173: Extreme Trust – How to Build Unstoppable Cultures and Teams with Jason Treu
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The level of trust, safety, and connection among colleagues in the top-performing 1% of teams is over the roof according to leadership expert and author Jason Treu. Jason advocates for what he calls ‘extreme trust’ in the workplace, and on this episode of The TalentGrow Show he shares how leaders can cultivate it to build unstoppable cultures and teams. Listen to discover how trust and connection transform culture, what you can do to promote a culture of safety in your team that allows for true vulnerability, and how to take the guesswork out of working relationships. Plus, learn about “Cards Against Mundanity,” the #1 team-building game Jason developed to skyrocket teamwork, communication and performance! Tune in and be sure to share this episode with others.
ABOUT JASON TREU:
Jason Treu is a Chief People Officer and leadership and teamwork expert. He helps leaders, managers and HR professionals build unstoppable cultures and teams with unbreakable connections, extreme scrappiness and the courage to tackle seemingly impossible goals. He provides coaching, workshops, keynote speaking, conflict resolution, and other training services. He spent 15+ years in leadership positions working with industry-changers such as Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), and Mark Cuban. He’s the best-selling author of Social Wealth, that’s sold more than 60,000 copies. His 2017 TEDxWilmington talk was on “How to Get CoWorkers to Like Each Other.”
More than 25,000 managers and employees are using his culture and team building game Cards Against Mundanity to increase trust, communication, and teamwork. It’s being used at Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Ernst & Young, Google, Gillette, Microsoft, Oracle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Worldwide Express, CareHere, Oklahoma City Thunder (NBA team), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Novartis, Merck, Intel, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and many others. He has his law degree and master’s in communications from Syracuse University.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
What is ‘extreme trust,’ how can leaders build it, and how does it enhance employee engagement? (4:38)
There are so many barriers to having a perfect team. What can leaders actually do to overcome them? (8:11)
How to promote a culture of safety that allows true vulnerability (10:48)
Jason describes the neurological basis for trust in the workplace (13:54)
“Cards Against Mundanity”— the structured culture- and team-building game that Jason invented (15:10)
How suspicion sabotages productivity (17:49)
Jason shares a couple of stories that highlight how trust and connection transform culture (19:00)
Taking the guesswork out of working relationships with a “how to work with me” manual (22:34)
What’s new and exciting on Jason’s horizon? (31:25)
One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness (32:05)
RESOURCES:
Get Jason’s book, Social Wealth: How to Build Extraordinary Relationships by Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Lead and Network
Check out Jason’s website
Check out Cards Against Mundanity, Jason’s structured culture- and team-building game
Episode 173 Jason Treu
TEASER: The problem with teams is the little things that start to create the disconnection between us, that those divides get bigger and bigger over time. It rarely is some major thing where someone is in a meeting, out of the blue, and yells at you about something. Whenever I hear that from someone I’m like, “That’s the end.” That’s the leaf on the tree, not the root. If we got at the root, we never would have gotten to that point. Something else has happened in almost all the cases.
INTRO 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.
Hey there TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist and I’m here at TalentGrow which I launched in 2006 to develop leaders that people actually want to follow. TalentGrow sponsors the TalentGrow Show so that you can listen to it for free every Tuesday. This week, we are going to talk about how to build trust fast with all kinds of people. I’ve brought on Jason Treu, who is going to share with you some of his insights with working with thousands and thousands of people in very impressive companies like Southwest Airlines and Ernst & Young and Google and so on. He’s going to share with you a very applicable, very practical, very concrete type of technique that you can use, and some stories about how that works and why. I hope that you find today very interesting. I did, and I look forward to hearing what you thought about it afterwards. Without further ado, let’s listen to my conversation with Jason.
LET’S GET THE SHOW STARTED! TalentGrowers, welcome back. This week I have Jason Treu. He is a chief people officer and leadership and teamwork expert. He helps leaders, managers and HR professionals build unstoppable cultures and teams with unbreakable connections, extreme scrappiness and the courage to tackle seemingly impossible goals. He provides coaching, workshops, keynote speaking, conflict resolution and other training services. He spent 15-plus years in leadership positions working with industry changers such as Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, and Mark Cuban. He is the best-selling author of Social Wealth, that sold more than 60 thousand copies, and his 2017 Ted X Wilmington talk was on how to get co-workers to like each other. Jason, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Thanks for having me on your show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.
