Courageous Conversations: Forward Talk with Gustavo Razzetti

0:00people are the most consequential and dangerous forces on earth well personality psychology is about the nature of human nature it's about people and wouldn't that be useful to know it seems to me i can't i can't think of a more important problem you're listening to the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments the global leader in personality and leadership guided by your hosts hogan chief science officer and world-renowned personality psychologist dr ryan sherman alongside hogan's pr manager and

0:35resident storyteller blake lepp this podcast explores the impact of personality on life leadership and the nature of human nature hello everybody and welcome to the science of personality podcast i'm your host ryan sherman along with my co-host as always blake lepp say hello blake hello everybody and welcome back to the science of personality podcast episode 149 today ryan and i are joined by author gustavo

1:06rosetti who has written multiple best-selling books including remote not distant design a company culture to thrive in the hybrid workplace stretch for change how to improve your change fitness and thrive in life and this latest book forward talk the bold new method for getting teams unstuck which hit shelves in online stores today on may 5th which is actually not the day we're recording this but is the day that this will be published so in this episode we are going to talk with gustavo about

1:36courageous conversations people must have in the workplace to avoid team derailment and to help teams thrive through productive conflict this is at the core of his new book and we're thrilled to have him on the podcast to discuss this very important topic but before we get to our conversation with gustavo if you wish to give us any ideas for upcoming episodes or you want to ask ryan or me a question shoot us an email at hello at the science of personality.com or follow the science of personality on linkedin now let's get to it gustavo welcome to the podcast is there anything you'd like to share with

2:11our audience before we get started yeah sure first of all thank you for hosting me i was thinking that something you didn't mention is that i like to cook and one thing that i like to do is when i visit people to say hey what do you have on your fridge and create something with ingredients they provide and that's exactly how i would like to work with teams i ask them what are you bringing to the conversation what ingredients you're sharing and they were going to make something out of it well i i will also just add that we didn't mention in the intro that gustavo was also a very successful

2:46consultant and the ceo and founder of fearless culture which has helped organizations all over the world including many fortune 500 companies design better company cultures creating the culture design canvas which is a framework that he and his colleagues have used or in thousands of teams and organizations have used around the world to assess and design better cultures and so he's really an expert on how to change culture how to change organizations i'm really interested in talking about some of the work you've done around remote uh workplaces as well

3:22but of course today we're super excited to talk about uh forward talk your your latest book and some of the big ideas that are coming forward in that book so so thanks gustavo for joining us today absolutely well gustavo okay i you know we're gonna step outside of the the questions that i i plan to ask you and not because now i've got to know what are you cooking for dinner tonight i haven't thought about it i need to check my fridge all right well it's steak night at my house so it's that's that's

3:53what's happening tonight but well okay i i had to ask so hopefully hopefully you come up with something and uh maybe you can just use the ingredients that you have but you know gustavo we uh we typically kick things off in the same manner and this episode will be no different so what got you interested in the topic of courageous conversations in the first place two things i mean if i look back when i was a child i mean i have a six siblings so we're a team of seven siblings so you need to learn how to

4:24talk and how to drive conversation when there's a lot of people with different personalities that want to get the spotlight but jokes aside like in the line of work as you mentioned earlier i've been working a lot with teams on improving their culture and i realized that the most important factor basically is the conversations whether the ones that we avoid or the ones that people don't really manage with the right skills so i always tell clients if you want to change your culture you

4:57need to start by changing your conversations well that's such a great line uh if you want to change your culture you have to change your conversations but let's talk about um you know and i know we're going to get into a little bit today uh gustavo uh you know about what you mean by forward talk and i know we're going to probably have some examples of these but can you give us an example with a client where you've said hey this is how you're currently having a conversation this is what needs

5:27to happen instead this is the conversation you need to have i'd love to start with you know a real uh client that you've seen change by changing their conversation yeah recently we're working with a financial service institution of course everyone's trying to push an ai first agenda and they were pushing a lot their employees to experiment to start developing and testing ai agents and when i talked to the leaders they were frustrated because

