Career Warrior Podcast #318) For Leaders: Challenges of Getting Hired | Leading Through Crisis | Paul Falcone

Episode Transcript

Paul Falcone 0:00
No matter what a crisis you’re facing, the truth of the matter is, again, war people look to us than we know. And you set that tone for them to be kind to other people in these kinds of adverse circumstances.

Chris Villanueva 0:15
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast.

And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast where our goal is not only to help you land your dream job, but to help you live your best life. Today’s episode is for those who want to grow as leaders, whether you’re a first time manager or you’re experienced and simply looking to grow into your full potential, you need to listen to every minute of this episode, we’ll discuss the challenges of getting hired as a leader and how to stand out as a job candidate. Today’s society needs strong leaders, ones who can lead through times of crisis and change. So we’ll speak about leveling up as a leader perhaps more generally answering questions like how can I grow as a manager or leader? How should we deliver bad news? How can we address layoffs and other challenges? And what about global disasters?

There was someone who I would consider to be a top expert in this area, and we’re so lucky to have them today, Paul Falcone. He is the principal of Paul Falcone Workplace Leadership Consulting, LLC, specializing in management & leadership training, executive coaching, international keynote speaking, and HR advisory services. He is the former CHRO of Nickelodeon and has held senior-level HR positions with Paramount Pictures, Time Warner, and City of Hope. He has extensive experience in entertainment, healthcare/biotech, and financial services, including in international, nonprofit, and union environments. Paul is the author of a number of bestselling books including his latest, The First-Time Manager: Leading Through Crisis. Part of The First-Time Manager Series originating with The First-Time Manager, which has sold over 500,000 copies. He is a certified executive coach, a long-term columnist for SHRM.org and HR Magazine, and an adjunct faculty member at UCLA Extension’s School of Business and Management. He is an accomplished keynote presenter, in-house trainer, and webinar facilitator in the areas of talent and performance management, leadership development, and effective leadership communication.

So my gosh, what an amazing bio. And like I said, we’re going to cover all things leadership, perhaps you are somebody who is looking to move on up and your career from manager to director, director to VP or it’s your first time managing, you gotta listen to this episode, because we have some exciting content coming. So let’s launch into it with this episode of the career for your podcast. Paul, thank you so so much for coming on the show. It’s great to have you.

Paul Falcone 2:44
My pleasure, Chris, very happy to be here.

Chris Villanueva 2:46
Well, I’m so excited to dive into some of these questions that I have prepared, and perhaps some that I will just throw out – nothing that’s going to be completely out of the blue. But I mean, the first one that I think are going to prime listeners here for this topic of hiring and leadership and, you know, really growing into our full potential are some of your own stories. You have this great career, that you’ve developed, and these amazing organizations that you’ve been a part of. So I’d love to hear if you have any interesting stories in the realm of HR or hiring.

Paul Falcone 3:18
Oh, boy, I got a lot of stories. First of all, you use my long form bios. So thank you very much. I was like, wow, I guess I did all those things. It does sound like a lot. But I’ve had a lot of fun. The storytelling is kind of where it’s at. I mean, when people say, “How did you write 17 books on like, bully me about that creative?” When you and human resources, the constant just seems to find you. So I can’t take too much credit for it but what I am good at is turning it into stories. Because I think when you filter things through people’s imagination, they can relate to it. If you just give them facts and figures and rules and policies that, you know, they go in one ear out the other, but people when they can relate it to their own experience, it sticks. And I think that’s where the storytelling pieces kind of made sense for me.

And again, three decades in HR. I, you know, you sit back and you say I think I’ve seen it all, but not really, there’s still stuff out there. That’s pretty amazing. And it’s like you did white, and even I can get knocked off my chair. But the funny thing for me why this, I was my background started in search I did recruiting outside of human resources. I did contingency search for about six years, fresh out of college. When I moved inside with corporate, all of a sudden I was overseeing the recruiting and the staffing from the other side of the desk from the employer side as opposed to the agency side or headhunter side.

