Balancing performance with human leadership can be tough for some leaders. The goal is to strike a healthy balance, while always remembering that taking thoughtful care of your people, recognizing their unique contributions, and creating an environment where they can thrive can lead to the stellar performance results you seek.
But how would you lead if your title or position didn’t give you any power?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen is a leadership trainer and the award-winning author of Managing Without Power. Joris shares his unique journey at Google, watching the culture and leadership he loved so much shift as his managers changed, and why he’s committed to helping companies capture that early magic and scale it as they grow. We discuss recognizing and respecting your power dynamic while also understanding that the title does not give you power, but consistent, intentional small behaviors will ensure your team will help you meet your goals. Joris shares how to balance people nd performance through the five basics of his interconnected, practical, holistic leadership approach. And he shares how to solicit and take in upward feedback to help you effectively support an employee’s journey, ensure high performance, and make tough decisions when needed.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- How managers can shape microcultures and establish team norms.
- Upskilling leaders to avoid conventional traps and pitfalls.
- Providing ongoing support to learning, not just one-time training.
- The five basics of his interconnected, practical, holistic leadership approach.
- How to solicit and take in upward feedback to help effectively support an employee’s journey, ensure high performance, and make tough decisions when needed.
“The problem I see is this balance between human-focused and performance-focused leadership. I regularly meet leaders who think of them as opposites, but you need both of them in a certain balance…in order to create a high-performing team and organization.” — Joris Merks-Benjaminsen
Episode References:
- Joris’ Book: Managing Without Power: Creating high-performance teams and organizations in your own human way
- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
- Google re: Work – Guides: Give feedback to managers https://share.google/nhB0hREQOztuqQwOV
About Joris Merks-Benjaminsen, Leadership Trainer, Author of Managing Without Power:
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen is a leadership trainer and the award-winning author of Managing Without Power. Joris had a leading role in Google’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives, and was one of the highest-scoring managers in the company’s history. Today, he trains managers and leaders to help find the right balance between humaneness and performance pressure.
Connect with Joris:
Managing Without Power: www.managingwithoutpower.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joris-merks-benjaminsen-5673384/
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:00
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Balancing performance with human leadership can be tough for some leaders, the goal is to strike a healthy balance while always remembering that taking thoughtful care of your people, recognizing their unique contributions, and creating an environment where they can thrive will lead to the stellar performance results you seek. They go hand in hand. The question you can ask is, how would you lead if your title or position didn’t give you any power? Today, I talk with Joris merks benjaminson, who is a leadership trainer and the award winning author of managing without power. Joris had a leading role in Google’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and was one of the highest scoring managers in the company’s history. Today, he trains managers and leaders to help find the right balance between humaneness and performance pressure. Today, Joris shares his unique journey of Google watching the culture and leadership he loved so much shift as his managers changed, and why he’s committed to helping companies capture that early magic and scale it as they grow. We discuss recognizing and respecting your power dynamic while also understanding that the title doesn’t give you the power, but consistent, intentional, small behaviors will ensure your team will help you meet your goals. Joris shares how to balance people and performance through the five basics of his interconnected, practical, holistic leadership approach, and he shares how to solicit and take in upward feedback to help you effectively support an employee’s journey, ensure high performance and make tough decisions when needed. A lot of gems today and really interesting insights into a company we all know. So take a listen. Welcome yours to the empathy edge Podcast. I’m excited to have this conversation with you about balancing consistent leadership to balance humanity and performance at the same time, and you have some amazing experiences that I’m really glad you’re going to be sharing with our audience today. So let’s get right to it. Let’s talk a little bit about your story and how you came to this work and how your experience at Google really catapulted you into the work that you’re doing today?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 03:02
Yeah, sure. So nowadays, I’m self employed trained managers and leaders, and I’ve had a career working for a variety of companies for about 20 plus years or so. First half of that was media and advertising, eventually market insights, and I joined Google somewhere half my halfway my career as their head of marketing sites. And so at that company, I’ve had a journey of 12 years in total. I’ve had like five or six different roles. I had like nine or 10 different managers, and then during the last six years, I ended up running an education team called Google digital Academy. We were running education programs with Google’s largest customers, and most of my views around management and leadership have been formed during those 12 years at Google. And interestingly so the best manager I ever had at Google was my very first one, and I didn’t realize it at the time, unfortunately. So I joined Google because I read the book how Google works. And so they describe this company who wants to redefine work life with these rules, like, you can be serious without a suit, you know, like, so you want to have real impact work on real things. You’re serious about the business, but it’s also joyful. And, you know, so all of that, and I read that in a book, and I thought, Yes, that’s what I want to work and so the first three years, I literally had that. So it was precisely the way it was described in the book. And I thought that this was because this is just how Google is. And then at some point, I ended up leaving my first role, and I ended up leaving that team, because my profile of expertise was gradually moving away from marketing side. So I started presenting on conferences, first about research about shifting consumer behavior, and that then became digital marketing transformation. Conversation, and then it gradually became org change and leadership. And I realized I’m no longer a researcher. I was no longer a fit for the market insights team, yeah. And so I started to look like, okay, where in the organization would I then fit? And I ended up finding a new job working with Google’s largest customers. But from there onwards, in the next three years, so I gradually became less happy. So I enjoyed my work less, like I got my energy was draining, and that got to the point where I considered leaving. I was actually already applying for different jobs. I had job interviews and everything. And then I realized, thinking back, like I listened, I have this old Google that I used to experience right, that I loved, and I felt connected to it, and I never asked myself the question where my energy was coming from. And now I have this version that almost feels like a different company. And so I started analyzing it because I wanted the old one back. And then realized when I was moving up the chain of command, the management chain I was under. And I realized I was under a leader who was kind of a management by fair style of leader, and also very much command and control. And that style trickled down layer by layer, and it influenced how I the version I got from Google, right? And there was also the moment when I realized that, like, I first thought that Google just became political, you know, like, because it became larger, but, like, it was already 60,000 when I joined, so it was already large and political, right? So I realized that the manager I had at the time was the one that very consciously shaped that version of the organization that she still knew from the early days, because she had been around in those early startup days, and she shaped that very consciously for the team.
