Join us for an episode that dives into the core science that makes these conversations difficult on both sides, and how to use that science to improve them.
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Erin Wickham: Everyone happy. Friday. Thank you for being with us today on your brain at work. Live! I will give us all a couple of seconds to get out of the waiting room and into the session. But as you're joining, if you want to share where you're calling in from in the chat that's always good to know. I love to see kind of the span of these webinars, and where we're getting everyone joining in from
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Erin Wickham: again. Welcome to your brain at work. Live! I am Erin Rickham. I'll be your host. Today. I'm our senior director of Insight design at the Neuro Leadership Institute. We're happy to have you back for our regulars and for our newcomers. Welcome. We're excited to have you with us for the 1st time in today's episode. We'll explore the science behind. Why, some conversations are more difficult than others. We've all had the experience of avoiding or dreading certain conversations, but oftentimes they aren't a necessary part of our day to day.
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Erin Wickham: Now, as I quickly share some housekeeping notes, drop into the chat or the comment box on Social, and let us know where you're joining us today.
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Erin Wickham: we suggest you put your phone on. Do not disturb and quit your email messaging app so you can get the most out of today's episode. We do love the interaction, so feel free to share your thoughts, your questions, and your ideas in the chat as we go through
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Erin Wickham: our 1st guest for today. You all know him well coined the term neural leadership when he co-founded Nli over 2 decades ago with a professional doctorate for successful books under his name, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more a warm welcome to our co-founder and CEO of the Neuro Leadership Institute, Dr. David Rock. Thanks for being here today. David
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David Rock: Thanks, Erin. Good to be back
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Erin Wickham: Good to see you. And finally, our moderator holds a Phd. In neuroscience from New York University. She leads the research team at the Neuro Leadership Institute, where she focuses on translating cognitive and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organizations. A warm welcome to our senior director of Research at Nli. Dr. Emma Saro, I'll pass it over to you, Emma
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Emma Sarro: Thanks, Erin. Well, welcome back! Happy Friday, David
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David Rock: Indeed! Happy Friday. This is I see this is a popular topic.
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David Rock: Good number of people joining us this time. Hope we can. Give folks some insights and help with this. Interesting, interesting challenge
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, right? I know we even talked about having something a bit lighter. But it seems that people really want this topic. It's perennial. The idea of the challenge, I guess, of difficult conversations. And and it's so much more than just difficult conversations. There's all sorts of conversations that kind of fit under this umbrella. And they're different, right? The challenges are different. And I just think it's
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Emma Sarro: it's amazing, because I just did a quick dive into what's the current state of these difficult conversations. How is it affecting organizations? And and I think this will resonate with everyone is that 70% of us avoid them, and sometimes we avoid them for as long as a year, so about a quarter of us will avoid them. I'm sure there are conversations that you've avoided for a while for different reasons.
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Emma Sarro: and I'd love to hear from everyone in the chat, for you know, just thinking about what are the conversations that are difficult, and love to hear your thoughts on. Why is this such a perennial topic? David
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah. As as folks put things in the chat, that I think the question is, just you know what kinds of conversations you've difficult.
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David Rock: What kinds of conversations you find most difficult, and I think
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David Rock: we'll see as those come in. I mean, this is this is really a topic we've been thinking about for more than 20 years, and probably 25 years since we started. You know, helping organizations. And it's just, you know, it's it's clearly something inbuilt in the brain that makes this such a perennial topic. And then, kind of as as we go through different cycles.
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David Rock: this becomes more or less relevant. You know, it's particularly relevant right now with some in in North America, anyway, with
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David Rock: you know, political issues that are they're creating, you know, really intense conflicts between people and incivility and other things. So it's, you know, feels very, very relevant right now. But it's it's kind of always been a central issue. For the longest time. Let's see what's coming in with the chat with my no little daughter. Lots about performance.
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David Rock: Conversations with parents on, you know, expectations.
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David Rock: Accountability. Yeah. So I mean, I think there's a general category of kind of performance at work. And and I want to talk about the difference between like rare conversations that are really difficult, like firing someone. Right? You don't do that every week hopefully, not and those those, you know, conversations that
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David Rock: a difficult but should be happening every week or month.
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David Rock: There's quite a big difference, because when, whenever we think of difficult conversations. People often go to the really hard, long-term ones like.
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David Rock: you know, something you've been trying to tell someone for years, or, you know firing someone or the the sort of rare. But we're not gonna focus on that so much. It's just like, why is it that
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David Rock: the week to week stuff just doesn't happen.
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David Rock: And so that tends to be about performance.
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David Rock: So we'll, you know, we'll talk about performance conversations. But there's there's other kinds of con of conversations. For sure, there's this sort of the the.
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David Rock: you know. There are certain things that just we we shouldn't be talking about in the workplace. There's just no, there's. There's sort of no good comes from discussing politics in the workplace or religion in the workplace or sexuality in the workplace, like they just. They're just topics that don't end well to start. And so I think there's sort of a broad like like there's no good way to have those conversations. I think that's an area where you just don't have those conversations.
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David Rock: And workplaces need to kind of agree that. You know, we don't chop off people's fingers. And we don't talk about politics, religion, or sex, you know, like those things. They're just clear rules that I think are important, because, you know both those things end in a lot of pain?
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David Rock: And in in different ways. So I think, you know
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David Rock: there, there's no easy answer to how do we, you know, make it easier to talk about politics. There isn't just like the workplace isn't a place to do it. But the performance issues are interesting. And then and then sort of there's also the more kind of you know, stuff outside of work, the more you know, personal conversations are really hard. We can also dig into as well. But yeah, share share. I know you did some really interesting
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David Rock: deep diving into the stats. What were some of the most surprising stats that you saw in the in the research that you did
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I mean, I think that the idea that 70% are avoiding them. And I think that has been the case for years. And someone mentioned in the chat that the content itself might differ. And that's true the way you have. The conversation may differ, and we'll get into that. But the origin of why we avoid them. You know a 3rd of individuals are avoiding them for a month.
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Emma Sarro: I know that I've done this right, and does it only make the conversation even harder when you actually have it? Because maybe the performance issues have continued or gotten worse. And now the conversation has changed and gotten bigger, and a quarter of us are holding off for a year. I can imagine this happening in our own personal life as well. That's just so fascinating. You know. What is the conversation about, and what have you? What has happened in that
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Emma Sarro: time? That's maybe gotten worse
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Emma Sarro: or impacted other individuals? I mean, if it's a behavioral, if it's a behavioral issue, you know, talking about a topic that really isn't appropriate in the workplace that that's just continued. But you know, what is it like in our brain that's really that's really halting us from saying those words
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David Rock: 25% of people hold off on a difficult conversation for a year.
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David Rock: That's an amazing statistic.
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David Rock: and yeah, that's so fascinating. Well, let's let's dig into what's going on in the brain here. And what's happening. And you know, we've studied this question from lots of different perspectives. We studied it from the perspective of just kind of general performance conversations that might be a little bit of feedback. But it's sort of generally about performance. So we've looked at it from that perspective. And we have a whole solution in that called connect. We've also studied it from the perspective of
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David Rock: feedback itself, like, why is feedback so hard? And how do you kind of turn that around? So we've dug deep into feedback as sort of a subset of general performance conversations. We've also dug into it from the perspective of just sort of how do you get people to actually speak up
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David Rock: and share their ideas and challenge other people's ideas. And you know, so that sort of how do you? What are the muscles for speaking up? So we looked at it from there. We also looked at it from the perspective of the climate that a manager needs to create really, intentionally to get everyone challenging each other. And that's psychological safety. And we see that you need a lot more intentionality to get that like healthy debate environment happening where the best performance comes from. So psychological safety is not actually everyone feeling
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David Rock: great and fine and lovely and safe? It's actually healthy debate happening. And people still friends at the end. So we've looked at it from all those perspectives. Sort of general performance
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David Rock: feedback. Specifically the habits of people who speak up and the habits of managers who get people speaking up. So we've looked at this question from sort of 4 different perspectives. Oh, and also from de-escalation.