There was one point in my career, Chris, where I think I shared with you I was working for a private equity company. And in private equity when they buy a new portfolio company, they typically shave off the sea level or some of the sea level the CEO, COO, CFO and I was responsible for finding that new C-level talent for the new portfolio companies so I’ve kind of done it all the union hiring. I’ve been in the nonprofit world, I’ve done Fortune 500, I’ve done startup. And for me, I guess my story is my career was always parallel with my writing, because I’ve been writing since the mid 1990s. And I always wanted to make sure I had as balanced approach as I possibly could. And I think that touching a different industries, different sizes of companies all made the difference to kind of make, I would hope, the content more relatable to everybody. So lots of stories, and we’ll share them as we go, I’m happy to happy to enlighten the audience, some of the craziest stuff that goes on in my role, but anyone who’s in human resources has seen much of the same thing. So yeah.

Chris Villanueva 5:42
That is awesome to hear, please feel free to inject any of that, as we kind of cover some of the challenges of being a leader as well as getting hired. But I think that’s so cool that you were here today to help all the folks here who are, you know, looking to level up their careers. And there’s a lot of folks who were really struggling, I think, to get noticed, or to get hired right now. I know a lot of the clients we speak with here at Let’s Eat, Grandma are folks who, you know, perhaps they’re looking to move up a level in their career kind of progress and move forward and get hired in these leadership positions. So I know you’ve worked, you know, along on the other side, working with getting folks hired in these awesome companies, but to speak from the perspective of a job seeker. What do you see from their side of the big challenges of getting hired? You know, what are these challenges of getting hired as a leader? Paul?

Paul Falcone 6:36
Well, there’s two points to the question, Chris, one of the challenge in getting hired and one of it is getting hired as a leader. And I think they’re two separate things. And I’ll talk briefly if I can about both. The one thing I would say is everybody, there’s something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics bls.gov and they have the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which talks about the next 10 years going forward. And where’s the growth coming in various professions, HR, IT finance, marketing, whatever. It’s a great website, it’s BLS (like Bureau of Labor Statistics) bls.gov/ooh, like Occupational Outlook Handbook, spend some time there. Now you can look up your particular job, for example, in my world, “HR management” because it gives you the stuff. HR is one category and HR management is another category, and there’s a spreadsheet. And what you do is you just kind of filter it from top growing industries, to slowest growing industries. And for example, we’ll say the average job in corporate America is growing at 5%. Right, then it’ll say, well, HR management jobs are growing at about 7%. So that’s good, you’re a little bit higher than average in the HR profession, keep it and when you get to the spreadsheet, there’s a 40 plus or 40 minus type of swing, if you’re looking to get into HR, in healthcare, in the technical world, in the consulting space, and the whatever, that could be up to 2030 40%. Relative to that average, seven. If you’re looking to get into HR in the post office, it might be minus 35%.

And the reason I bring it up crisis, because industry is the most important driver these days, it regardless of what you do, if you’re a marketing person, but you can do it in the STEM type of company, right? Science, technology, engineering, math, if you can, you didn’t study STEM, you’re not a stem student, but you can take your discipline and focus it. All of a sudden, there’s so much more job security, there’s so much more job opportunity, there’s so much more demand. We live in a schizophrenic environment out there, it’s like a lot of companies are laying off. A lot of companies are like starving for oxygen, they can’t find people. Some companies, it’s the same company on the left, and they’re laying off on the right hand. They’re dying because of talent scarcity. So know your industries. So look at whatever your discipline is, spend time around that BLS website, get a feel for where the growth is. And that’s really the greatest trajectory factor that I can say in terms of your career.

To the second piece of what you’re talking about with the leadership, there’s something out there that I talked to people about the MOOCs, the Massive Open Online Courses. There’s organizations out there Coursera, edX, Udemy. These are MOOCs and MOOCs are courses that are taught for free by university professors from the largest universities out there, we’re talking Harvard, Yale, Stanford, all this stuff. It’s this goodwill effort to educate the world for free. And where they spend a lot of time in the MOOCs, Chris, is really if you want to learn about artificial intelligence, or it and these kinds of things, but for leadership development to these are free classes, you can pay a small fee if you want to get a certification. That’s an extra cost. But the bottom line is, it’s kind of like a LinkedIn learning but it’s just broader than that. Spend your time building muscle put that on your resume that you’re learning about these management techniques and leadership techniques, and that you’ve been educated by a MOOC, most employers like me would be very impressed with the level of ambition that you show just doing that alone.