I’m really glad that you have joined, and I look forward to our conversation today. TalentGrowers know I always ask my guests first to briefly describe their professional journey. Where did you start and how did you get to where you are today?
Well, like a lot of your guests, it’s a long and windy road. I went to law school and got my masters in communications from Syracuse University, and then I decided to go west to Silicon Valley during the technology gold rush. That was a fantastic opportunity to work with many significant leaders that are out there today in the Valley, because I worked in a PR and marketing agency at the time. I got to work with Pixar, a lot of Yahoo when they were in their heyday and Mark Cuban got acquired there. I got to just work with a lot of great individuals and people. Apple, it goes on and on. It was a fortunate thing. Then I decided to move closer to my mom and family back in Dallas. I was working at HP long-distance for quite a while, and along this journey I felt like the real passion was working with people and helping work with leaders and managers and having them work better together, and also really understanding communication, teamwork and really helping people bring out the best in each other. I started to do that as a side hustle for a little while, and then eventually full-time.
Definitely I love stories like that. I do find that most people’s careers are meandering paths and that side hustle is a cool way to try new things and take minimized or controlled risk. Good for you that it’s worked out for you and you’re doing good work in the world. There’s a lot of research that says there is really low employee engagement, and that a lot of organizations feel like they’re struggling with people that are not really at their best at work. You say that high-performing, engaged teams are built on the foundation of what you’re calling extreme trust. So, I would love for you to break down, what does that mean? What is extreme trust, and how can TalentGrowers create that kind of trust on their teams?
The problem when you start having conversations – and I’ve literally now had thousands of them. I think I’ve spoken to like 15,000 people, and probably three-quarters of the have been in talent functions – and when you ask them the question, “How do you build a culture? How do you build employee engagement? How do you build trust?” the details get really, really sketchy. They can’t really talk about a process that they’re actually institutionalizing that anyone can use and that can be both strategic and tactical. They really don’t get down to trust. They talk about it as a side benefit, like a leaf on a tree and not the root. It’s clearly the foundation of everything that you do. Because when you think about when you meet a new person, really, in the back of your head unconsciously, you’re asking two questions – do I trust you or not? And at what level do I trust you? Because when you think about the people who are closest in your life, you implicitly tell them anything without much of a filter and have a conversation. You wouldn’t do that with other people. So that is how we operate.
When we take a look at the top one percent teams – which I’ve gone and looked at them – a lot of them have been sales-driven times, because I can stratify them on a piece of paper based on how they’re doing vis-a-vis the other people. The level of trust, the level of psychological safety, the level of connection and belonging is out of the roof. You can tell that, and that coincides with helpfulness and caring and everything else. So what extreme trust really is, when you think about it on a scale of one to five, extreme distrust and then extreme trust on that side of it, you’d have everyone picking a five, on the entire team. When you have that, you have a closeness, because extreme trust by definition says, “I know you extremely well and your experiences and you’ve shared quite a bit. You’ve taken risk in telling me information you wouldn’t tell other people. You are vulnerable. You’re going to have tough conversations with me. You’re willing to go to difficult places and you’re willing to embrace failure because the opposite side of that is significant success.” That is a requirement to build that from day one, and what most people do is they inch through this process, or they do it very haphazardly. So you have half the team trusting someone and half the team not, and then you’ll see the team doing fairly well, but they can never get at the highest level.
Another way to think about this is if you think about the greatest team you’ve ever been on. Either personally or professionally. Think about how you felt about those people, what you accomplished, how you were able to communicate and collaborate and then what you thought of the future things with those people. Now imagine a world in which every team you were on, that was how you felt and how you communicated and how you operated.
It sounds amazing and of course I teach this as well, so I just want to engage with you in this conversation a little bit further. I believe some of the TalentGrowers, as they’re listening to you, will say, “Well, that’s really great, but how the heck do you do that, especially when you have people on your team that are not making themselves extra vulnerable or not being extra trustworthy or I inherited them and I would not pick them for my team but I have them?” There are so many different barriers to having a perfect team. What can people actually do?
I think what you have to do is start to engage them in a way to build trust by have them opening up and sharing. You have to do it through massive level of being open and sharing very personal information, because otherwise, what happens and takes forever and it probably will never happen. I saw some research that was done by a professor at Arthur Aaron back in 1997. He was trying to do an exercise with individuals to build extreme closeness with them in minutes. And he had them ask vulnerable questions and they were complete strangers and did not know each other at all. So over the course of 45 minutes, 30-percent of the people said that they had created a closeness relationship in their life, and they’ve replicated this dozens of times over geography, sexes, with different people from geographies, everything, and the result sets have been the same.