Maria Ross 06:50
Yeah, I mean, definitely she set the tone in that micro culture, it sounds like. And we always hear that adage of, you know, you join companies, but really what makes the difference is your immediate manager, and the culture that they create and how they lead and how they grow their people. So you experience that firsthand.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 07:07
Yeah, exactly. And it was a huge contrast. And so when I realized that, I thought, Okay, I need to be in a different chain of command, and then maybe I get my old Google back. And so that’s when I started deliberately moving. And so after that, I probably had, like six, seven more managers in different roles, and I found one above me, who was the founder of Google digital Academy, who was similarly deliberate in creating that particular culture. And I also realized, when I became a manager, I want to create that culture for my team, right? So I became very deliberate about building that culture, which then eventually led to me creating a track record upward feedback ratings, which was among the highest of the company.
Maria Ross 07:53
That’s amazing, I mean, and again, it’s just a total case study in the fact that the manager shapes the culture. And when you see good leadership model that becomes the model for the kind of leader you want to be, and that’s how we exponentially increase impact of leadership and sort of have that legacy, right? So absolutely, you know, your book and your trainings are called Managing without power, and it’s that mindset that leaders need to understand that their power doesn’t come from their title. It needs to come with how they are interacting with and connecting and engaging with their team. So you talk about you want to help leaders lean less on the power that’s inevitably connected to their roles and instead invest more genuinely in teams. So number one, first, can you talk to us about what are the problems that get in the way of leaders being able to do that? What happens in organizations? What are some of the three main problems that you see?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 08:51
Yeah, so the first one is this balance between human focused leadership and performance focused leadership. I see a lot of managers and leaders who are either good at one of them, but they’re not so good at the other one or the other way around, right? And I even still like regularly meet leaders who think of them as opposites that you Yeah, right. But reality is that you need both of them in a certain balance and also in orchestration, in order to create a high performing team and high performing organization, right? So the idea that they are separates. That’s probably the first problem already.
Maria Ross 09:24
I call that the binary thinking of leadership, of it’s either or when it’s really both and
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 09:29
yeah, absolutely, yeah, you need both, and it’s not easy, but that’s at least the first thing to realize that you must have both, right? And the next thing that then happens is the power position that is inevitably connected to your role as manager. Like day one, you become someone’s manager. You get the power to decide about their pay, about the promotions, whether they have a job at all. You are the one that tells them whether they’re doing a good job or not. You know, there’s loads of power that is the one. You want it or not you have it. And I sometimes still meet managers who are relatively new to the job, whether the first time managers, and they say when I say this to them, I said, No, no, no, I’m still one of the team. So even if you don’t realize you have that power, right? They know that you’re going to make those decisions. And because of that, there are certain things they will no longer tell you that they would tell to their peers, and there are certain things that are going to say to you because they think it’s what you want to hear. So day one, you become a manager, these dynamic changes, and the more senior you get, the worse it gets. And what that does to a manager, if you’re not sufficiently conscious and intentional, you can very easily drift away from becoming the manager who you want it to be. You’re under pressure. There’s always too many things to do, and it’s very easy not to do certain investments in your team because they don’t complain. So a good example of that is when you have a meeting between a senior person and junior person in a relatively large organization, the manager is likely to be a bit too late. The manager is likely to not have done the prep work. The manager is likely to struggle with attention. They talk a bit more, they listen a bit less, they leave a bit early. And you could say this is, well, they have a senior job, so they’re busy, but the reality is, all of these things, if it would be a meeting with their senior, they wouldn’t struggle with those things. They would show up on time. They wouldn’t struggle with attention. They would listen more. They would also try to bring a person along based on their intrinsic motivation, ask more questions, instead of just saying, we must do X, you know, and all these small behaviors that you don’t do for your team, but you do it for seniors, they illustrate how you casually lean on the power that you have and therefore fail to make the investments that are needed in a team to make it A high functioning team.