Chris Villanueva 10:06
Right? And not to forget the fuel that it brings to the conversation, when you’re in an interview, you’re going to have a little bit more of that background, that research and that fire behind your answer, I think if you just came off of one of these learning courses, so I love that advice. I’ve actually never heard that on the podcast. So I think that’s awesome. Speaking about leveling up in skills, one thing we spoke about in our prior conversation was about soft skills and how they’ve really kind of taken the forefront, I think of just things that leaders have to have soft skills are becoming more and more important in hiring in general. So I’d love it if you could speak more about soft skills.

Paul Falcone 10:45
It’s funny, because when I was going through my growing through my career, they called it soft skills. And if I said in a company where I was like, why don’t you try it on soft skills? They’d be like, back going away, we don’t want you here, right? Like HR stuff, get out of here. Okay, now they call it Emotional Intelligence. Yeah. And now there’s this big demand for CEO surveys, this idea of emotional intelligence or having a high EQ as opposed to an IQ, right, the emotional quotient versus the intellectual quotient CEOs are coming back and survey after survey where that becomes the top five, what changed COVID with the great resignation with the fact that American workforces that have now moved into either fully remote or hybrid types of situations, we’re most still are these days, with CEOs of realizes, you know, the greatest asset that they have.

And it is, I mean, all of a sudden, there truly is an appreciation for human beings in the workplace, they’ve always said, people are our greatest asset, but people are lucky, as sure you lay us off as soon as you can. Well, we hear this, we heard stories, you know, the restaurants were able to stay open through COVID. But then finally, the COVID was declared over. And they couldn’t find waiters, and they couldn’t find cooks. And they couldn’t keep the doors open, because they couldn’t find the human beings. Well, guess what, it’s not just restaurants that went through those challenges. A lot of companies did too. And what CEOs are realizing is, you need leaders who know how to bond with people, especially when they are not physically on site, down the hall, where you get to bump into him in the break. The reality is, when you’re doing remote leadership, it has to be more deliberate, more purposeful, more intentional, more planned. And if you don’t have the ability to bond with people, that rule is true. People join companies, but they leave managers, right. And if the managers aren’t able to build some kind of trust, some kind of bond, people are going to leave. And that becomes a reality. And CEOs have seen that. So now in the surveys, what they’re saying is within one among their leadership teams from the senior level, to the frontline operational managers, is they want the ability to bond with people and build ties, even if people don’t work in the same physical location.

Chris Villanueva 12:56
That makes so much sense. Again, given the context of everything that’s gone on in the last three years. One weird or kind of strange question I might have for you is like, I wouldn’t know where to start. When it comes to working on some of these called soft skills or emotional skills. I feel like I can’t really pick up a book and learn about how to bond or something like that. And like really have it stick. One thing I’m obsessed with, for example, is my own development into becoming a more creative individual, or someone who is able to communicate better, but I think books are great, and they have their time in place. But do you have any other recommendations for how to foster and develop the soft skills as leaders?

Paul Falcone 13:35
It’s a great question and criticism, but it’s what are the soft skills? It’s communication. It’s team building. It’s establishing trust. It’s getting people to want to give discretionary effort, not because they have to, but because they want to. The question I always tell managers is ask your people the question, “are you able to do your very best work every day with peace of mind?” That’s the question, are you able to do your very best work every day with peace of mind? You’ll be surprised when you ask that question. You’re not always getting good answers you saw coming, you might be a little shocked. And the manager says, Well, why didn’t you tell me and it’s like, it isn’t something I felt comfortable bringing up. But since you’re asking, and so the idea is there are questions that you can use to kind of build that on your own team.