So what you can take away from that is you have to have vulnerability to understand people’s experiences, because otherwise our biases and other things separate us from other people. And what we do is, we start to collect ourselves and start to lead ourselves and be around people that are like us, many other people who are similar to us. But once we start sharing experiences, we start to see the people that are different from us have many of the same experiences and they have many of the same emotional experiences and then we realize we’re all one. And we’re not that different. That’s how you break down barrier and you create closeness and you get people to know each other really fast, really well.
I think to some degree, it’s probably in that experiment, that those people didn’t have anything to lose. There were no ulterior motives that they might suspect the other person has over them, and I know that a lot of times, in workplaces, the people that have a hard time being open, being vulnerable, showing weakness or just showing their true selves, some people are very suspicious. Maybe for good reason. Maybe someone took advantage of them or used information that they gave in a way that supported their progress up the ladder or something like this. So what do you think?
I’ve done this at organizations with 700 employees or 500 or 600. It doesn’t even matter the number, and what happens is, in those groups, however they’re orchestrated and organized, you have a senior person go first and share. And everyone answers and asks the same question. So you can see the similarities and what happens in all the time is that people will open up and share. Sure, sometimes it may take a couple of questions for people to open up, but everyone does, because they start to see there’s a group safety level when everyone shares. No one is going to tell someone else your secret if six other people heard it, because not only to be ostracized, there are actually other consequences that would occur from that, that would be pretty significant organizational. No manager or leader is going to let that happen on their watch because there are consequences for them. I’ve never had any single person come back, when I follow up with every single person, and I follow up now for three years, ever share outside of the group something significant with someone else malicious or gossip or whatever. Do I think it could happen? Sure. But it could snowfall here in Dallas in July too. I mean, I guess of the .001 percent of everything, but it’s massive level change that can happen.
The other part of this that’s so powerful if you do this in a group and you do this in a group of 20 and you split it up, what you’ll find is all 20 people feel the same about each other, as long as they know they’ve done the exercise. Because this stuff spreads. The key thing is asking enough questions and getting there so you can see yourself in other people. Once our brain starts to share and we start to listen, we don’t see the outside of the person. We don’t even see the person itself, we just see an individual. Then as we get evidence about that person, we start viewing them from the inside out instead of the outside in, and if we question all of the evidence and what we thought about them, because a lot of the things we think about people are false narratives and stories, based on how our brain works and things, and the direct evidence overwhelms that, so it creates massive behavioral changes in people in minutes and sets in motion opportunities for you. It’s not the only thing you have to do, but is a massive first step to open not just a crack in the door, but blow the door off the hinges.
I love it. TalentGrowers know I sometimes put on my devil’s advocate hat to think if someone might be listening, what might they say as objections? So we can give it to them. I just had a recent solo episode, 159, where I talked about a very similar thing, super important, so I’m with you.
You don’t know people, and people have this false sense that you know the people around you, but you don’t because what you do is, our brain is wired to make quick meaning of the world around us. We get chemical releases, because we’re built for survival and we have to get rid of fear. Otherwise we couldn’t get out of the house every single day. A false sense of seeing the world around us and that’s why we have all of these biases and everything else. It’s fear-based, because we need to stay alive from caveman days. Now, that obviously hurts us because with diversity and diversity of thinking are absolutely critical to being a successful individual and on a successful team. So the only way to do that is give yourself direct evidence that the people around you are very similar to you in many ways, because then you’re more apt to go all-in on them and vice versa. Today there is no person that can be a rock star and have a bunch of people that are mediocre around her. So you are responsible for other people’s success to some level, because they will bring you down if you don’t bring them up. It’s an easy way to start that process.
That’s a great point, I love it. I want to have you talk a little more about this really cool thing that you did, which is to create a game. You call it Cards Against Mundanity – some people might know there is a game called Cards Against Humanity that probably you’re leveraging the name, and if not, look it up but don’t have your kids around for that – and you have used this with more than 25,000 managers and employees in places and it’s being used in places like Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Ernst & Young, Google, Gillette, Microsoft, Oracle, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Worldwide Express. The list goes on, and kudos on that success. I like your Ted X talk that describes it and we’ll link to that in the show notes. So, tell us a little more about this game and why is it a good idea for leaders to use it? In fact, you have it for free download on your website.
