166: How Network Analysis Can Improve Your Collaborative Process and Prevent Burnout with Rob Cross
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Have you considered that too much collaboration could be causing the high performers on your team to suffer? ‘Collaborative overload’ is a real problem in the workplace, and it tends to affect the best employees and leaders the most. On this episode of The TalentGrow Show, professor and consultant Rob Cross joins me to discuss how to leverage network analysis to create collaboratively efficient networks and improve your collaborative process. You’ll learn the steps leaders can take to implement network analysis in our organizations, how to avoid overloading high-performers or ‘energizers’ by being more strategic about collaboration, and how to leverage what Rob calls ‘second tier connectors’ for maximum collaborative efficiency. Plus, find out how creating more collaboratively efficient networks can help you buy back one day a week of your time and be happier! Listen and be sure to share this episode with others.
ABOUT ROB CROSS:
Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Business at Babson College. For almost twenty years, his research, teaching and consulting have focused on applying social network analysis ideas to critical business issues for actionable insights and bottom-line results. He has worked with over 300 leading organizations (companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations) across industries on a variety of solutions including innovation, revenue growth, leadership effectiveness and talent management.
Ideas emerging from his research have resulted in three books, the most recent one titled, “Driving Results through Social Networks.” Rob has written over 50 articles, many of which have won awards. In addition to top scholarly outlets, his work has been repeatedly published in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Academy of Management Executive and Organizational Dynamics. His work has also been featured in venues such as Business Week, Fortune, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CIO, Inc. and Fast Company.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
What is network analysis? Why should leaders be paying attention to it? (6:54)
Rob discusses what leaders can do to implement and apply network analysis in their workplaces (10:20)
How Rob’s framework allows you to assess and analyze who the energizers and the non-energizers are on your team (11:46)
How to leverage your ‘second tier connectors’ to reduce what Rob calls collaborative overload (16:09)
Rob shares an example of how one company used network analysis to improve their collaborative process and drive innovation (21:19)
How network analysis can help leaders on a personal level (22:51)
What distinguishes high performers over time? (25:32)
Rob cautions against a dangerous trap that high performers can fall into, and shares some simple ways to avoid it (27:31)
What’s new and exciting on Rob’s horizon? (32:32)
One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness (33:54)
RESOURCES:
Get Rob’s book, Driving Results Through Social Networks, and the HBR article he mentioned, Collaboration without Burnout
Check out Rob’s website
Join Rob’s online community: Connected Commons
Connect with Rob on LinkedIn
Episode 166 Rob Cross
Soundbite
The people, and especially at this level, that I talk to in all of these interviews who are on their second or third divorce and kids don’t like them and they’ve just kind of fallen into bad places in life, you can tell this is actually very personal for me. Having been through hundreds and hundreds of interviews, you get stories that are very deep at a certain point. It’s because they’ve fallen into this trap of thinking things are going to get better in three months or six months or whatever the timeframe is and they’re not owning the situation and pushing back with the leverage they have. That’s kind of the key, and when we’ve distinguished the more successful people versus the less, it’s this kind of proactive tendency to play offense and not kind of fall into the patterns that are dictated to them. You can’t control everything, but if you start looking for the small opportunities, we find that’s how this game is won. It’s stopping the death of a thousand cuts.
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.
INTRO
Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, the company I started in 2006 to develop leaders that people actually want to follow. TalentGrow generously sponsors this podcast so that it is free for you every Tuesday. Many people talk about how important collaboration is, but is it the end all, be all, or is there such a thing as too much collaboration that’s taking a toll on productivity and our well being? Well, this week my guest is Robb Cross. He’s an expert in network analysis and we’re going to talk about why you should care about network analysis as a leader, what you can gleam from his work and research with hundreds of leaders that can help you leverage network analysis to create collaboratively-efficient networks and improve your collaborative processes and your teams. He describes the steps that you can take to implement this in your organization, how to avoid overloading your high performers, or as he calls them, energizers, and even how to maximize your own productivity and buy back a day of your week, every week, in terms of how much more productive and efficient you can be when you leverage some of his insights. Plus, it’ll make you happier too. So, I hope that you will enjoy this episode. Without further ado, let’s listen in to my conversation with Rob Cross.