The other thing I’d say is that we complicate things so much we tell ourselves too many narratives that get in our way up the average bear, right? Would you want to work for you? That’s a question that I asked with executives who I coach and the other question is if the whole company followed your lead in terms of your behavior, your conduct your your role model leadership, would you be happy with where you took it? And those drive career introspection, and it makes people look at me and they’re like, you know, Paul, I yeah, sometimes not always. I realize I’ve got my shortcomings but you know, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and they kind of go down that rabbit hole. I pull them out of the rabbit hole and say, “Don’t apologize. It’s cool, it’s good that you recognize it.” But I’m gonna give you a simple prism to look through. Think about your favorite boss, tell me about your favorite boss. And right away, they start talking about well, she challenged me to do things I didn’t even think I was ready for, she had more faith in me that I had me and myself at the time, or he always made me feel good about myself, he made me feel like I had a seat at the table he had my back – what you’re talking about in that situation is who that person was not necessarily what they did.

It is a society, we’re always chasing our tails about doing doing doing the truth of the matter is the best managers best leaders will just being there being a certain way and from their beingness. Stems what they do. So again, just keep it simple. Can you pay that forward? Can you be someone’s best boss, because through that prism, you bring in employee engagement, employee discretionary effort, employee satisfaction, the idea of safety for innovation and creativity, because people have to feel safe, they can’t feel like they take a risk for them to be innovative. You know, it’s one of those things where they don’t want to be if you stick your head out, it gets lopped off. So right away, they go back into the foxhole, you’ve got to get them to the point where they’re comfortable suggesting ideas, even if someone might think they’re stupid, for example. So again, just pay it forward, can you be the best boss to your employees, that the best boss you’ve ever had has been to you. And voila, your soft skills go up, your level of awareness goes up your level of empathy, and empathetic leadership gets higher and stronger. Just like don’t overthink this stuff. Keep it simple. But just understand that more people are watching us than we know. And I don’t say that from a big brother standpoint. I say that from the standpoint of, you know, people watch us and they look for cues, and the leadership of any company, that’s your culture. If that leadership is healthy, if they laugh a lot, if it’s pretty light in there, you know, and you can be yourself and do your best work every day with peace of mind, you are going to get one result. If it’s tense if it’s constantly micromanaging. If it’s angsty, you feel like you’re walking on eggshells. Let’s and you can’t be successful, but I don’t know that you’ll be as successful as you might otherwise be very practical.

Chris Villanueva 17:14
And by the way, didn’t mean to, you know sell books. You’ve written all these amazing books, but it’s just so great to physically hear you say these things. So people could feel the excitement and practical application of asking these questions to your employees. I think that’s awesome, kind of pivoting to the making sure we are on track for the job search piece. One thing that is tough, and this comes from a person who started a resume writing company, but one thing that is tough is to just communicate soft skills on a resume and have it actually be effective. I loved your answer to this when I asked you earlier about how do we communicate soft skills such as communication, creativity, being able to bond in remote environments? How do we communicate that on a resume and or an interview?

Paul Falcone 18:01
It’s good question. I wouldn’t put it in the section that says, you know, overall, great communication skills, great leadership skills, you know, people do that and on a resume, it comes across as insincere. There’s no way to prove it. It’s just okay, well, I’m glad you have it in there. But truthfully, it’s a waste of space, build bullets that talk about what you’ve done to demonstrate strong leadership and communication and team building.

So for example, when things turned remote in your world, what did you do as a leader somebody or on the leadership side, to keep the communication going to keep your people feeling like they’re still part of the mama ship, that they are still part of the action. And for some people that meant began one on one weekly meetings with my direct reports, began bi-weekly staff meetings where everyone had a chance to contribute and give updates implemented a quarterly achievement calendar where everyone could see what everyone else was working on, on a shared drive, created monthly start stop, continue meetings to make sure that we were in line and learning from our best practices, started quarterly one-on-one meetings and moved my annual performance review process to actually three quarterly meetings leading up to the annual meeting so that we can talk about performance in real time, and then focus the annual review on goal setting and professional and career development in the future, which is really where it should be. Most companies do annual reviews once a year, and all they do is talk 90% of the time about how they did performance wise in the past. If you’re doing this on a quarterly basis, and you’re talking about performance, then the annual review is just an aggregate of what you’ve talked about in the past, but it can focus on the future.

