L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - The (Dis)Comfort Quotient: Building Elite Teams, Attracting Top Talent, and Handling The Uncomfortable At Work

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

Roberta Matuson’s prolific career started in one of the least comfortable ways imaginable–being thrown into executive leadership at the age of 24. Through a nearly 40-year career since being put ���suddenly in charge,” Roberta has written 7 books, spanning the topics of leadership, attracting and keeping talent, and feedback and communication. She shares her insights on how the greatest leaders set themselves up for success, allowing the resources, people, and opportunities they need to flow naturally to them.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week on the show, I welcome Roberta Matcheson. Roberta is a speaker, consultant, author, and global executive coach. She is a prolific writer, having penned seven books while contributing regularly to Forbes, Harvard Business Review, The Enterprisers Project, and more. Through her consultancy, Matcheson Consulting, Roberta has worked with leaders

at global brands, including General Motors, New Balance, and Microsoft. In the industry, she's known as the talent maximizer, highly regarded for her ability to help leaders build, deploy, and manage high-performing teams. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with my friend, Roberta Matcheson. Roberta, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you so much for having me. We have worked together many times now. I think I've worked with you as an individual more than just about any other thought leader or expert, and I'm very privileged to be able to say that. I think I've read all of your books at this point at least once each,

and as I was kind of going through and reviewing them for this chat that we're about to have, I noticed a bit of a theme, and I hope I'm not going to surprise you too much with this, but in Subtly in Charge and Can We Talk, these are largely about turning uncomfortable moments or scenarios into successful ones. Whether it's being thrown into leadership as you were, I think that's kind of the origin of Subtly in Charge. You were like 24 years old and you became a manager, or it's having challenging work conversations like in Can We Talk? And even in The Magnetic Leader, you talk about Teflon leadership and uncomfortable behaviors that lead to poor leadership. So my first question to you is, do you find inspiration and even joy in discomfort? What's going on there? You know, that's a really great question. One of the most frustrating things for me as a reader of business books is

reading books that are not really set in what I call reality. And everything that I write about has either happened to me. Okay. And so when you mentioned that at 24 years old, I was tossed into management, I was actually tossed into the executive suite. And there probably aren't that many 24-year-olds that are all of a sudden in a corner office, I mean, literally, with a reserved parking spot, but that was my story. And, you know, I learned so many lessons. And I just feel like if I can prevent any other person from making the kinds of mistakes that I made, then my purpose on this planet has been met. And so when I talk about these uncomfortable situations, I mean, that's really reality.

That's what's going on for all of your listeners. And you and I've talked and we've met in New York, and I've told you I'm from New York. So I really just believe that people need to hear the truth. And that's what I write about. I write about the truth. So many people are focused on enhancing company culture these days, especially with post-COVID decentralized work and all that we're dealing with. It's a whole different landscape than it was five, 10 years ago. And developing a strong, cohesive culture is just more a challenge than ever. I think we've probably seen more books come out that are specifically on that topic in the last year or two than in the prior decade even. And we're going to talk about this in various bits and pieces. We're going to talk about leadership, how to have difficult conversations. I do want to kind of

address some of the different principles from possibly each of your books. But I want to start with one sort of space of discomfort, which is office politics. So is this suddenly in charge? It's every book, but yes. Okay, let me put it this way. You're the only author that I've read who, rather than giving broad principles about, you know, developing a hyper cohesive culture, as if that's something that can really happen, you know, that sort of idealistic view of creating this like perfect utopian company where everybody is just, you know, holding hands

and singing together. You take a pragmatic stance in many cases, and you talk about reality, as you just said. And in the case of office politics, you have a handful of key points that you make for how people should handle those. And I would actually like if you could kind of go over those. I think there are four major points that you talk about in, I want to say, Suddenly In Charge, one of the books. Well, I mean, the most important point I think for people to understand is that whether you like it or not, you're in the game. You're in the game of politics. And oftentimes when I do speaking engagements, people will come up to me, you know, I'm talking about office politics and they're like, well, I work in a nonprofit, like we don't have that. And I'm like, whoa, like that is where most

of the politics will happen. Office politics can generally be found when resources are scarce. So in order for me to get what I want and what I need, somebody has to give up something here, right? And so I have to be very savvy. And so then you see all the political games begin to happen. And so I think the biggest takeaway for listeners is that office politics happens everywhere. You're in the game, and so you best get good at playing it. And it's really about moving around the organization in a way that's pretty seamless and doing things that will help you get the resources that you need for your people and for yourself. So it's not a dirty word and it's not like, oh, I'm not going to play this game. I'm not going to do this.