You get cards and you can pay for them, but I wanted to show people it actually works for them without having them to have to actually pay. What it is, in essence, you go in a group of people and you pick questions and everyone answers the same. What do those questions look like? Questions like, “Tell me what superhero you would like to be and what superpower you’d like to have?” Fun questions like that, or, “Tell me if there’s an actor in a movie that is going to play you, who would it be and why?” And then questions such as, “Tell me the most important lesson you’ve learned in the last year. If you were to thank someone for helping you become the person you are, what was that? Tell me your biggest blessing in disguise?” They are questions that really elicit information that you’re sharing with other people and opening up that you most likely would never share with them, unless there was some circumstance. It would probably be only a few people. Now we can do it in a compressed amount of time, create that knowledge with people across the board which helps you communicate, collaborate, work with people. Because everyone I’ve asked who works with people that they love, they talk about how well they know them. Well, what if you could just know a lot more people? You’d work a lot better with them by defacto, right? But you just don’t. This is a way to expedite the process in getting to know people significantly and them getting to know you and what makes you tick. All of that then raises a level of your performance, your collaboration, your communication and your ability to do your greatest work. That means you’re going to be trending successful and the people around you will.
Because suspicion and low trust are things that totally get in the way of productivity.
It can sabotage everything. And if I have a problem with you and I don’t really know you extremely well, do you think I’m going to take you in a room and have a conversation with you? The risk is way too high. I won’t. That’s what causes the problems for people for conflict resolution. It’s the problem that happened five years ago when someone said something in a meeting that made them feel like they were stupid, that they never raised, and it started a divide. It created all these problems not only in the team, but in multiple teams. And it stemmed from the smallest, little thing because that person did not feel comfortable pulling aside other people and having that conversation, and now it’s lost millions of dollars and created tons of problems and people leaving the organization and all of these other negative consequences and it just is a cascade, like an avalanche going down Mt. Everest, directed right at you and it could have been avoided in seconds.
So this is a good investment, right? It has so many ways that it pays off. Give us a story of a change or a turnaround that you’ve seen that was maybe triggered by this game.
I’ll tell you a couple of them that just happened. One was more, I would say not supremely over the top, was I did it at Google. It did start over the to because my client brought me in for 700 people for an off-site and they were having a lot of problems with their communication across some of their teams’ geography because they’d made all of these acquisitions and weren’t really sure what to do. They’d tried these things and it really didn’t work. I brought it in and asked questions and one of the first questions I asked, and I don’t even know what it was, but my client was sitting there and started to cry and talking about his kids and everyone at the table started to, and then everyone in this room. It was probably 200 people, I had to separate the groups for the rooms, but it was really interesting what came out of that one was that one of the things, they started to ask all of the people that were in the off-site, outside speaker questions, and their engagement went way up. They found that people from different geographies started to communicate in a way they never had suspected. One of them was the engineers in India actually made trips over to the U.S. to visit their U.S. counterparts and brought their families. They had never been to the U.S. before. So it made a supreme difference in there.
One of the things here, I did in a team with a commercial real estate team that was very high performing and they had a lot of problems and it really stemmed back from things that had happened three or four years ago, and the level of tears and level of how close and connected they were after going through this in less than two months was pretty intense to see. Their performance shot through the roof. They were way under plan and way over plan, and then one person left the team which was actually beneficial for them because now they had new standards and values. It was pretty amazing to see. My first group, it was pretty profound because there was a small business here in Dallas that I started to test this out. Two people hated each other and they were criticals for running the business, two women, and they were described to me as Superman and kryptonite. And I brought them in the room and one of the questions I asked was, “Tell me the biggest lost you’ve had in the last five years,” and one of them said their dog and one of them said their mom. And you’d think by yourself, that’s nowhere near the same, but what happened was they connected on the emotional experience of loss. I saw them walk out of the room, talking about it, which I thought was a great first step. They ended up having lunch later that week, and 30 days later they were social friends. It turned around their entire communication and their ability to work together, and the affect it had on everyone else on the team. It went from a team who was losing money on the profit side of things to now going to making money, for the first time in like five years. Instead of having to declare bankruptcy or dissolve the company. It was pretty dramatic, what can happen in a short period of time when you start to open people up.