And that’s where we want to be future is the fun part. What can I do differently? How can I reinvent what I’m doing? How do you get people to kind of feel motivated. Your job as a manager is not to motivate all motivation is internal. Right? It’s self motivation. I can’t motivate you you can’t vote hate me. But my job as a leader is to create the space where people can motivate themselves. And one of the ways you do that is to get them constantly focusing on, you know where you are right now is your baseline. How do you grow it? How do I help you get there? And this idea of Career and Professional Development Chris, in survey after survey, when you look at Gen Y, Millennials, and Gen Z Zoomers, it’s one of the top three or top five, always in survey after survey, they want career professional development, this isn’t that hard to do. Just carve out the space on your calendar. And they will also say, I’m not giving managers more work. I’m putting the work on the employees, they set the time on my calendar. Yeah, they set the agenda, I’m here to listen, I tell them I’m going to be your mentor and your coach. But I want the managers to have a couple of questions in their back pocket in case the you know, the meeting gets a little quiet or it’s a little awkward. You want to have some prompting questions to help. That makes sense. But the bottom line is, these are adults, I want my employees to feel like they can step up, they can prepare, they’re in control. My job is just help them get there. And that’s really what a coaching leader does.

Chris Villanueva 21:07
And how often did you say that these meetings were quarterly, monthly?

Paul Falcone 21:11
Companies do it differently. Sometimes they start when they want to move into this mode of real time feedback. The first thing you have to do is teach them how to give positive recognition in real time because again, we tell ourselves narratives, a lot of managers will say, Oh, you can’t say good things about your employees that will go to their head, they’re going to want more money, which is baloney. Because if you’re the average bear and your boss called you out in front of everyone and said, “Paul Falcone, that was a great job. How did you do that? How did you save that account? We all want to learn? Do tell?” What are you going to think I want a 10% Raise. That’s not how people think they just it that’s the psychic income when it comes to recognition, give it freely, it doesn’t cost you anything.

But the only thing is, again, people want to learn their craft their trade their job, you have to be able to give constructive feedback. And again, it’s not what you say, but it’s how you say it. There are some managers who call out people with the why word. Why did you do? What were you thinking? Do that in front of a team of 10 people, you didn’t just lose the one person you directed it at, you lost the other nine as well, you just gave them a very clear message that you’re gonna get called out and publicly humiliated if you make a mistake. Instead, be that boss that you would want to have. Tell me, you know, hey, sometimes it’s great job, we’re gonna say that in front of all 10 people on the team. Sometimes I have to give constructive feedback, I do that one-on-one in private, right? Praise in public, criticism in private. We sit together, as he told me about that. Tell me what you were thinking, let me see if I can help. Maybe we can strengthen this together? Or when I was working with this particular client or whatever, I’m happy to share with you some of the shortcuts that I learned if you’re open to it.

You become that kind of leader, your people aren’t going anywhere for 20%. Yeah, I can get 20% If I switch jobs, but they’re not going to want to, Chris, because they’ve got a manager who’s got their back. Yeah, that’s it. If I feel like my boss really wants for me what I want for me, which is career growth and development, while I’m making a positive contribution at work, I’m not going to leave that too quickly. 20% is great. But I may end up working for someone who spits fire and throws chairs, that risk isn’t worth it for me, I’d rather stay where I’m comfortable. And I’d like to say that over my three decades in HR, I’ve had very little turnover on my teams. So to me, that’s why I own Paul Falcone proof that this stuff works really well.

Chris Villanueva 23:27
That’s awesome. Now I want to pivot to the topic of leading through change in crisis, we have a few exciting questions that our listeners are gonna want to hear, first of all, just to kind of prime our vocabulary a little bit. And it’s a good reminder for me even what’s the difference between a manager and a leader? Your book is called the first time manager but you also have so much good advice on leadership. But how do we distinguish the two definitions?