5:59they felt that the teams weren't working they weren't really taking the challenge so then we had conversations with the team members and what we saw is people were experimenting and actually they were doing much more work than their leaders thought in that direction but they weren't sharing their progress with the leaders because they feared that they say hey look at this ai agent that i created to be more efficient to do my job faster that their leaders would fire them so people were working on the

6:33same directions but they weren't having the conversations once because the pressure from leaders was all about productivity and for a team member that means oh efficiency then people are going to get fired and people were experimenting embracing leadership's challenge but they weren't sharing that with their leaders well that's fascinating i mean i can kind of see why there would be some hesitancy of these people whatever they do create these agents that are maybe you know doing a lot of the work that

7:04they that's maybe making their job easier taking less time but also maybe not willing to to to stand up and say hey you know i'm actually not having to work quite as hard because i figured this thing out is that is that something that that you're encountering absolutely and because instead of discussing how can we integrate ai to to make a better job or to free ourselves from day to day mundane tasks so we can focus on more meaningful work the message is about efficiency and you know what happens when we talk about efficiency someone has to go

7:38well you know gustavo we mentioned your new book forward talk in the intro so now i'm curious you know can you define forward talk for our audience yeah i'd like to say that sometimes the best way to explain something it's about it telling what it's not so let's start with what the problem is the problem is teams getting stuck because the conversations they have or they avoid are not really helping them move forward they get stuck in the past so forward talk is based on a two by two matrix that has of course

8:15four quadrants right one of the axes is are we focusing on the future so moving forward while we're focusing in the past and the other axis are we addressing the issue or are we avoiding it so this give us four patterns one pattern is blame when teams get stuck into finger pointing finding who to blame not only who but maybe another department maybe the client so we get stuck in that conversation we're hashing past issues and we cannot move forward it avoidance is when we don't want to talk about issues and of course

8:55that get us stuck because we cannot we can only fix the things that we talk about and lastly this is very interesting group think it looks like we're moving forward it looks like progress but actually it's delusion of progress so group think comes when people agree too quickly when people decide to move on not because they are on the same page but actually because they don't want to talk about something so the leader says hey this is the new priorities this is new project this is the revised timeline and people say okay let's do it

9:30but deep inside them they don't agree and actually we're going to see that that's going to create a lot of issues along the way so forward talk is about conversations that matter that address the issue and the intent and the focus is into the future not the past yeah so gustavo if i understand this correctly here then there's really three sort of three ways teams can go wrong in these conversations right one way uh is by being stuck in the past even if they're trying to address the core issue right

10:04they're having a conversation that they need to have but it's focused on the past and not you know what they need to do going forward another way would be to be stuck in the past but not even really talking about the issue talking you're still avoiding the issue uh which seems really counterproductive and then the final way they can make they can go wrong would be to sort of feel like we're having that moving forward conversation we're addressing the issue but at some level we're sorry we're not addressing the we're we're trying to we're talking about the future right so we're trying to move forward but we are avoiding the key conversation that we need to have that last one that you just

10:39talked about there so does that mean that about 75 percent of the time we go wrong or what's your sense of the base rate how often do teams go wrong in these conversations is it higher than that that's a good point i mean we have three patterns that are wrong i don't know exactly how much time people spend there but i would say that at least 75 right and some teams even more and once again i'm not expecting teams to be always playing on the forward top quadrant but at least most of the time

11:13we should be working there i mean we can blame our team members from time to time we're humans right but when that's the default pattern that's our behavior every day or most of our days that then that's where your team has a problem and we i'm we might end up getting into this but i'm i'm already thinking about it so i mean if there are these members on a team maybe they have been avoiding these conversations you know they're not wanting to have these conversations that have been kind of

11:44boiling up um and the more that this happens do you find that it just builds resentment in these individuals on the teams and maybe that even makes it more more difficult and a little bit more toxic for the team in in general yes absolutely because i talk about the concept of conversational debt so the things that we don't fix they don't go away and there's some magical thinking that people have because that's how we are wired that most people don't want to have these tough conversations