Cool, very good. Thank you for sharing that. That’s very helpful. There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about. You are full of many ideas of how people can get to know each other better and build trust, and one other trick or technique that you’ve used and wrote about it in a recent article I read was that a lot of times people try to guess how to deal with us and guess what we like and don’t like and what we need, instead of asking directly. You suggest instead of just this whole roller coaster of confusion and miscommunication, misunderstandings, etc., how about if we just create a how-to-work-with-me manual. Tell us a little bit more about that.
When I started to ask a lot of really smart, extraordinary, senior-level managers on how they were working with their teams and how do they build better cohesion and communication and productivity and performance, I got a lot of things out of it from asking people. Also, what did they learn over time. One of the interesting things was the how to work with me manual, some people called it a user manual, was one of the things that these people had mentioned to me that was a critical element in their success, that they had made a lot of mistakes. Usually people had told me they’d almost gotten fired and had a lot of problems so they were like, “I’m sick of trying to guess what people want. I’m sick of trying to analyze that and predict,” because they were wrong a lot of the time and it cost them big time. They’re like, “Instead of doing that, why don’t I just ask someone explicitly? Have them tell me and then I don’t need to guess anymore, and it will solve all of these myriad of problems I have and show the other person I care about them and am interested in them, which now will help build more trust and take our relationship to the next level.” So how do we operationalize that and make it real. One of the things you’re writing about and taking a look at is that you’ve got to give people practical tools that they can actually get some of this stuff done instead of talk about it as pie in the sky. Someone can use this, if they’re managing a team or managing multiple teams, you can also use this as an individual to share with other people so you do not need other people to participate in it. If they know how to work with you better, that’s great. You could ask them to do it, but even if people don’t, it can benefit you. And it’s essentially creating a user manual, like you would buying instructions to put together anything you want. Think about the best user manual you’ve ever had, made it simple to organize or put something together – that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re sharing with people your operating system and what you want and what you need and what makes you thrive.
Questions are on there, you could ask what things energize me? What are my pet peeves? How can people best communication or interact with me? What times of the day are times you should just stay away? If I’m in a bad mood, here are three things you can pick to get me out of it. If you have hard feedback or want to tell me about something I’m not doing right, this is exactly how to approach me, here are the words and things to use and here’s how to act. And you can go through a bunch of questions and that will save you a lot of time, so you can just give them out to people. You can hand them to people if you’re an individual and you are not a manager on a team and you can’t do that. But if you’re a manager on a team, you can have everyone fill them out, you can talk about them at a high level, you can put them online so people can read them and have them, and it’s a great process to align people and do that, especially if you have to work across groups with other people and new people and you want to jump-start that relationship and have it hit the ground running and do it super fast. This works exceptionally well.
It also works well for people to have conversations, so sometimes what I’ll do, especially in conflict resolution, I’ll have people fill these out and then talk to each other one on one. It spurs another level of conversation about a lot of things that were bubbling below the surface that now get completely gone. And, they have a new level of understanding about each other. The other thing you can do too, for senior managers in some companies, is they create these much more in depth ones even. Like the COO of Stripe did, and she sends it out to entire companies so everyone knows how to email her, interact and everything. It’s pretty in depth. And that also helps too, because now people know pretty much what to expect and how to do things, rather than guessing and worrying and stressing out.
More explicit communication. I bet you that if nothing else, I would say that for some people, it might even be hard for them to answer these questions about themselves, because some of us don’t have as much clarity or self-awareness around our preferences. It might just be sort of gut reaction or knee-jerk reactions and we don’t even think about, “Is this intentional or what do I actually prefer, what would I want to say to someone that they should do with me?” Going through this exercise, if nothing else, can help you raise awareness about what you know about yourself and if it’s hard for you, well goodness me, it’s going to be hard for others to try and guess how to communicate with you if you don’t even know what you want.
And think about how much time this will save you and how much more productive in this position and so much conflict and how much people are going to want to be your advocates and want to help you and how this is good for your career. Everything you’re thinking about. Here’s the other thing I’ve found that happens too sometimes, and I think you brought up an excellent question. Let’s say someone brings up, “Here’s three things to interact with me in a bad mood.” And let’s say you write those down and you’re not actually sure and someone tries something and it doesn’t work. It gives them an opportunity to approach you and say, “Hey, you know, you put down bringing you a cup of coffee from Starbucks would help and you just bit my head off after I did that.” So then that person, that opens up another conversation opportunity that would have never been there, to squash a conflict or something else, or for you to say, “You know, I guess that’s probably not really it. It’s probably if you could have grabbed that brownie.” That helps too. That’s a simplistic example, but there are a lot of things that aren’t that can be extremely helpful. Even if you don’t know yourself and you struggle with this, it still gives people and opportunity to feel closer to bring issues and other challenges up to you and vice versa. Which, again, the problem with teams is the little things that start to create the disconnection between us, that those divides get bigger and bigger over time. It rarely is some major thing where someone is in a meeting, out of the blue, and yells at you about something. Whenever I hear that from someone I’m like, “That’s the end.” That’s the leaf on the tree, not the root. If we got at the root, we never would have gotten to that point. Something else has happened in almost all the cases. Sure, there are outliers, but in general, that’s what starts to happen.