Paul Falcone 23:54
Yeah, all of a sudden, I’m kind of getting into the new manager space. And I’m enjoying that it’s not really an audience that I’ve written to in the past. But last year, I had a book came out called new managers. Right now I’ve got a book that’s called the “First Time Manager Leading Through Crisis.” Next year, I’ll have a book out called the “First Time HR Manager.” So I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in that space. It’s fun space, because that’s where people still hungry to learn. You need both management and leadership, right? Management is giving people direction. It’s telling them “what to do.” It’s giving them guidance. It’s asking short questions, and it’s practical. Leadership is different. It’s inspirational. Leadership is what influences people to want to follow you. What makes people feel like I don’t want to leave this company because I really liked working for Paul, I’m very comfortable here. Not comfortable in the sense where they’re left alone to do their own thing. That’s not what I mean by comfortable. comfortable to me means a balance of I’m challenged. I like the work that I’m doing. I feel like I’m learning new things. And I’ve got a boss who a has fun, lightens things up, and who cares about me personally. That’s really the key to it all is.

I mean, literally, when you think about your best boss, your favorite boss you’ve ever had, it comes down to their character and their caring. It’s the two Cs, their character means you respected them, you trusted them, their word was their ball, and you can rely on them. That’s the character piece. And again, even in the surveys, Chris, about what a Millennials want. One of the top things is career professional development. One of the other things, they want to work for a for an ethical company doing meaningful work for a management team that cares about them personally. So again, just look where the trends are. We’re talking trends that are gonna go out now for the next 20 to 30 years. Not that hard. But how do you as a manager, how do you as a company, try and fill those needs, some of the other things they want is corporate social responsibility, and environmentalism.

Okay, they want to make the world a better place, some of the things they want would be some kind of work life, family balance, control, equilibrium, there’s different things that you’re reading about in the surveys. But these are the tea leaves that kind of point to the future. As much as you can incorporate and embrace these concepts and build them into your culture, you’re just going to be kind of that invisible hand that makes people feel very attracted to your organization. So again, horse sense on the one hand, but not everyone has the time to do the research on this stuff that I do. So I hope that, you know, in my books, I’ve tried to keep it simple, but kind of bring some of that wisdom along with.

Chris Villanueva 26:21
I love that. Thank you so much. I’ll ask you about the tough challenges we’ve dealt with this year, we dealt with everything from the layoffs, inflation and people’s fear or excitement about AI and how that’s quickly changing the hiring and you know, human resources work landscape. But my question to you is, how do we lead people towards the company vision during times like this? And I’d also love it if you can build in an answer to how to deliver bad news practically since I did mention the layoffs thing a second ago. But yeah, how do we leave people during turbulent times? Just more generally, and bad news?

Paul Falcone 27:00
Okay, two questions. I got answers to both. Okay. So here’s the here’s the thought. So rule number one is that we’ve lost the ability as a society to sit around the campfire, and pass wisdom from the elder generation down to the younger generation. We’re just too busy. We’re looking at our phones. That’s what staff meetings represent an opportunity to get everyone back and involved in everyone speaking not just you, this is not a top down meeting, this is everyone getting a chance to talk about their achievements. So we can pat them on the back, celebrate, talk about where they’re doing in terms of their project status, where they might need help, and get everyone to know that we’ve got each other’s backs. And we’re there to help one another. Just that message alone to your team makes a very, very big difference.

You know, Gen Z, the Zoomers, the 25 and under crowd have tested out as the loneliest, most isolated, and most depressed generational cohort on the planet, even more so than the than the retirees and retirement homes. They’re the first truly digital generation, but with that digital illness came a sense of isolation. The workplace has a chance to kind of bring them back in COVID, which didn’t help. Chris, how many kids in high school last two to three years, how many kids in college last two to three years. It’s hard. Our job is people who are elder is to kind of bring that give them back to themselves, bring them out of that so that they feel more comfortable in that space. So that’s the first thing that I would say, you have to be able to sit around and talk about like the campfire analogy to just as a side note.

Chris Villanueva 28:27
I think that’s such a great way to compare that.

