Rebroadcast: Leading and surviving company transformations — Esther Weinberg (Founder, CEO)

Tune into our conversation with Esther Weinberg to hear about how product people can deal with company transformation during times of turbulence.

42 min read
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0:00 Company transformations and leadership
14:50 Leadership challenges in product
22:35 Leadership and communication in restructuring
33:56 Adapting to remote and hybrid Workplaces

Featured Links: Follow Esther on LinkedIn and Twitter | The Ready Zone | Esther’s article‘ The Power of a Reality Check, Moving from Reactive to Responsive’ | Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom – CNN Business | Work Trend Index Report – Microsoft’s latest research on the ways we work

Episode transcript 

Lily Smith: 

This week on the Product Experience, we are revisiting an oldie but a goodie. So if you are in the process of trying to lead and potentially survive through a company transformation, this is definitely the episode for you. Esther Weinberg is the CEO and founder of the ReadyZone, a company which helps other businesses through this exact process, and she knows what she’s talking about. It’s one of my favourite episodes and that’s why we’ve decided to revisit it again.

Randy Silver: 

The Product Experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.

Lily Smith: 

Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind the Product’s conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world and online.

Randy Silver: 

Create a free account on the website for a fully personalised experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you.

Lily Smith: 

Hi Esther. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Esther Weinberg : 

Thank, you both so much. I am excited for this. I think it’s going to be a joy. It’s always great to be in conversation about these topics, I think it’s really relevant for people today because there’s so much you know, head exploding, change happening to everybody. So yeah absolutely.

Lily Smith: 

Yeah, and so before we get into our head exploding change, it’d be great for our listeners if you could give us a real quick intro to who you are and like, your background and how you got into it.

Esther Weinberg : 

Yeah, so I’ve had all right. So I started my career on I’ll just do very quick. I started my career on publicity, corporate communications, marketing side of things, and then I did it on the agency side. I did it for big brand names like Disney and Fox, and I had left the corporate world many years ago and I started my own company that does that. Initially I was like, oh, we’re going to do leadership development right. And then we started doing it both domestically and internationally, including in places like Africa and the Middle East, and and then we also created a, we developed ourselves into what we call the ready zone framework, which, what I would say is where we find ourselves as leaders today want to feel ready to take advantage of all the opportunities and challenges at their feet. They just question is the big question is, how right, practically, pragmatically? And we really believe you do so by creating these workplace cultures where trust, respect and psychological safety are not just valued no one would probably argue with that but there is measured as the bottom line, and so we’ve created what we call zone performance indicators. They’re they’re areas, they’re diagnostic areas to see if you’re doing it. We’ve been doing this work inside of big brands, small brands, big bands and tiny brands that most people would know, like Netflix, sony, espn, microsoft, disney, and so those are some of the large scale brands and you name a large scale brand, especially on media and tech side. We probably work with them.

Lily Smith: 

I love the. I love the business name, the ready zone. It like gives me all the feels I’m like, yeah, we’re going to be ready, we could do this. And it feels like a real kind of like product management sort of approach to leadership, of like measuring the sort of softer side of leadership as well as the business side of like the output of the business or the outcome of like revenue and all of that kind of thing as well. But before we get kind of stuck into like some of the fundamentals of what you think is important in leaders today to be in that ready zone, there was a stat that you sent through when we were kind of prepping for this, which was around 900 billion is wasted on failed business transformations each year. So where is this money going? Like, why are businesses getting it so wrong in terms of like managing change within their business and adapting to new things that are coming their way?