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David Rock: We did a lot of work. On a solution called calm, that we actually gave away to lots of police forces and other agencies. During the pandemic, so so de-escalating as well, which is very much so. So, you know. Obviously, we're not going to try and cover everything that's in there. But the thread the thread through this clearly is, is, you know, social threat, and the prediction of social thread that people have.
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David Rock: and most of you, I'm sure, know. Scarf scarf is the primary colors of social threat and social reward. I'm actually working on a new book right now, just on scarf, because there's so much that we've learned about it around yourself and others, and change all this. So it's very top of mind for me. But but if you think of scarf as just as this sort of 5
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David Rock: things that you are assessing.
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David Rock: You unconsciously predict as you go into different interactions, scarf issues, and you won't. You won't necessarily have the 5 words in your language, you know, if you've never heard the model. But you will go into a conversation, and you'll imagine you know
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David Rock: saying to someone that you know. Let's keep this simple that they need to, you know. Dress better in the office. Right? Let's say you know you're in the office, you with one of those companies, and someone's just not addressing at the level that they need to. It's it's, you know, it's not a massive problem, but you can see that it's not really working right? Like you imagine having this conversation.
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David Rock: And and what happens is you think about it?
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David Rock: You actually can sense what the other person's gonna do, which is, they're very likely to have a status attack, which is the S in in scarf. Right? They're very likely to have an autonomy attack of being told what to do as well. But and and the big one is is relatedness, which is, they feel like you. You know you're you're against them.
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David Rock: but it also might have a fairness attack. It might feel really unfair, you know. They might not have any money for better clothes. Right?
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David Rock: so it's, you know. There's lots of context here. And what what are the guidelines, you know? Let's assume this is a you know. Place where clients come in and clients have certain expectations. So you know, putting aside the kinds of you know, biases that could be there, and all sorts of stuff is, you know. Let's assume someone's just kind of outside. The range, you know, is is wearing shorts when they shouldn't be as an example in an environment that just doesn't make sense, you know. So
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David Rock: just, you know, as a as a sort of relatively inner case, you, you predict all these things. And you basically get anxious
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David Rock: as the person trying to to have the conversation.
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David Rock: And you know, we're built to minimize pain. We we do everything we can in life to minimize pain. This feels like pain.
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David Rock: and in particular, the relatedness one. So you actually imagine this person is going to hate you now and avoid you and not be helpful and not do what you say. And they're basically going to shift from friend to foe. That's the r and stuff right? So you're imagining like they're going to be upset. And they're going to now be an enemy and not helpful.
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David Rock: And so what we do is, we put it off. And you know, 25% of people put off for a year.
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David Rock: We eventually have the conversation. It comes out horribly wrong. Because we've been building it up and building it up and building it up. So that's kind of what's going on and what what we saw when we actually measured this around inert feedback, like feedback that should be trivial
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David Rock: in an exercise we did when we studied feedback in a company, we set up an environment where about a hundred people gave and received feedback about tasks they were doing, and when they were wired up right? And and what we found is the person giving feedback. The person, like, you know, having a high conversation.
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David Rock: has as much of a threat response in their brain, or more than the person receiving it. And so we're basically imagining all the things that can go wrong. And therefore we avoid. So that's that's basically the mechanism that kind of makes all of these hearts. You want to comment on that, Emma. What's your what's your reflection?
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I was. I was hoping you were going to bring up those results, because I think that speaks really well to you know why, I mean, that same impact, physiologically is probably going to affect everyone going into any kind of difficult conversation. A change in heart rate, you know, like the conductance of, you know, the anxiousness. But what was other
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Emma Sarro: fascinating results that came out of that study was that the feedback itself, when it wasn't asked for in that anxious state was actually worse, was not productive. It wasn't detailed enough to actually help that individual improve. We actually change what we say when we're in a state of this higher stress state. We kind of like dampen what we're going to say to kind of protect the other person. So
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Emma Sarro: when we're in that state. If we're not able to regulate our emotions in a way, or be in a in a space of high psychological safety, or have this be able to have a good conversation? We're going to dampen the output so the conversation won't even be as
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Emma Sarro: productive.
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Emma Sarro: Right?
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Emma Sarro: Oh, you're on mute
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David Rock: Yeah, no, we sugarcoat things right. And in fact, we found that in the research we we published 2 papers on this issue. And we found that people really sugarcoat? The whole thing.
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David Rock: In a in a really deep way. So it's a.
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David Rock: It's a really interesting issue, the study, the study that we did involved roughly 100 people in. We paired people up. It was in a real company in Australia. We actually sent some scientists that we're working with at the time from Nyu. They spent 2 weeks in this company. People were playing these various games and then giving each other feedback about their performance. And
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David Rock: they're wired up with various technologies to see what stress level they're experiencing. And we found that we found a number of things. One of them was that receiving feedback is about as stressful as going for a run on your heart rate.
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David Rock: So similar similar like heart rate impact. The second thing we found was that the people giving feedback were as stressed or more, which was really surprising. But then the really interesting thing in the in the data was that in the people that had been tasked with asking for feedback first, st before receiving it, both sides were about 50% less stressed
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David Rock: the giver and receiver. So we we found that the the asking mechanism was super helpful for turning down the stress of both sides.
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David Rock: And that that was a really really important variable
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David Rock: in in in making the whole thing, you know, kind of flow better.
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David Rock: So I don't know. I think we've probably got some summaries of the papers. We're generally not sharing the papers except to corporate members, but there was a big piece we wrote in strategy and business about the whole study that we can put in the link that's able to be there. So so this is sort of one clue, anyway, that this is kind of one clue and a lot of people who approach
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David Rock: this topic end up at sort of one or 2 answers, and and they're really unsatisfying to me. And and 1 1 of those answers is like
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David Rock: a fairly kind of complex model to follow. Someone asked about crucial conversations. And there's other kinds of books out there. What I found is that is that a lot of these books have quite a complex model like 5 to 7 steps to follow.
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David Rock: And the reality is, humans won't remember 5 to 7 steps. The book sounds great. It works in theory, if you're actually able to follow these things. But it's it's too much. So a lot of the. And there's quite a few books, you know, with the word conversations in the title. I don't remember them all, you know, fierce conversations, crucial a bunch of others, and they do good work. They're on the right track. But in terms of if you train a thousand people
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David Rock: in it. How many of those 1,000 will actually do something differently still, be doing something differently 6 months later, and I haven't seen anyone study that. But my hunch is, it's a pretty low percentage of people who are actually doing something because it's just too much
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David Rock: to remember. So so that's sort of one direction is like really modeling out better conversations. But it ends up in too many steps.
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David Rock: This the second thing that I've seen kind of trying to turn down this threat response is basically saying, grin and bear it. Just just be candid, right? Just just, you know, we know that there's no candid feedback out there. So let's train managers. To be more candid.
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David Rock: and there's a you know, there's a body of work on, you know, candid conversations and candor and all this stuff. And I, I personally think it's not the direction to go. I think that it's problematic. And the reason I say it's problematic is
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David Rock: a couple of things. Firstly, the threat response that people feel when they're receiving feedback.
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David Rock: The threat response people receive is very strong and
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David Rock: requiring more of that threat. Response doesn't in theory make for better relationships like it makes for more
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David Rock: dysfunctional relationships or anything. And I actually ran into a company years ago in Australia, who? Who collapsed under the weight of requiring candid feedback.
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David Rock: And and I say that quite literally, the company collapsed under the weight of requiring candid feedback. They basically put in a protocol that every manager had to give one piece of feedback to every employee every week
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David Rock: in their team, and what they found was that everything just ground to a halt. The company literally collapsed. Just you can't make this stuff up. And it. It made sense. I actually interviewed the people years and years ago. It was more than 10 years ago, but I interviewed the people and kind of got a sense of what happened. And it's just, you know. Everyone just started fighting.