12:17because they are afraid or different reasons i'm going to explain that later but in the end the magic thinking is if i don't address the issue the issue is going to fix itself or it's going to disappear but actually it's like not opening your credit card statement right you still owe the money even if you don't look at it you still have a debt to pay and the same happens with conflict or unresolved issues or misalignment issues we might not talk about them but they're still there

12:49and the more we procrastinate the more we avoid it the worse it's going to become the worst yes yeah that's such a great way to put it about the credit card balance i was whatever you said conversational debt i was trying to kind of visualize it or like you know come up with some kind of example but that's a great one that you that you did and you you saved my brain from having to do too much work um you know you argue that most teams avoid these conversations that really matter most and so you know can we get to the core of as to why you think that's the case what's going

13:22on there sure the one of the reasons that usually people talk about why team members don't engage in conversations why they don't share their opinions or perspectives or they keep certain questions to themselves or their closest colleagues is fear right we are afraid of what people would think about us we fear that there will be some kind of retaliation or maybe we're going to be look like stupids because we're the only ones who ask that question so the study i conducted i try to

13:58to go beyond that fear because of course there's some fear but there's something deeper so i asked people why do you think others don't engage in those conversations and of course the most a given reason was oh my colleagues are afraid for whatever reason but when i asked them why is it that you yourself why isn't that you don't participate why is it that you stay silent people said because nothing's gonna change and this for me is really critical because it's not that people

14:33don't want to do something is for example many organizations have a employee engagement service once a year twice a year even every quarter and often what i hear from employees is they share their concerns they share ideas for improvement but then nothing changes so at some point people say hey what's the point of speaking up if no one's gonna care if nothing's gonna change so people basically stay silent or they detach from those conversations

15:06so gustavo in your consulting work i wonder you know what kinds of things do you implement into organizations to try to reduce that fear i mean do you talk with these groups separately and then bring people together or you know without trying to give away any secret consulting sauce you might have i mean how can we get these groups and these teams to overcome that fear to have these conversations that they need to have yeah my approach it's that the same way if we don't fix something together we need

15:39to fix it together so it's like working on a couple's therapy and not having both parties together you're never going to solve the issue right because it's a relationship that needs to be fixed the same happens with teams my approach is to have everyone in the same room because we need to coach and train people to have the conversation with the people i mean there are a lot of team members even leaders that are consulting chat gpt or claude

16:09to deal with issues they have with their team members what actually they need to talk to the person at hand not with someone else right so one of the tricks to your point is to start reading the room better what are the patterns that you observe for example if you are a leader and you ask a question and people look to the floor they look to each other or they look at you like asking for permission when they're giving a an answer that's a sign of some of the symptoms that might be affecting your team

16:43we talk about the patterns no we talk about blame we talk about avoidance we talk about groupthink well when you understand the key questions to ask to really see what's happening you start observing those patterns so the next time i can assure you you get into a team meeting and you start seeing the conversations through those lenses you're going to start observing which patterns are the ones that are driving the conversation and then you can start saying okay guys maybe we need to stop avoiding the topic maybe we need to stop rushing alignment maybe no you start getting into that a reflection before you

17:21start fixing the issue yeah now i imagine gustavo that some of these sessions you do with teams must bring a lot of emotions in them you know i i just i'm sort of uh curious if you have any stories about outbursts of emotion whether you know sort of uh whether that might be anger or sadness or or what kinds of uh things have you seen happen in these sessions i see a lot of that but less than most people think and i see more relief as an emotion because people

17:56have an expectation that things are going to go really wrong uh-huh and actually when they engage in these type of conversations they usually go much better than most people think actually there's a lot of research not only mine that shows that when people engage in a genuine authentic conversation even it was really tough in the end people feel oh it didn't go that bad or actually went much much better than i envisioned so i was working with a with a team of executives and one of the things

