Camille Rapacz: Well, welcome back and happy New Year, George.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Happy New Year to you too. And everybody listening to us, all five of you,
Camille Rapacz: I think there's at least 10 people, at least 10.
Well, I don't know. We've been gone for a while, so I hope we didn't lose people because we took some serious time off over the holidays because, because it's my podcast and I can do what I want, but also we were busy. We were busy doing, you know, holiday thingies and we were traveling, traveling.
Yep. You had some travel in December. So yes, not that we need to make excuses to our listeners, but, you know, sometimes things happen.
George Drapeau: We made a decision about how to end the year. We scared that decision.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. Now we're trying to get all started up again. And yeah, I almost forgot how this works.
I've been thinking about what's a good way to kick off 2024 of our first podcast of the year. And I, you know how we love to reflect. I'm sure everybody's rolling their eyes. They're going to reflect again.
But you know, we love it. We just love it. So we're going to do it.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: So we're going to reflect on themes from 2023, but centered around leadership. I've already decided that this year is really going to center around leadership as the conversations that we're going to have.
And I'm super excited about it. And I hope you are too George, but if not, you're just going to have to fake it. You're going to have to fake enthusiasm for leadership if you don't have it.
George Drapeau: I'm going to make it so you can't tell whether I'm actually enthusiastic or I'm faking it. That's how
Camille Rapacz: good it's going to be.
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. It doesn't matter. Just as long as everybody thinks you're, you're into it. So yeah, the themes are going to center around leaders because leadership really just keeps showing up time and time again is really the core of, I mean, everything that I work on. That is the central theme of what we really need to focus on in order for businesses to do well.
Without it, you can't build a strong culture, you can't have a winning strategy, you can't operate effectively and efficiently. All of that is dependent on good leaders doing good work. And so because it's what drives everything in business, I want to spend a bunch of time talking about it from all sorts of angles, because it's also something that we can I think overly simplify what it means to be a good leader.
And there's so many nuances to it that it's worth diving into all those things.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I agree with you. That sounds great.
Camille Rapacz: So I hopefully give you enough of a heads up George, so you could think about this in advance, but I pulled a few themes. I was just thinking about the recurring themes that keep showing up with what leaders are challenged with that I've worked on back in this past year. And so I wanted you to come up with maybe you have some themes that recurring themes that were showing up in your world as well. And maybe we can just go back and forth and talk about them. Some of these are certainly going to be future podcasts that we can take deeper dives on. But I thought it'd be fun to just share what's been going on.
George Drapeau: I think that's great. I'm ready. Mostly I want to hear what you've got. I already know what I'm thinking.
Camille Rapacz: Well, it's funny because you have an outline of what I think. I don't know what you're thinking. So I'm always entering into this, like, I wonder what crazy thing George is going to say.
Hmm. Cause George shows up. No notes.
George Drapeau: That's right. No notes.
Camille Rapacz: I love it. You want me to go first? Yes, please. Okay. I'll go first. So, my first one is leaders aren't paying enough attention to their blind spots. That's a theme I noticed last year. Really? And, yeah. So, this is a little meta, because, I'm basically saying a leader blind spot is their blind spots.
Mm-Hmm. . And it's not an easy one. So I do wanna give a lot of grace to leaders out there who are struggling with this one. It's not easy to do, but I do see it over and over again being one of the most essential things that's holding individuals and businesses back and, and in some cases quite a bit. And it's not necessarily because they don't think they have blind spots.
Like people are pretty openly can admit like, sure, sure. I have blind spots and my leadership and my work. We all can easily admit it. Then when I ask about, you know, well, how do you. Seek them out. How do you try and uncover some of your blind spots. They'll have some, basic answers. And you know, of course, that's partly my job as well as to help them to show them their blind spots, but where I find the, like the rubber meets the road in terms of really being able to make a difference.