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David Rock: and they lost in. They lost the in group of a company, you know, collaborating and working together. There was, just, you know, conflict across everyone. So requiring candor for me doesn't sound like a great idea. And then there's another study that we often talk about, which is that
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David Rock: someone actually did a meta analysis of feedback interventions, and they found that feedback does nothing or makes things worse more often than it makes things better.
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David Rock: You know, in a meta analysis of feedback feedback does nothing, or make or makes things worse
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David Rock: more often than it makes things better. And and so that gives me pause. It's like, Do we really want to build a strategy around candor? So we want to build a strategy around. Just look, you feel uncomfortable saying stuff. But just say it, anyway. I don't personally think that's the right approach.
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David Rock: Now, just saying, Hey, ask for feedback also. Isn't the right approach right? You've got to actually ask. Well, and that has certain qualities, or it doesn't do anything right, there's certain. But we have found that asking for feedback well, does facilitate much higher quality feedback with much less stress. So you actually get to the candor.
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David Rock: but just saying, Hey, be more candid, give that feedback more. I think it's a terrible strategy, whereas asking for feedback. If you teach people to ask, well, and you build that as an initiative seems to. Really, you know, shift this dynamic quite a bit. So, anyway, that's a couple of reflections on candor, but we can certainly dig more into the science. What's coming up for you, Emma?
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I think there's a lot of thoughts in the chat around this idea of feedback. And how do you ask for feedback? And what exactly does asking for feedback? Do I think it might be worth it just to talk about those habits because we talk about you know, how do we ask for feedback? How do we create that culture? Because in the end you're you're creating a culture where people more regularly have these conversations. Right? I mean asking for feedback more regularly.
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David Rock: Will give you better feedback right ultimately, because the feedback will be remembered easier by the person giving it. And if you ask it in the right way. They know exactly what kind of feedback you're looking for.
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Emma Sarro: You provide
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Emma Sarro: with a bit of a status status reward. Oh, they want feedback from me, and something very certain I want. I'm going to give feedback on this. So you don't feel like you're pulling, you know, whatever kind of feedback out, and the individual is able to choose what they want the feedback on. And I think there's also, you know, a role of of leaders and role modeling this behavior, doing it first.st So can you speak a little bit to like. How? What are the habits specifically for this
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David Rock: Yeah, I know for sure. I mean, let's let's just take it apart from a scarf lens perspective, so that the habits make sense right. When you when you give feedback, you create a status threat. So you're basically telling the person that they did wrong right? And a lot of the time. A lot of the time, like people already know that they did wrong, and they've been beating themselves up about it, for, like, you know, hours, days, weeks, or months, right? And they don't need you kind of piling on. They they already know they messed up right? So
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David Rock: people are fundamentally their own worst critics right unless they're attacked, and then they won't criticize themselves right? They feel a status threat. So basically giving feedback creates a status threat
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David Rock: giving feedback also creates an autonomy threat. You know, you're doing it like this. You're doing it wrong. You need to do it like this. You you're basically telling people what to do differently, and often it creates a fairness threat, because the person giving, you know, might seems like the person giving doesn't have all the context doesn't understand everything this person went through. So you can have that. But the the biggest one is a status threat. It's followed by an autonomy threat and potentially a fairness threat. Right? So you've got 3 elements
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David Rock: that are in in threat. And if you, if this person's never given you feedback before, and now they are, and you think they're being harsh. Now, relatedness will shift from friend to foe as well, so you can easily have 4
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David Rock: of the 5 domains right, and if you weren't wondering if your job is at risk, you can have 5 of 5 domains in thread right? Which is like the 5 alarm fire. So so what happens with asking for feedback is
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David Rock: it? Turns down the the status threat in a big way? Right? So if you know, if you asked me about feedback about one of these sessions, right? You actually get to like you kind of look smart and thoughtful and intelligent by asking. And I'm not just coming out and telling you you did something wrong. You're actually saying, hey, I really would like some feedback about how we're doing. You're doing great, by the way, but the just talking about feedback is enough to make the heart race right.