Maria Ross 12:00
So when we talk about
Maria Ross 12:02
upskilling our leaders to avoid those traps and avoid those challenges, I understand that you see some challenges with the way conventional training and leadership development is done. Can you talk about what those are, and how do we fight against that?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 12:17
So you if you would say kind of in black and white, right? Right? Like you would roughly, have two types of trainings that I’ve personally been on in a variety of ways. When I was a manager, you had had some of these trainings where they bring you on an inward journey, you know, to try to explore yourself. And then hopefully you have some kind of Revelation, and you come out with great intentions to do things differently, you know, and then you go back to the same job under the same pressures, and it’s very hard to actually change. So that’s like one end of the spectrum, and then the other end of the spectrum is more practical trainings. And my personal experience there has been, I got loads of training. I think if any company invests a lot in manager training, it’s Google, you know, I think many people become manager and just expected to figure it out. I was lucky enough to have lots of training. But even then, it was just many isolated topics. So I would get a training about giving feedback, a training about how to manage low performers, a training about how to write good OKRs, etc. But the reality is that all the topics that you do in management, they have a relationship with each other. It’s, for instance, very hard to give a person fair feedback if you’ve never been clear about expectations. And it’s very hard to be clear about expectations if you don’t have a solid strategy that you translate to goals, that you translate to what your visual Yeah. So I created a set of five basics, essentially to cover the practical element of training. And I do this in a holistic way. And at the same time, this inward journey is also important. So this inward journey, the only thing is that I believe that this inward journey needs to happen on the job, yeah, kind of needs to get that voice from the team. You know, the things that people no longer say to the manager get that voice going, and so that the manager starts hearing what their team needs from them, and what consequences of their actions are on the team, both positive and negative. So if you create that layer where on the job, they become more conscious of their impact on the team, what the team needs, and you give them a practical, holistic toolkit that you train them on. That’s when you start to make a real difference. Yeah.
Maria Ross 14:30
I mean, I love what you’re saying, and it’s really interesting, because just recently, I came across a study that showed that when you do traditional trainings where you know, you just put your employees or your leaders through a course
Maria Ross 14:42
or through a workshop, they lose
Maria Ross 14:45
70% of what they’ve learned in the following 72 hours, and they lose 90% of what they’ve learned within the next couple of weeks. So monies are companies are spending all this money on training programs, but they’re missing this consistent action of. Coaching, they’re missing this consistent of now, let’s take the learnings and apply them and provide you ongoing support. So when the situation comes up that you learned about in your training three months ago comes up now for you in your actual job, do you have support? Do you have a place to go? Do you have a coach or a mentor to actually role play or remind you of the key learnings, or, you know, whatever it is that you do within your organization. And instead of treating training like a one and done, we really have to treat it as an ongoing nurturing environment, right? It’s like watering a plant once and then expecting it to flourish over time, right? We’ve got to keep watering it. We’ve got to keep checking the soil. We’ve got to keep adjusting the light, all of those things. And for some reason we are we as companies, are willing to throw away millions of dollars in training and development because we think it’s just like, oh, we rolled out this curriculum of these courses, and that’s it. Good luck. Bye. You know, hopefully you’ll remember that five months down the road when you need to do that difficult performance review, or you need to, you know, have that uncomfortable conflict in your organization. So, you know, you talk a lot about this idea of, like a practical, holistic approach. Can you share with us the five basics, sort of the basic tenants of that, and give us some examples of each
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 16:21
Yeah, yeah, sure. So these five basics, they’re actually things that most companies have and that most managers do, however. So you could look at this as a collection of many small behaviors, and they’re very easy not to do when you’re under pressure, when your team doesn’t complain, you know, and when you consistently do all of them in a way that reinforces the different aspects of management, you put your team in an upward spiral. But when you ignore some of them because there are relations between them, all of them become weaker,
Maria Ross 16:53
right, right? So, so let’s talk about them. Let’s get to them. So what’s the first one?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 16:58
The first one is, I call it genuine conversations about career, personal growth and life. Second one is very much about how you set goals and strategies. So I call it collaborative setting of goals and expectations, and I typically would use OKRs, but that objectives and key results. Third one is discussing and agreeing team norms with your team, so how you work together? And then you will also have to cultivate them. The fourth one is about tracking progress, course correcting and always on feedback. And then the fifth one is fair, predictable decisions about reward and progression, right? And if you have that, if you have all performance system, people get ratings, you know that also means para predictable outcome of the performance system, right? You can already see there the relationship between them, because there’s no way to ever give a person a fair, predictable outcome of a performance evaluation
Maria Ross 17:51