And if it is, then, I mean, I guess you just have to get your own business because that's the only way to avoid. Well, you don't really avoid office politics then because then when you're trying to get business, you're dealing with the political arena of what's going on in the customer's organization. sort of know the players. So, you know, know the people that have impact on your job, on your role, on the things that you're trying to achieve. And for what it's worth, I do believe that you have principles and ideas that work toward that, you know, more sort of idealistic company culture type mindset. There are plenty of things that come through and how you talk about leadership and conversation that, you know, theoretically lead to that sort of thing. But when it comes to sort of knowing the people at an organization, let's say, you know, from a management perspective, how do you recommend going about meeting the people and, you know, assessing kind of what their role is, the impact they're going to have on you, and, you know, maybe what their attitude is toward you, your job, and the impact that you have? Well, I think you have to start by,

first of all, having good intentions, right? You're not trying to meet these people so you can plot out this big, thick plan to invade or whatever. You really just want to try to get to know people, right? And so if you approach people with the mindset, hey, you know, I'm here to help make your life easier and whatever I can do to do that will help both of us. So I need to find out more about you and just do it in a way that's friendly and feels okay. So, I mean, I would never suggest to somebody that they put on an acting role of some kind to find out what other people are like. But I think if you are genuinely curious and you get

to know people and you're observant. So an example is early on in my career, this was when I was an executive. I worked for the senior VP and his name was Martin. And it only took me one meeting to observe that every time I met with him or the one time, if it was longer than three minutes or five minutes, he would look at his watch. I was like, oh God, time's up. And I quickly realized that Martin was a bottom line guy. He didn't want all the background. He just wanted the facts. And if he wanted more information, he would ask. And so your listeners are working for people today that are very overwhelmed. They're understaffed. A lot of jobs have been eliminated and they don't have time to hear the backstory. And so if you want to figure out how to best work with people in a political sense,

you have to be observant and notice, do these people like to chit chat or do they want to get right down to business? Like that's just one example. So being observant, I think we are in an especially challenging place for being observant of your colleagues because, you know, I've been working from home for four years now and many people are in that new space. And as we all know, social everything is just more complicated, social politics, social interaction, engagement, etc. In Can We Talk, most of the seven steps that you talk about have like an emotion attached to them. So, you know, build up the courage, sort of muster the confidence. You come into the conversations with empathy. You also just mentioned curiosity in your last statement there. All of these things, they come from an ability to observe very well.

But I think that's a lot harder than it might have been five, 10 years ago. And when everybody was just kind of working in spaces together, obviously, you know, this doesn't apply to everybody. But my question is, for those that are managing remotely, especially, how do we ensure that we can actually come in with those emotions when we are so detached from the people with whom we're having those difficult conversations. Well, I think you answered the question with your question. And when you said, because we're so detached, okay, you shouldn't be detached. Okay. You're going to have to make a little bit more of an effort to be very intentional. And rather than hop on a call with your colleague to discuss a marketing project that you're working

on you say hey can I have 10 minutes of your time I just want to chat and then you start the conversation off hey I really want to know how are you doing you know I noticed in our last meeting you seemed a little bit distracted is everything everything okay? You know, like, really, is everything okay? And they may open up and say, oh my gosh, like, my spouse asked me for a divorce. Like, everything is really just going south here, but I really appreciate you even asking. So you have to make more of an effort to be more attached to the organization. You can't just say, oh, those people are just little boxes on my computer. You have to make that effort. Yeah, it can be really hard though these days. I think there's a handful of things that you actually list as signs for when somebody is