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David Rock: And also, if if you ask, you're actually choosing it, and that variable of choosing it versus being told. Something is huge. We don't realize how important that is right, you know, choosing to run a marathon very different to being told to run a marathon right? The the act of choosing something creates a towards state.
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David Rock: So when you ask for feedback, it's much less of a status threat, and it's much less of an autonomy threat. Right? And so you're just more in control of the whole thing. And you can ask
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David Rock: you know about exactly what you need. And you and all these kinds of things. So it basically turns that down. So you know, keeping with that. It's like, you know, with with feedback. It's not just taking up some feedback. It's actually you want to make it easy for people to give you feedback. So it really is feed forward for a start, because it's much easier to talk about the future than the past. You talk about the past. You're gonna create more status for it.
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David Rock: Talk about the future. You create less status thread still can be there. So you're really asking more about the future, not about the past. And what you're really asking is, you want the positives first, st right? Like you want, like.
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David Rock: okay, what do I do? Well, I should do more of.
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David Rock: or keep doing like. Tell me something I do that you like that, I should know. Keep doing more of and people like don't ask that enough, and people don't give that enough. It's actually really important. And then tell me something that in the future I could do differently. And what we found our research is, the more explicit people are in their ask, the easier it is right. So if you said, you know, tell me something specifically about the way I ask questions. You know, it's gonna be easier for me to answer that. Then, you know, can you give me some feedback? So the more explicit you are, the better.
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David Rock: and so it's it's what do I do? Well, what could I do differently in the future? And being quite explicit, and then also reminding me that you're asking quite a few people
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David Rock: which is important, that you do ask quite a few people, so that you, you know, you really want my honest input because you, you know, you're trying to get everyone's perspective. And that just makes me much more likely to give it. So so you know, we we have all that into a solution called Improve it's gone right across Microsoft. It's gone right across accenture. It's gone across a lot of companies. But that's kind of one of the kinds of difficult conversations, and, you know, happy to talk about some of the others, but but essentially
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David Rock: at a cultural level. You want to shift your organization from a giving feedback culture to an asking for feedback well culture. And it actually creates psychological safety and accountability and growth mindset all at once. And those 3 things are really important growth, mindset, psych safety, accountability. We've been talking about them as Gpa.
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David Rock: You know. What's your leadership? Gpa. Asking for feedback? Once a week from someone is a fantastic habit for every manager in the organization, like every manager asking one person for feedback somewhere once a week, transformational to the whole organization's culture. So that that's sort of one way to get those difficult conversations moving anything else you want to say about feedback before we explore some of the other domains
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I think the last thing I'll say is that ultimately we all are driven to improve. I think it can be pretty rewarding if we get into the habit of asking for feedback often, because we'll get used to. Hey, you're doing this great like. Continue to do this. We know we get that reinforcement like, I'm doing this well. But we ultimately do get rewarded when we see ourselves making progress so, and when we ask, it'll just become less nerve wracking to ask less anxiety, inducing to ask
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David Rock: Yeah.
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David Rock: yeah, Gpa stands for growth mindset psych safety accountability within talking about leadership. Gpa, so growth, mindset psychological safety accountability are the kind of 3 core skills right now that I think leaders need in drove so growth mindset to be flexible and adaptive, resilient
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David Rock: psychological safety. So you're creating safe arguing and safe debate, and really, you know, engaging everyone very intentionally, and then accountability making sure things really happen. They're kind of a 3 legs of the tripod of the most important things right now, just looking at a couple of comments for a moment to Brenda's comment. Actually, the reason Patagonia implements that process is because we taught them how to do it. When Dean Carter was at Patagonia we did a ton of work, and we actually wove
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David Rock: these principles into their talent system at the time, their digital system as well. And we helped them build that whole, asking for feedback culture. A great great organization. But it's you know, it's a few comments. This is, you know, this is definitely about the future. It's definitely about solutions. It's definitely about what to do, more of and what to do. Less of you know. Stop, stop, continue is okay. But
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David Rock: at Accenture we built well, better next? What do you do? Well, what could you do better? What do we need to think about next? I think that's different to I mean, similar to start. Stop, continue similar kind of thing. But it's a little bit less of a status threat.