if you haven’t clearly set the expectations. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it’s funny, because these track so well to my five pillars of effective and empathetic leadership with decisiveness and clarity and joy and self care and all of these things. So let’s get down to brass tacks. So just let’s briefly talk about each one. The first one is genuine conversations about personal growth. So tell us
Maria Ross 18:15
what that looks like. So the
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 18:17
typical thing that I see happening there at companies like almost every person who has a manager has some kind of conversation maybe once a year or so where the Okay, let’s have a look at next year. You know, yeah, but what very often happens, and that they make it feel like a tick the box conversation, so you get a performance evaluation, or at least some evaluation about how last year went, and then they say in the same meeting. Okay, now let’s look ahead. You know that total meeting takes about one hour or so, and if you do it that way, if you combine those two conversations in one performance evaluation and a career conversation, the second one is going to be the tick the box, almost by definition, and the reason is because they’re fundamentally different. So one is looking backward, and there’s an element of judgment in it, which makes it somewhat unsafe. And then career conversation, if you genuinely want to see the person who they are, you know what their aspirations are, where they want to grow, the scenarios to see in work, in life, you know, that’s an expensive conversation, and it requires safety and trust. There’s no way that conversation is going to open up if you combine it in a one hour conversation with a performance evaluation. So the first thing I say is, like you have to split them, and if you are very good at managing these five basics, the performance evaluation can easily be a half an hour video call, because it’s just a summary of all the things you already discussed throughout the year, if you were disciplined investing, right? The other one, I would definitely not do off a video call. I wouldn’t even do it in the office. I would spend about 90 minutes on it and practically go for a walk in the forest. And then you have a completely different environment, which creates a different setting. It creates a more. Rich conversation, right? And you kind of start in the here and now, right? Do you like the job? It gives you energy. What drains your energy? You start off in the job over time, and then you move outward and outward and outward, right? To future scenarios in work and life, which includes scenarios beyond the current job and beyond the current company, right? But if the trust is low, they’re never going to tell you exactly. That’s the important element of trust there, for sure.
Maria Ross 20:26
And I think that also not everyone has the luxury of being able to take their employees out for a walk in the forest. But you know, basically, I hear what you’re saying, which is, sort of get out of the normal environment. How do you recommend people do that if they’re doing hybrid or remote leadership
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 20:41
this, I’ve actually had to do this remote for three years because it was covid when I’m still at Google, right? So I had a remote here I was in the Netherlands, and all of them were spread across EMEA, and normally I would fly to them, you know, like twice a year, yeah. Or they would come to my country, and then we would do something nice together, right? And suddenly, during covid There was no longer possible, yeah. And then we still agreed that we wouldn’t do it over VC, because it would have been just another meeting, right? And so what we did instead was we decided to go for a walk, uh huh, in a nice environment, each in their own nice environment.
Maria Ross 21:16
Uh huh. Oh, wow.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 21:20
Okay, if you do that, you sit in a forest on a bench or whatever, and there’s some kind of quiet environment, and you have someone very close in your ear on your headphone, suddenly it starts to feel like an intimate conversation, which is completely different than the whole sequence of video.
Maria Ross 21:34
Calls Interesting. Interesting. I love that. Okay, so the second one is collaborative goal setting and clear expectations. And I talk about this a lot, that we can’t really set. We can’t hold someone accountable to expectations that we haven’t clearly set. And so when there’s conflict around that, and you’re having you’re struggling with being empathetic with your employees, or they’re struggling to be empathetic with you, it’s probably because there’s a misalignment, there’s a misunderstanding about there’s assumptions going on about, Well, we I assumed you know what we meant by this or that, or the other or and so whenever I catch leaders saying like, well, this is something everyone knows, or, you know, we’ve always done it this way, or I assume they understood when I said X, I’m really seeing that in the second point. And I know you talk about aligning what the individual wants with what the team and the organization want. So what does that look like? Can you give us an example of work you’ve done around that? What that looks like for someone to do collaborative, full setting and clear expectations?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 22:31
This is where the link with the first conversation is, right? So that conversation leads to very rich picture of what the person wants now and in the future, right? And the reality is, some of that may not even match with their current job, but it may not match with Right, right? And so when you go into the second basic it’s all about cascading company strategy, team strategy, to individual goals, right? And so you have to write a very clear strategy roadmap for your team with milestones, etc, and then need to have conversations with all the individuals that work under you, like, Okay, if this is where the team needs to go, and we had that conversation about where you want to go as a person, you know, yeah, how much of that still overlaps? And if it overlaps, then great, you can put them on projects that are good for the team, good for the person over time, at some point, either the team direction changes or the person changes, and that overlap becomes smaller, right? And then you can have an honest conversation where you say, Listen, I think you’re reaching the end of your time in this role, or even in this team, or even in this company,