18:31they asked me to help them with is start difficult conversations when it comes to employee performance right so they say hey i need to talk to this person they're not doing a great job i don't know how to do it i've been avoiding it this for many months and so on and so forth which is a very typical scenario right and one thing i told the guys is you know what the other party the employee at hand knows that you're not happy they can tell that there's something missing that there's a conversation

19:04that needs to happen and probably if they're really having a bad moment or they're not delivering they're aware they really know so they're waiting for you to take the lead so actually it's going to be relieving for them to have that conversation because then they're going to see hey am i going to get fired is there any room for me for improvement and are they going to move me to another team so the fear that we have is usually much bigger than the actual experience of going through that

19:36conversation you know gustavo i would have to imagine that you know it's probably i mean so i'm thinking of you as the facilitator this has to be i mean kind of an eye-opening experience but also i'm thinking at it through the lens like would these teams be able to figure this out on their own because it sounds like and i'd love to be a fly on the wall in one of your sessions but it sounds like i could invite you no problem that would be it would be it would be really really neat to see this but you know part of me has to think that i wonder how many of these teams that actually figure all this

20:11out on their own because it seems like you're really the one who kind of cracks the code for these teams i mean how would you how would what's your thought on that yeah i don't want to think that i have a special superpower so i think it's a combination of both you need some kind of catalyst to spark that first attempt of a conversation but also in my practice one thing that i'm really aware of i want to build capacity not dependency so i don't want teams to say hey we need to ring gustavo

20:45or one of his team members or someone else so yeah to get it to get started to break that silence to learn how to observe the patterns to learn how to improve the conversations you need help but in the end the team needs to walk on their own without having someone to assist them yeah you're there to teach them how to fish not to give them a fish so that they can feed themselves yeah and then i cook the fish yeah you cook them yeah that's whatever's in their fridge uh okay all right

21:18well okay let's let's get into the the personality side of things because in your experience you know are there any personality behaviors or characteristics that are common among those who typically avoid these tough conversations and ryan i'm also going to be curious to get your thoughts on this as well yeah i talked to be a email with ryan when i was writing the book right so he can maybe explain this before more than me but there are three things that you know usually people talk about psychological safety so how the context affects conversation so if a context is safe people are going to speak more

21:55than if it's not however i my research shows that there are three types of groups and some are immune or two of those three groups are actually immune to the context let me explain this there are some participants that are more sensitive more a influenced by the environment right so depending on the signals they get they're more willing to speak up in a more safe culture or team environment and the opposite if

22:27the team feels a aggressive even toxic however there are people because of their personality that regardless of how safe the environment feels they're always going to speak up and i can bring an analogy what happened recently here in the us with a the current administration having some a issues with a law firms and many law firms cave and say you know what yeah sure we're going to do what the

22:57government wants and then other law firms pushing back and say no no we're going to stand our ground and what happened no so the context wasn't safe enough but certain law firms decided to push back as a result many clients shift from one to the other because they want their law firms to stand up and represent and defend them when there's some kind of a aggressive kind of behaviors so we have these two groups and the third one is a group that i call the natural avoiders there are people that

23:33even in the safest space they're never going to speak up because they don't want to because of their personality or maybe they are checked out and they simply happen to be there right so i'm going to invite ryan because he talked a lot about the the the the different personalities i mean there are some people there's some traits in which people are more willing to question others a challenge authority so i let the expert channel here yeah well i mean certainly i think from a hogan standpoint you know based on your

24:07descriptions gustavo uh something like a high cautious would certainly describe that last group right this is a group who is afraid of making a mistake in public right afraid of potential public embarrassment uh you said you mentioned earlier the potential for for saying something or asking a question that would be potentially embarrassing uh people who are fearful for you know they're just more fearful for things like uh you know their their job retention as well

24:38right so certainly high cautious uh individuals are going to be more reluctant to speak up i do think uh sort of on the opposite end obviously um low cautious individuals be more likely to speak up but at the same time i also think low dutiful individuals right this is when again one of those hds derailers people who are really low and i like talking about the low end in in in this case because a lot of times people don't want to interpret the low end but the low end has real interpretive information and a low score on