And then where they don't is doing something about it. So there can be an admission of a blind spot of like, yeah, that's really kind of a problem area. We probably need to do something there, but they haven't quite articulated how it's a problem. They just have this general idea, or they've kind of gotten some feedback.
But they haven't formed up a solution. They haven't decided to take action on it, and that's where it's killing them. So the topic will keep coming up over and over again, and then we're still sitting here not doing anything about it. So it's almost like it's a blind spot in that they're kind of acknowledging it, but they're not recognizing the full impact it's having.
So they're not prioritizing taking action around it. That's how it's a blind spot.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I see that. This is a tough one. We could all say very easily. Sure. I know I have blind spots, but hard to figure out. Okay. So where do I take it from there? What's my first step in figuring that out?
Although we have talked about it, we did talk about it during the year. And I thought that was a really, really helpful podcast. I learned some good stuff from hearing how you think about dealing with blind spots. So there is help to be had.
Camille Rapacz: There is help to be had, but even I find with clients who I'm working with, and that being my job, there can still be these mental blocks to doing the work.
That's where like my coaching, consulting chops really have to go into high gear. Like how do I help them be able to embrace this change that they need to get going on when they're just kind of stuck. They'll they'll acknowledge to me, but they won't make that move. There's a whole lot of stuff happen in there There's not like a singular solution because everybody's resistance is coming from usually a little bit of a different place. But it's something I want leaders to be aware of That if you're acknowledging a blind spot, but can't pinpoint, these are the actions I'm taking, then there's still work to be done.
Again, not easy, but there is still work to be done, and it might take some time.
George Drapeau: Yeah, so a confession to make I actually was listening to every word you said I got it, but also Something you said activated a different line of thinking in my mind that was going on in parallel still listening to what you said
THe comment that really kicked off this thread was talking about some people even though you're working with people professionally about this Some people have a still a block to working on it. And it reminded me of a couple of friends I had in college who are architecture majors.
And man, oh man, so they would do these projects, build, make ups, draw plans, all that stuff. And they'd go through their reviews. And those people had the toughest critiques I'd seen in any major in the university. I was a computer science major, you know, not easy stuff. I had a roommate who was in the film school at the best film school in the world.
You know, they got reviews on screenplays and stuff all the time. The architecture majors had the worst. They would go in and they would get torn to pieces. Practically crying, every one of them coming out of these, no matter how good their work was, there was plenty to critique from the architecture professors.
They got torn to pieces. And I used to wonder why, why do that? What is that all about? But something I realized then, and that's something I want to offer to you right now that you got me thinking about something back then is, well, they improve, you know, they get torn to pieces and they, improve rapidly.
And for something like architecture, where you're not just designing, but you have to design something that can actually work, you know, it can't afford to really fail. The thought that I have right now that's got me thinking of is none of these people could afford to have blocks to receiving critique.
There was no way they could say, ah, I'm going to ignore that. You just couldn't do it because they were, everybody had to go in, show your stuff, stand in front of everybody and just get beaten down. And it was sort of like shock training. When you help people get over phobias, you can just do it sort of like that.
Like you're going to learn how to take feedback, but you can just beat it into you for hours. It feels like there's a theme we could talk about around applying feedback. This is extreme feedback, and it will break people down, but I'm not sure that's most of the way you want to do it.
But you and I have also both had talked to each other about experience we've had with people we've managed who are just resistant to feedback.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I think that that you know, going through that experience in school, certainly you know, I had a couple of those and I remember thinking part of it was also a weed out process.
And I think architecture is one of those where they're trying to weed people out as soon as possible because it's not really what people think it's going to be. And right. So I think there's a lot of just reading people out that, if you're really, in it for real, then you're going to power through this and you're going to take it as an opportunity to learn.
But I do think that there's in the connection I was making as you were talking about that is just. if you're really going to assess your blind spots and take action on them as a way to improve, you are going to have to go through this painful moment. Whether that's taking in feedback or taking it because what's happening is you have to discover something learn something change something and that's always hard to do that's work for our brains to do and it's painful. And whether it's I'm getting feedback from somebody else or I'm just having this aha of my own and then realizing looking back and going oh dang it now that I see this I can see how these other things I did before were either wrong or could have been better.