Maria Ross 23:32
right, right? I
Maria Ross 23:34
love that. Okay. So the third one is establishing and cultivating healthy team norms, and I talk about this a lot in the clarity pillar as well as the joy pillar, which is really about let’s write down all our unspokens. Let’s articulate, really articulate, what our mission and our values are, not just for the company at large, but for our team. How are we going to interact? How are we going to get work done? So how do you This is where I really see the role of synthesizing diverse points of view and diverse learning styles and diverse motivations. Tell us what this looks like for a leader to you know, if they’re like, how do I establish and cultivate healthy team norms?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 24:14
I like that. You call it the unspokens. Yeah, because this is a topic I never got trained on, and I rarely see trainings on Team norms, thing where you just start collaborating, and then you hope that people figure it out, but they don’t exactly. And so when I do this as part of my trainings, I typically start with focusing on very practical things, right? For instance, establishing norms about communication channels, like, which communication channels do we use for what purpose? What is a reasonable response time for email? What is the reasonable response time for a ping? I also talk about remote work, like, How often should we be able to work from home? When should we come to the office, and why? So lots of practical topics. Yeah, get them to discuss. Across those things, yeah, have different opinions, right? Those opinions about the practical topics to actually get the level of their values right. So I had some people advocating, for instance, for no meeting days because they felt there was overload of meeting but no meeting days also make you less flexible and autonomy to plan your schedule flexibly is also something new for their well being. So you have meeting overload, which is good for well being, but flexibility, autonomy is also good for well being, right? And they start conflicting with each other. So you have a conversation about the values you have in work life and in collaboration based on practical things, right? You agree with each other, okay? If these are the values we want to live by, then let’s make decent disagreements, you know, like email, yeah,
Maria Ross 25:50
like, how are we going to, you know, what’s an acceptable response time? You know, if you’re on vacation, we don’t expect, unless it’s an absolute crisis, we don’t expect to have to reach out to you when you’re on vacation, whatever those norms are, and not only dictated by the leader, but collaboratively created, right? And what’s coming to mind for me, as you talk about this, is the reality that teams evolve. Right? Teams change. We don’t always have the same set of 10 people for three years, so how often do you advise people to revisit the norms as new members come and go.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 26:24
So I would definitely do it at the start of a team, or when you are a new manager to the team, right? But actually the biggest work, so it’s first discussing agreeing, right? Then the biggest work is cultivating, and that’s where the role of the leader is, right, and cultivating is role model, amplify, tolerate. So it starts now. For instance, if I want to establish effective meeting habits, and someone needs to do note taking, you know, if I would say who does who wants to do note taking, it’s always the same people raising their hand, and it’s always the same people who avoid it. And also these people who avoid it are also the ones who typically avoid the projects that nobody wants to work on, you know, like, and so instead of asking who wants to do notes, I would say, Okay, we’re going to have a rotation system for doing notes. I go first. And so when I’m the most senior person in the room and I’m not above taking notes, yeah, everybody gets the signal like, okay, nobody is above the dirty work. You know, everybody does cleaning. Yes, that’s the role modeling. And then amplifying is a bit of a spectrum. Amplifying starts with if someone demonstrates desirable behavior, so they did the notes, they were fast, they were good. You give them a public compliment, amplify it. But it’s also in your reward system. There are many behaviors and jobs that don’t get rewarded in a reward system as a consequence. Just know, well, I could do it, but in the end, nobody cares, right, right? So, and then there’s tolerate, is giving people a nudge when they don’t demonstrate desirable behaviors, or if it’s really extreme, you know, if it’s a manager who hits KPIs but burns out the team exactly, and say, Well, it’s a high performer. We’re not going to fire that person. So then your culture becomes what you tolerate. So eventually you’re going to have to fire a person if they really cross the line, right, right?
Maria Ross 28:13
Yeah, definitely. It’s those toxic rock stars. That’s really people are going to look at your actions more than just what’s up on the posters on the wall or what you say as a leader. So I love
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 28:23
that, but most of the time with if you cultivate, well, you don’t have to redo this exercise very often. Yeah, it might just be that every now and then there’s new people and you want to refresh on a particular sub topic or something, but you don’t have to follow it anymore.
Maria Ross 28:36
Or if someone new comes in and has a new idea, at least creating an environment where you know when they come into the team, say, we have these established norms, but if there’s anything you come up with that you want to add, or you think we should talk about to add to this, please do that, right? These are not, they’re not etched in stone, right?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 28:56
I had a team member who was very structured in how he used calendar, and he felt passionate, like, Okay, I’m so frustrated how we’re doing this as a team, you know? And I just gave him the floor, and then we just had a whole session about calendar, and it should be open. How you do focus time? Don’t plan over focus time, those types of things. Yeah, see that?