Paul Falcone 28:31
Yeah, and the other thing too is there’s a great TEDTalk. It’s one of the top 10 TEDTalks, it’s by Brene Brown, Professor at the University of Austin on the importance of vulnerability. And when you as a leader can make yourself vulnerable, your employees can make themselves vulnerable in a healthy sense. The vulnerability is kind of opening up your body to say, “look, I’m not perfect. I’m here, I need your help.” And that when it’s accepted and reciprocated, builds trust greater than anything else. So I’m talking about, you know how to be a leader through these times when you’re going through pandemics. There’s war going on right now. We’re worried about so many things. So your point, right, is that the weather the temperatures out there a global warming isn’t the politics which are going out what are going on, there’s homelessness issues. This is gun violence. We have a 24/7 news cycle. And it never stops pounding these messages into people’s minds.

I mean, think about it for a minute, Chris, in October of 2022. Just about a year ago, no one really knew what AI wise, if you can get people to say AI stood for artificial intelligence. You had a pretty advanced group. In November of last year, ChatGPT comes out. And now everything is about AI. As a matter of fact, Elon Musk said the world is going to end because of AI soon. And he’s not the only one to make these predictions. You can’t go from October when no one knows what it is to November in the same year 2022 when the world is ending. It’s just much with you, but it’s get 24/7 news cycle to fill that air and they keep doing it. Be the wisdom, help your people look at things from the 30,000 foot level. Yes, we live in the weeds and you don’t have to be the only one who is wisdom, ask them for their wisdom too.

But the truth of the matter is, we all have to help each other through these times, I had written an article for SHERM, the Society for Human Resources Management, in terms of helping your people let their hair down in a staff meeting, and it opens up, you would never talk about religion and politics in business. But my point of that article is sometimes people have to. Now this is not about red hats and blue hats and who believes in what this is about how things are affecting you and how we can help. Because sometimes you can just look at your team and they’re exhausted, they’ve just had enough. And you got to call them into a staff meeting, and you have to say,

“Look, you guys, let’s talk about this. I want to make sure we’re all okay, now the way I did it, does anyone need some additional time off? Even if you don’t have time on the books, I will give you the time off?”

“No, no, Paul, we appreciate it. But we’re okay.”

“Okay, does anyone need extra sets of hands that I can help with or anyone else can volunteer to help?”

Give them that that space, give them the room to breathe, give them the room to exhale, and they can kind of rebuild themselves, but don’t just look the other way and sweep it under the rug. So I would say that part of it is important.

To your second question, Chris. When it comes to delivering constructive feedback, I had written a book called “101 Tough Conversations to Have with Your Employees” and knock on wood, that book has been ranked first in the Amazon Best Sellers category, from corporate cultures to team building to conflict resolution, all this stuff. It’s not what you say it’s how you say it. If I open up a meeting with someone who’s got a really, really bad attitude, I have a choice. I could say, “You know what, you got a really, really bad attitude. And I’m really tired of it,” which is going to shut them down and make them defensive right from the very beginning.

Where you can open it up differently and say, “Paul, I need to talk to you about something the most important decisions about you and your career are going to be made but you’re not in the room. That’s the same for me as it is for you as it is for everybody else. There may be things that are missing awareness right now, that could hold you back over time in your career. And I wouldn’t be doing you service as your manager if I didn’t bring this up to your attention. So I’d like to talk to you about it, if you’ll be comfortable with by doing so. And you’ll give me the okay to do so. But I think this can help you over the long term because it’s going to raise your awareness. And I’d like to be the coach to help you get through it. So you can fix it now. So that it ever plagues you in the future. okay for me to go on?”

And they’ll say, “Yes, sure what’s going on?” And now you can talk about the fact that whatever, you know, people are using terms like bright, arrogant, condescending, confrontational, combative. And, “Paul, the truth of the matter is, it’s a perception problem. I don’t think that that’s what you’re intending to do. But you are held to your perception just like I am. It’s a perception management issue. I have to hold you accountable, right for your perception management. And let me help you do that.” You’ll be surprised how quickly you can turn around someone who’s going down the wrong path. And all of a sudden, they’re like, You know what, they may not like hearing it, Chris, but the way it’s delivered. Some people need to sleep on it for a night, maybe for a couple of nights. Normally, they’ll come back and say I’m ready to listen to it. You have to say so yeah, a little bit of space. Absolutely. But make it in their best interests.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai