.