LET’S GET STARTED
Hey there TalentGrowers. I am here with Rob Cross. He is the Edward A. Madden professor of Global Business at Babson College. For almost 20 years, his research, teaching and consulting have focused on applying social network analysis ideas to critical business issues for actionable insights and bottom-line results. You know we love that here on the TalentGrow Show. He’s worked with over 300 leading organizations, companies, government agencies and nonprofit organizations across industries on a variety of solutions including innovation, revenue growth, leadership effectiveness and talent management. Ideas emerging from his research have resulted in three books, the most recent one titled Driving Results Through Social Networks. Rob has written over 50 articles, many of which have won awards. In addition to top scholarly outlets, his work has been repeatedly published in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Academy of Management and Executive Organizational Dynamics, as well as in venues like Business Week, Fortune, The Financial Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CIO, Inc. and Fast Company. I’m so excited to have you on the show Rob, welcome!
Thank you so much. It’s a real privilege for me to be here, and thank you everybody for making the time to listen today.
I’m really excited to bring you on and as I mentioned to you in the preshow, I actually became familiar with your work through reading your article in the Harvard Business Review and in many of my networking workshops, I actually mention some of your work. But before we get into your work and you sharing some pretty actionable and unique insights with the listeners, I always ask my guests to describe their professional journey very briefly. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?
I started early on with a major technology organization and we were very focused on that point in time around knowledge management and how organizations could design databases and technologies that would move ideas more fluidly across the organization seamlessly. All the things we’re still talking about today in many ways. And I was very focused in my Doctoral work in designing systems that more naturally replicated how people thought, to increase absorption of ideas. What was amazing to me is I would go out and ask somebody, “How did you solve a big problem? Win a client, get a solution through, whatever it may be in the organization.” With the intent of understanding how they tapped the technology. And very rarely, if ever, did anybody say they used the technology. Everybody always mentioned that they turned to other people to get information, expertise, decision approval, things like that, and yet we had very little insight into what these patterns of connectivity that were promoting success or productivity looked like. So it kind of started me on a trajectory of saying, if you could take an x-ray or an MRI in two groups you care about and understand how positive and negative aspects of connectivity were either promoting ideas or actually hurting performance in some ways, it would give a really different set of insights to leaders. That has accelerated over the 20 years through several different consortiums that I’ve run. Worked with over 300 organizations, as you mentioned, and consistently really coming at this from the perspective of kind of two levels. One is, as a leader, if you had the insights, what do you do with groups you do control in your organizations? And then two, as an individual, if we look to see what do to the high performers do and they’re the people who get and stay in the upwardly mobile category? It’s often very counter intuitive, in terms of how they’re managing connectivity in a way that promotes performance and well-being. That’s been a journey, really, over about 22 years now that has kept me super busy through a range of different consortia and opportunities to engage with a really great group of organizations.
Super interesting to me, and I think that a lot of times we neglect to stop and think explicitly or proactively or intentionally about the role that our network plays in our own success and in the success of the organization. You say that in today’s flatter organizations, work of significance demands effective collaboration within and across organizational, functional, physical and hierarchical boundaries. In your research you focus on what is called network analysis and thinking about how that can bring about performance improvement opportunities that a lot of traditional managerial tools miss. So I definitely want you to describe to us, what is this network analysis and why should leaders be paying more attention to it?
The approach is an analytic way of understanding different patterns of collaboration. Who is interacting with them? We may be using surveys in some instances and other instances we may look at electronic forms of communication. Not opening emails and mining the emails, but just looking to see who is sending and responding to emails or other kinds of electronic communications with people. But no matter how we do it, there’s a range of different sources we can leverage. The core idea is being able to understand in large groups, maybe 3,000 or 5,000, 40,000 or 50,000 people, ways that the patterns of interaction are either promoting success or slowing things down in invisible ways. When you say, “Why should people care about it?” what I’ve seen in my work is, over the past decade, a massive increase in the collaborative intensity of work. Especially for your audience today, I can see over and over and over again, you kind of sneak through this middle tier in the organizations and get to the senior executive ranks and things get a lot easier. Fewer demands coming at you in different ways, but for this level, the collaborative intensity of the work – and by that I mean this reflectively thinking about it yourself – the amount of time each week you spend on the phone, on email or on meetings, has just skyrocketed. It’s generally about 85 percent or more of people’s weeks, and we do absolutely nothing to track the effectiveness of that and the efficiency of these different sets of interactions that are taking so much time in so many places.