about to up and leave an organization. So this is suddenly in charge, I believe, where there are just things that you can observe. I think one of them is, you know, when their LinkedIn connections go from 50 to 50 new connections per day, the sort of thing that says, OK, this person seems like they might be on the way out. And I think there are those indicators that we can see kind of their metrics or things like that. But again, this is one of those things that is much easier probably to observe if you're in a physical space with somebody because you can see how their demeanor changes and how they change physically. But would you mind kind of going over some of those indicators? And since you wrote the book, because it's been a little while, I think the edition that I read was 2018. Are there any new sort of indicators that somebody is just kind of like in a bad space that you would look out for

that might even mean that they're kind of on the edge of leaving? Well, I'm really glad you brought up that the book was written in 2018. It was actually 2017, which is why I just wrote the new edition. I just wrote the third edition of Suddenly in Charge, which will be out in April of 2024. And I wrote this book for the very reason that you stated. When that book was written in 2017, we didn't have a lot of hybrid and remote work. And then all of a sudden, you know, the world changed as we know it. And so in the new book, I discussed exactly what people need to do who are working remotely or in a hybrid situation. So if you have a specific question, I'd be happy to share what I have. Otherwise, people may have to wait, but I know there are people who can't wait. So tell me again, which specific question do you want an answer to? I do recall the principles that you listed in the initial suddenly in charge. I

think there were just like three major indicators, at least one of them was the LinkedIn thing. And then just some things about how they are conversationally, their demeanor and that sort of thing was big. But is there anything that you can... Yeah, that was actually the second edition, but yes. Really, some of the new signs are you're trying to set up meetings with them and they're no longer available, right? They used to be available at three or four and now they're interviewing. You used to be able to have a face-to-face conversation,

now their cameras are off because they don't want you to see that they're not that thrilled to be there. Or, you know, maybe they're her cameras are off because they don't want you to see that they're not that thrilled to be there. Or, you know, maybe they're still in their pajamas. I don't know. But I do think still signs like LinkedIn, all of a sudden, I can see when other people are posting. I can see when they're liking things. It comes up on my feed. And if all of a sudden they're liking, you know, 10 strategies to get a new job or your boss stinks, you know, that should be a clue. Now, should you confront them? I don't think you should confront them, but I think you should ask them, hey, are you happy here?

Like, what were your hopes and dreams when you took this job? And what, if anything, might have changed? Those are the courageous conversations, right? That as a manager, you should be having with your people before they give you their notice. Oh, and then again, some people, they don't quite get the technology thing and they may put up on their LinkedIn, you know, looking for work. And it's advised to do that if you're looking for work because the likelihood of recruiters reaching out is much higher. But only if you're looking for work and people know you're looking for work, including

your boss. Yeah, of course. A big theme in your work is attracting talent, you know, talent magnetism and being a magnetic leader. And obviously, you don't want people to kind of slink away. I think what you're describing in that last part there is a little bit of quiet quitting. This has been a term that has seemingly fallen out of use, but for a while it was a bit of a meme on LinkedIn. People just kind of doing the bare minimum, not really showing up in the same way that they were previously. And I do think it's worth thinking about in those terms, though, because of how prominent this idea came up, especially after something as

large as a pandemic, when you get a new term that seems to reflect a change in the times and remote work, I think that's important. But also, I've seen people who push back on the idea of quiet quitting and, you know, saying, you know, I'm doing my job, the bare minimum is, you know, I'm being paid to do a certain thing. If there isn't explicit sort of growth expectations in what I'm doing, then can you really say that what I'm doing is wrong? And even beyond that, I've seen a handful of people say, what about quiet firing? And I have heard stories about this. And I've actually seen posts about this on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is such a good place for getting just like nitty gritty details about businesses that you otherwise knew nothing about. I can only imagine what it was like