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David Rock: you know, in the process. So you know. You imagine you have a start. Stop, continue conversation with a thousand people, and you measure the threat response. It's going to be higher across 1,000 people than you know. What do you do? Well, what could you do better? What could you do next? So you have a different quality of conversation, less status, threat, less autonomy, threat. So the language of these things matter. The architecture of these things.
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David Rock: you know, are really really helpful. So that's you know, that's but
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David Rock: the kind of difficult conversations around feedback. And I think the the way to address that is, get the organization into this habit of
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David Rock: you know, of of asking and everyone asking. Well, we've seen that really at work. Where did you want to go next? And what kind of
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Emma Sarro: I I think we should. Let's just touch on some general performance conversations. I think I think we can cover a lot of conversations just by
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David Rock: Yeah.
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Emma Sarro: Talking about. You know, Performance gap conversations. Maybe it touches a bit at behavioral issues, too. So and I think we have a story that really helped us to understand those kinds of conversations
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David Rock: Yeah.
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David Rock: it's, you know, going back to sort of the the can, you know, candor question right? If candor is not the answer, and if, like a 7 step process isn't the answer. What's what's the right way to make sort of performance conversations generally better. And and we think of. We think of feedback as as a subset of performance conversations that often needs focus work. We think of it as one of the 6 main performance conversations. And I'll outline what those 6 are
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David Rock: when we do performance management consulting with companies, we help them define their philosophy for all these 6
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David Rock: I think it's helpful to sort of to start with that, you know. Goal setting is one obviously
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David Rock: goal setting can be a difficult conversation right
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David Rock: everyday feedback which we've been talking about is the second one.
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David Rock: The check in is another one. So the check in is talking about.
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David Rock: not the end of cycle or end of year, but just like, Hey, how are you going? Overall with your goals? You know. Let's revisit your goals and talk about progress so that could be a really difficult conversation for people at times. Right? The check in the next one is the end of cycle conversation, where you're actually talking about. You know how person, how, how person contributed to the organization, and what they learned, and all that stuff.
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David Rock: Again, that can be a difficult conversation. The next one is the career conversation. What's next for someone, and how they're thinking could also be very difficult. And the final one is compensation. And that can be very difficult conversation. So so goal setting, everyday feedback check in
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David Rock: end of cycle, career and compensation right? Those those we think of, those as the sort of 6 buckets of conversation. So most companies have sort of never thought about. What does the science say about each of these? And what's best practice for each of these. They just kind of do what they've always done, what the technology tells them to do. But we think there's a really specific
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David Rock: well, we know there's a specific body of research for each of these, and each of these can go wrong. So so we were thinking for the longest time like, what? What can we do? That improves all of these. That isn't isn't just like, be candid, and it isn't a 7 step, you know. 5 to 7 step process like, is there a sort of are there habits people can get into that can stick.
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David Rock: And we thought about this for a long time. And we used to run we used to run these much bigger programs, that sort of built these skills. And we, we knew that they built these skills, we measure them. So if you, if you looked at the history of our company over 26 years, it was a history of
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David Rock: going from really big, long, you know, learning experiences that lasted like, you know, a year. The 1st 1st program we ran was a year. Second program was 3 months, and then it became, you know, 2 days. And then one day, so over time we've you know, we've gone from, you know, huge amount of time with people down to
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David Rock: small amount of time with people. But the number of people we've impacted has gone from literally like 25 in a year to, you know, 3 million in a year learning the work. So so there was. This really interesting thing that happened
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David Rock: is about 2,02015. This really interesting thing that happened. There's a company that I think they've been rebranded. They don't even exist now, but many people probably know them time. Warner Cable and they had. They had this reputation at the time of being terrible customer service, and just being impossible to deal with.