Maria Ross 29:16
That’s great because we there’s so many of those things we don’t talk about, and then they’re just resentment builds up and misunderstanding builds up, right? Okay, so continuous feedback and progress tracking, so talk to us about that.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 29:29
What is that? When I say to leaders tracking progress, the first thing they think is KPIs and but the reality is, 80% of tracking progress after you have been clear about strategy, goals, expectations, etc. Those shape the meetings people need to be in. They shape the agenda as the meetings need to have, which project teams there are. And then, as a manager, you know in what meetings you should be joining to observe people at work. Essentially. Mm, hmm. If you do that in a disciplined way, you plan enough time and attention for your team to be alongside them on the right moments that is 80% of tracking progress right. You don’t just get to see whether or not they hit the KPI Exactly. Get to see how they do it, how they collaborate while they do it. And so you get a huge set of information that enables you to give people in the moment feedback in a way that is so thoughtful that every single bit of feedback you learn builds trust with them, because they realize how much attention you’ve been paying to them being at work, right? Well, and then
Maria Ross 30:34
there’s no surprises, you know, yeah, exactly, if you wait until the end of the quarter to get the spreadsheet, that’s it, say what went wrong. So I like that, and just making that a habit, that that actually is your job as a leader, is to be popping in, is to be, you know, tracking, not waiting till that end of quarter, you know, QBR, or whatever you’re doing within your organization, to figure out three months later that you could have course corrected something
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 31:01
earlier, exactly, and you still do the spreadsheet right? Yeah, you still can already know what’s coming right. And then also interesting if, for instance, someone is bluffing their way through the spreadsheet right, you already know Right,
Maria Ross 31:14
exactly, okay? And then finally, fair and predictable decisions on rewards and progression. And I love this one, because decisiveness is a really important pillar for me of helping people understand not dictatorship but decisiveness, that you really need to perfect that art of synthesizing multiple points of view, but making a swift decision, not letting it go on and on and on and on. So talk about what you mean by fair and predictable decisions. What does that look like for a leader?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 31:42
Yeah, I spoke earlier about the need to not unconsciously use a power on the wrong moment, right? And most of these first four basics, a lot of that work is alongside where you have to step down from your power position. You know, spend enough time shoulder to shoulder with your team every now and then you still need to make a top down decision. You know, then when you step in, etc, but most of it is shoulder to shoulder, right? But that moment of a decision about reward progression is inevitably a power moment, and the only way for that not to damage the trust that you have with your team is first of all to get the first four basics right, and then to make that decision from your power role way that is crystal clear, how you got to the decision that is based on solid and I call it fair and predictable. So fair means without bias, yeah, means that the impact people bring and the qualities they bring to the job, they should define the outcome right? And not how many coffee chats you had at the boss, not whether you worked on the most visible projects, but not whether you were in the same office. You know, not whether you are a white, tall heterosexual man. You know something else, right, impact and qualities you bring to the job and the team, you know that should define the outcome and then predictable. Essentially means that if you get a performance rating, it should be one you already expect. Yeah, if you get feedback, it should be just a summary of feedback you already received, or moments you could still act on it. So it’s just like a half hour summary of things you already discussed with your team, and then you move on, right?
Maria Ross 33:18
Yeah, I love this, and I love what you’re saying. Because, you know, we started out saying that a lot of your work is about helping people balance humanity and performance, and there’s really no like one thing you do to do that. And I love that you have this framework of these five components that if you are practicing these intentionally and working on them, and you’re not going to get them right all the time. But if you are just practicing these consistently, you will be balancing humanity and performance like that’s the outcome of it. Absolutely, yes,
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 33:49
that’s also why they’re created that way. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can still also give someone a low rating and even fire them, you know, but it’s still fair and predictable, right? If you invested consistently in these basics. You’re doing everything in your power to set them up for success, right? You’re giving them warnings, you’re giving them coaching, you’re giving them support, you’re giving them a good team around them, and then they still don’t deliver. At some point, you can fire them in a way that’s fair and predictable, and that’s good for the person, and it’s good for the team that deserves you doing it exactly.