Esther Weinberg : 

Well, first of all, it’s a great question about where the money is going and I would say good luck finding it. But I would say that. I would say that there’s a few things that you have to take a look at right, because about what’s also causing this velocity and also our approach to change. So, first of all, if you think about, digitization has hyperconnected us, it’s harder to predict how things are going to go, and the rate of change has increased exponentially. There is new threats and opportunities that can seemingly appear overnight, like COVID as an example, and I would say this we keep talking about things such as change. We keep talking about change in a siloed bucket like change management. We have change management practitioners, we have change management signable organizations, but there is no such thing as change management any longer. And, if you think about it, we need, as Dr Andy Zuckray called it, dynamic realignment. Well, as you get feedback, adaptive systems quickly realign to move better than they’ve been before. So, if you think about it, what we really need to be doing here and the big opportunities that now exist for product leaders, non-product leaders, leaders in general, is how do you develop the skills and the nimbleness for the dexterity that you need to go through any kind of climate? And what we’ve seen? If you look at it, if you think about it, covid is a great example, because what COVID did is change everything. Nothing in I know, in my lifetime has ever shaken the ground as much as this, because it happened to all of us all at the same time. Globally. Same thing happened right, and so we need to stop talking about changes. It’s a one-time event. We have to start preparing people to move nimbly and dexterally through it, and I think that’s why businesses I don’t know I could say if it’s getting it wrong, but I think we need to start evolving our mindset and how we’re evaluating, rewarding people through mobility, moving people up by having a new way of looking at the way we do work.

Lily Smith: 

Like how does that manifest itself in the business and in the behavior of the teams? Like what does a very adaptable agile team really look like?

Esther Weinberg : 

Yeah, it’s a great question. So we created what we call zone performance indicators, what I mentioned before and so we’ve created these six diagnostic areas to know if you yourself are doing this in the way that’s going to be most successful. Because we found that, to your point, it’s like we’re all right, that’s lovely, you know what you’re saying. I can’t agree with more. But that’s where’s the practicality around it, right? So the six areas that we do, just very quickly, we have and there’s not necessarily any order, just to be clear pivot ready, the degree of shiftability that we’re talking about now. Action ready is all around your level of emotional agility. Influence ready your visibility, your influence, your relationships. Connect ready surround your communication impact ready is how you’re building teams and culture. Ready is developing a culture where coaching and mentoring is not like, oh, we’ll do it in a program, I’ll do it once off. It’s like, no, everyone is walking around looking for opportunities to do it. So, to give you a real time example of what you’re talking about, we one thing that we talk about we teach people resiliency by creating what we call pivot moments. So, like we’re talking about, we can’t control change, but what we can control is our intention and our actions, and if you ask people to shift, for a moment it’s like I can do that, but if you ask me to change forever, that’s a problem. So, so we, if you think about it, because if you think about shifting for a moment yeah, I can what’s possible is potentially unlimited. So what? These pivot moments are a framework of three things, very practical, you can use as both for your professional life and personal life. So one it’s made up of looking at what your current reality is and that’s made up of how you Feel about the change, or your emotions. How do you experience the change and the actions or in actions you’re taking that could support the changers or not. And if you’re really honest with yourself, you could see if your output is a match for your intention. So we had a client, aisha, the other day, who’s gotten really frustrated with her boss, jamila, and Jamila is the president of a division and a large company and she was very frustrated with Jamila because she can’t make decisions, she vacillates, she go back and forth, she can’t really handle conflict and Aisha’s scene is kind of the I hate to use hierarchy, but really like the number two executive on the team. And so what does Aisha do? She starts to step in and start making decisions where she shouldn’t, or looks to be more strategic and she or frustration, or even looks to manage one of her peers who can’t make decisions, and so you can imagine, for a high performer it’s really struggling. So her emotions is she’s angry, she’s frustrated, she’s disappointed, she’s afraid. Her experience about her boss is she does not lead. Her lack of decision-making is gonna get the division really into trouble from a financial perspective. She isn’t strategic. She leads with her ego. But we looked at what actions she was taking to support her intention of managing up with great re’s being a collaborator. She’s like look, if I had to admit it everyone, I’m stepping in to make decisions where it’s not appropriate. When it was time to present a reorganization plan to her boss with her peer, he’s not remember, he’s not strategic. So she started, she did it. So she’s not sharing her frustration and she was thinking about leaving, which would be detrimental to the organization. So when you actually, when we say pivot in this moment, what does it mean for Aisha? She can. What she did was pause when she examined us to see what’s feasible, and that’s what I call possibility. Right, so we go to current reality, possibility and you could see something for what it is and not what you prefer. And once you see that, you can step into a place of opportunity. Third phase, and that is to determine practically and pragmatically what you need to stop and start doing to create a new outcome. And then, once you do that, then the road in front of you is super clear because you’re able to separate untether yourself from how you’re interpreting the situation, your emotions around it, to really what’s the what’s so about it. So then you can move forward with greater ease. So that’s like a small example, but just imagine if everyone inside your organization was thinking that way, how different work and the relationship that people had at work would be.