20 years ago before any access to the internal workings of businesses was out there. But there are cases where somebody is kind of like being moved around from department to department because the people in charge are thinking, you know, this person probably needs to go. We want to give them a chance or something like that. And then there's like the hints at layoffs. And then there's even examples of people saying like, there's absolutely no way that you're going to be laid off, which is like overcompensating for what they know might actually be the truth. And all of these are kind of examples of quiet firing, maybe. So I just, I want to look at things from the other perspective, you know, as a manager, as a leader, you talk a lot about being magnetic and magnetism. And I'm just

wondering, do you see these things as issues as well from the leadership perspective, you know, not handling employees correctly and that idea of quiet firing. Like, do you believe in that? Do you think that's real? Yes. I recently spoke to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal on this very topic of quiet cutting. That's what they're calling it. And what's happening is, let's just say you have an employee who has three kids and they're, you know, very involved in the community. And now you're offering them a great quote unquote job opportunity like in Alaska. And, you know, there's just no way, you know, they've lived in Miami their whole life. They are not going. Okay. But you're going to offer them this great opportunity. You know, you're really basically

saying, look, you either take this job or you're not going to have a job. And the problem is, is that people aren't being transparent and magnetic leaders are transparent. They're honest and they say, look, we're going to be modifying the workforce here. All I can tell you is that this is the only opening that's coming up here. And I totally respect the fact that that might not be the location you've been pining for. If it doesn't work for you, let me see if I can go back and see what kind of packages they may be offering. In return, I just ask that you just kind of keep me up to date if you decide you're going to leave now or you give me enough notice so I can find somebody else to go to Alaska or whatever? When you have this conversation and you're honest with people, because later on,

there's a pretty good chance you're not going to be with this company either, unless you take that job in Alaska. And one day you may be asking the person in Miami for a job. So if you've treated that person well, they'll remember you. Or if you go to another company in Miami, they'll call you up and say, hey, we worked together two years ago. We'd love to see what's happening where you are. One of the magnetic principles that you cite is being visible, being a visible leader, somebody who speaks and is obviously, you know, pretty deep into their profession, their skill set at events and that sort of thing. And this is one point that I want to maybe push back on a little bit, but just ask you about how you feel since you last wrote about this. In magnetic leadership, there's a stat that I want to get right here. So you said

that the average job tenure overall is about 4.6 years. And you actually described employees as free agents, which I think is a very important way to think about the people that we're dealing with. I'm willing to bet that that number has dropped. I bet the 4.6 is not much low. I don't know if there has been a new study that has shown, but I'm willing to bet that it's a lot smaller now. And I'm curious, I think that maybe Gen Z and even me, you know, millennials are a bit skeptical of leaders who are very visible. You know, I see a lot of folks who are thought leaders, people like yourself who are out speaking. But when it comes to like within an organization, if leaders who manage a lot of people are constantly speaking and out there,

it might start to make me think like, okay, that person seems to be pretty focused on themselves. And that ultimately means that they have less time to focus on me if they're out there in the public. It ideally means that they are learning and sharing with the community and spreading that knowledge. And to be clear, I don't think that this would make me not want to work for that kind of person, but I do feel like subsequent generations are a bit more skeptical of the idea of being able to manage one's reputation in that way and also being able to manage a small team. So do you agree with that at all? What do you think about that? No, as the parent of two Gen Z young adults, no. And I say that

because, look, if I were asked to speak 10, 12 times a year, that would be amazing. These people are speaking at the American Society of Electrical Engineering, you know, which you're probably a member of because you're an electrical engineer. The local meeting, they're speaking at Toastmasters. They're not flying all over the world on the main stage, most of these people. And so, again, a lot of the people in Gen Z and the millennials, they want to be remote, right? So if you want to be remote, why should you care if your boss this week is in San Francisco speaking? Because if you need something and you're on Slack and you send him a note and he responds, what do you care? So I don't see that as an issue at all. In fact, I would encourage your listeners to be more visible because opportunities will come to those people. People will say, oh, I saw Tyler speak at the ASTD conference. He was amazing. We should try to bring him in on our team. Like, definitely that disability can only help. So what is it about being a speaker, somebody that's involved in the community that is so attractive to potential candidates? Because that's one of those sort of like passive attracting talent type things. So what is it exactly? Can you elaborate?