Like you start to judge yourself for not knowing this sooner. And you have to come through all of that and say, that's not the point. The point is I'm here now, and if I'm going to get better, I work through this next blind spot. So I get why we resist it. It's not necessarily comfortable, but when you come out the other side, and you have improvement from it, then it's great. But it requires us to think, in that long term way that. As humans, we're not very good about. Yeah, for sure. All right. All right. So blind spots, that was one of my themes. So share one of yours.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I'm going to call it communication and I'll tell you where it comes from. I'm split this year in half being at one company, the first half of the year and another company, the second half of the year, and both companies have been going through organizational change. Go into reorg stuff and I've been able to see how that's been executed, how that's been carried out.
What I noticed that's in common is both of those reorgs could have used better communications. Communicating how things are going. What's the plan? Why are we doing this? What's your connection to all of this? And then repeating all of that. I will say I'm going to out myself here.
I'm at a company. I'm not going to name it. The company won't be that hard for people to figure out, but I feel like the reorg that's been going on there that I joined midway through is brilliant. I think it's a very, very difficult to reorg. To have done cleaning up an organization that had a lot of mess, a lot of technical and organizational debt that's still being cleaned up because it was so messy before.
And I think the plan to do it is fantastic. And in defense of the leaders who had to do this, there was so much mess to clean up and so much change that there wasn't that much time to really communicate to the whole organization what's going on except for a couple times over months. And so some of the result we got out of that, that I observed was, Morale's a little bit low.
They don't really know what's going on. They haven't heard from leadership in a while. Their connectionship between what's happening at the leadership level and what's happening at their level hasn't been connected very well. I was hired in my role in part to be that bridge. There's another up here of mine who was hired at the same time to be a bridge for his part of the organization.
And so that I hope that's helping. And I think that was part of the strategy, but I'm seeing the effect of low communications on the effectiveness in the organization. The first half of the year is dealing with an organization where lots of changes going on, but I would hear a lot of comments about, I really don't know what's happening.
I don't know why these changes are being made. A lot of decisions are being made in secret and they're not communicated to us or just being rolled out all of a sudden. I'm not sure why. So I guess what I get from it is communication seems like it's a little bit too simplistic a term to put on, but that's what it is, you know, be doing these reorgs and without communication.
I'll make two other comments about it. It's in clear contrast to a huge reorg that I went through when I was at Sun Microsystems, where we took a 300 person organization and We raised it to the ground and built it from scratch person by person, manager by manager. I mean, I've not seen a complete reorg done like that ever, but the guy who led us through it, communicated so frequently about what was going on that the reorg became boring and it was just, just the best.
My last comment is you've heard this thing, right? Where you say people have to be told things seven times for it to sink in? The older I get, the more I go through this kind of stuff.
So, I mean, I, the first couple of times I heard that, I thought, really, you got a number on that? That's not a bad number. I believe it now. You have thoughts about that?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I mean, a couple of things about what you just said. Communication is a constant theme in leadership for me.
That one's just like never goes away. From all sorts of different angles. And from the one you're talking about, it made me really think of was just how much organizations don't really value doing change management well, because that's what you're talking about in the organization. So it's centered around good communication, but there are all sorts of aspects of change management that need to happen in there.
And so yeah, I've seen that same thing. What I hear a lot of leaders who are resistant to, I try to push them to, it's better to over communicate. Right. You'd, you would rather people get bored listening to your message. Like they've just heard it enough that they've got this.
You'd rather err on that side than on the side of, I don't know what's going on. Right? Because you're more apt to lose motivation, maybe get disgruntled, lose faith in their leadership. There's so many things that will happen that are very hard to undo.
