Start With A Win - This is Critical to Your Leadership with Anne Morriss

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

⚡️FREE RESOURCE: 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘞𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱?  ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/myleadershipWant weekly leadership content? Go here ➡︎ https://adamcontos.comIn this engaging part two episode of Start With a Win, host Adam Contos welcomes back Anne Morriss where they dive into the often-underestimated power of soft leadership skills in transforming organizational culture. They explore the challenges of burnout, inefficient meeting cultures, and the fear of change that holds businesses back. Through insightful stories and actionable strategies, this episode unpacks how tapping into agency, inclusivity, and a commitment to change can unlock extraordinary success. If you're ready to reframe how you lead, this conversation is packed with gold. Tune in for an inspiring deep dive!Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of The Leadership Consortium (TLC), a leadership accelerator focused on building inclusive executive teams and preparing emerging leaders for senior roles. With over 20 years of experience guiding entrepreneurs, companies, and government leaders on strategy and organizational change, Anne is committed to helping individuals realize their full potential as leaders and changemakers. She also founded GenePeeks, a computational genomics company that developed breakthrough methods for identifying disease risk.Anne is the best-selling coauthor of Uncommon Service, Unleashed, and Move Fast & Fix Things, a guide on trust, leadership, and business. She also co-hosts the leadership podcast Fixable with Frances Frei, where they offer quick, actionable coaching to help solve workplace challenges. Anne serves on the board of IGNITE, which promotes political engagement among young women, and has been recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s most influential business thinkers.===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

I want you to repeat this on every single podcast you do, because the world has not fully adopted this behavior. And it really is literally mission critical. That's where all the learning is. That's where all the improvement is. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business.

Let's go. And coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. This is part two of two. Go back and listen to the last episode with myself and Anne Morris. She wrote a book called Move Fast and Fix Things.

It's a great leadership principles book talking about the soft skills of leadership. We're gonna jump right in and finish this second part. The first part was full of gold. I can't encourage you enough to go back and check out the notes on part one. Part two is just as good. Let's go, Ann. Like the pattern you gave in these five.

And now they're assigned to a day of the week. And I love the ask the right questions on Monday. Because you're setting the stage for the rest of that week. And then, you know, obviously the trust, you know, the inclusive leadership brings everybody together to accomplish things, storytelling, and then be able to go fast. I mean, this is really an incredible, you know, process here. Can you give us an example of a company that, that you've instituted this

with and some results that you've seen or any outcomes or feedback that you've received on this? Some, you know, those realization moments that people have, because that's when we see the magic is when an employee, a manager, a leader of some sort says, whoa, okay, I get it. That, that light goes on. Yeah. I'll give you what I hope is a simple example. This company we worked with recently that at the beginning of the process was really wrestling with burnout among employees. And so fantastic company has had an incredible run, very mission-driven. So attracted a personality that would run through walls for the stakeholders they were trying to serve. And then, you know, five, six, eight years in to this

entrepreneurial sprint, you had a lot of very talented humans just having trouble accessing their energy. And so the, you know, CEO brought us in, They were feeling all the costs of this at the level of culture, and they were really trying to figure out what's going on. So we spent a lot of time on Monday, because what we see a lot is that organizations are solving symptoms of problems, but not really tunneling down to the root cause. So when we surfaced the issue, one of the things that really fell out was that the kind of norms and mindsets around meeting culture were a big problem. And we see this in a lot of organizations, people spending an incredible amount of time in meetings that are not thoughtfully planned. We're not treating each other's time as the most strategic resource we have. So in this company, a lot of people spending time in meetings, there was a lot of fear of missing out. You know, people felt like something might happen there. So

I should show up. And then there's also a disengagement cost because you're spending all the time in meetings. You can't possibly pay attention. Anyway, we did this whole process. We figured out the problem. You know, we figured out the stakeholders who were kind of most in pain here, which were middle want to come up, we use the P word all the time in Tuesday, which is run a great pilot, give yourself permission to get into that organizational sandbox and play. So they came up with a couple of ideas to make meetings better. They learned a ton from those pilots. They brought additional people in to help them out. That's what inclusive leadership is really about is you got to make your plan better by tapping in to networks and communities that you don't usually go to, but who are, who are really invested in the problem. They came up with the answer, right? So they came up with these like 10

new norms for meetings and some of them were were super creative. They would be recorded, the recording would be distributed, watch it on 2X. We're only going to invite the people that are critical. They introduced a no agenda, no attenda rule. I love that. If you got an invitation, there was an agenda attached, you could politely decline because someone hadn't clearly thought through how they were going to use your time. And there were like 10 things on the list, ultimately, that they rolled out to the entire company after they had confidence. They were solving the right problem. They had the right answer. They'd done all the pilots. They told a great story about why it's worth it for us to really commit to pivoting in this way. Three months into the rollout of this,

employees at this company, there are thousands of employees at this company, they are spending 50% less time in meetings, right? And they are redeploying all of that time in more strategic ways, including recovering when they need to recover. And so it's been this really profound success. And it has also gotten people in touch with their agency, which is really at the fundamental part of our work. As human beings, we underestimate our power and agency in so many situations, right? So getting in touch with our agency to change things, particularly at the level of culture, which we think is just something we have to inherit. It's not something that we design and build and fix all the time. So it's a simple

example. You know, we deal with more complex problems as well, but it's, you know, you can, you can imagine if you really look at the amount of time that it took to solve that problem, if you, all the meetings, the pilots, you put it all together, it's actually not that much more than 40 hours, which is a week. So we're being playful about this whole week thing. Obviously there's some problems that you're not gonna be able to solve in a week's amount of time,

but you can make an astonishing amount of progress if you really focus. And so we really wanna push people on that speed because there is this other magical, like there are all these magical byproducts to speed when you make it clear to everyone that you take the problem seriously enough to focus and move fast. Wow. There's a lot of gold in there. I encourage everybody to rewind this and listen to what Ann just said. It's fascinating when you look at making those changes. Now, I mean, what's the biggest challenge in change is that people reset back to the way it was before after the consultants or the change agents or whatever leave the room. But it's incumbent upon us as leaders to commit to that change, that's when we truly find the results because, um, you know, change can be

stressful to people, but the reality is burnout is the ultimate stress on a human being. And if we can remove that burnout and you know, I, everybody can secretly raise their hand if they've faced burnout in, in their career. I'll be the first one to say I faced it two or three times. Um, and change is a hundred percent. Yeah. It's, it happens, especially in high achievers. But let me, I want to push on something around change because that you just said that I think is really important. So we do come to this question of change with a lot of ambivalence.

Yes. But when we push on that ambivalence in our work, one of the things we found is that people don't fundamentally fear change. They fear things getting worse. Oh, I like that. Right. So sometimes we have this assumption like there's only a certain capacity we have for, you know, for the cheese being moved around, whatever metaphor you want to use. But in fact, our capacity to absorb positive change is infinite. Right? The reason we have anxiety around this is because we've all been through change experiences

that have not been successful or that have made things worse. And so as a leader, if you can stand up and say, here's my plan for better, here's how we're going to get there, here's how we're going to learn as we go, when we screw things up, and we will, we're going to correct them quickly. So here's the listening system I'm going to put in place to make sure we're getting this right. And then here's the pace I'm going to set because I am impatient for better, right? It has come to my attention that there's a way we can improve, right?

So we're going to improve as quickly as we can. In those environments, the emotion that we see most often in response to change is relief. That's amazing. A lot of great notes coming out of this. I want to reiterate something that you said here, and that's that people don't fear change. They fear things getting worse. And I mean, that's a very powerful statement there. Put it on a t-shirt.

Oh, yeah. It's funny. It's a very important point because people, leaders give themselves a lot of outs around this people fear change myth. Right. Right. I'm like, oh, the people are pushing back because they're just afraid. It's just a lesser, right? It's a lesser person who's afraid. They're not afraid.

These are like assumption number one is that the people reporting to you are deeply intelligent, right? If you, if, if, if you hold on tightly to that assumption, it's going to be a very powerful true North as you navigate this leadership thing. So they're pushing back. If there's ambivalence, if there's fear in the system, go back to Monday and get deeply curious about what's going on. I love that. How do we, okay, obviously pushback is key here because the fear response is fight, flight, or freeze. How do we as a leader, this just made me think of this question, how do we as a leader, when we, this just made me think of this question. How do we as a leader, when we walk into a meeting, recognize fear in the room? I'm going to ask

you to answer that. I bet you've walked into a lot of meetings where there's a lot of fear. Okay. I would say. What's your next move? The next move I think is to, I think to call it out is say, you know, and just be transparent with everybody and say, I think we have some fear in the room because, one, we have less feedback. I think fear prevents feedback because if you just look at fight, flight, or freeze, freeze is do nothing and people not giving input. I also think that people are, they demonstrate fear by not including themselves in a conversation that they have knowledge of, that they can provide feedback and input to in a valuable manner. They know that they have that and you can see them sitting on their hands just, you know, with attention. And that's a big problem for you as a leader it really is yeah yeah that's where all this work on psychological safety comes out of

is is you know it psychological safety isn't about cozy or comfortable it's about creating environment where you are getting all the information you need out of everyone in that room where they are giving you that information without fear of consequences. That's, I think you hit a key point because that's the word that came to mind as soon as I said that is they need safety and, you know, safety to perform, safety to fail. If, if they deliver something and, and, um, you know, they find out it doesn't work. Have we given them that safety in our organizations? Uh, organizations? Because they're going to fail. So the question is, are you going to find out about it or not? Right. You know, like leadership is the practice of imperfect humans leading

imperfect humans, right? So that imperfection is going to, and can we fail intelligently? Can we fail smartly? Can we create norms around failure so that people understand, you know, what does good look like? What are the steps I should take? But then what happens when the plan doesn't go the way we expect, which is usually how the plan goes? I want to go back to something you said that I think is really important, Adam, which is around making this discussable. Yes. The great Chris Argyris, one of the great organizational behavioralists who ever lived, may he rest in peace. He did a lot of research on this question of why is it

when smart people come together in teams, sometimes they excel as you kind of would expect with great inputs, but sometimes it's mediocre and sometimes it's just bad. Right. So he was very curious about this. He studied it for decades. He started out in consulting and investment banking in the nineties where all the inputs literally looked the same, you know, they'd gone to the same schools and same haircut and were dressed the same, couldn't figure it out. And finally he comes back towards the end of the career and he said, I have the answer. Right. And the world was breath, you know, the world had been waiting

for this guy to crack the code on this. And he said, I can sum it up in three words. Teams that excel were willing to discuss the undiscussable. And then this is the part that always surprises me. They weren't even that good at it, right? Because sometimes I'll hold back from a difficult conversation because I'm not a UN level conflict negotiator. But what he found was that it just, the courage to get in there, make things discussable, have the conversation, that was the variable that mattered. And they weren't even that good at it. And they weren't even that good at it. It didn't matter. I mean, obviously it's helpful around

the, read all the books. You know, there's so, there's so much wonderful research out there on conflict. If that's helpful to you, do it. But what matters even more is just the willingness to have that, hey, can we talk? Can we just... And conflict is this crazy thing in biology that actually gets bigger when you ignore it. Usually it's the opposite. We pay attention to things and they grow and prosper. When we ignore conflict, it gets bigger, it gets more complicated. And so if you can get in there and get in there with a sense of urgency and make things discussable, it's a huge variable in team performance, including speed. Speed is a hidden, or conflict is a hidden killer of speed inside teams.

It's fascinating when you think about that, because just reflecting on my past, I used to run a SWAT team. And after a mission, there was always something that went wrong. Of course. It's inherent. I mean, it's a chess game. You're going to make a wrong move here or there. They're going to make a move you didn't foresee, something like that. But ultimately, it came down to the debriefing and how transparent and how discussable was the debriefing in order to make the team better for the next mission. And I hear this from my friends who are in special operations teams. I have a lot of friends in the different special units. And they said,

that is the most important thing you possibly can do is a very transparent, to use your word, a very discussable debriefing. And I think it's the same for professional sports teams and for professional business teams for that matter. So this is a very incredible point. And that lines up with all of the literature, Adam. I do a lot of coaching in my work. And this is the tactical advice I give most frequently is increase your reps on after action reviews like this. It's so important. And you're such a beautiful messenger for it, Adam. I want you to repeat this on every single podcast you do because the world has not fully adopted

this behavior. And it really is literally mission critical. That's where all the learning is. That's where all the improvement is. I think we try to hide. We try to bury our mistakes instead of grow from them. For some reason, it's the ego satisfaction of trying to pat each other on the back and say everything went fantastic somehow outweighs the logic and the leverage that we get from recognizing those mistakes and learning from them. I don't understand it, but you're absolutely correct on that. Increase your reps in the AARs, after action reviews, and watch the magic happen here, folks. You know, I think it's simple. I just think we are wired to avoid discomfort. Ooh, yes. You know, and it's uncomfortable to go back to those feelings of when I didn't nail it or I didn't get it right.

We have two teenage boys. And the conversation we have most frequently around the breakfast table, by the end of the day, kids are burned out. So breakfast is where we have the hard conversations. But what we often say to them is that all of your hopes and dreams are in the zone of discomfort. So if you can get more comfortable with discomfort, it is the ultimate human superpower. Because most human beings, when they hit that discomfort zone, will step back. If you can keep going, you don't even have to lean in. If you can just keep going, then you are at a huge advantage compared to the rest of the

population. Amazing. And another huge one-liner from Ann here, all of your hopes and dreams are in the zone of discomfort. Write that on your hand, people, and look at it all the time because it is so true. And you know what's interesting? And it's hard. It's really hard.

It totally is. This is really hard. It totally, but here, it's hard, but it can become, I think, a lot easier. Because once we rip that Band-Aid off a few times and we enter that zone of discomfort, we find that we're getting better. And then we start to get addicted to that process of entering discomfort. It's like a bodybuilder or, you know, a marathon runner or, or just, you know, somebody is special operations or professional sports, or even a, just a, you

know, a, a great leader when they walk in that meeting, knowing, knowing this is going to be very, you know, uncomfortable and they do it with that pride and that transparency and say, I'm going to learn from this. It gets addicting people. Try it. It's amazing. Yeah. And I think I love, I love that point, Adam. I think we can desensitize ourselves to the kind of pain of discomfort. We can stop telling the story that something is necessarily wrong when we're uncomfortable or that it's a signal to stop. So we can practice overriding that instinct. But then if we can get addicted to what happens next, which is the better, the end of the conversation of the conversation when we build trust, when we've surfaced the problem, when we have a plan, when we've learned what we're going to, you know,

keep doing, stop doing, start doing like when, if we can get addicted to all that good stuff on the other side of discomfort, then I think that that's when that beautiful flywheel of progress is going to kick in. Totally. I call them growing pains. I mean, it's, you know, when, as our kids are growing, they're like, oh, my legs hurt. Or, you know, this is hard. You're like, it's growing pains. Yeah. But let's focus on the growing part. Let's focus more on the growing part and less on the pain part. And that's going to allow us to move forward. Well, what was it? Um, Zig Ziglar, the, uh, the pain of regret weighs tons, but the pain of this, or actually the pain of regret versus the pain of discipline,

the pain of discipline weighs tons. The pain of regret weighs ounces, or is it back the other way around the other way around the other way around? That's right. Yeah. The pain of regret weighs ounces. The pain of, or the pain of discipline weighs ounces. Here's what we got folks. The pain of discipline weighs ounces. The pain of regret weighs tons. Yeah. I was just looking for, uh, for my older son for his birthday, like in some of these inspirational

posters, cause he's, he loves David Goggins. He's like, he's like really getting into this stuff. And that was one of the posters that really caught my eye. It was just, it was just like a bar chart. And you know, the small one was, you know, the, the pain of discipline. And then the big one was the pain and such a beautiful visual. And it just hit, it hit with the resonance of truth. So amazing. All right. And, and, and starting to up here, and we made this a two part episode because we just could not stop talking about leadership here, folks. This is this is imperative. This is our lives. This is the growth. This is society, for that matter, because we all know that we have a gap in leadership.

Please do something, you know, as as Anne talks about in her book, move fast and fix things. And Francis, also, we want to give kudos. We're due here. Thank you so much for what you do, Francis. But I want you to think about this. What can you do this week in order to get better at leadership? We've essentially had a masterclass here from Anne on how do we grow in leadership and some amazing discussion, A ton of one-liners. So if you want to go tweet some things out here, go for it. There's a lot of great material here. Anne, I do have a question for you. Where can we find you and Frances online and more information about your books?

Yeah, we have a website, annefrancis.com. You're welcome to come learn more about what we're up to. We spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. What we're having the most fun with, we started a podcast called Fixable, where we work with callers live on problems. We bring in experts. We give a lot of unsolicited advice, sometimes to callers, sometimes to companies who we think need to hear from us. So it's a really fun conversation and we invite you. It's totally free. We invite you to come join us there as well. Awesome. And make sure you pick up a copy of Move Fast and Fix Things where all the books are sold. I saw it on Amazon. It's an incredible format for building and

developing leadership on a regular basis because it's not a one-time thing, folks. It's an all-the- time thing. Think what would happen if more people focused on building leadership. First of all, it'd be a heck of a lot easier to find great qualified leaders to hire in your organization. People would stay longer and we would get so much more effectiveness out of our teams when it comes to their personal development. Because ultimately a leader, their job is to create an environment where people can be as successful as they want to be. That's what we're here for. That's your job. That's it. That's it. I love it. And any closing thoughts before I get to my final question? No, it's just, it's been so fun to connect and have this conversation with you, Adam. I I'm delighted to come do it anytime you want. I'm I'm game. Awesome. And we appreciate you so much for being on start within with a win.

I, I have a great question. I asked all the amazing leaders on the show and that's, and how do you start your day with a win? It's a great question, Adam. You know, I start my day the night before. I think the most important thing I do is start the night before. And I am really at an age and stage of life where I take sleep hygiene and sleep discipline very seriously. So, uh, I, I, I just, I'm, um, very disciplined about, um, going to bed at a, you know, by a certain time and, and creating an environment where I can really recover deeply. Awesome. I'll tell you, that's so important. I look at my sleep score every morning and I figure out what could I have done better the night before and what can I do better tonight? So thank you for bringing that up. People sleep puts gas in the tank. That is what drives you through

the next day. And when you get a good night's sleep, don't pollute your sleep with screen time or anything like that right before bed. Put that screen away. Hours. I know the best factors is an hour, but I think that they're lying to you, right? It should be hours. I know the best factors is an hour, but I think that they're lying to you, right? It should be hours. They just don't think you can handle it. Totally agree. And put something good in your head, you know, write down those gratitudes, a journal, a little bit, you know, a nice book, something like that. Not some sort of a murder mystery novel or something like that. Folks were up all night trying to solve the crime. True crime. My wife gets into that every now and then I'll wake up in the morning and she'll be like up all night trying to solve the crime. No true crime. Yes. My wife gets into that every now and then. I'll wake up in the morning and she'll be like, I'm trying to solve

this crime. It's not free. No. It's not free to put that stuff in our ears. That's it. Ann Morris, amazing author, great leadership coaching consultant. Make sure you check her out online. Ann, thanks for all you. And thank you for starting with her. Thank you, Adam. Such a pleasure to be here.