So what is it exactly? Can you elaborate? Well, I use the example of a gentleman I know by the name of Ray Palicki, and he was the CIO at the time of Biogen. And he would speak locally and he would speak in a lot of places. And he is a very authentic guy. And after he spoke, people would line up and he would take the time to have conversations. In the whole time I think he was CIO, he may have paid a handful of recruiter fees, a handful in a tech role, which is unheard of because people knew him. People were like,

oh my God, you get to work for Ray? Well, Ray, he'll help you out. And so he just got this reputation of being extremely magnetic. And when he had to fill a position, it didn't take very long, whereas colleagues in other companies would complain, oh, we can't find people, we can't find software engineers. He was having a great time. He's just filling jobs. So in addition to actually being a speaker and being visible, like you said, it's also the ability to be effectively social. Like you mentioned, you know, after the sessions, he would take time and speak to people. And I've definitely experienced people like that who I'm just like blown away by their ability to not only kind of like be a prominent figure, but also just develop many relationships. I mean, I consider you to be one of those people, Roberta, to be totally honest, like super connectors, you know, I mean, everybody knows who you are and your ability to develop friendships develop professional relationships that sort of thing and i guess maybe that's where my skepticism comes from that i initially mentioned is that that just it seems so hard you know but it's not and it's authentic yeah it is authentic right and for

some people it is hard i shouldn't say it's not because it is for some people but this is a skill that can be developed i mean you can join toastmasters and that's not expensive. I don't even know if there's a fee to join. So for those listening who are on a limited budget, you can do that. You can volunteer at the local association that your company belongs to. There are a lot of ways you can take an online class on public speaking. It's a muscle. And the more you do it, the better you get and the easier it becomes. So that's my suggestion. But I don't think that people look at it going, what's Tyler doing on the stage again? They're like, oh, that's that guy, Tyler. He was so great when I heard him out in Vegas, you know. That's actually a good point.

I did give a presentation of the Get Abstract book awards in Vegas. And now that I think about it in that moment, I mean, I wasn't, you know, teaching or speaking in any formal way, but being out there meeting people in the L&D world, instructional designers and engaging with other vendors and that sort of thing. It is all very exciting. It's very authentic because we're all working to resolve the same problems. We have relatively similar interests, if not the exact same interests across the board, and we deal with the same people and it is very exciting. But then I think that next step of like turning that into actual recruitment

and maybe building a team, that next stage is a bit of a challenge for me, like kind of how that turns into practical, you know, now you have people working for you that are actually strong hires and everything. And one of my favorite things that I read from your book, you said hire for potential, not just background. And I think, you know, this is relatively intuitive. You know, you don't want to take somebody just because they have worked here or they got this degree from that school, of course. But when it comes to recruiting, like if there's one thing I know about recruiters and HR processes, it's that people can be pretty overwhelmed. And the number of candidates out there can be overwhelming with the access to data that we now have and simplicity with which you can apply to jobs like on LinkedIn and that sort of thing. So how do you advise that hiring managers and just leaders in general get out of the weeds of their job enough to actually spend time and

make sure that they're hiring for potential instead of just for background? Well, that goes back to being magnetic. And that also goes back to networking and being out there, right? I read a statistic and it was pretty amazing. And I'm not quite sure what it was, but it was a very large percentage of jobs are filled through networks. So many of these people never even post online that there's a job opening. They'll call up their colleague or their friend and say, hey, do you know anybody who's a video editor? Do you know anybody in sales looking for a new job? And so they get connected with those people.

And so it makes their ability to hire qualified people that much faster. And then they don't have to go through the 500 applicants that are coming through postings that you see going up. If you're a manager, it is your job to get out there. And getting out there, it could be going to church or synagogue and meeting people that are in your community. It could be networking on the soccer field while church or synagogue, like, and meeting people that are in your community. It could be networking on the soccer field while your kid is playing. It doesn't have to be, oh, my God, do I really have to go to a session on how to have work-life balance, like, at 7 p.m. on a Friday night? There was a conference board survey that came out two weeks ago, about 10 days ago, actually.

And I just spoke with Minda Zetlin, another author on this in my last episode, but I'm curious to, about 10 days ago, actually. And I just spoke with Minda Zetlin, another author on this in my last episode, but I'm curious to get your perspective on it too. The number one item that was regarded as most important within a company outside of just salary compensation, 1500 people were asked to select their top five things and the number one with 65 of people selecting it was flexibility in terms of work and workplace and the time the hours you work as well and there's a few ways to look at this a few questions that i have about it first of all are people just really starting to embrace autonomy and sort of freedom to do their work and that does seem to be working because there have been statistics more recently that came out. I can't remember who did the study, but

it was Scoop, I believe, was the company that did it. They looked at 500 different organizations representing 27 million people, I think. And flexible companies, those that were largely flexible, had about 21% revenue growth, whereas those that were not considered flexible had about 5% revenue growth. So, you know, as much as revenue can be considered a proper measurement of productivity and success, it does seem like flexible work is working out pretty well. But from a leadership perspective, given that leaders have that sort of flexibility in where they work and the times that they work, do you think that actually makes the principles that you're talking about easier, the ability to get involved in the community and kind of have that sort of flexibility in where they work and the times that they work? Do you think that actually makes the principles that you're talking about easier, the ability to get involved in the community and kind of have that autonomous ability to be a thought leader in that sort of thing?

What do you think about that? Yeah, well, first of all, I want to say this. This is nothing new, okay? For years, people have wanted autonomy. And autonomy could be the ability to have flexibility in how they work, but it's also the autonomy to do the work the way they think it should be done. They don't want a boss who's a micromanager. So this is nothing new, this whole thing around autonomy. You know, it is a balance, right? Finding the time to be able to go out and have lunch with a group of people who are in your field, being able to go to a conference and meeting other people who are in similar roles. That requires giving up time at home, right? And so it is a balance, but people are doing it. And if you're not, then you're going

to be left behind. And if you're okay being left behind, that's okay. One of your principles from an earlier book is to give very clear job descriptions and clear job expectations. Now, I don't mean to suggest that that means that you're limiting autonomy there, but what is your ideal manner by which leaders should give their employees freedom to do the work that they want to do in the way that they want to do? Okay, well, I don't believe in job descriptions. I believe in results descriptions. I believe that when you're putting together what the job is going to be, you should look at what are the results I'm looking to achieve, not what are the tasks this person is going to be doing. I'm a firm believer in that. So, I mean, I don't know if your question

still applies, but... Can you explain how you would initially deliver a results description then to somebody? If when you're, you know, recruiting and hiring somebody new, is it just that you really just don't talk about the day-to-day tasks? No, I say these are the results we're looking to achieve. For the person who's filling this job, we're looking for them to build our social media out. That would include our TikTok, that would include our Instagram, Facebook, and any other resources that you deem necessary. But I'm not gonna tell them we need 25 posts on a day

because they may say 25 posts on TikTok is a waste of time. Why don't we do three really good videos and put them up on LinkedIn for our market? That makes much more sense. They have the autonomy. They come back and show you the data. Look, it's working. We're seeing more click-throughs.

We're seeing results. I want results. I want our marketing to create more opportunities for our salespeople. I just don't want more crap put out there. So that's what I mean by results. Just really talk about what are the results that you want these people to do. And I have examples of that in several of my books, including Talent Magnetism and Evergreen Talent. So if people are interested, they can go right in

there into those books and they will see examples of what that means. Yeah, that's very helpful. I want to go away from the books and talk about some of your articles that you've written now, some of the pieces that have been on LinkedIn and in other places. shortly after we, you know, quote unquote, learn it, which unfortunately translates into, you know, many billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in loss in the industry because of how much we invest in teaching and training and all of that. The L&D world is a vast one. You say that there are a few things we need to do. We need to apply immediately. In some cases, coaching is just really important because learning is a process, not an event, I think are the words that you chose. And I'm curious if you can elaborate on that, but especially, you know, how do we address learning that is largely abstract? Is that kind of where the coaching comes in is just

spending more time with somebody and helping them understand how principles can be applied and achieve an ROI, that sort of thing? Well, it's really about working in real time, right? So if you take a course on, you know, how to interview and you have no job openings and you're not going to interview until next April, the likelihood of you remembering, oh, well, they said I should ask these questions and here's the reason I'm asking these questions and how do I follow up with that? That's going to probably like be gone. Okay. However, if you're working with a coach, and I have just recently put together these new peer leadership programs that I'm calling leadership growth circles, where I go into organizations and we take like-minded leaders, you know, who are at the same level. And in real time, we meet like every month.