25:08dutiful would indicate that someone is likely to buck the trend to go against the authority to challenge what people might be said and to take some risk and to not be so worried about towing the line that people who i think are low on dutiful are going to be less susceptible to groupthink people high on dutiful far more susceptible to groupthink so i think there's a number of personality characteristics that that would play into this i'm sort of curious though gustavo about the

25:39role of the leader i wonder if in these group settings the leader and the leader's personality has an outsized impact on what people are willing to share and willing to say totally i think that to your point there's the personality of the participants or the team members that we're not going to change who they are there's the context and then to your point the personality of the leader plays a very important factor it amplifies but we know that some team members don't cave or don't adapt to their leaders and some are basically more reactive to their

26:15leaders approach once again we cannot change who people are and that's one thing i learned many many years ago so what we teach is how can we make people work better based on who they are so it's about we know that leaders because of their role they tend to dominate conversations what we help them is to how can you facilitate conversations so you are not the one who should be providing the answer you should be curating the answers from your team getting the best out of people but then you

26:50need to make sense out of those different personalities different information in order to inform your decision gustavo can you i want to go back to the first uh group that you talked about these three groups can you can you break that one down for me just real quickly again the three groups or the first one just the first one the first one is people that basically uh their personality they they speak regardless of who they are or where they are regardless of the environment

27:24okay okay i was yeah i was just trying to get clear on that um because i don't know ryan for me some of these were i was feeling like a little bit of like almost like the clusters on the hds like moving away moving toward and moving against type of thing because you would think that these courageous conversations in themselves are already causing some stress that may cause people's derailers to surface so i don't know i don't know if you want if if i'm if i'm even getting close here no no i i i

27:57think so blake so i think that moving away from are the ones that you're going to see where people are really struggling to speak up really uh you know sort of um you know just sort of fearful right for you know not wanting to speak up out of fear the moving against cluster that's where you're going to see people speaking up but out of challenge right sort of like i know i want to challenge this idea and i think it's important that i challenge these ideas right so like the law firm part he said what's that like the law firm's example that he used yeah exactly that's right yeah that's right

28:30okay lots of self-confidence yeah for sure okay okay yeah and then the last you know to your point about moving uh moving towards as well blake i mean that's where you're more likely to see that group think that's not out of fear it's not out of fear for getting in trouble it's just about wanting to get everyone to get along like hey it's it's just really important that we get along it's not that i'm afraid if i speak up i'll be in trouble or i'll be outcast it's just uh i'm afraid if i'm if i speak up there'll be some disagreement and that'll make people uncomfortable and i don't want to make

29:03people uncomfortable i want everyone to get along and so more likely to go along okay all right all right i this i think this is all starting to click for me a little bit um you know i'm not the personality psychologist here so i'm just kind of uh i'm i'm learning as i go but uh gustavo you know in your book you talk about getting teams quote unstuck so what are some of the signs that a team might be stuck even let's say when performance metrics look perfectly fine

29:33yeah that's a great question because usually when we think about getting stuck to your point we associate it with a we're not getting any positive outcome and this is something i observe with many organizations teams that seem to be performing well and then all of a sudden we start seeing all those metrics to suffer why because sooner or later if you're having issues if you're not addressing the real topics that's going to hurt the team unstuck it rather than getting to explanations people can read

30:11the book i can i better focus on what are the key behaviors that people are going to relate to think about a team you join a meeting because we need to make a decision and how does that meeting end with another meeting because we weren't able to agree on something or we make a decision and two weeks after people are relitigating it they're opening again we are complaining about it it was we haven't

30:42even tested and we are still saying that it's not going to work so those are behaviors of getting teams stuck that we continue to rehash the same conversation over and over or we talk about blame you know when we keep blaming a whoever hired that employee that was a disaster or someone that really did a mess when it came to estimate the budget for a project and numbers went totally over that and we couldn't fund the whole project we have to stop halfway so those conversations in which

31:17we keep rehashing things that would be the the experience whether it's decisions whether it's directions that we took or even the decisions that never actually come to fruition gustavo i'm sort of interested on the performance side itself thinking about when teams get stuck how does that affect performance i mean you know to blake's point earlier i think to sometimes a team

31:48can be stuck but performance metrics can still look okay but it's sort of masking some underlying issue but i also think at some point if we stay stuck for too long it is going to have an impact on performance so you know just how much or you know what is your experience tell you in terms of how much does getting teams stuck impact performance

32:11as i mentioned if if you're not able to commit to a decision or agree on what you want to implement that's going to hurt the team it's going to hurt performance going to hurt a results no be let me see if i can if any example comes to mind this moment well i was a working with a team that the ceo was a leaving the organization after many many years and the team were stuck in the

32:46conversation like some of the team members the direct reports were thinking hey i'm going to be the next one i'm going to be a i'm going to take over i'm going to be promoted to become the new ceo there were other team members that wishing that the ceo never a quit so hey hopefully he's able to stay for one year or two years more because we still have to a finish with our new strategy whatever the the case was right so this dynamic imagine the senior executive a firm of a large global packaging

33:21woods basically how can they move forward when the people instead of doing their job they're speculating about this kind of team dynamic some people want the leader to stay some are thinking i'm going to be promoted i'm going to become the leader and all these people are going to report to me for example right you know that really kind of hits on our previous guests that we had ryan you know um victoria grady who was talking about a similar scenario where the ceo was retiring and it was the way people responded changed gustava that was what the what the topic of the the podcast was and that

33:58there were a lot of people who were you know that that change upset them um whenever there was there was this outgoing ceo and a new one coming in um so that that makes a lot of sense to me now i'm it's kind of nice to see that that overlap and this is all kind of gelling together but you know these these uh courageous conversations they seem to be obviously critical to team success but you know there's also some risk involved with this as well so i'm curious how can teams have these conversations and make them productive instead of destructive because i i can see that this this

34:34could go one of both of those or one of both directions yeah like everything in life i mean it requires practice and training so i'm not going to expect people to run a marathon if they haven't exercise for decades right so developing the muscle of having these conversations requires starting small starting with simpler topics until people start to learn the principles the practices and then become

35:05more confident and better at that but also it's understanding the intent so usually people are afraid because they think that things are going to go wrong but it it doesn't matter which kind of conversation you're having if you start from a positive intent so you're trying to fix the issue that's why i'm saying this is not about blaming someone this is not about finding a culprit this about how can we solve the issue that's affecting us as a team when people see that hey we might have different opinions we

35:40might have different experiences or perspectives but we'll try to solve the same thing for the sake of the team for the sake of our own health no so we don't keep to suffer from that dysfunction that helps a lot

35:56you know gustavo it seems like a big part of this conversation or strikes me that a big part of these conversations ultimately serve some purpose of building trust right so you said you mentioned starting small so i start with some small techniques and building in this forward talk into our conversations uh building in having these kind of courageous conversations with each other that helps us establish and build more trust which helps us have more of these conversations in the future

36:27do you think that's true do you think this is part of that building trust is a big part of this how this all works um or what's your sort of take on how trust has an impact on having these conversations trust i mean to your point you're right trust is the glue that brings people together and trust is the foundation of effective conversations and we i coach people to start from a a

36:56full but i call it the the trust battery you know with a full or semi-full battery so assuming that trust should be there even with people that you don't know even with colleagues that maybe screw up a couple of times because if you don't signal trust then people are not going to reciprocate however trust also gets built through actions and interactions so that's what's important the repetition building that practice in which people start trusting that the process itself is going to help the team get to where

37:26they want to go research shows that most people after going through difficult conversations not only they realize that they were they didn't go that bad as they expected but actually they went much much better than they thought at least they got to understand each other at least they go through the anxiety of not because the conversations are happening inside our head and when you're able to share it openly with someone else you basically release that anxiety that stress and also when people start to listen to the

38:01different points of view they realize that we're not that distant from where we thought we were and it's the first step towards a healing so to speak yeah i like your point there gustavo because that's one of the things that we found in some of our research with teams is in all in pretty much every model of teams whether you know whoever makes them every consulting firm a number of people have models for high performing teams or leadership teams and almost all of those models include trust as a central principle

38:33of effective teams but the problem with that is that trust you can't just get a team together and say okay trust each other more and then your team will be more successful you have to build that trust over time and so what i like about your point of view with these courageous conversations is that's a big part of what it seems to be about it seems to be about let's have these conversations so that we can build our trust so that we can be successful going forward right that trust is this outcome of this process of

39:04having these conversations that's going to take us to that next level so for me i really i mean that that's what i really see here is this is a way way to go do that so i guess i would just follow up by saying like is that an outcome that you measure when you're working with these teams are you seeing improvements in trust uh at the end of your engagements yes absolutely and i think that my goal is to get people to talk about the things that they were withholding for many weeks months and even

39:37years right i was recently working with a senior a leadership team from a company and some people have been working together for even a decade or over a decade and we run an interesting exercise about conversations asking each other to basically two simple questions i trust you because and i will trust you more if right so you start from the point that the moment you say i trust you because i don't know how you dress or whatever or because how you speak so you need to give the other person something that signals

40:11uh positive intent so the other person immediately is going to open up and it's going to be more receptive the second part of the question i will trust you more it doesn't say i will trust you it trusts you more right that's very important it gives people an indication of what me as a team leader expect from them i will trust you more if you show up to the meeting sometime if you interrupt me less or whatever so that creates very simple yet a powerful conversation because people start getting

40:45cues from people about what they need to do what irritates them and there are usually little things but those little things compounded are what drive a crisis you know gustavo i'm i've got to ask now because how did these engagements begin you know like who who who reaches out to you like from your consulting practice or like in your consulting practice who at these organizations are is most likely to reach out to you to to bring you in and facilitate

41:17a session or or work with a team like where did that where does that start who who is saying hey i think we need to get gustavo in so they reach out to you who's usually your main point of contact is like an hr person is it a somebody in the c-suite is it a leader is it all the above what what who are your customers all of the above i would say the the end customer usually is either the ceo or the team leader one of most of the conversations start with someone from hr but also have many team leaders or

41:53ceos reaching out directly because they're seeing the dysfunction and they want to do something about it it when hr calls either it's because the ceo ask or because they want to put some kind of solution in front of the ceo but also i've got many requests from team members that they're frustrated because this is the team change doesn't happen just from hr or from a team leadership standpoint it also come comes from the inside out so a team member say hey we're struggling with this we're having a huge issue

42:28can you help us and let me sell this to my boss and then we can have a an engagement all together perfect thank you for for clearing that up i wanted to visualize what this customer journey looked like on the on the other end and how they how they came to you and who was coming to you so uh you know gustavo let's get down let's get into the leaders side of the thing you know leadership so you know many leaders you know want to think that they're fostering a culture where there's open dialogue

43:00but their teams still might stay quiet what are some of the the blind spots leaders have when it comes to creating like this real conversational courage

43:13we always say that we need to model the behavior we want to see in others right and first of all i think that leaders need to be authentic sometimes leaders go through a training or a coaching or whatever and they start applying techniques to try to create conversations and they really are not buying into the process so that comes like an authentic right so that's for me one of the biggest watch outs the second one is we always think of leaders as they need to go last so we don't want leaders to dominate

43:46the conversation we want them to ask a question and let people a a chime in however there's a caveat when it comes to a basically modeling courage we want leaders to go first so if you want for example for people to reflect on their mistakes on the on their screw-ups and what they learned about it the one who has to start sharing their mistake is the leader right so that's where things change lastly one thing that's

44:18important is to show that you don't have all the answers most leaders ask as i mentioned earlier they ask people for input but then they dismiss it so you do it once you do it twice and that's the end of the conversation so it's great to ask of course great questions but also it's important that you stay silent that you recognize when you don't know so don't ask a question if you have the answer yourself or if you ask a question don't try to compete with your team members to who have the best answer