Randy Silver: 

Mr, I’m curious because this was something that happened kind of dynamically but also was something that was building for a while in this case. But transformation can come in two ways. It can be impetus, can come in two ways. It can be planned like we’re going to go through a corporate reorganization, or it can be a sudden thing that suddenly changes and you’re purely reactive to it. Is this different, based on whether you’re being proactive in the first place and taking the time or being reactive, or is there a fundamental difference in how you act in transformations when being proactive and reactive?

Esther Weinberg : 

It’s such a great question, I would say that I would say no. And here is why because, no matter what is what’s happening, as human beings we’re making interpretations about it and that interpretation about it becomes our reality. This is great, this sucks. This is positive, this is negative. This is going to be detrimental for me, this is going to be horrible for my people. Very, and we always. It’s human nature that we’re making interpretations, but what happens is that there’s the truth of the situation, there’s the meaning we make out of it, and then there’s the impact. If we see it from the meaning that we’re making out of it, right, and then we tend to move based on the meaning we’re making out of it, and that’s not necessarily the reality. And so what happens is that you can imagine, if you’re moving very fast, even more detrimental to the organization, because what pivot moments does? It’s an intentional pause. Now you don’t need a year to sit down with a pen, piece of paper forgive me for sounding so old school or an app, or anywhere you can. Literally what we encourage people to do is we teach people the formula. So it’s almost like it’s like a client of mine once said she’s like it was a scene out of minority reports. She’s like I’m sitting in a senior executive meeting, sitting with the CEO, and he starts talking to me and in front of me I could see the formula and in my head I’m processing it so that when I’m speaking I’m not speaking to my reaction, I’m speaking to the truth of the situation and how I really want things to land. And how do I wanna start and stop being in this room with these people and how can I lead in my intention? So I would say that it’s agnostic to situations because it’s a question of you know, it’s like anything. If you’re going to learn something new like, for example, if someone listening goes you know this is really interesting. I’m gonna practice this, but it seems like it’s gonna take a while for me to get used to it. I always say better to start something and do it crappily than not start a new behavior that can lead to a new outcome at all. It takes something to become a habit.

Randy Silver: 

Esther, that’s really interesting what you’re talking about there, about people having different perceptions and different realities. So I coach a lot and there’s a problem that I see again and again for people and no one’s figured out how to do this one especially well. So I’m curious about what kind of change leadership we might do through this. So it has to do with often, as a company is growing, the product team takes longer to ship things or to deliver value, and there’s a perception from the CEO that it’s not like it used to be, that things are too slow, that the product development team isn’t delivering value quickly enough and they just ship anything, just get something out the door, just get this one little thing. That’s going to fix everything out the door, and the product team must be a little more deliberate and validate things and they may be delivering value, but it’s not the magic bullet and I’m curious is there a way for a product leader to try and approach that, to try and make some consensus or to change the situation through this framework?

Esther Weinberg : 