And during those meetings, we take a different topic. But in between those people also are able to connect with me so that they have a problem and they've got to hire somebody and they completely forgot, like, what are the three things I'm not supposed to ask or say? They can reach out. And in real time, I can coach them. And then they go the next day and they do the interview and they're like, wow, that really worked. I felt much more comfortable. I feel like I made a better decision. That's how you learn. Listen, I've written as of now, seven books. I can tell you, you're not going to learn to manage by reading a book alone.

What about by reading seven books? No, you won't. Nor did you learn how to ride a bicycle by reading a book on, this is bike riding. You had to get on, you had somebody next to you who was running next to you saying, okay, pedal, pedal, pedal. And eventually they let go and you were fine, or you weren't. So that's where the coaching piece really comes in. And a lot of organizations, they reserve that coaching for the upper echelon. And then it doesn't trickle down, which is very unfortunate because I think we can all benefit from coaching. And even I have a coach, so I can say that. And you do coach as well, right? You actually work with executives. Are

you mostly working with the upper echelon? Sometimes. I mean, a lot of my clients are executives, but then from time to time, I'll work with a leader, a new leader. I love the companies that reach out and say, hey, can you help us with this high potential person or this new leader? We want them to be super successful. And, you know, since I wrote the book on suddenly in charge, I know exactly what they're going through and the fear and have done many mistakes myself that they're making. So it works at all levels. What are the best methods or strategies or tactics when it comes to coaching one-on-one in your mind? Is there anything that kind of universally is the most successful, whether it's acting out scenarios or looking at past case studies? Is there anything that

seems to work really well within your systems? I think what works the best is being extremely selective as to who you work with. And that works on both ends. So when people reach out to me and they want me to coach them, I have to make sure they're all in. I don't do remedial coaching. If somebody's like, well, we're looking to get rid of Joe and we don't think he's doing well, can you see what you could do with them? I'm like, I'm not your gal. Because they've already decided Joe is out of here. One of the lessons that I've learned is that you can't want more for people than they want for themselves. So if they're not really interested in improving, want for themselves. So if they're not really interested in improving, nothing I can do. I could do case studies out the kazoo. I could do real time. I could sit with them. I can drive

them to the meeting. None of that's going to work if they're not interested in changing. So you mentioned that, you know, generally there isn't a very strong trickle down effect of coaching from the upper echelon down. If you are, in fact, given a task to work with somebody that's pretty high up and executive, do you try to set up a system so that those beneath them that are below them are reporting to them also get some sort of education that something happens with them too? Well, you can try. But, you know, you always hear, well, that's not in our budget or we'll think about it or whatever. The really serious companies will do that. And then again, I'm implementing these new leadership growth circles because I feel like that's a way

for companies that don't have the amount of resources that a Fortune 500 company might have. They can offer this to their employees as well and help develop those leaders. Not to say that I haven't done this in Fortune 500 companies as well, but in those organizations, budget is generally less of an issue. Yeah, I see. As we get into our last few minutes here, I would like to ask you a couple questions. The first is, what do you hear in these days? As much as you can tell me from these executives, no names, no specifics, no companies, but what are the biggest issues that executives in particular are coming up against that you are being summoned to coach them on? Well, I'm hearing we can't find talent. And I'm

like, really? Because it's out there. What's happening is that they delegate it to HR. They've already cut HR. And HR has 10 other tasks besides recruiting now. And so they're expecting this miracle to happen. They're not utilizing their network. They're repelling talent. They're ghosting people. Their employer brand is horrific at this point. So I'm hearing a lot of that. And I find that really confusing because I know a lot of really good people looking for work. Also, I'm hearing a lot of complaints from people about how poorly they're managed. And it was interesting. This was a number of years ago, but I think if you did this study again, you'd get similar results. And, you know, a company did this survey and they asked employees what they wanted most from their boss. And a crazy percentage of people said the number one thing they wanted from their boss was for their boss to quit.