We can track airline seats down to two decimal places. We have the systems to be able to kind of look at that or other things, but a lot of times, this collaborative fabric that is either driving results or creating gridlock and excessive cost structures and actually poor health for people is an invisible impact on organizations. It’s a very robust way of being able to look at how work is getting done differently today and taking very targeted actions that promote connectivity in a way that yields performance over time. Way too often, the knee-jerk reaction when anybody says the word collaboration is to always assume more. To always say, “We need to be doing more with these people or connecting more rapidly with other people.” Usually companies are throwing and layering in various applications. The mid-level leaders that I’m speaking with now are describing having to work across seven, eight and even nine applications to get their work done, all in the spirit of promoting more collaboration. Of course that’s draining us all in different ways. Many, many people describe working from 8 to 6, just getting through all the collaborative demands and then going home to do their work and get things done. It’s a way of being able to kind of take a look at that and see how things are going and then they can make data or evidence-based decisions on where you do need greater connectivity, but at the same time, how and where you create space for that by reducing other demands in the system.
So, it sounds really interesting and I guess very high-level. Break it down for us a little bit. What are the tactical ways in which people can tap into this insight? What can leaders actually do to tap into this and benefit from it?
The actual conduct of network analysis is pretty simple and pretty straightforward. There’s a lot of emerging technologies that are coming from established vendors. Microsoft has fantastic products that are looking collectively at email and calendar data, both at an organizational level or at an individual level, or it can be as simple again as a very simple 8-10 minute web-based survey. We - the consortia I run, the Connected Commons, we run quarterly virtual programs for free and we give everybody the software away for free as a kind of public service. So it’s a very fairly simple and straightforward thing to be able to conduct and go and look at how things are getting done, whether you choose a more elaborate kind of approach and looking at emails or other trails like that, or a more kind of hands-on approach. But it allows you to see in those patterns who is turning to whom for information to get their work done, or you might look at other kinds of interactions that you care about in groups. For example, you might look at decision making, or if we are at a bank we might look at production, where people have collaborated in ways that generated revenue differently or we’ll also often look at emotional dimensions in these networks. So the thing that has out-predicted everything for 22 years has been the idea of energy and mapping. Who are the people who create enthusiasm in a group? We all intuitively know that. You’ve been around people that have the ability to just get people engaged and enthused and what they’re up to, and our work shows over and over again that the small set of people are hugely important in organizations and that ability to create energy is about four-times the predictor of a high-performer as anything else we’ve see. Then we’ve seen the reverse. You have people that can just rip the life out of a discussion, and the way they sit in a room or the way they kind of comment on things. So being able to see that, it’s not then a matter of saying, “This person is an energizer, that person is a de-energizer.” Rather, we’ve focused very carefully on nine specific things the energizers do that differentiate them. They’re more likely to see possibilities, to connect with what others care about. They’re more likely to disagree in a productive way rather than say, “That’s a bad idea, given where we’re trying to go, there’s an alternative.” And by virtue of being able to do that, boiling this idea down, not just being able to visualize it, but to also convert it into what behaviors need to change to adapt the culture, you can have really tremendous impact. It’s actually very, very actionable, both analytically but also kind of driving results from these kinds of analytics.
So your analytics and sort of the network maps that they create, you can see who is an energizer and who is de-energizing, or it’s questions you’re asking people about those people?
We can see at that level, if that’s how you choose to set it up. A lot of organizations will choose to go in and conduct the assessments in a way that maintains complete confidentiality, and so in those cases you’re not necessarily looking down to the individual, but you may be aggregating the results of teams or units or looking at culture in an organization differently. In other cases, it really is entirely based on the culture of the organization. They’re just more ready to look at and think about these network analytics in a more detailed level. And in those cases, they may not release it to everybody, but they may say, “We’re going to show some high level ideas around where silos exist that are hurting us or where overload is slowing us down and how we can shift decision making, interactions, things like that.” And then maybe they’ll show to a select few people in HR, a select few leaders, who the strong energizers are, and you care about that a lot for change-related purposes or succession planning purposes. Or, you just as importantly care about who are the people that are stuck on the fringe that you just haven’t on-boarded as well as you think.
