Ep22: How to hand-craft your dream job and how to make work better with Chip Joyce
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Listen to this fascinating conversation with Chip Joyce, CEO & Co-Founder of Allied Talent, about what the essential problem is with workplaces nowadays and his vision for how it could be so much better if we evolved the way in which we view the employee-employer relationships. First, Chip and I explore the highly unusual and very inspiring way in which Chip created his perfect job when the right job wasn’t simply waiting on some job board (and is it ever?). Then we discuss how managers should craft a professional alliance with their employees to build trust and create value and ways to make incremental positive changes in the world of work. Chip and I talk about how companies and leaders need to get used to being in ‘permanent beta’ mode and iterate constantly, adapting to the needs and information presented by the moment and by the environment. Finally, Chip shares a great, actionable tip that will help you upgrade your leadership effectiveness and even offers a downloadable worksheet to help you implement his suggestion – see the link in the show-notes below!
What you'll learn:
- What is the right kind of networking mindset and how does it actually create a higher chance of serendipity and lucky breaks?
- Why is luck usually something that people have been cultivating for a long time
- How is Chip’s company, Allied Talent, trying to change how companies, employers, and employees work together?
- What’s the essential problem in the current employment model and why don’t managers like to hear it?
- What’s wrong with the way we’re currently dancing around our actual interests at work, and why this creates misalignment and causes all of us to miss a great opportunity for both bosses and employees?
- What are Tours of Duty and why can they transform both the company and the career of its employees?
- How should managers craft a professional alliance with their employees to build trust and create value?
- How can leaders create ways to truly engage employees?
- Why is culture, as it’s perceived by employees, really important – and why most senior leaders are totally blind to it?
- Why do CEOs like to talk about how they have a very transparent culture with high trust, but often front-line employees feel a very different climate? And how is this a huge barrier to the kind of transformation Chip’s company is promoting?
- Why is the manager-employee relationship central to culture change and organizational culture health?
- Why do we (as consultants and change agents) need to get better at meeting organizations where they are – and perhaps need to down-shift on some of our more controversial and radical ideas?
- What is permanent beta and why it’s hard for some people to get used to it but why it’s imperative for companies to constantly adapt, shift, and change things
- What is Culture Sprout, Chip’s newest ‘beta’ project?
- Take a free diagnostic survey they’ve created that measures about how you perceive your current employers’ career development opportunity. Learn how it will help employees articulate your needs for career development and help you find companies that can help you. Also, learn how it will help companies assess where they stand and how they compare to others.
- What’s one specific action you can take to take your own leadership competency up a notch?
- Get the worksheet Chip offers to help you plan for this conversation – download it here.
About Chip Joyce:
Chip Joyce is CEO & Co-Founder of Allied Talent, a consulting and training company that works with organizations that want to learn and adapt the Alliance management framework in order to recruit, manage, and retain entrepreneurial employees—those team members who make companies adaptive and innovative.
Based on LinkedIn© founder Reid Hoffman’s ideas presented in the New York Times Bestselling book The Alliance: Managing Talent in a Networked Age (co-authored by Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh), the Alliance management framework truly is a new model for the employer-employee relationship.
With two decades of international management and consulting experience, Chip specializes in helping organizations makes significant cultural changes. Chip has worked with global banks and financial services companies, Big 4 professional firms, as well as leading pharmaceutical, biotech, insurance, and both publicly traded and start-up technology companies. He has guest lectured for Columbia University’s MBA and executive MBA programs and is an experienced corporate speaker.
Chip is also founder of People Innovators Mutual, a professional society for senior leaders who provide services and technology for the People departments (HR, talent acquisition and management, learning and development, culture, etc.).
Allied Talent has locations in the New York City and San Francisco areas, and Chip lives in Holmdel, NJ, with his yoga instructor wife Stacy, toddler son Dashiell, and French Bulldog Olive.
His interests include a Paleo lifestyle, cooking, photography, history, film, and being outdoors as much as possible.