Yeah, so I would say it’s a few things, okay, there’s not a silver bullet for everything, so I would just say it this way. It’s actually interesting because you’re reminding me of something that happened the other day with the CEO, who got very inflamed about something because his perception and interpretation of the situation was very different than the situation itself, and so he was very much like what you’re describing. I mean, the situation was different about. It wasn’t talking about shipping something in the moment, but he was talking about I don’t care, get it done. Now what happened? It was interesting because we were in a room with about four people having the conversation. Now the next day I had a conversation one on one with the CEO, because what I would say is that you have to be very careful who you’re in the room with and when you choose to dissent, and so you have to remember that it’s your relationship and what I would say is number one. What happens in those moments, like when we talk about the. This is a different concept, but we talk about reality check, which is kind of what I was talking, a little bit of what I was talking about, but reality check is a framework we talk about, which is what’s the truth, what’s your interpretation, what’s the impact of seeing it from your interpretation and then go back to your original intention? So what happens is when someone says something that’s a misalignment to what you believe is right, is that we get triggered and then we go into our interpretation of either the person or situation. But we don’t do sometimes. I’m not saying this is always right. So these are things to think about in the moment. Number one is you don’t wanna dissent, sometimes in a room full of people, because it’s not smart. Number two is you want to, as an old boss of mine, you say get consensus privately before you get consensus publicly, and so, like what happened with the CEO is, the next day one of his executives in the room had FaceTime with him and said I really am curious as to what brought you to that decision, and I just wanna apologize to you that we haven’t delivered with velocity on time and it seems like our deadlines are a little off and you just want us to move no matter what, and I just would. Is there any way that you could just share with me what your expectations are where we felt off the mark and also what are your expectations now moving forward, because I wanna make sure that we recalibrate to it. So number one, I would say go back and have an individual conversation with the person, if possible. Number two gets really curious about what is the context to which they’re operating from, because oftentimes, especially in a hierarchical matrix organization, we don’t have all the information and so we’re operating from different contexts, and also expectations and context change so fast we don’t know it, and so we don’t often don’t go back to reexamine. Is their context different than mine? Because it probably changed. Five minutes ago someone just walked into their office this is like the CEO I’m talking about. He makes decisions in, like he’s very reactive, and so five minutes ago someone walked into the office and said, hey, you should worry about that. And he’s like oh yeah, I’ll worry about that. So you wanna make sure that you’re operating from the same context. The other thing, too, is that at the end of the day, let’s say all that’s beautiful, but you still have to move. Let’s just play that game out right, because that happens. What I would say oftentimes is you have to anchor yourself. So oftentimes, as a leader, you have to support a decision that was made by others above you and you are not 100% in favor of Now. It depends on what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about something that will harm people’s lives, be detrimental to the life of others, that’s a different thing than what I’m talking about right now and in fact, I had a client who went through this. They had supply chain issues and they were just like shift, whatever you have, and he’s like wait a second. So. But I would say the company relies on you to be an advocate with your team, and you may have a hard time reconciling that with being genuine, because the decision that was made or the message that’s being sent is not in fact, what you feel or is the ideal or best. And so, like I said, I am not referring to decisions that call your be unethical or against your values. I’m talking about situations where perhaps you agree up to a point and you’d prefer that it settled a bit differently or that the implementation was different. And when you have the responsibility of conveying and promoting a decision like that or a message, you have to look for elements or aspects of that decision or message that you can connect with, that can resonate with you, that you can sincerely get on board with and anchor yourself to those and then you can come before your team, or, frankly, before yourself, and you can move them in the direction that’s expected of you, and do it from a genuine place, cause the worst thing it’d be like this person’s an idiot and a fool, but we should still do this, yeah.

Lily Smith: 

It seems like you just can’t breathe these days without hearing the term AI.

Randy Silver: 

Tell me about it. If I hear someone say AI one more time, I’m gonna scream.

Lily Smith: 

When chat GPT launched, it felt like things absolutely snowballed, and it’s quite an effort to keep up with it all, which is why I wanted to tell you all about my in the products brand new AI Knowledge Hub.

Randy Silver: 

I told you I was gonna scream, didn’t I? But actually tell me more Please don’t scream.

Lily Smith: 

It’s a dedicated place for all things AI, with a wealth of completely free content from voices in the field, including insights from working product managers and AI experts. In the AI Knowledge Hub created in collaboration with Pendo, you’ll discover a range of free resources that will help you delve into the world of AI. You can learn what AI truly is, explore its impact on product management and dive into extensive case studies that showcase how product teams have harnessed AI to improve their craft.

Randy Silver: 

Okay, there’ll be no screaming this time, because that sounds like a good way to actually explore the angles of AI and product management. Is there anything in particular you’d recommend?

Lily Smith: 

Absolutely. Sign up for a free AI webinar, download the free AI playbook and take the brand new AI for Product Management online course in partnership with Google Cloud. Just visit mindtheproductcom forward slash AI Knowledge Hub and dive in. And I think one of the sort of, you know, big trends that we’re seeing at the moment is a lot of companies going through restructuring and layoffs at the moment and I guess you know, as a leader within the organization, you may or may not agree with the process that’s kind of happening, but you’re, you know you are essentially sort of having stuff happen to you and also having to support and manage your team through that process. So what advice would you have for leaders, team leaders, kind of undergoing that process, you know, from like just keeping your job to like retaining your sanity and also, you know, maybe making the most of the opportunity?

Esther Weinberg : 

Well, let me give you an example. I had a client of mine with president of the division and she was asked to cut her workforce by about 20% and non. So she was asked to cut her workforce by 20% and she had never laid that many people off. So she got communication to her that. So I said to her, because I was coaching her I said you know, have you ever done this before? Was that look like? What support are you getting internally? And she said I’m not sure, but you know I’ll get back to you. So she says to me I got an email that said here’s how I should fire someone. And she says to me and it was. And the way it read was something like I know it’s horrifying. It was something like you know, at our company we’ve been working with you in a long time. We have hard decisions to make and we’re in a tough financial spot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said to her the only thing they’re gonna hear when they sit down with you is I’m fired, not gonna hear any of that. And also they’re not gonna care about that. And I said how do you wanna do this? She’s like there’s no human dignity in this for me. She said I have to do this, I need a one, get behind it. And I have to figure out how I get behind it. And what she realized was that there was a whole division who reported to her 20 people who she really liked. But at the end of the day she realized that she probably should have eliminated the division, probably a year or more ago. And so she said you know, I want to make sure when I do this, I do this with human dignity. So my intention for all of this is that I do it with human dignity. And then I have a plan for the people that are remaining to help them feel cared for, engaged, and I. So what I do is before, because they don’t know they’re being laid off right, people are remaining. I make sure that I tuck them in as much as possible. So what she did was she created a whole different through this, that horrible email out the window, and create a whole messaging system for how she was going to speak out of her heart, which was very hard for this person. She always operates at her very analytical head of how she actually speaks with her heart, that she can actually let these people go. That’s number one. Number two is, then, what she did when she met every single person who was remaining and started creating a mini, almost like career map, development map for them so they could feel like where they are here, even though they’re they’re so grief stricken that their colleagues have left, that they’re able to A be heard about their grief and they feel that there’s a home and a place for them. So, also, you can’t move when you’re going through these times. You can’t move so great, so fast and develop. Let’s talk about your career here. You know you have to acknowledge the grief that people are feeling from the situation. Not people won’t get stuck in it if you actually acknowledge it, speak to them about it and then start to move them forward. So that’s what I would say about what to do. Yeah, that makes loads of sense, and so you know I want to say just one thing, just about when you’re talking about, like layoffs and motivating your team. You have to remember there’s data around this that 86% of employees say that a lack of internal communication is largely the blame for failures of the company. And then well informed employees actually outperform their peers by 77% and, paradoxically, 69% of those in management positions actually don’t feel comfortable even communicating with their staff. So we have to make sure that we’re training and developing people in order to be strong communicators, so, no matter what the situation and circumstances, are that they’re able to do that?

Randy Silver: 

Can we cover for a moment what is what is good communication then? Because there’s lack of communication is obviously a problem, but I’ve seen so much over communication or poor communication, or people sitting in long meetings that are not relevant to them, or the same material that they’ve seen five times before. You know, I know as leaders, we get the advice say it seven times and or say it until you’re sick of it, because it may be someone else’s first time, but the same time that’s not always the right way to. So how do you get to a point of quality communication?

Esther Weinberg : 

Yeah. So I would say that you have to remember that just because your lips are moving doesn’t mean you’re actually saying anything meaningful or relevant. And especially during times of change, everything means everything and it’s even more upon you to be your word. So a guy had an executive who got in front of her people and said we’re not laying anybody off anymore. You know what happened three months later. It was, it was terrible. So you have to be careful also what you’re promising people, because in this kind of environment is very difficult to promise anyone anything. So I would say it’s not necessarily order, but number one, you have to make sure that the messages that you’re saying, first of all, they look like it didn’t come out of a robot. You know when people say, oh, our administration believes in the solutions that are in alignment with market conditions, it’s like are you a person? You care about me? So you have to make sure that the message is heart based, that there’s heart beat messaging to this and there’s I mean it’s it’s I would say it’s horrifying when you’ve I mean you’ve been part of this, when you’ve heard people talking and just like, oh, my God, is there? Hello, there was actually an example. Have you heard of the what happened with bettercom. Do you hear about what happened with?

Lily Smith: 

that.

Esther Weinberg : 

So Of not doing this well is CEO Vishal Garg, ceo of the mortgage lender startup bettercom, and after he was, after the company received the 750 million cash infusion, with a valuation of seven billion, he bluntly informed 900 of his employees that a large number of people would be fired. In this cold, awkward, one way video announcement you can actually Google it and and, basically, in looking really uncomfortable, he said 15% of the workforce would be laid off in a monotone voice and he said the second time in my career I’m doing this and I don’t want to do this. Last time I did it I cried. This time I hope, I hope to be stronger. I mean, this is literally the way he delivered it. And then later he apologized and he and also Fortune magazine reported that that he accused at least 250 of the people that he 250 people that he fired of stealing from the company and customers by working just two hours a day. So he wrote in an email, something like an all caps, like hello, wake up, you’re too damn slow, you know, like that kind of thing. So that’s not what I’m talking about. So remember that number one you’re caring, touch peep, touches something in me that ignites me to care, and so show who you’re in communication, with your sincerity and spirit, in order for your message to ring true and for it to be genuine. And so the second thing is make sure that there’s actually one key takeaway. I remember I used to work for a woman named Ellen Cooper, who always do say make sure there’s one must make point. You know that when people leave all your verbatim that you’ve said, it’s clear, the one thing you want people to leave with what is that? One key message that is meaningful to them. You know it’s and that you can repeat to your point. Right, but that, because the more you clutter up your messaging and often people clutter it up because they feel guilty or they feel shame and they don’t want to do it. But you’re a leader and so as a leader, this comes with the territory, and so how do you get aligned with your message? So it’s clear. This third thing I would say is remember, like what I said before, is be have curiosity and be really actively listening, because oftentimes we relate to a present conversation from our past, our judgments, our biases, and it’s normal. The question is, do we recognize that pattern or do we speak and listen from our past? So you have to listen from a position of curiosity right now and give yourself an opportunity to be open and listening in the present. The other point is to anchor yourself. We talked about that. You also have to invest in positively building relationships with others. People have to know when I get up in front of them. Hey, you know, esther’s always been really honest with us, so she’s been honest, she’s been direct. You know what I know. When she’s telling me something, it’s meaningful, so you’ve got to actually trust that and that’s why context is so critical and being consistent with your message is gonna be very, because the moment you’re inconsistent, people can’t trust you and then it becomes unsafe and you don’t wanna leave more uncertainty, more lack of safety, more ambiguity on top of an already ambiguous situation.

Lily Smith: 

So just when we’re thinking about leadership through change, whether that be big or small, like all of the kind of advice that you’ve given there on what good leadership looks like is great. But then are there other sort of specific skills that leaders need to nurture in order to sort of successfully lead through change, like you mentioned, that ability to sort of step back and see the reality of the situation rather than sort of be influenced by your emotion or response to it. So how do we kind of develop those skills to assess the current situation, and are there other things as well that we should be trying to do and to be more adaptable as leaders?