Once you've broken some trust in that way with your employees, it's very hard to build it back. They will remember that, that you didn't build trust by sharing with them all of the plans of the organization. Yeah. And I think leaders sometimes they get up at a level where they forget how important that is, and I've heard leaders say that like, well, those frontline people, that's not really going to affect them.
And they don't really care about what we're doing over here in our little C suite. I'm like, Oh yes, they do. They absolutely care about what's going on and it absolutely is affecting them. And it's really easy to lose sight of that when you are in your little, C suite conference room with all your other VPs.
It's just really easy to lose sight of it. It's not because they're bad people. You're just working on other stuff. So I liked hearing that part of that strategy was, hiring somebody like you at this level to do this because that's your job at this level of an organization.
When you're in these director level roles, your job is to translate from both directions, what's happening above has to get translated down, what's happening below you got to translate up. You're in this really key translation mode. So doing that communication is important. But at the same time, it can't replace top leadership coming out with communications.
And it was funny how you said, you know, I get they're busy and they don't have time and oh my gosh, that's like the worst excuse. If I was in there, I'd be like, you must do it. It's hard to make time for that stuff though, because you have to do it well. You can't just like slap something together and send it out. You want to do it on that. Oh, what?
George Drapeau: You and I in reality are on exactly the same page on that, but my pushback anyway, is going to be, I'm going to make an analogy between the situation that I'm in now and first responders going into a bad triage situation where there's just a bunch of immediate level stuff that needs to be taken care of.
And you can go in, I'm going to propose that you could go in and just start triaging, or you could go in and say, okay, everybody, Get in a circle. Let's talk about the plan. Here's what we're going to do. Here's the plan of attack. We're going to go in everybody understand that? No? You had questions? You're going to take some time communicate when people are dying. Sometimes situations about you didn't get in there and they're not enough time to release to lay out a clear communications path. I don't quite fully fully believe my own argument, but i'm going to propose that.
Camille Rapacz: I'm going to push back to your pushback. Nobody goes into an emergency situation like a firefighter or an EMT or whatever and doesn't communicate what they're doing. Those leaders can go in and say, we're in triage mode. Right now, here's what we're going to do. Expect a little communication from us as we're working to right the ship.
And we'll come back to you later. Like, at a bare minimum, and people would get that. If that's really what was happening. People will go, Oh, okay. Thanks for telling us. And you can go in there and say, it's going to be a little chaotic. We might be doing things that don't make sense right at this moment.
We'll come back to you later. But right now we need to put the fire out. So we're going to focus on that. Yeah. Because, I mean, even if an EMT shows up, they're still, if they're going to treat you, they're still going to tell you what they're doing. If you're conscious. They're not going to just start doing stuff to you.
So that would be my argument is. I hear that one a lot, which is like, well, but we don't have time to fully think through and do, and we really need to fix it. I'm like, right. That's great. And I agree with that. You can still tell people that's what you're doing, and it will immediately put people into a level of understanding of what's happening. You'll earn some time and patience from them, because they're like, oh, okay, got it.
George Drapeau: Maybe we should talk about how to do this, because, I can empathize with somebody who's trying to execute this stuff and doesn't have time, doesn't feel like they have time to communicate, but execute stuff. But there's ways to get it done. Identify chief of staff, pick somebody to be your spokesperson.
There's ways to handle this. And I bet a lot more people than you think listeners are stuck with this kind of problem. Exactly this kind of problem is like, I don't see how I can do both. Do it, lead through it and communicate about it. We get it. Yeah. It's really hard.
And we don't want you to lose sleep every night because of it. Maybe some nights. There's ways we could, we could help.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Future podcasts I think we can have a lot of discussions around communication and change management and just take a scenario and just talk about what are the resistance points? How would you do it? Cause some of it too, I think is if you just give it a thought for a minute. It won't actually take as much time as you think it will. And I think that's something we could talk through as well.
So yeah, I agree. We're totally, totally worth doing. Yeah. Okay. All right. Communication. Ooh, that was a big one.