Maria Ross 34:20
We’ve talked on in the past on this show about the fact that whenever you have to let someone go, or if you have to have a layoff, all eyes are on you from all the people that are left, and they’re going to see if you’re treating people with respect, with empathy, with kindness, with humanity, or they’ll see you’re not. And then now the people you have left that you’re counting on are going to be paralyzed by fear and anxiety and doubt, so you’re not going to get the best performance out of them. Yeah, I want to talk, as we kind of wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about your notion of creating an environment where doing the right thing pays off. And you’ve mentioned Lee. With data, mind and heart. Can you tell us what that means, and how can leaders listening look at those vectors for themselves?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 35:09
Yeah, so I mentioned like, there’s essentially three layers that are important, right? The first one is creating that consciousness about the impact of the power on your behavior towards your team, getting the voice from the team on again, and I typically would use upward feedback surveys, using Google’s oxygen the 10 behaviors of great managers, right? So upward feedback, second one is consistent behavior with these five basics. Those two are not enough, right? Because the reality is that in most organizations, depending on which flavor you have, if you are in a survival of the toughest, where this harsh culture the performance is the emphasis on performance is there, but the human is missing. Or you’re in survival of the nicest, where the human is good, but the other one is missing. If you try to establish a leadership style which goes against the one that exists in the company, yeah, then it becomes harder to do the right thing than the opportunistic thing. So if you are part of a survival of the toughest culture, and you spend lots of time investing in your team, you risk being looked at as someone who’s too nice to their team, too soft, you know, and the other way around. If you’re part of an organization that is surviving the nicest where it’s very easy not to deliver. If you are the one you know what, we are going to have impact. You’re going to have to walk through the mud Right, right? So then it’s much easier to just do the opportunistic thing, which is going along with whatever culture is already there. So if you want people to go to a training and then actually apply it consistently, then you’re also going to have to create an environment where doing the right thing pays off more, and we’re doing the optimistic thing pays off less exactly, survival of the toughest culture, and you have a manager hitting KPIs burning out the team, it should have consequences. If you have a manager who is hitting KPIs and building a great team, they should get rewarded compliments and maybe even reward and promotion. It’s a bigger team, yeah,
Maria Ross 37:06
well, you get the culture you reward.
Maria Ross 37:08
And so you really have to think about what is it you’re incentivizing within your organization? And again, you can say you’re incentivizing doing the right thing. And we value integrity, we value empathy, we value collaboration, but if people see you rewarding and promoting and keeping the people that constantly
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 37:28
do not exhibit that, they’re going to know that that’s just talk. So this is
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 37:33
especially put your money where your mouth is exactly, exactly so.
Maria Ross 37:37
But I want to talk a little bit about this because I love this concept of like data, mind and heart, and being able to lead through all three modalities. So obviously, data is about, you know, measuring what you can measure, looking at the numbers, tracking all of that, what, where for you. How do you define the mind and heart part of it? Yeah.
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 37:57
So my background is a research this is where it comes from. Yeah, I used to do ROI research, so measuring the ROI of advertising, and what I realized is the things that matter most are typically the hardest to measure. So long term impact always harder to measure than short term impact. When you try to optimize efforts and the impact of these efforts, it’s very easy to do it in silos, but it’s hard to do it across teams. Yeah, and then when you try to predict what will happen if you make an intervention, it’s relatively easy if the intervention is close to what you were already doing, but it’s close to impossible if it’s a fundamental innovation. So if leaders are not conscious of, and these are universal limitations of data, like even an AI model, which is super smart, will still have those problems then. So if you create a KPI dashboard and that becomes the leading thing of steering your organization, what will happen is people will do short term, optimistic wins. They will start working in silos, and they will stop innovating, or they will innovate in a way, and they will try to hide it from seniors, so nobody can stop them, right? So what you need is data, mind, heart. So mind is essentially the strategic roadmap and also the holistic roadmap. So you need to have a clear picture where you want to be with the organization and the team three years from now or so very clear milestones between them. So you kind of make the things that are harder to quantify. You make them slightly easier to quantify, right? But also a holistic roadmap, so that you can give teams who need to contribute to a joint goal. You can give them joint oprs, which you then sponsor with senior leaders. So then if somebody brings teams together. You know, they get visibility for the senior leaders. Yeah. And then the heart is very much about the principles you want to live by, both internally and externally. So it’s like, how do you want to work together? Yeah, what do you want to be for your clients? What do you want to be for the world? You have to not just articulate the principles, but also translate them to behavior. Years and behavior should count when you make decisions about reward and progression, because otherwise it’s just pretty words, and everybody knows, well, if I hit my KPIs, nobody cares if I support the world, you know, nobody cares if I burn out the team.
Maria Ross 40:14
Yeah, well, as we I love all of that, and I just think it’s so important. Like, yes, that’s all very hard, and it’s a lot, but that’s also why you’ve been put in a leadership position. Yeah, if it was easy, everyone would be able to do it. And so, you know, I have empathy for leaders that have so much on their plate right now, because we’re talking about all this other stuff that have to that has to do with the people and the team and getting work done. We’re not even talking about the actual work that has to get done, right? So I know there’s a lot on leaders plates, but this is the job of leadership. And actually, if you invest like you’re saying, If you invest the intention in it, you create the micro culture like you got to experience. The rest takes care of itself, absolutely, because then you’re creating again, you’re creating that fertile soil for everything else to grow. It’s not like you have to work on all this and then you have to work on the other side of it. You know what I’m saying, like the actual work and the results and the delivery will follow if you make these investments first instead of I
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 41:16
very often get that reaction right? So when people realize there’s not one simple solution, but you actually have to approach it holistically and consistently, right? They feel like, okay, but I’m very busy. I don’t have time to do all of that. Right? To me, that is an individual contributor mindset, and it’s also short termism, yes, because, like, the impact a well functioning team can have is always 10 times bigger than what you can have as an individual, right? Right? The only problem is that it’s an investment now that pays off a bit later.
Maria Ross 41:46
It’s like not doing strategy before tactics like you have to take some time to step back to create a strategy before you start spending money and engaging resources and tactics. Otherwise, what are you doing? Right? So this is the this is that strategic investment time to help your team run better. Absolutely. Yeah. So this has been such a great conversation. What would you leave leaders with who are like, wow, I am overwhelmed. This is a lot love this holistic model. And I know, again, I know it’s not easy, but what’s sort of a good first step, or a few first steps you can offer of like someone’s leading a team, they know it’s suboptimal. There’s not a lot of trust. They know they’re actually conscious enough and self aware enough to know that they could be doing better. Where within that holistic model, would you advise them to start?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 42:37
So what I try to do is first create your holistic picture, right? And then, among all of these things, probably two thirds of them, they’re already doing well, just in their own way, right? So those things, you don’t have to change. And then the other bits, you just have to find, kind of the weakest link in the chain, and you fix that one first, yeah. And the way to find that biggest link is by using an upward feedback survey. We didn’t talk actually about the oxygen survey, right? But yeah, I was a manager at Google. I was evaluated by my team every six months through the 10 behaviors of great managers. And it has been by far. It was mandatory for me where I do I would do it wherever I go, even if it’s not. It has been the best tool I ever had. Once, your team tells you, in a very structured way, what is the most important thing that they need from you, and you can then change your behavior, and you can see the data shift. It’s very motivating, and that tool, it’s freely available. If you type in a Google oxygen survey, you will find a website from Google. It’s called Rework, and they have open sourced it because they want work life. You can literally take that survey, run it every six months with your team, right? The important thing there is then debrief your results with your team, have a conversation about it, right? Behavior, right? Yeah, every time, pick one thing that you’re going to change, which is the weakest link cycles, and eventually you will find that you do all of it.
Maria Ross 44:05
I love it. I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes for people, but I think that’s a great place to start. If you’re not sure it’s ask them, ask them what they need, right? And I’ve talked in the past, and a lot of my work about you have to put ego aside to be an empathetic, human, centered leader. You have to take feedback as a gift and as an opportunity for growth, and we have to understand that we don’t have all the answers as leaders, and that it’s okay to hit up against our leadership edge, and as long as we recognize that, and as long as what we’re taking in as feedback from our people. The goal of that is to help us get past that edge, to move that edge, to extend it. And if you’re not, if you don’t have that continuous growth mindset, it’s sort of like, What are you even doing? Right? If you think you’re
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 44:53
there and you’ve got all the role model, the growth mindset?
Maria Ross 44:56
Yes, exactly, because no one has all the answers. And if. You’re a leader who claims to have all the answers. People just assume you don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re not going to have respect for you. They’re going to go, this person is delusional, right?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 45:09
Yeah, so there is one thing about asking them, right? Because some leaders go to their team members, and what do you think of me? Yeah. Reality is, when you ask it verbally from a power position, team members might say things to you, but many will not, and especially not the sensitive things, right? And good thing about that oxygen survey is that it’s a combination of quantitative behavioral statements, and there’s an open question like, What is it that I like that my manager does? What would I like my manager to change? Right? These open questions, they will be very careful in the beginning, yeah, the closed questions, they can actually give you very actionable feedback, right? And when you have the conversation, change your behavior, you build trust, your role model, growth mindset, and suddenly they start being critical in the open questions, yeah, yeah. And if you do that consistently, yeah, they might just come to you and say, Listen, you did that thing wasn’t, okay?
Maria Ross 46:01
Yeah, you create that trust. Because if they, if you do that kind of an upward survey, upward feedback, you do something with the results. First of all, the worst thing you can do to, you know, if you want to really ruin trust with your team, is give them a survey to ask their opinion, and don’t do anything with the results, right? So if you take it, then the next time they’re probably gonna, like you said, they’re gonna open up a little more. They’re gonna open up a little more, maybe the a little more. Maybe they’ll start talking to you outside of the survey, right? You start creating that environment where, you know, people ask a lot, well, how do I build trust with my team? And they want like a magic pill? Yeah, this is a very safe and structured way to create that, build up that element of trust within your team, and it won’t happen overnight, because no one trusts someone overnight, right? Exactly?
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 46:48
It’s so journey easily off like a year or longer, exactly, exactly.
Maria Ross 46:52
All right? Well, this is all so great. Thank you. Yours for your time. I want to mention again, the book is called Managing without power, and we’re going to have all your links in the show notes. But for anyone that’s on the go, where’s the best place they can find out more about you and
Joris Merks-Benjaminsen 47:06
your work managing without power.com. Perfect. Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me,
Maria Ross 47:14
thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge. If you like what you heard, you know what to do, please rate and review and share it with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge calm. There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place