Esther Weinberg : 

Yeah, it’s. I would say it’s interesting. I was reading some data the other day that said that, especially during times of change we alluded to this earlier, but we sometimes talk about what we’re talking about today as soft skills, like it’s often used, like this is soft skills, but I don’t believe. I wish we could just eradicate that phrase, and what I mean by that is there was data, data I was reading that 70% of employees avoid tough conversations with their boss, their colleagues, their director, ports that, and that actually translates into $7,500 per conversation of lost in time resources. I mean, if you start doing the math in your head, right? So one in five employees estimate that their lack of ability to speak up in really crucial moments has cost their organization more than $50,000. That’s one in five, and 40% say they waste two weeks or more ruminating about a problem. And so, going back to your $900 billion right, I think we may find it US employees actually spend almost three hours a week dealing with conflict, which equals $59 billion in unpaid hours. Wow, $50 billion in paid hours, not unpaid paid hours. And then time. And so if we’re going to look for strategies, right, which is what you’re talking about, like, how do we actually then deal with this. So I often say that the one thing we teach this it’s called I affectionately call it the five A’s, and so what I mean by that is oftentimes how we prepare for conversations, sess us up for actually how we can move through the conversation. So we say is there’s five questions that are important to answer when you’re engaging in any conversation that may be squirrelly for you. And the five A’s stand for aware, accurate, acquire, accountability and action. So number one aware what am I feeling? Number two what is the truth? Is it accurate or just my own personal interpretation? Number three acquire what learning am I meant to acquire from being this situation? I often say, even if you are 1% off, because sometimes people are like I’m right, but even if you’re 1% off, what would you learn here? Accountability what’s my part in this situation? What responsibility can I take? And the fifth A is what proactive action can I take? And that action isn’t always a conversation. It could be lurking it yourself and your actions it could be, hey, any more people to make this decision. But I find that if you ask yourself those five questions before you engage in a conversation, you’re more ready to actually have you know what intervention makes sense, and then you’re much more prepared to be able to facilitate the conversation itself, which you could go a thousand different ways. And so we’re going back to communication. If we could master even just that I think it could I mean $59 billion. I mean it’s crazy, right yeah.

Randy Silver: 

Esther, this has been fantastic. We’ve got time for one last question and I fear it’s going to be a challenging one, so Okay wait. So all of this makes sense. All of this is hard enough to do at the best of times, but now we’re also operating in a time where we’re no longer face to face a lot at the time. We’re doing this remote, we’re doing it asynchronous. The cues that you get, the subtle cues that you get from being around other people all the time they’re just not there. There’s a building, that culture building, that communication. What do we do differently? How do we take this into a world where we’re asynchronous and hybrid and remote and all of that?

Esther Weinberg : 

Well, I would say then this is even to take a step back even further you remember the good old days. We had a good old days when we used to come to work and we’d have dry cleaning and ping pong tables.

Randy Silver: 

No, no, we’re in England. We didn’t get those perks.

Esther Weinberg : 