SO I'm going to do my next one. Mine is managing up. Really? So this is a skill that if you go to leadership development, training, a program, whatever, do you ever see managing up as a topic?
It's not something we really talk about that much. And people, when they ask me for support with this, this isn't what they call it. But it's essentially what they're asking for. They want me to help them manage up. They're trying to improve communications with their boss.
They're trying to get buy in from their boss on headcount. They're trying to get their boss to approve a project. And they realize every time they talk to them, they're like, I'm not clearly making my point because I'm not getting the result I want. They're trying to do this work with their whoever they report to, and they're having trouble just making this connection with their leader.
But what's lacking is they're not thinking about managing up and I don't actually like that term managing up because it really is about being a good leader. In all directions. So if you're going to be a good leader, you have to be a good leader up, across, and down. You're always working on all those angles.
And we don't often think about how do I be a good leader upwards? How do I be a good leader to who I report to? And so this is a theme that's come up quite a bit where people are coming with these different challenges they have in working with their boss. And what it really comes down to is they don't have the skills for how to manage up or how to be a good leader in the context of their boss. And it's because they're looking at their boss as I need them to approve a thing for me so I can go get something done. And they're not thinking enough about what do they care about what's important to them? How can I best support them? There's sort of this lack of like the two way streets conversation happening.
We could do a whole other episode on this. I find this showing up quite a bit where people are just struggling because they haven't quite been given the tools for how to deal with their boss. Because they do have to be able to, I need to be able to make a good case. I need to be able to present an idea and get it approved by my boss in order to do X, Y, Z in my department. And if I'm not good at that, they're not going to approve it. And I'm trying to kind of be stuck.
George Drapeau: Can't wait for this podcast.
Camille Rapacz: I can't wait for this podcast on managing up?
George Drapeau: Yeah. I want to see what you have to say about it. I also don't like the term in particular. It's just because it's got so many connotations that sound like scheming. It sounds like it's disingenuous. And I know that's not what you're talking about at all.
So I think it's going to be very useful to hear what this really means and how it fits into a 360. I agree. Manage up across and down. I also like that. That's very simple and straightforward. It's comprehensive.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, it's looking at your role and all the people that you impact. And so how you influence people below you is different from how you're going to influence people above you in the org chart.
That's the conversation we have to have. That's what we're mean when we were talking about this term managing up. It's really about that. How do I navigate being able to be influential, also being able to be a good servant leader to those people that are above me. All of those things.
Yeah,
George Drapeau: man. All over that.
Camille Rapacz: Big theme. We'll talk more about that one as well. Cool. What do you got? What's yours?
George Drapeau: Consistency, I think is what I'm going to call it. And so here's, I think I, I realized as I was thinking about mine, mine feel like boring. Boring, straightforward, bread and butter issues, but they're very helpful. Consistency is probably one of the most boring things to think about in terms of management, and I'm not gonna say it's the hardest thing to get done. You need some discipline in order to be consistent in how you're leading, but it's easy to understand.
I'll tell you what I mean. I've picked up in an organization that really had lacked leadership for a while. And so we had a lot of really high performing people in this organization, really impressive people doing their best to get things done without any real guidance about what to do and when to do it.
A new structure was put in place on this organization about how we build stuff, how we give it to our sales force, how we communicate about it, but really no guidance about when to do these different parts of the program. People trying to figure things out on their own.
There was no guidance about like, how often do we do these kinds of review meetings? When do we set our goals? How often do we communicate with what people, there was really no, no consistent expectations set. And so for me, I got in here, started observing what this organization was doing and I observed there were patterns to be had, and patterns that were not being followed. And when they were not followed, deadlines were being missed. People would not coordinate because they didn't realize, Oh, we should have talked by then gotten to this point. And then we had another month to negotiate.
If we had done that, we would have gotten stuff ready in time. So what we've been doing over the last six months is just trying to do simple things like, Hey, let's talk about what's the rhythm of this organization? When do we set our goals? When do we execute our goals? When do we go in firefighting mode?