I totally agree. I would say, also, I would just add TalentGrowers, as you’re listening, my guess is if you find yourself wanting to adapt this technique and maybe you’re one of those people that is like, “I’m not exactly sure,” then one thing you can do – and tell me, Jason, if you agree – is you could engage in a conversation with people that you already have a trusting relationship with. People that might be your peers, your managers or former managers or a coach or mentor or other people that know you. People even in your family, and then ask them some of the questions about yourself. What would you say would be my answer? They might sometimes see you in a way you don’t see yourself.
Yes. I always feel this much, if there is resistance and you need something to get around it, then do it. Then you’re going to get it done. If that’s helpful, I always say to people, “That’s a great idea. Because you’re right.” Some people might not know and they might need some help, so why would you not take advantage of it? The people around us want to help you. Reach out and ask them. Otherwise they can’t.
That’s right. At least the people that care about you want to help you and that’s a place to start.
I think other people do too. You just may not know about it yet or care enough about you, but these are the things that if you do, they actually will, because people are put on this earth to connect and belong. It’s our job to try and be vulnerable and lean with that and open them up, because they want to be in that place. They just don’t know how to, so you can teach them by doing things like this.
Perfect. Jason, I would love to talk to you a lot longer, but we’re running out of time. Before you share one specific action, tell us what is new and exciting on your horizon these days?
I’m doing a lot of speaking, which I love. I’ll be working on a next book which is going to be around teamwork and employee engagement and building great cultures. And then just doing a lot of leadership management and executive coaching. Those things are taking up a lot. I also got married on Halloween! So that’s pretty new and exciting.
Congratulations! Yes. Well, here’s to many years of harmonious communication.
Yes!
So what’s one specific action that TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, to help them upgrade their own leadership skills or their trust-building skills?
I think the things we talked about today. Asking vulnerable questions and really getting to know the people around us and what makes them tick in their experiences are absolutely critical and we get two opportunities to do that. That is what we need to do to build great relationships with people is build trust. Don’t do it the slow way by thinking you’ve got to ask some small questions, because the other thing I’ll tell you, I started these groups where I spoke and gave an easy question and eased into the harder, more complex questions, and then I just started asking people the first question – tell me what’s the biggest lesson that you’ve learned in the last year, vs. tell me the superpower you wanted, and actually, they went a lot better when I dove into the deep end of the ocean.
Interesting. So what is your superpower is one of your examples. Give us two more.
I’d say, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in the last year,” and I would say, “If you were to thank one person for helping you become the person you are, who is that person and what did they do for you?” And then I would ask someone, “Tell me the biggest blessing in disguise that you’ve had.” The other one you could ask is, “What’s the most exciting thing happening in your life right now?” If you want to go more light.
Good, thank you. I appreciate that and I appreciate you taking time to visit with us on the TalentGrow Show. I’m sure people are going to want to learn more from and about you. Where do you hang out online, on social media, where should they follow you?
I’m on Twitter. You can go to my LinkedIn. I’m on there quite a bit posting things. You can go to my website, that’s JasonTreu.com. And then obviously you can download Cards Against Mundanity on the website and get that and start playing that.
Awesome. We’ll link to all of that in the show notes and I believe and want to believe that people will. It’ll make the world better. Thank you for the work you do and thanks for stopping by Jason, we appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
WRAP UP All right TalentGrowers, that’s it for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m super glad that you listened and that you stuck around all the way to the back of the podcast club, as my former guest David Burkus called it. I’d love to hear what you thought about this episode and also what action you took and how it worked. I’m super curious. So, be in touch and let me know. You can always put down a comment on the show notes page at TalentGrow.com, you can leave me a voicemail, you can hit me up on social media or you can send me an email, halelly@talentgrow.com, because I create this podcast for you. I want to know what you need, what you think and how it’s working. That’s it for another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and 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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