Oh, okay, all right. So in the US we got all those fun perks. We got dry cleaning and ping pong tables and free food and free coffee bars and all of that, right, and so that sounds lovely, right? Isn’t that fun Like? Come to work. I always said it was really a smart bribing system to have people work longer, you know. But it was great, right, and that’s part of how we judged how great a culture we were creating. Right, and people would feel this community and we’d have these cool artsy areas where people could come together. Right, and it was fun. Then COVID happened. Now, what the hell happened with all that? But what we forgot is number one is we have to create a workplace that’s portable, culture that is portable. And so what? As leaders, the number one thing you have to focus on is how to create. What do you want? What culture? Do you want to be portable? Right, because in COVID it’s still true to this day, because we have not I’m speaking broadly many companies have still. We’re still trying to figure it out, I would say. But what happens is that we don’t say, okay, the culture is now in your living room and in your bedroom and in my closet and someone else’s garage. What do we want people to experience? And feel Like. I had an executive say to me a while ago. She said we’re struggling with hybrid. We’re struggling with how to bring people back to work, because we were in work three days a week and then we have we do have asynchronous work, right, so we’ve got people in three days a week, home two days a week, and so how do we get people in the office? Really struggling with that. I was like it sounds like a prism, sounds like all you’re talking about is how do we get people into this building and lock them in three days and then give them more action to do and then let them out at a certain time of day, right, but I said, why not? It’s important, as executives, to sit together and say what kind of environment do we wanna create for people that they’re inspired to work in, regardless of the medium? What do we want people to experience as being part of us, as being part of this community that we have here, that we’re intentionally creating in our environment? Now, sometimes people will say to me well, I’m not CEO of the company, I can’t make that decision, but the moment you’re a leader of a team, you could absolutely do what I’m talking about. So that’s the question you have to put at people’s feet. Like I was working with a division who had just been reorganized they had just been subsumed under another leader and the woman who had taken the leadership position she was new to leading such a huge team and she was like people seem excited, but I’m not really sure. I think we’ve got a lot of different temperaments. But what we did was one of the first things we did was we created what we call a vision narrative, which is a narrative and articulated vision of the future. Not a sentence, but an actual picture. Paint a picture of the future. Then what we did was, out of her leadership team, the people that reported directly to her we created what we call a team commitment. Now, given that’s our North Star, what are we committed to in order to gather us, the six of us, and delivering on that that we’d be excited about. Right Now, she has no idea of that vision. If her boss is gonna sign off on that vision, but she’s like, no, I’m gonna create that, our team commitment. We are creating that. And then what ways in which do we wanna operate in order to deliver on these things. And then what do you have? Now? You have people who are literally she says to me the other day more productive than they’ve ever been. People that were scared about change are now invigorated about it. The content, because they’re part of a marketing team that we’re creating. We’ve never created such a high level of content ever before. People are happier. We haven’t had a single person leave, so it’s absolutely possible. You have to shift the way that you’re thinking. You’re not in an office anymore, so you have to change differently about how you’re gonna create culture. So those are the elements I would say. You’ve gotta create vision, narrative, a team commitment and what we call an impact guide, the ways in which we’re working in order to deliver on that and hold yourselves accountable for my village, my community, my fiefdom, right here, that can get people inspired, no matter what’s happening outside of us. That’s in everyone’s control.

Lily Smith: 

I think the other thing that I found just to I know we’re running out of time, but the other thing that I found which I think really helps with this kind of move through asynchronous and the hybrid workplaces just a kind of constant reflection on how that’s working for everybody and making sure that if someone’s struggling because they don’t have a very nice setup at home, that that’s dealt with. Or if people are struggling because they’re overwhelmed with Slack messages, then that’s kind of addressed as well and just like a constant, just check in on how is it working, like the ways in which we’re working together, how is that working for everyone and what changes can we make to make our communication and everything easier and better on everyone?

Esther Weinberg : 

You know, I think the other thing too and this is really important, it can’t be overemphasized enough Microsoft came out last year with an incredible report that talked about work trends in a hybrid work, and they talked about the fact that employees with an authentic manager, Simple right, Our more inclined to go into the office, our more open to working in person if needed, they’re more likely to discuss their well-being and mental health, which is something everyone’s concerned about now, and so it’s a. So we have to make sure that also. I always talk about Microsoft talks about this too but it’s almost like if you were gonna re-recruit your employees, how would you re-recruit them? What would you actually do that be different than what you’re doing now in order to keep all this amazing talent? So you have to remember the cost of losing one person. Now, of course, your great people leave, and the people that you would prefer to leave stay, so you have to. That’s why you have to be even more engaged in what we’re talking about, and if people don’t feel like they’re learning, they’re out, they’ll leave fast.

Lily Smith: 

Yeah, esther, this has been so great. You are a fountain of knowledge with this topic area and I’m sure we’ll have some great resources linked to in our show notes. So, yeah, thank you so much for joining us and talking to us today.

Esther Weinberg : 

My pleasure. Thank you both for great questions. I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks, Esther.

Lily Smith: 

The product experience is the first. And the best Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith.

Randy Silver: 

And me, Randy Silver.

Lily Smith: 

Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver: 

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based band Pau. That’s P-A-U. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP Engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

Lily Smith: 

If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproductcom. Forward slash product tank.