What I find in all of this work is it can take quite a while for people to get engaged.
And you can see on the map, visually, who the energizers are by the way that information flows to them and from them?
Yes, we can do that for sure, and other analytics that kind of let us get a sense. A lot of times we’re not using the actual maps in the discussions because I’m less interested in getting down into questions and hearing what one person thought of another, but what I might show is that, gosh, Susan, who had not been being thought about in terms of promotion, turns out to be an energizer for 45 other people. And if you lose Susan, if you pass her or him by, then those people are more likely to leave, obviously, and when they do, we know the follow on attrition is even greater with those people. So that would be more of the emphasis to think about. Not who is saying what about whom, but rather, what are the categories of people in these networks that you as a leader really want to be thinking about? And this is a surprise to leaders, who would be on your show, but usually they’re about 50 percent off. What I can say is that about three to five percent of the people typically account for 20 to 35 percent of the value-added collaborations in most places, and if I asked leaders to guess ahead of time and tell me who are your top 20, they’ll get the top two or three right, but then they’ll miss four and seven and eight, 10, 12, so it’s often a really great analytic to say, “Where do I have talent that I may be overlooking?” They’re more susceptible to departure, causing other kinds of inefficiencies in the group.
Awesome. That’s really helpful. I saw on your website that you have a collection of success stories from leaders, and of course we’ll link to your website and people can go read those. But I would love for you to share one or two that really demonstrate how leaders can solve problems from a network perspective and add value, strategic problem solving value to the organization or to their own leadership.
Sure. Obviously I can’t mention names of companies, but I can kind of talk about general themes we’re seeing. One of them right now in many organizations are these transitions to agile environments. We have a lot of organizations in the consortium that are in the process of moving into agile team-based structures and the processes they tend to follow is they’ll compile eight teams, eight scrum teams and start this process of seeing if agile is successful. Well, they completely stack the deck in their favor. They pick the eight teams, staff them with the very best performers, give them a lot of attention, resources, physical space, other things that make them successful, and they’ll claim victory off of eight. They’ll say, “We need to diffuse this out to hundreds of scrum teams and actions.” And that’s when they start to hit a problem, because you think about it yourself, when you’re sitting around thinking about who is going to go on these scrum teams, you are generally – without these analytics – you’re generally picking by reputation and it means that usually, 90 plus percent of the time, you’re picking your busy people in the networks. In essence what you’re doing in these wholesale transitions is you’re taking your most connected, most important people out of an existing work stream and putting them on some kind of agile initiative, so you’re disrupting a work stream in one area and then of course those people’s connections don’t just stop coming because they are in an agile team. They still have to be a resource and an answer to get things done, so you create overload on the scrum teams in a lot of ways that has ground a lot of these initiatives to a halt over time.
You start to see the disruption in work means clients that are lost or other things that become a problem, and especially the people on the teams getting overwhelmed with demands and working late into the night and also to other things. That’s an example of where we’ve been able to kind of see that pattern analytically through a whole series of companies and then say it’s not that you don’t do agile – that’s a great approach – but it is that you leverage the analytics to inform your decision. Rather than take your top of mind people and put them on these teams, look for what I call the second tier connectors in these networks. Not the most busy, but the next tier down that you’re trying to develop in different ways and make them nominations into these efforts. If you do that well, you tend to kind of balance out the demand, the collaborative demands on the system, in a way that is feasible for people to engage in. There’s a lot in that regard, where if we think about any kind of change effort, this just happens to be one form that’s going crazy right now through the system. Any kind of change effort like that, if you’re doing it more intentionally by looking at the collaborative analytics and then making decisions, you end up doing much, much better.
Similar kind of thing that our members have gotten huge traction on are, for example, integrating new groups, like merger situations. They falter dramatically in most places, but if you run the analytics, you can start to get a sense of who do we need to staff together? Taking well-connected people from either side and really streamlining the integration process, as well as avoiding loss. You have a very rich sense of who should get the retention bonuses. It actually often times isn’t the formal hierarchy that you’re most concerned with when you look at things this way. There’s just a lot around change related applications and whether it’s bands and layers, agile, merger integrations, things where if you can understand where these influencers exist, where overload is happening, you just do things very differently. That’s one kind of approach.