Why haven't I seen this study? I feel like I've seen versions of this where it was like, I want my boss to be a better communicator or something. It just seems like really simple, but that's brutal. Well, I mean, I loved it because I was like, oh my God, like that's honest. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad they gave him that option in the survey. So that's fascinating. I'm also hearing the quiet cutting and, you know, of course the people who are retiring in place. But I also think that a lot of employers are unrealistic. They're like, productivity is going down. It's like, productivity is going down.

It's like, oh my Lord. I mean, these people are killing themselves. If you're measuring productivity based on FaceTime, meaning, and I don't mean FaceTime on your computer, meaning, oh, how often and how long is this person in the office for? I think their measurements of productivity are very much off and may not reflect what's really going on in the workplace. Yeah, sure. I do want to ask you about recruiting and finding talent because I had Sam Keenly on probably five or six episodes ago. He is at Loxo, which is a talent intelligence platform. It's AI for recruitment, and they have access to just

many millions. I think I actually saw the word billion in reference to how many candidates they had access to. And I'm not sure how familiar you are with these tools, but I think theoretically, the goal, whether it's there now or not, theoretically, the goal of this sort of thing is to help HR people really kind of slim things down and to just facilitate their job. Do you think that technology can facilitate this? Or do you think that at the end of the day, we're always going to have to rely to a certain degree on people to really make those strong decisions? which are run by AI or AI is part of it, they're doing more harm than good. They're screening candidates out rather than screening one in, which is why I tell my clients there's a reason why people are called hiring managers. And it's because their job is to hire people and they should be the ones that are pulling the talent in. And every single employee should be a recruiter for their company, not just one or two people. But these systems, you get your resume in and they never come out.

And that's why you hear, oh, you know, I got my job through a friend or this or that. I mean, you and I were talking, you're like, I got my first opportunity from somebody who knew somebody. and I were talking, you're like, I got my first opportunity from somebody who knew somebody. So now more than ever, that's exactly the way you need to look for opportunities and candidates. And this is interesting that you brought that up because last week I interviewed this president of a company called Roster. And he had told me, this is a co-founder, he had 300 applicants for a job, and it was a very important job, an important role in his company. And he went through the resumes personally and pulled out about 60 people and interviewed them for 10 minutes apiece, and then went back and interviewed five people in depth. He did this himself.

Okay, but here's the real interesting piece. He then went back to everyone who he sent out thanks but no thanks and said, if you'd like any feedback as to why you were not chosen, just hit reply. A hundred people hit reply. He went back through all of their resumes and gave them feedback. It could have been like a one sentence thing. Hey, you applied for this job. It's based in LA.

You're in Saudi Arabia. Not going to happen. But he did that. And he said to me, one of the reasons I did that is because I believe that this pendulum will change and it will once again get hard to find talent. And it's my hope that people will remember us and remember me when I reach out and say, hey, are you interested in coming to work here? And that's the difference between being a magnetic leader and pushing the button on your applicant tracking system and getting 30 resumes of people who all look the same. Yeah. You can't hire for potential over background if you have a system that's separating people based on the keywords that represent their background.

So yeah, I see that. Okay. Interesting. My last question then, can you give us any details on what's coming up with the new edition of Suddenly Uncharted? Any little hints as to what we might see? Yeah, there's a whole chapter on how to ask for a raise and actually get it. Okay, cool. I love that.

That should make people want to buy the book. The book's been totally refreshed. I'm just really committed to making sure that when someone picks it up, that they see something of value and they don't think, wow, this was great back in, you know, 2017. It would never work today. I think a lot of it will hold true. I think a lot of it still holds true from what I read, but I'm looking forward to the update for sure. Me too. Well, thank you so much again, Roberta, for joining me. Before I let you go, can you just let our folks know where they can learn more about you, buy all your books and the work that you're up to right now?

Sure. Well, they're welcome to reach out to me directly at Roberta at MatchesonConsulting.com. They can also go onto my website, MatchesonConsulting.com, where there's hundreds of free articles. My blog's there as well. They're welcome to send me an invite on LinkedIn. And if they mention this podcast, I will be more likely to actually accept that invitation rather than one I don't even know. All right. Well, that's wonderful. Again, thank you for joining me today. This was a wonderful conversation. Great to see you again. And for everybody listening at home, we will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode.

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