That turns out there's seasonality to a lot of this stuff in this organization. And I just started making that explicit. Let's all be clear. If we want to make our products ready by deadline, here's when we do the different phases. Okay. And then we get to the next quarter. We'd say, okay, now remember we talked about this?
We're in this phase of that. And it was consistent and it didn't really take much, but our engine for doing stuff is much tighter now because we've got great people and they've been given consistent expectations about when they need to get stuff ready. So I think the next step is for me not to have to tell them anymore.
Everybody gets it in their head and they know it and they do it by themselves. And they're not quite there yet, but they're much better off than they were before. That's kind of what I mean by consistency.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I was thinking of a lot of different ways that I think about that. When you said the rhythm, it's like the rhythm of business is what I talk to my clients about, right? What's your rhythm of business? So everybody knows. It's not a big fire alarm pulled every time it's budget season.
You've been in organizations where it's like that. And some people listening might be in those organizations, but you can get out ahead of this because it is the same thing every year. Or some people have just the same projects that repeat every year or a product launch. There's things that you're doing in your business that you are doing over and over again, and if you create this consistent expectations, processes, all of that kind of stuff, man, it just goes a long ways to helping people.
That's how you help people perform better is by giving that to them. Giving them that consistency. Yeah. I love that one. In fact, so every year when I do my annual business planning for myself part of that exercise is I always re evaluate what are the values in my own little organization. And I have a little exercise I go through and value number four is consistency.
George Drapeau: Really? Yeah. Yeah. I think one nice byproduct for consistency is it lowers stress. You may not realize it, but it really does lower stress. I noticed this as a parent. I mean, one of the things that we do that really helps us with our child. We have a chalkboard right outside the kitchen and we lay out the evening schedule, the things that need to be done.
We all see it. When we have rough timelines, it doesn't have to be anal retentive, but everybody knows here's what you do first. Here's what's expected. And so we're not always yanking the kid around from time to time. It's not like random expectations. He may not like it, but he's comfortable with it.
And overall it's clear when he's got clear expectations, how much calmer he is than when he has random expectations. He does not like getting out of his pattern. Who does, really?
Camille Rapacz: Yes, absolutely. I think that what you're talking about is getting down to like human nature.
We do well when we have some consistency in our lives and it makes it easier to deal with chaos when it does show up, especially in business, you have a little more energy for it, right? Nobody likes to get thrown off of their schedule. But if you're constantly doing that, then you're just burning energy like crazy, right?
Your mental, capacity is just shrinking so fast because you're constantly in that mode. That's how we talk about trying to get organizations out of firefighting mode and getting, being able to be more proactive. It really is about this consistency that you're talking about. How do we build that consistency in all the places that you can, so you can better manage the places that are by nature going to be more chaotic.
That's a great one. It might be a little bit related to my next one. So my next one was you could simplify this to a work life balance, but it's a little bigger than that. It's partly that, and it's partly balancing your own priorities with other people's priorities at work.
So it centers around this common theme that has been coming up with this is mostly with my, one on one coaching, is people feeling like they always need to say yes to other people's demands, and their struggled with. Their question the last me is can you help me learn how to say no nicely to other people when they're asking me to do things because it's getting in the way of my own priorities and it means they have this never ending list of things to do so it's that.
And I think that combined with the idea that people have been working from home. And it's blurring the boundaries of work hours even more. And so that's adding on top of this problem. There's many factors in here of how this is showing up. But that's another added element to that I see is occurring for people.
Oh, like, I can work whenever I want is good, but also bad. Because I can also be expected to work whenever they need me. I know, places where people are, they're basically on call 24 seven with their phone if somebody calls them for a work thing. Or they're doing emails while they're on their vacations, even though they don't want to.
And so there's that level of it. But the one that comes up even more often is just the day to day, how do I just manage my workload on a daily basis when the workload is often coming from other people? How do I do that?