Resources:
Connect with Chip via email, Twitter: @chipjoyce, and on LinkedIn
Chip's company is Allied Talent
Chip mentions Cal Newport's work as well as Adam Grant’s book Give and Take
Chip mentions his colleague Marla Gottschalk and the diagnostic tool she's created for Allied Talent
Culture Sprout is Chip and his colleagues' newest project - check it out and take the survey!
Don't forget to download the worksheet Chip has provided here and take your one action!
Subscribe to Halelly’s free weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to Halelly’s podcast on iTunes (don’t forget to leave a rating and review!)
Intro/outro music for The TalentGrow Show: "Why-Y" by Esta - a great band of exquisitely talented musicians, and good friends of mine.
Scroll to read TRANSCRIPT
Announcer: Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Halelly: Hey, hey, welcome back to the TalentGrow Show. This is episode 22. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist and my guest is Chip Joyce. Chip is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Allied Talent that he has co-founded with Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn, and a couple of other authors that you’ve probably heard of, and he’s probably working on transforming, revolutionizing the world of work. But we also talk about how he created this opportunity for himself because I don’t think that many people go about a job search the way that Chip did to find this opportunity, to craft this opportunity, and I think you’re going to learn a lot from it. I can’t wait for you to hear it. Also, there’s of course the actionable tip at the end, and Chip even offers us a downloadable worksheet that I will make available on the show notes page that can help you take that action. So, here we go, Chip Joyce, episode 22, the TalentGrow Show.
We’re here with Chip Joyce and I’m really excited about this interview because Chip is a friend of mine but also someone I have admired and followed his career. He is the CEO and co-founder of Allied Talent, a consulting and training company that works with organizations that want to learn and adapt the alliance management framework – which we’ll talk about in a few minutes – in order to recruit, manage and retain entrepreneurial employees, those team members who make companies adaptive and innovative. Chip, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Chip: Thank you for having me.
Halelly: It is my pleasure. And before we get into the opportunity for you to talk more about what you do with Allied Talent and your career, I want to get a little bit of an overview – I always do this at the beginning of every interview – of your journey. And it’s hard to do in a short amount of time, but I think it’s very informative about who you are and where you’ve been. So how did you get to where you are today?
Chip: You know, my career has really been entrepreneurial in that I’ve always been drawn to solving big problems and I’ve done it in a few industries. For a while, it was in banking and finance. Briefly in media, and for the past several years I’ve really been focusing on how can we make work be more fulfilling.
Halelly: And what kind of roles have you had then? I mean, if you can talk about maybe the kinds of hats you wore?
Chip: Sure. A lot. I started out as an analyst at a bank, first corporate job. Pretty much hated it. I was a product manager for technology for a little bit in a banking-related field. And I started my own company after that, which was this intersection of finance and internet technology at the time. It was really hot, and I knew something and most people knew nothing, so I had a company around that for a while. I actually had a high-end women’s fashion company as a side project and a design studio. And I was not the creative side, I was sort of the business side on those. And then I went to work again as a consultant for companies in banking and finance and then in the media for a while. And eventually I started working in boutique consulting for banks and hedge funds and I was a management director of two companies doing that. One was in New York and one was in London and it was a very global experience, traveled around the world for those jobs for a few years. And then I worked for a private equity division of an investment company and that ended abruptly in 2008 with the market crash. At that point I just decided, “What do I really want to do?” The financial field is pretty boring and broken and I was interested at that time in really how to make work better. And I worked for David Allen Company for five years. I had gotten to know him and the team there, so that was really helping people to be more engaged at work and tips to be more productive and things like that. So I started working on sort of large, cultural interventions in corporations and that sort of really strengthened this obsession of mine where I just saw people coming to work every day and not really being fulfilled and frustrated about it. And that was a tiny piece of a much larger picture.
Halelly: Well, I see that too, my gosh, and so I think we’re on a similar mission. I love that, to make work better. So before we get into a little more of how you currently work, and thank you for that, that was interesting. Because I wanted the listeners who don’t know you as I do to see and hear how many different ways you’ve done work and the kind of roles that you’ve had, because they’ve informed the value that you bring to your current endeavors. So before we do talk about your company, Allied Talent, I found very interesting through just sort of how you shared your journey along the way with me and others who are friends with you about how you created this opportunity for yourself. Because I do, I meet a lot of people who feel unfulfilled or feel like their work is not exactly allowing them to use their strengths, or they sort of feel stuck and especially if they get into a job search mode, and rarely is the perfect job just printed or written in some job bank somewhere. And you crafted this! So can you maybe talk a little more about once you ended your previous role and you weren’t sure what to do next, how do you think you did your job search differently from what most people do or how they go about it, and what’s the biggest lesson that you learned from this experience?
Chip: Yes, so I agree with you completely. If someone is looking for a job, it can be an incredibly frustrating and depressing experience, and really make people feel worthless, because job board applications and recruiters and things like that, if they aren’t working for you, you just feel like nobody wants you, nobody values you. And I hear that from so many people. And the truth is, almost nobody is seeing you as a person when you’re going through job applications in that way. There are computer systems and filters and people, even if they see it, it’s a person who is looking for key words. And so it’s a terrible way to find a job. And in fact, I made it a point to never do that again. And last time when I did leave my company and not having any idea what I was going to do, I resolved I would never do that. And instead, what I did was I had an idea of what I was interested in, and I looked for companies who were doing things like that. And I wrote to CEOs. Mostly through LinkedIn. And I never asked for a job. I never said I was looking for a job. I just said, “Here is something I think you’re thinking about. Here’s what I have to offer on thoughts or whatever it is. I think we should have a conversation.”
Halelly: That is so bold to write to CEOs! I just don’t really know very many people who would do that.
Chip: Yeah, and maybe sometime in the future, too many people will do it, but the number of people who actually responded positively I would say was over 80, 90 percent. And so I talked to a lot of people. And that was the opposite of looking for jobs that don’t come through or you don’t get responses. They were all meaningful, rewarding experiences in and of themselves. I got to meet interesting people, find out what they were thinking, and many of those people I have in part of my professional network. And from those conversations, just organically, some job opportunities came up. Not that I asked for them, but rather the CEO would say, “You have a lot to offer. Maybe there’s something here we should be doing.” And I declined a couple of the opportunities. I actually got a friend of mine a job that came about through this. And in the meantime, I was doing some consulting work and just to basically pay bills and whatever, and I was thinking maybe that’s what I need to do, just continue to do what I was doing. And make that my new career step.
Halelly: The consulting, or the talking to CEOs?
Chip: The consulting. And the problem is, I really dislike working alone. And that was the number one issue that I had with it. And so I still continued talking to people, trying to find something that I could do where I could work with people and collaborate. And I really just cared about that a lot. And then serendipitously what happened was I had made friends with a partner at McKenzie who had been my client for years, and he sent me an article written by someone named Cal Newport, who is a professor at Georgetown.
Halelly: I love his writing.
Chip: He’s a bestselling author. And I was interested in the blog topic and so I wrote to Cal and we ended up talking on the phone a few times. And he was interested to see if I could help him with some ideas that he had and projects. And the truth was, I didn’t really have the expertise he needed. But then he emailed me and he said, “You know, I’ve got some friends who are writing a book and they’re looking at business ideas. Is there something, would you be willing to talk to them? Because I think you could help.” And so I said sure. I’m talking to people, that’s what I do every day now. And it turned out to be my business partners, Ben Casnocha and they were writing a book with the founder of LinkedIn, who was a friend of theirs, Reid Hoffman. And that was the book The Alliance, and they were trying to figure out if there’s a way to build a business around it. And they talked to tons of people about different options and so anyway, I started talking to them, telling them basically all the ideas that they’ve heard were no good. And I was pretty critical of everything like that, and they kept wanting another call. So I felt like I was shooting down ideas. I certainly wasn’t looking for a job by doing that! And then eventually I said, “You know what? I’m going to write you a business plan that you can take. It’s a gift. You can throw it away if you want. You can run with it.” And so I did. I just went to Starbucks for a few hours and I wrote a really rough draft business plan, and sent it to them. And they didn’t call me back with the frequency that they used to, so I thought, “Well, I guess that stopped that conversation! I can get on with my life now.” And then after a while they called me back and they said they’d really been thinking about it and they wanted to discuss this. If I’m interested, would I join, would I start the company and run it? So that was pretty shocking to me, because I really didn’t think I was, there was any possibility there. This point I was just giving free advice.
So I flew out to meet them and we met at Greylock Headquarters, the famous venture capital firm. And I met Ben and Chris and then Reid, and after a couple of days there, we decided to start Allied Talent. So it was pretty surprising the way that unfolded.
Halelly: That’s pretty amazing. So what’s the biggest lesson you would share with someone else about this experience, about the job search?
Chip: You know, it’s really about networking, professional networking. And getting over the cheesy thought of what networking means. You know, networking events where people hand their business cards out and trying to pitch and all of that stuff. It’s really just being, hopefully each person is curious and inquisitive and if you have that, ask questions, learn about things, talk to people, try to share. Anything that you know, be very generous I think with your time, with people who matter. I mean, not with everybody. But people who have some value in their profession and how you see them or whatever. And by giving them things, you know, it really reminds me of Adam Grant’s Give and Take. That it’s the serendipity that occurs when you do it, and the more you do it the higher chance you have of serendipity. So this story sounds like sort of a fairy tale, right? And the reality is though that this is the product of behavior that I’ve been cultivating for a very long time. And I think that’s the case in most people, where it looks like they’re just lucky – you just don’t see what’s actually been going on for a very long time.
Halelly: Yes. I love that. I totally agree. It’s funny, because just yesterday – it won’t be yesterday when this releases but it was yesterday when this happened – I was talking to a group of students about networking. And sharing, I hold a very similar philosophy. It’s the mindset you have about networking and what it’s purpose is and it changes the way you do it and it totally shifts the results.
Chip: Absolutely.
Halelly: Really, I mean, your story is exemplary and I think it’s very, very inspiring to a lot of people. So thank you for sharing that. Well, I definitely want to talk more about your company, because I am so excited. I mean, I love the work that your co-founders do and what they’ve written and I think that what you’re trying to do is to revolutionize the world of work through the way in which you’re suggesting employers change their relationship with employees. So, you could probably talk about that for three days straight, but in a short amount of time, give us maybe the really tall building elevator pitch. What does your company actually teach?
Chip: Sure. So, what we’re trying to do is change this perspective of how employers and companies, basically, and the employees work together. Because right now, everything is broken. It’s broken so fundamentally because there’s no trust. And I think that’s just the essential problem. Everybody who is employed knows there’s a pretty high likelihood that you’re not going to be employed by that company for very long. And whether it’s by layoffs or the company goes out of business – which we’ve seen plenty of in the past few years – or the company just changes strategic direction and you’re no longer wanted, or you just realize as an employee that better move on, because this isn’t going to be the right place for you in a year or two. And so the reality is there’s no conversations about this, of course, because the company pretends that you’re going to be there forever. And the employee pretty much pretends that they’re going to be there forever. You don’t normally tell your boss, “Hey, I think I’m going to work here for two or three years. Then work for your competitor.”
So, what really happens then on an interpersonal level is you have nobody actually knowing what is truly what you want out of the relationships. So the manager doesn’t know that as an employee, you might be there in order to acquire certain types of skills so you can make a career pivot. And that’s, a lot of people are doing that. And similarly, the manager, not knowing that about the employee, doesn’t know what would keep that employee really engaged. And so he might be assigning the wrong types of work or making assumptions about what the employee really wants. Assuming, let’s say, that the employee wants a promotion to the next level, and always thinking about work in terms of that way. Like what would be the next step for this person to get that promotion internally, and the employee on the other hand has no interest in that job, but pretends that they do because they think that’s the way that they’re going to show that they’re a team player and that they’re loyal to the company. And then what happens is both parties are misaligned. They don’t understand each other and they don’t have any trust in each other and they’re missing a great opportunity. Because it might be that if they really understood each other, they could redefine that work relationship and what the employee is doing, and understanding, “Hey, in two or three years that employee wants to do something radically different.” They would be in a much different position to do it if they achieved something meaningful in this company. And guess what? That’s actually what the company needs.
So, what we really learned is that’s a great framework and we have structures to do that – we call it tours of duty, which is really a realistic timeframe and a commitment a manager and employee make to each other to achieve a mission. And that mission completed is going to transform the company in a good way and the person’s career. And that’s what you’re always striving for. But what we learned by, we started working with LinkedIn, and then working with a bunch of companies since, is that none of this can work unless you build trust. And managers really have to work hard to earn trust in their employees. Managers don’t like to hear this – they think, “I’m a good guy. Why wouldn’t someone trust me?” And it’s because you’re a manager. You have power. And you represent a company that really doesn’t care about that employee, when it comes down to it. If there’s a business need, that employee is going to be unemployed the day before Christmas and who cares? And so you’re in a position as a manager where you’re really institutionally not a trustworthy person, and you’ve got to understand that and acknowledge it, and then say, “Okay, all that may be true, but here’s what I want to do for you. You and I, I want to have a professional alliance. I care about you. I want to help you out, and I want to have a meaningful understanding of what you want, and I really want to be there to help you get that.” Independently of the company, whatever. Work for me and we have goals here. But you and I are both not going to work here forever, most likely, and I would like to have a professional relationship with you that transcends this temporary time when I’m your boss.
And so we teach managers how to have trust-building conversations in a very specific way, and really to get to employees’ aspirations and career goals in helping managers to figure out in the real constraints that they have of their bureaucracy and limitations and budget and opportunities or whatever, ways for the employee to feel highly engaged at work as much as possible and to do something meaningful and get to the next step in the career, whatever that is. Internally, or somewhere else, totally different industry, whatever it is. And by working together like that with realistic timeframes which we call tours of duty, which for a young employee that might be a year and could be three, four, five years – it’s usually not longer – let’s just do something great together and achieve it and then reassess where we are. And maybe there’s another tour of duty here for you, or maybe it’s somewhere else.
So anyway, we’ve been teaching managers in workshop format, and then we’ve learned that we really need to know more about companies. The culture as it’s perceived by employees is very important. And the reality is most senior executives – who are often ones who bring us into a company – they actually don’t know the truth of what their culture is.
Halelly: That’s scary too!
Chip: They live in bubble. Either they live in a bubble, a lot of companies we worked with have been fast-growing, so the culture when the company was 20 people or 50 people, in the mind of the CEO it’s the same when it’s 500 people. And maybe for the senior team that culture is the same, but what we find is when you go to that middle ranks of the organization, the first level of management, their perception of what the culture is is often totally at odds with what the CEO tells us it is. And one of the things is, we have a CEO, a very transparent culture or high trust, etc., and then you talk to people who are first-line managers and they’re employees or whatever and they say, “Yeah, we don’t really trust this organization. They laid off 30 percent of the people last year. Broke people’s hearts. We don’t know where the company is going. We don’t know the strategy. We’re all worried.” And if that’s a climate in an organization, we can’t actually be very successful unless we know that. Because if the company has such problems like that, then trusting the manager doesn’t really mean too much if you think the whole company is untrustworthy.
Halelly: It’s not an option.
Chip: No. So what we did, we made a very good decision. We hired Marla Gottschalk, who has a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and she’s really been focused on this idea of how to make work a better experience. And so together, we’ve created a diagnostic for a company, and it’s a 50-question survey that all employees take and we’ve been able to really diagnose what is going on in an organization. And then we are better prepared as a consulting and training company to address the real issues. And we’ve actually built from workshops, it’s really just HR and organizational change consulting that we’ve built into, and we can tell companies, “This is what’s working. This is what’s not working. And if you don’t fix it, we have pretty good indications to tell you what’s going to happen in terms of high turnover, disengagement, lower productivity, etc. And here’s what you need to do to change it.” And a lot of it is just really back to how do you create the manager and employee relationship better, and how do you make the structure of the organization conducive to that relationship? So it changes job competencies, performance reviews, promotions. How do you think about your career? How do you have meetings manager to employee? Development plans, things like that. All that really has to change. And you know, we started to find companies who are really willing to essentially redesign their entire company around this idea.
Halelly: That’s a little bit of a hard sell, isn’t it?
Chip: It’s very hard. And it takes an amazing leader, frankly, to be willing to do this. So, we’re way ahead of our time in a certain way.
Halelly: Well, it’s good work still, but I can imagine what a challenge it is. And it almost sounds like you set out to change the world of work with this kind of one idea about creating more authenticity and transparency and bringing out this thing that’s been cloaked in mystery for too many years and creating a different way of looking at work and talking about work. And now it’s almost like you recognize that’s premature if the culture doesn’t even allow it and if the trust isn’t there. So it’s almost like you can’t even get to talking about the alliance until you talk about the bigger culture. Is that true?
Chip: It’s true, and in fact, we’ve been in business now for two years, and what we’re recognizing is we need to also get better at meeting organizations where they are. So, if they aren’t prepared to make the fundamental changes, the radical changes yet, you know, in large corporations it’s hard to change anything. But we’re now thinking of how can we make incremental positive changes that moves them in the direction but it’s not as controversial and radical as what our ideal is. And we have really good ideas on how to do that. And they’re not controversial. How do we have better career development in our organization? That’s not controversial. Nobody seems to know how to do it. Everybody is talking about it. So we have ideas. We can help to do that. And it’s always in the spirit of the alliance framework, if not in its full implementation.
Halelly: Got it. Wow. Well, cool. Thank you for sharing that. I think that it helps reinforce the idea that all of work, all of everything we do, no matter what our role is, is iterative and it’s sort of like a process or a journey. You don’t flip the switch and make some kind of change. It’s always this incremental journey. And so it’s like you’ve recognized along the way some of the barriers and then you went to attack them. And you’re building toward that outcome that you can envision but there is work that’s along the way that shifted the way your company works along with it. That all organizations should really do that, adapt to the signs that are there and to what’s needed in the moment.
Chip: And you know, I’m fortunate because my partners are very aligned. Because this is very tech and Silicon Valley orientation. It’s like Google’s permanent data. And we have that in our company and it’s hard for some people to get used to. Some people that we’ve brought on, it takes time for them to get used to it, that we roll things out when they’re half-baked. And we try them and we’re constantly changing things. Just as an example, every single workshop that I’ve run, three or four hours, I would imagine that there’s probably 10 hours of debriefing and redesigning of the workshop. Every single time we do it. It’s never the same. And now there’s a downside to that, because the downside is you’re always reintroducing grammatical errors and typos and pagination and the little things like that never get perfected. Because you’re changing something significantly and so it’s like just rapid development of something. And I would rather do that because our product gets better all the time, in the essence and the cost is to some extent looking a bit amateurish, because we haven’t … I’m never going to hire a graphics artist and create permanent books with every single page perfect, because if I do that, the next time I run a workshop I’m never going to feel that freedom of reinventing it. Because now I have an enormous investment on this static thing. And so it drives some people nuts. And frankly I’ve had some clients in learning and development who think poorly of us as being kind of amateurish and they don’t get it. They don’t get that they’re getting literally the most cutting edge though that we had, that we didn’t have a week ago.
Halelly: You illustrated a dichotomy really well, I think, that is true in so many other areas. The more that you commit to a way, even a way of thinking, the more you become resistant to changing.
Chip: Oh absolutely.
Halelly: Very interesting. I’d love to talk to you forever about it, but we’re pretty much coming close to the end of our time with this podcast. And maybe we can do a session B another time. So I want you to, I always have my guests share one specific action that they can recommend that people take this week to upgrade their leadership skills. But before we get to that, what’s a very short description of something that is new and exciting, a new project or new discover, that has your attention?
Chip: Well, coincidentally, today we launched another beta. It’s a project called Culture Sprout. CultureSprout.com, you can go there. And what we’re really doing now is we have a new diagnostic tool that’s up there and we’re asking people to take this survey. It takes a few minutes and it’s for us to collect information on how people perceive their current employer’s career development opportunities. And this data is going to inform us, basically what we’re doing is creating a new service which is going to help employees articulate their needs for employee development and also get a sense of ultimately finding out what companies are better at offering employee development than others. And help companies to understand the needs of their employees. Also rank themselves against other companies. So it’s really to help solve this problem of why does everybody complain about lack of career development and why can’t companies figure out how to serve it? And so we’re going to try to provide really objective information that’s going to help everybody win. So CultureSprout.com. Take the survey.
Halelly: Good. I’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you. So it’s a free survey?
Chip: Yes.
Halelly: Excellent. Well, I think that sounds like amazing data to have and certainly near and dear to the work that I do, helping create and develop opportunities for people in organizations and it should provide amazing data also to leaders to help them figure out what else they could do or what might be getting in their way. Thank you for that, and I would love to talk to you more about it once you have some more data in, maybe we could bring that into our next talk about all the stuff that you have to share? So, Chip, what do you recommend that people do? One specific action that people can take that’s not too hard to do this week, even today, that’s going to make them a better leader?
Chip: Well, I think the first thing you should do is choose one employee that you have who has your most attention – could be your star, could be one you’re concerned about, disengaged or might leave – and you have to have a very different kind of conversation. You really need to learn how to get to their true aspirations, their career goals, and don’t ask them that question. Because you will not get an answer. Instead, what you really need to do is tell them what your career goals are and aspirations, and discuss things and open up and tell them things that you wish they would tell you. By leading that and being vulnerable, you can kick start a conversation and then you can say, after you do that, “I’d really like to meet again. This time, if you would tell me your journey, what’s important to you, where you want to go?” Start by sharing first. And in fact, if you want, I can make available to your listeners the worksheet that we use to help get those conversations going?
Halelly: Yes! Of course. Why not? Okay, cool, so how can people get that? Should they email you or do you want to give it to me to create a download?
Chip: I can make it available to you.
Halelly: Okay, great. Okay, good. So folks listening, that’s an amazing opportunity for you to actually take action on Chip’s suggestion and thank you for that, Chip, because I think that will make it helpful. So what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and stay in touch?
Chip: LinkedIn. Easy to connect with me there. @ChipJoyce on Twitter, and chip@alliedtalent is my email address.
Halelly: Very good. Well, I hope that everybody does, because you’re an interesting guy. You’re a very thoughtful guy. And there’s a lot to learn from what you put out in the world and also just from the way that you role model, how you go about your career. Thank you for sharing your journey and your work with my listeners on the TalentGrow Show, Chip. I appreciate you.
Chip: Thank you and best of luck to TalentGrow.
Halelly: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Well, wasn’t that inspiring and are you going to take that action? That’s a really important conversation, and let me tell you – if you’re not currently a leader of others, you are a person who can have this conversation with the person who is your manager, your supervisor. This is an important conversation. Now, of course you can’t make the other person reveal things to you or be vulnerable in front of you as you could yourself as the leader, for sure. And so I hope that this is something that you will put into your bag of tricks, even if you can’t fully implement this right now. But go ahead and download the worksheet. It’s on the show notes page. I will make it very easy for you to download it and so go to www.talentgrow.com/podcast/episode22, and you’ll be able to see all of the different resources that we mentioned and ways to contact Chip, take that survey and to download that worksheet. Thanks for tuning into the TalentGrow Show. I appreciate you and I really want to hear from you about the shows that you would like to hear next. What are the topics, who are the guests, how would you like to get involved? So make sure to leave me a comment or email me, halelly@talentgrow.com, because I’m here for you and it has to work for you for it to work for me. So I can’t wait to hear from you. In the meantime, as always, make today great.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
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