12 May May 15, 2019 – Best Practice Institute Louis Carter and Facebook Ad Guru Kim Barrett
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Louis Carter – CEO of Best Practice Institute, Top 10 Organizational Culture Global Guru and Author of In Great Company: How to Spark Peak Performance By Creating an Emotionally Connected Workplace – Read interview highlights here
SPARK leads to employees wanting to perform better by 3 to 4 times. Systemic collaboration, positive future, alignment of values, respect, and killer outcomes.
Louis Carter is one of the top 10 Global Gurus in Organizational Culture around the world voted by Global Top Gurus. He is the author of 11 books in leadership and management which have been translated into 6 languages including Change Champion’s Field Guide, Best Practices in Talent Management and In Great Company: how to achieve peak performance by creating an emotionally connected workplace. As the founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute, he has led consulting and benchmark research projects that have impacted millions of employees worldwide for most of the Fortune 500.
Kim Barrett – CEO, Founder, Speaker & Trainer at Your Social Voice
If you can articulate the prospects’ problem better than they can, they will buy from you.
Kim Barrett is a world renowned Social Media Marketer, focusing on Facebook. He is an International Best Selling Author, Speaker and Trainer, having taught marketing around the world and helping businesses grow to 6 and 7 figures. Your Social Voice helps businesses get heard on social media, and most importantly, build engagement, generate more leads and more sales. Kim Barrett is the CEO and Founder of an online marketing agency helping their clients generate awareness, leads, and sales. They help businesses generate more leads, more sales and help them scale using the latest marketing strategies and tactics to keep them ahead of their competitors. They’ve worked with ASX listed companies, Australian Government, companies like The Unstoppable Family, YWS, F45 and Speakers and Thought Leaders at Multi Speaker events including Nik Halik, Caleb Maddix and Gary Vaynerchuk.
Highlights from Louis’ Interview
We’ve got to figure out how many of those people have ever been disrespected or felt really badly inside of the workplace. And here’s what I did, I looked at all those people who have cake, and their birthdays, and they play foosball, and they eat lots of pizza. And I found out that just one time, they’re feeling like they’re in a relationship, or they’re feeling like they’re not getting their work done, or there’s stuff that’s not happening that you don’t see, it’s what you don’t know that really has the most impact.
Only 2% of those people will actually leave your company. So it’s not about the people who leave your company, it’s the other 98% of the people who are eating your pizza, playing ping pong, hanging out eating cake, cashing their paycheck, and telling you about their kids, who are wasting your time and who don’t care. They’re the most actively disengaged employees inside your company. And it’s not just about engagement, it’s about what they’re going to do to your scores when you’re not looking. And when you’re giving them cake for their birthdays.
People, there’s a lot of misperception that can happen from a lack of communication. Sitting down, I was reflecting, when I was staring at you, I was thinking about something else. In fact, I was staring at you.
In my first job out of college–and this is a long time ago–my first job out of college, I was in an environment in a consulting firm where everybody else was from Harvard. And I was not from Harvard. Right away, I was the odd person out, which is cool, I could find out figure out what they’re from.
So my boss said to me, at the time, he said, “Hey, look, Lou, I want you to stay in the office, and do everybody else’s work while I go out and party with your colleagues.”
I think, “Great, okay, let’s do that.”
At the end of the day, two o’clock in the morning for me, I went downstairs, done with everybody’s work. And I was without code or key and was locked in with their alarm on the right. So I had to call my boss and he was too drunk to understand me, and so I voted that time was the end of it. It was a dysfunctional relationship.
I knew what I would do next, which was wait for him for five hours outside of his office, until I can go back in and tell him that I would never work in an environment like this again, which I did. And I still remember to this day, what it was like, because it felt like the most empowering moment in my life. Now, only 2% of people would do that. Okay. So, that was a direct incident of feeling disrespected. Other people are really about miscommunication. It’s about not asking questions. And in the book, the principles we’re talking about, it’s really the respect, and the respect is part of and the systemic collaboration, talks about mirroring, challenging supporting, actually moving to decisions, and how important it is to test assumptions. And walk up this ladder of inference about what we’re seeing, and how we perceive things that are impacted by our environment, where we’re from, or even sometimes our makeup in terms of our synaptic class that have less or more serotonin than others. So people are different. People read in so many ways, and how we process information, some slower, some moderately, some too fast, or two are more rapidly than others. And we have to adjust to this in the workplace, and in every moment, and do not withhold information that may harm ourselves or others in the workplace.
There’s two ways of looking at active disengagement, two diagnostics. Number one is if somebody is not actively talking in the dialogue, there’s two things you have to check up on and talk to them. Number one, they may be introverted, they may be processing things differently. They may not feel connected to other people. And that’s okay, you don’t have to have friendships at work. People have said that they do. But in reality, in our research, it’s not about friendships, what really impacts performance is this feeling of emotional connectedness to the people and to the company itself, which is that feeling a psychological safety inside of the environment. So you need to test for when you’re with people inside of the break room, how they’re feeling inside the environment. Are they able to talk when they need them? They want to talk, express themselves, and they need to express themselves in whatever way it may be. And so you’re testing not for active disengagement in terms of what they’re saying, but you’re seeing if they’re actually talking, so somebody’s hanging out. And, you know, they’re feeling like they can’t say anything for fear that they’re going to be shut down, or there’s going to be some colleagues in to say, “Look, we don’t need to hear from you anymore.” And that’s not a joke, because sometimes that can be a joke. Like if we’re people joking with each other, and not at each other’s expenses, but as an appreciation for him. I’ve seen it’s true, seen that with your teenagers, right? They joke around like, “Oh, you’re like that.” And that’s a form of love, right?
But there’s situations when you really do put somebody down actively, and you may not be seeing that, and there may be something behind somebody’s silence. So you have to walk up the ladder of inference for that as well. And really talk about what’s behind their silence, and they’re not engaging activity in the break room, or even talking to people. And you know, what are they doing? What are they thinking? What’s happened in their lives, that may be causing that kind of active disengagement in the discussion?
Amy Edmundson is from Harvard. She is a doctor, she did a lot of research in the field of psychological safety, and what she found, she related to several incidents. One was the Challenger disaster. Others were about the CIA FBI breakdown during 9/11. When we don’t speak up, catastrophes happen. And people don’t speak up, typically because of fear of reprisal, of what may happen, and then they may lose their job. They may feel like they’ll lose their job, they may feel like they’ll get yelled at. So the fear of making mistakes actually creates catastrophe.
The model for purpose we have in the book is alignment of values. So that’s the A, and purpose, for companies like Patagonia, that’s important because their purpose is environmental awareness. When you go to other companies, where purpose becomes something like business strategy, or values for getting customers’ packages on time, or being able to order movies with your underwear on, rather than having to go get in the car and get one from Blockbuster. They differ, in terms of it, purpose differs.
If your purpose is an individual purpose, to put food on your family’s tables, and enjoy your life and happiness and love your life, your children and your family. And that variable may be, and you can go to a workplace, and make sure to know that that’s your purpose in life, because to do a great job and be with people that support you, and get better with what you do. If it’s chicken gizzard, that could be your purpose.
It’s SPARK, sparking emotional connection. And there’s five different areas that I interviewed, I did a full lunch this Sunday with 3000 employees throughout the globe.
In these five areas, SPARK sparking an emotional connection that leads to employees wanting to perform more and better by three to four times. And the five are real quick, I’ll just say them quickly. It’s in the books, systemic collaboration, positive future alignment of values, respect, and killer outcomes. All five of these things were taken from thousands of statements that we categorize in these five areas. It’s the next level of emotional intelligence, where EI is a lot about empathy, and about having emotional regulation. We take that EI and we become EC, by enabling us to have agreements on how we really work and collaborate a daily basis. So miscommunication doesn’t happen, and we can do the very best to create outcomes for each other.
For years I was with Coleman and Ruben Baran. And they’ve created quotations around simple things that are around empathy and emotional regulation. So you know, how upset am I getting, is my amygdala having an overflow? And I always say, in terms of my regulation, can I calm myself down to make more objective decisions? And then also it’s about empathy, putting myself in other people’s shoes when I’m talking with them. That’s something you do, as it really is an independent activity for yourself as you’re engaging in conversation. So in the manifesto, or in the competency of EI, you’re changing yourself as you talk with somebody. It’s awesome as a precursor, and a competency for doing etc, etc, it’s an activity you do with people.
Arthur Ahrens did an experiment called How to Fall in Love with Another Person. He found that when you bring two people together, and they stare at each other’s eyes for three to five minutes, I think after that, you got to make sure that you know, you agree on X and get can get kind of creepy. And then you ask a series of 56 questions or so of the other person, and you will have a sense of feeling of love with that person after you talk to them.
You’re the guy that says, “This is really creepy. It’s not gonna work out.” Which is totally cool. Some people are just like this isn’t cool. So what I say is like, EI, you need EI, or you should use the EI to do experiments like Arthur Errands. If you apply it to the org sector, though, it’s completely different. You can’t stare at each other’s eyes, and ask the six questions, you don’t have enough time to do that. What you can do though, is you can position yourself, you can look at each other a little bit better. You can hear each other differently. You can ask if you’re really being heard, and asked to be stopped. If you’re not hearing or understanding, with somebody saying you can have a structure for how you give advice. And asking for advice, listening, thinking, thinking, respond, and then changing. So there’s a process by which you can be in relationship, ask the right questions, ask for perceptions, and be in that kind of relationship where you really are asking questions, you really are listening, you’re not staring in a creepy way, you’re listening, you’re actively with them. Have you know, a leader that you could talk with? A CEO where you can say, “I really feel like when I’m with that person–CEO, or anybody could be anyone in your life–they are actively with me 100%, and their attention is only on me in that moment. Do you know somebody like that?
It’s about being in real time with people, and not just being kind of robotic about your empathy and emotional regulation. Just actively working with real tools that are all in the book, and each of the phases that you can use to enable great, awesome performance for each other. Because, look, if my life isn’t better as a result of having you in it, and your life isn’t better as a result of having me in it, why should we be in it? So we got it. Figure that out before we even created.
Find me on twitter at LouisLCarter. You can go to LouisCarter.com. I own a company called Best Practice Institute. That’s my main gig. Just check it online. Look up Louis Carter. I’m on Amazon, your local bookstores.
The answer about big publishing for me is, I actually appreciate it. I’ve been with John Wiley and Sons. And now I’m with McGraw Hill. I’ve really appreciated my relationship with them. It’s the publisher, the relationship I had with them, I liked. And the other stuff I had, I obviously have to work on. I understood that was important, but I like McGraw Hill people, and specifically one person there I connected with, like how he did business. That’s where it came down to. It was like, who do I like? Who do I want to work with?
That one employee you get in touch with, or you hear that solely is the entire organization, and that ruins your perception of the entire organization. Like what’s your second book to this for authors?
It’s all about promoting yourself, and you have to get out there, you have to make things happen and have a plan for it. Your books are great for that. People, you got to pick up Jim Beach’s books because he gives us a great roadmap for this, and the great thing about this process is that when you find the right person in the publishing house that you go to, or if you even self published, you may be the right person, you yourself, right? So it’s just about clarifying what the relationship is and what you want to get out of it, and just being honest about what you want and where you’re going with it.