George Drapeau: Yeah. You said it in here, but before you had said it, the thing that was coming to mind as you're talking to me about it was the work boundaries.
Are we good at setting boundaries? Knowing when to say no to things or people? Knowing what to protect our time . This reminds me of a story maybe eight, nine years ago. I was working with other people. A guy in our marketing department, great guy. And he was trying to get help with one particular partner we were working with.
And I had reassigned my technical resource to another partner, but that technical resource didn't want to give up on the first part. And he still wanted to help out. He was kind of splitting time between both and he did not have time to do both. And so this marketing guy would ask for his help and sometimes he'd say yes.
And sometimes he'd say no. And the marketing guy came to me and said, okay, George, look, it would actually be more helpful if you just said no all the time to my request for this partner than yes, sometimes. Because I don't know when you're going to help me or not.
But if you say no all the time, then I do know and I can deal with that. So can you just be more consistent about basically putting a boundary on me? That was fascinating to me because before then I had just been thinking about trying to be helpful and I didn't really consider the impact of my fuzzy boundaries on that other person. So I learned that, wow, okay, setting my own boundaries actually helps other people.
It's not angering them necessarily.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I do think we underestimate the value of setting the boundaries and then clearly communicating with others because then they know, like, it's much easier to work when you know what you're going to expect and what's affecting how you're setting those boundaries. That kind of communication, boy, that's when teams really can start working.
You know, together and cross functionally really well. But it's not easy for everybody to do because there's also a sense of people will have different levels of boundaries that they need to set. So, your boundaries for either the level of work or when you can work will be different than somebody else's.
And that can be based on a million different things. And we tend to want everybody to have all the same, have all of that be the same. And I just think that's unrealistic because there is different stages of life, all sorts of things going on. And so I think that makes it difficult for us to communicate it because we don't want to be the jerk that is setting the boundaries that feel too restrictive for other people.
But then if that's really what you need, how can you actually get to it? So this is a very complicated space to work in with an individual to get them to navigate this, but hugely important to do. So I love that example that you gave because it isn't just about you, it is also about other people.
George Drapeau: I like this topic.
I'm so glad you brought it up. It's cool.
Camille Rapacz: Good for everybody.
George Drapeau: Do I have time for one more?
Camille Rapacz: Yes. I want you to do one more.
George Drapeau: Okay. I'm going to call this one incentives because it's about incentives. I have a friend, I don't think you and I've talked about her much known her for almost 30 years and she's probably the best person at figuring out incentives for motivating behavior better than anybody else I know on the planet.
She's not a manager right now, she's just brilliant. And she grew up in an environment where she had family members who are all competing for stuff. And they've figured out how to build incentives to motivate themselves to work well with each other and share food and all this stuff. I think incentives, if you can figure out how to give good incentives, you can motivate a lot of really good behavior if you do it right.
Also, I think for me, the way I work, if I'm having trouble figuring out goals, one way for me to start making goals is to figure out, okay, what kind of behavior do I want out of these people? What kind of incentives can I give them to create that behavior? And then usually a goal will fall out of that. If I have trouble making a goals, I don't know if that makes sense.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. In fact, I wish more people would set goals that way, because I think when we do it the other way, we often end up causing the wrong behaviors. Yeah. Right. Especially if we decide that we're going to incentivize a specific outcome and we're not clear about how we want that outcome to be achieved, that could cause people to do all sorts of crazy stuff in their behaviors just to try and get that bonus.
And so you really have to be careful about thinking through, if I'm going to create this incentive, what kind of behaviors will it produce? I think if you can come at it from that angle, that's even better.
George Drapeau: I also personally, maybe it's just my, my personality, but I think thinking about incentives, creating incentives as a game, it's fun.
It's a creative process. I enjoy that. And it applies in so many different realms. I mean, if you're selling stuff, figuring out incentives for your customers, how are you going to push them toward one product line or another or making certain choices?