44:53because once again people are going to say sure you always win so boom move on you won't hear from me again

45:01yeah i think that's a a really interesting one particularly yeah you know to your point there about about leaders and um you know i think showing that sort of vulnerability or showing that they don't have all of the answers is really critical because otherwise i don't know i suppose for me it would be frustrating to be on a team where i felt like if the leader was just going to decide whatever they wanted to do no matter what then sort of what's the point of having the team what's the point of us getting

45:32together what's the point of having the meeting um do you ever see situations like that with your clients gustavo and and how would you how do you remediate that

45:46i've seen i mean maybe i'm lucky but i think that many leaders can change sometimes they're not aware so i think that helping them understand what they're missing is the first a step of course there are some leaders that are really clueless and maybe they're never going to change and i try to filter which if the leader has the potential or they're not really interested right some people are not they don't care and that's a reality and maybe if you're an employee and you're working with a leader that you feel that it's not that they don't get it but they don't want to get

46:19it well at some point you need to do something about it right there's not much change there one question that really helps is for leaders to challenge others and invite them to commercial for example like they can say if i'm leaving the company in two or three months from now what would be the first thing that you would tell the new leader when they arrive and take over right so that's a great trick to get people to share with the leader things that they are not sharing for

46:51example steve jobs had a great question a set of questions he said what's working what's not working so when he joined pixar as the ceo every time he hosted a town hall no one gave gave him any feedback so he said guys any questions any feedback and crickets and he was steve jobs of course he had a huge personality but pixar was a very creative very open environment and still people wouldn't speak up and one day he decided to say hey guys what's working at pixar and what's not working at pixar

47:26it's a very simple question but basically he was saying hey we have good things going on let's acknowledge those but also i understand that we're not perfect and i'm giving you permission to share what are things that i can work on so that duality of both recognition and hey opening the door for we we can improve and things started to change

47:50well gustavo this has been an awesome conversation i i do have one last question before we let you go and that is what advice would you give to our listeners who might have difficulties having these courageous conversations themselves you know what would you recommend to them what what's the key advice you would give them

48:11in the end is you're part of the problem so you can be part of the solution so if you don't share and sell your ideas if you don't ask the questions you need answers to do a better job in the end you're gonna pay the price right so i'm not putting the blame of you but we need to regain what i call conversational agency we all play a part in the conversations and if other people are not participating or not playing ball that doesn't it that's not an excuse for you to not do so so

48:46my advice in that regard would be people don't regret the risk they took in life they don't regret the conversations they had even if they went south people regret the conversations that we never had i had a broken relationship with a friend and i always wanted to reach out but i never did that's the kind of things that we're going to regret i wanted to tell my boss that he was being dismissive that's the conversation we're going to regret first because we didn't have it so it was our call

49:19not to have it but most importantly we didn't never will know if things would have improved because we were having the conversation inside our head with ourselves and not with the right person the right team

49:35yeah i mean i think that's amazing advice and uh you know i just want to remind our listeners that they can get a copy of your book gustavo forward talk uh they can pre-order a copy well at least at least at least the day that this comes out i think will be the official day that they can order a copy um for themselves and i want to say thanks gustavo for joining us today this has been a fantastic conversation which of course as we learned today is really uh the most important thing you got

50:05to have if you want to get your teams unstuck you've got to have those conversations so thanks for being here with us really appreciate having you on absolutely thank you guys for hosting me it was great to have this conversation the three of us yeah really appreciate it gustavo and for our listeners out there interested in getting the book uh i will also make sure that you can just go look at the at the show notes and we will have a link there for you if you're interested in buying gustavo's book so gustavo thank you so much for your time we enjoyed this conversation and we we look forward to uh

50:38to seeing where all this goes and uh can't wait to read the book thank you thank you mm-hmm and that does it for the science of personality podcast episode 149 be sure to join us in two weeks for another fun and informative episode cheers everybody

50:56this has been the science of personality podcast brought to you by hogan assessments you can access all episodes on our website thescienceofpersonality.com or on the streaming service of your choice see you next time