I think the other big thing that everybody is always interested in is how do we cross silos? If you mention the word agile or collaboration or whatever, nine times out of 10 that’s what people are really saying at the heart of it is we want to drive innovation by getting different kinds of capabilities connected that go to market differently or whatever. Yet way too often they apply this kind of knee-jerk reaction. We’re going to throw a tool at it and we’re going to get everybody connected, and that just overwhelms. So, we get a huge amount of traction in different ways by running the analytics and seeing where silos exist across capabilities in an organization. Life sciences, it might be key scientific abilities, software, it may be key kinds of coding. If it’s professional services, it may be capabilities you’re trying to take to market. The idea then is to say not how do we get everybody connected to everybody else, but to be really precise at those intersection points where, with a little bit of investment and finding ways to work together, you can drive core innovations. Over and over and over again, we’ve seen great success with that.
For example, one major consumer products company (I can’t mention the name of it), they have a 10,000 person R&D group and they found 42 specific intersections where they weren’t getting groundbreaking innovations that should have been possible if they got people to connect across capabilities, domains. What they specifically did, they have these massive facilities that people can go into and do ideation sessions and practice what IDEO tells you to do, design thinking and everything else. But the problem is, every time anybody decided to hold a brainstorming session it would take the same people over and over again. Always you had to have this expert, because they were high reputation. With the analytics what we could show them was you want to get those people, the people who are central and high reputation in that group, but what you really want is those people who are sitting between the groups. People that I call boundary spanners or brokers. Because they have perspective on what will work on either side, and they’re less protective of their turf, less seeing the problem through a certain lens. They found when they organize those ideation sessions differently, by kind of pulling people from the network in different packages, they had very different outcomes. The possibilities that were coming out of them were much, much broader and much more innovative. That’s one example. I’ve seen things like that. You’re really thinking about how do you leverage what you see in the network to kind of drive innovation a little bit differently.
Makes sense. It’s really much more strategic and thoughtful. You mentioned earlier that this kind of thinking and this kind of insight can also help people on a personal level, a personal/professional level. What would be something that you’ve seen really change for leaders personally as they think about network analysis with their own careers?
That’s a great question. That’s been a huge piece of work fro about the last decade or so that we’ve been very, very focused on running these analytics and then collecting performance data from the company separately, and then our emphasis is on understanding what do the networks of what I’ll call successful people look like? We’ve been framing that idea of success in two ways. One is that you get and stay in the upwardly mobile category, and so you’re doing things that enable you, through your network, to be innovative, to scale, to do other things. And, are you just God forbid happy in your work? Are you also scoring high on measures of thriving or resilience or well-being? And what we found in all of that is the conventional advice is not great. It’s never a big network that distinguishes more successful people. That only works in very transactional kinds of goals like maybe residential real estate sales and things like that. It’s always much more nuanced, especially today with all the demands coming in on people and especially the group that would be listening to this podcast.
Rather, what we see is this kind of side, if you can kind of envision it with me a little bit, where on the left side of the loop, what we can see the more successful people are doing are things that create more collaboratively-efficient networks. For the past decade, I’ve been very focused on using the analytics to see who the people that give the greatest impact and take the least amount of time, and then we interviewed them in great depth. Started with 100 men and 100 women and then did a lot of other analytics on this to see what are the things that those people were doing to buy back about 18 to 24 percent of their time? They’re about a day a week more efficient than kind of average people in the network. It boils down to very specific things they do in terms of how they put structure into their work differently, how they manage their own identity triggers in terms of jumping in when they shouldn’t, and then behaviorally. How they run meetings or how they use email, other things like that. Things that on the margin we have a lot more control, even if it’s mid-tier level, than we think. The people that are more proactive on saying, “I’m not going to allow the system to dictate me. I’m going to influence what I can influence,” do much better. Over time they buy back about, again, that proportion of time.
Then on the right-hand side, what they’re doing is not just investing it and doing the same thing faster. They’re thinking kind of carefully about what is it that distinguishes a successful person today in terms of how they outperform and also how they thrive in connections and investing that way. On that side of it, it’s a broad network, early-stage problem solving that distinguishes the high performers over time. That’s the biggest predictor, my work and other people’s work has shown, and so what that means is right very tactically when you have eight things going on and you’re already stressed and the ninth lands at your desk, there is a category person that is so overwhelmed that all they do is hunker down and try to get it down. Then there’s another category that bought back just enough time that they’re exploring in the network a little bit and saying, “Is there a different way to look at this? A different way to involve other people to address a client need?” Whatever it is.
It’s that second category that wins because they’re solving a bigger problem and they’re building a better reputation in the network, so things kind of flow to them more. The key to it, for me, is if you’ve allowed yourself to become collaboratively overwhelmed, such that you’re redlined, just trying to get through the day so you can get to your work at night, that is of course the first thing you stop doing. You don’t explore and kind of see things more innovatively. Or you’re not an energizer. When I mentioned that idea early, it turns out that the energizers, statistically, if you are an energizer, other people see you that way. Not yourself. You’re not saying, “I’m an energizer.” Other people are saying it. Then, statistically, that’s four times the predictor of a high-performance behavior. Again, the very first behaviors are you stop engaging others in when you’re overwhelmed. It’s this kind of recursive loop and the way we’re showing it is an infinity loop. You’ve got to buy back time first and then figure out how to engage in a way that gives you scale and when you do that, that enables you to buy back more time.
We’re finding the people that are kind of doing that on the margin are the ones that are successful. The people, and especially at this level on your podcast, that I talk to in all these interviews who are on their second or third divorce and kids don’t like them and they’ve just kind of fallen into bad places in life, you can tell this is actually very personal for me. Having been through hundreds and hundreds of interviews, you get stories that are very deep at a certain point. It’s because they’ve fallen into this trap of thinking things are going to get better in three months or six months or whatever the timeframe is and they’re not owning the situation and pushing back with the leverage they have. That’s kind of the key, and when we’ve distinguished the more successful people versus the less, it’s this kind of proactive tendency to play offense and not kind of fall into the patterns that are dictated to them. You can’t control everything, but if you start looking for the small opportunities, we find that’s how this game is won. It’s stopping the death of a thousand cuts. Not trying to control the one or two big things you may not be able to, but the marginal things that you can that pay off over time.
This is so interesting to me and it still feels nebulous. Like I’m not sure, how would someone listening right now be able to apply what you’re saying? What would be a couple of things they could do that could help them move out of the negative kind of loop that you’re describing, which sounds very familiar to me – I also hear stories like that and it’s just terrible.
One very tactical thing that people would have access to is, and I published a piece in Harvard Business Review on this, we created an online tool that is made available through that piece. It’s a 25-item question that people spend five to eight minutes going through and then they automatically have generated a profile around here are the three things that you most need to go think about. It kind of customizes the recommendations for people. That would be an easy thing to think about and look at in the article. We can post that with this podcast.
Just purely tactically, we find the more efficient collaborators, they’re much more likely to strategically calendar Friday night or Sunday night for one week or four weeks of time – depending on their level and the timeframe that they’re working toward – and what they’re doing is managing two a rhythm of work that meets who they are. I would talk to some people and the first thing they want to do in the morning is get on email and get that done. The very next person would say, “Why would I let other people start my day? I’m going to focus on what needs to be done creative and I’m going to block email in 30-minute chunks through the days. And then I’m going to put the creative work for Friday at 3:00,” which would surprise me, but people would say, “I know enough about myself that I know if I think about something creative at that point, it just kind of stays in the back of my head over the weekend. And I’m more likely to have these ideas pop by the time Monday rolls around and solutions to things. So that’s an example of what I mean by putting structure in. Whereas many people kind of allow their calendars to be dictated to them, these individuals are saying based on kind of my priorities, the capabilities I want to distinguish on and the value I enjoy experiencing in my work, I’m going to manage to that as much as I can through calendaring in a way that pulls me into networks. It’s not just the calendaring. That’s the problem with so much of the traditional time management stuff is that it assumes that you’re an atom in isolation. It’s not looking at the things that drive you back. That’s an example.
Another easy thing to do is, with executives that I get to that are overwhelmed in different ways, we look back four months in their calendar and with select email trails and you can’t look back last week because we’ll justify everything. As human beings we have an amazing ability to say why everything is critical. But if you look back four months, what you’re looking for is four things – the routine informational requests that I’m getting that I don’t need to be answering. I’m not adding unique value and it’s not adding value to me and I could make somebody else a go-to person on that. So you’re looking for routine informational requests, routine decision approvals that you’re getting pulled into, routine portions of your role that if you could buck it in different ways and use to get talent that you’re trying to pull into your team more connected, it has a dual effect. It takes the demand off of you and something you don’t care about and it slingshots these more peripheral people on your team into more productive roles. And you get them more active, more vibrant, more quickly. So you look back four months and do that and then you look ahead two months and see what are the routine calendar entries, the reoccurring meetings, and do we really need them or can we cut them in half or whatever? People will get huge portions of their time that way, if you take me up on it. Those are two very specific things out of 25 that come out of that assessment.
Great. You’ll send me so we can share a specific article and we’ll link to that in the show notes. That sounds great. Awesome. I want to talk to you for a lot longer, but we are running out of time. Before you share one super specific tactical action people can take, what’s new and exciting on your horizon these days Rob?
The thing I’m most enthused about right now is we’ve shifted our lens a lot from looing at what the high performers are doing to looking at what happy people are doing. So I’ve done that analytically in a ton of places. By happy I kind of mean saying that tongue-in-cheek. We’ve measured psychological well-being, resilience, engagement, career satisfaction, all these different ideas that are very valid to see what’s unique about people that are just kind of doing better in life. Now we’re doing interviews, so I’m interviewing 150 people this year, just like this audience. So 15 organizations have given me five of their most successful women and five of their most successful men and we’re spending 90 minutes kind of walking through connections promote physical health, connections promote a sense of purpose in people’s lives, they’re promoting a sense of resilience and the ability to bounce back, and a sense of growth and adaptation. That is as you emerge. These super powerful stories and very, very specific things that people do to live more intentionally and they do better when they’re thinking about these other elements. That’s the thing I’m most kind of passionate about today and what we’re doing right now.
I can see why, and I look forward to reading the results when you publish them or maybe we can bring you back on to talk about that. That’s exciting and interesting. Thank you. So, what’s one specific action that our listeners can take today, tomorrow, this week to help them upgrade their own leadership success using your lens?
I would say to be intentional and think about the way in which you’re engaging others and the way in which you’re affecting others in the network. That’s an uber principle in all of this, that we find that the more successful people, it’s not that they have a bigger network, but it’s usually one that’s more proactively built in the face of needs that are coming at you. So that’s kind of the uber principle and a very specific thing I would push yourself to think about is, as you go each day, are you creating a context where others experiencing energy in their work? Not do you get it, but are you creating a context where others get enthused about what they are up to? Do you co-create with them? Do you start with a why before the what and the how? Do you do a set of things that, in essence, allow them to kind of engage differently, to kind of feel and bring a greater sense of commitment to the work? That’s the biggest predictor we see of successful leaders and everything we’ve done and it’s very tactical, it’s very incumbent in the leaders themselves. We found that people join organizations but then they stay and they engage and they give greater effort to the leaders that create that context around them.
Awesome, so be an energizer!
That’s it!
I love it. That’s your bumper sticker. Well, it’s been fun talking with you Rob. I appreciate you sharing your insights. Thank you so much for coming on the TalentGrow Show and letting us learn from you. How can people stay in touch with you and learn more?
Absolutely. I enjoyed it. The biggest site for us is Connected Commons, a consortium that I run, like an open source community in many regards, and we’re constantly putting out both research and tools on that site. Some of the things I’m speaking about here, you can get a lot greater depth by just kind of perusing that and pulling down some of the things we’re constantly posting. For example, we know energizers, it’s nine specific things they do that distinguishes them over time. That would probably be the best outlet, to look at that site periodically.
Great, and do you hang out on social media? Should people follow you anywhere?
I do have a Twitter account that somebody got for me, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the best.
Super. Again, thank you very much.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
OUTRO
TalentGrowers, I love how super actionable and concrete Rob made that recommendation there at the end for your actionable tip, and I do hope that you will take action because there is no chain to that action. Take action, let me know how it went, let me know what questions you still have. Let’s keep the conversation going. You can always comment on the show notes page over on TalentGrow.com. You can leave me a voicemail message, hit me up on social media or email me Halelly@talentgrow.com. I would love to hear from you about this episode and also about what you’d like to hear about in the future. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this is the TalentGrow Show. Until the next time, make today great.
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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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta
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