What are you going to provide as incentives for parenting? Oh my goodness, incentives all over the place. I mean, we had a major incentive. Our screen time dollars thing that we did with our son, huge win. Being able to give our kid an incentive to stop screen time. And it's very simple and had a lot of lessons in it.
They're fun to think through how do you incentivize behavior?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I wonder how many leaders actually find that fun. I'm guessing not as many as we would like to think. Why not? It's fun.
If you wanna learn how to make incentive setting a fun activity, call George.
George Drapeau: Do you like doing it?
Camille Rapacz: I do. Because I also like to think in terms of, okay, what's really gonna be best for the people? Like it always starts with that.
Okay. So what's going to be best for the people is I need to be really clear about the behaviors that I want as a team or as leaders or whoever I'm working with. What kind of behaviors are we're trying to get to that fits into our leadership culture and all that good stuff. Or, just what do we need in order to be successful as a team?
What's going to be most effective for them to be happy and motivated, all that good stuff. I like starting with that and then building out the, okay, obviously that has to then tie to what do we actually need to achieve as a team or as a business. Yeah. But when you put those two things together, That's where the magic happens, right?
So yeah, I think if you think about it as sort of a little bit of a game and how can I come up with something that's actually going to work here and get creative? I think too often we just think in terms of the one thing, which is just dollars. I'm going to give a bonus if you get to X result, which is, I'm going to give you money for getting to a certain level of money is usually how it works.
Right. Like we think in terms of sales, you know, sales incentives is kind of the only framework we sort of give to thinking about how to incentivize teams, but so many teams aren't in the sales business. They're trying to create other, outputs for the company. So you do have to get creative about it. But if you can learn how to have fun with that and enjoy that process, it's excellent. Excellent to be able to do that.
George Drapeau: Okay. Thank you. That's mine. Did you have one?
Camille Rapacz: No, I'm going to end with that. I like your last one. Yeah. I mean, I have a million other things that we will do, but we will be talking about more themes all throughout the year.
We have all year to talk about leadership stuff. All year, George, literally all year. Do you think we'll have enough topics?
George Drapeau: Yes. I think we're going to overflow with topics this year. I'm confident of that.
Camille Rapacz: So I'm kind of thinking we'll do like first half of the year, I don't want to say we're going to be a seasonal podcast, but we're going to take some breaks.
So there will be a summer break. So we just came off of our winter break. But I think I'm going to be a little more deliberate and just planning for a summer break and a winter break. One because hey, everybody listening, you should also be taking a break from listening to business podcasts and go listen to other stuff, and do other stuff.
So that's one reason. But also we want to take a break and enjoy doing something both in the summer and in the winter. So we will definitely plan those out a little bit more. So we won't have to do 52 episodes, but we'll probably do at least 40 episodes at a minimum. We're going to have to come up with 40 leadership topics.
George Drapeau: I think we can do it. I'm up for it. I like the challenge.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I think the challenge will be, how do we pick from all of the topics that we want to talk about? Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening and tuning back in. Those of you who maybe, thought that we had disappeared and fallen off the face of the earth.
We are back. We will be doing an episode a week. Most of them will be both George and I. Occasionally, it might be just me. We definitely want to get some guests on here. So we're going to start focusing on getting some other people's perspectives in here talking to us about all things leadership and business.
And if you have any ideas, we would, of course, love to hear from you. But, Really what I want to talk to you about is, is there anything I can do to help you? Are you struggling as a leader or in your business? What do you need help with? I would love to talk to you about that, whether I'm the person who can help you or not.
You can do that by going to CamilleRapacz.com/bookacall. There'll be a link in the show notes, but you can get on a free consult with me. You can talk to me for free for an hour or maybe you've heard enough from me on the podcast, but it's different when we're getting on the phone. So.
George Drapeau: It's totally different.
Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. you'll actually probably take something useful away for free. Imagine that. All right. That's all I have for this week. Thank you everybody for tuning in and we will be back in your ears next week.
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