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David Rock: And they had some interesting practices, but they also had some real challenges with their culture internally, and they had real trouble. Like keeping employees, they had trouble managing employees. They had trouble like improving performance, even talking about performance. All this, anyway. Long story short.
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David Rock: we we'd been we'd been doing these bigger programs up to this point like a day or 2 days like a 1 day was the shortest or 2 days, and they said, Look, we, we love what's in your one day program. They've gone through it. We love what's in there. But we have 5,000 people, managers spread out across the State and you know, in different call centers, and we want to develop them to have
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David Rock: uncomfortable conversations more easily. And it included all those 6. Right? Not not any one particular conversation, but just you know, our managers are just terrible at good conversations, right? They avoid them. They're bad at them when they happen.
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David Rock: We've got 5,000 people, and we've got some budget. But we actually want to do this in the next, like 3 to 6 months. And we looked at the numbers and and the way we currently did. It was, like.
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David Rock: you know, an order of magnitude outside their budget, and there was no point sort of even looking at it. But at the time we were we were just. We just published our work in 2012 around learning where we updated the ages model. And in this update paper. We'd seen that there was a very outsized effect to spacing and a very outsized effect to social learning, and we'd continue to see how important insight learning was. So we sort of challenged ourselves. And we said to these guys, Look.
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David Rock: you know, the budget was enticing. I'll be honest. The budget was like a very large budget. We're like, it'd be amazing if we could do something to impact all 5,000. But we'd have to completely rethink how we do learning about quality conversations, because, you know, we were teaching the dance of insight, which is incredibly powerful. But, you know, takes a day
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David Rock: all this stuff. So we're like, all right, what can we do? So we we went back to the drawing board and we said, Look, we actually think there are 3 habits that generalize to all those 6 conversations.
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David Rock: And those 3 habits
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David Rock: basically make you better at every kind of difficult conversation. Right? So difficult performance conversation, but also other kinds of difficult conversations outside of just performance. Right? And so we we thought about it. We thought, okay, well, at the time we had no idea if this, if we were right. But you know, follow the science experiment. Follow the data.
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David Rock: Is our mantra right? Follow the science experiment for that. So we said, Look, let's do a pilot. We're going to build something for you. We're going to test it on a hundred people. We're going to test it pretty low cost. We don't really know honestly how much impact this will have on the surface. When you look at what we're proposing. It might not have much impact at all
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David Rock: like this. You might. It might be very little measurable impact.
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David Rock: Or it might be a lot we just don't know. And we say, Look, let's get those 100 people.
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David Rock: Week one, we're going to give them an insight about one idea. And this one idea was basically turn down the threat right? We, you know, using the scarf model. It's like, turn down the threat and then showing people kind of why that matters. And then some insights on how to do it. In the second week turn up the insights the other person has.
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David Rock: Right? So stop you solving the problem and turn up the insights someone else is having. And so a lot more asking rather than telling. But without a you know, an objective just like really help. Other people have insights. And then the 3rd one was, Do all of this with a growth mindset. So you're you're really nudging towards improving and nudging away from proving right. So so now again, you're talking about the future, and, you know, feed forward. And you know all this good stuff. So so we sort of articulated that there were these 3
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David Rock: broad sets of habits that that really, when you think about them, are like cognitive processes. Right? Okay, I'm going to thoughtfully turn down through it. I'm going to care about how stressed I'm making someone. I'm going to make this less stressful for them. I'm going to help them actually do the thinking. And I'm going to do it all focusing on the future and focusing on growth. And so we found that we could teach this in 3 weeks with just a brief video
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David Rock: and a 1 pager. And we, we measured this and we, we got the most ridiculous data back that the company was just like blown away with.
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David Rock: How much we changed people by doing this, and I left out a piece in the last week. So 3 weeks of that in the last week we'd had a real time experience where people had looked at these 3 habits in the context of the check in
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David Rock: in the context of end of cycle, in the context of everyday feedback. So in the context of these difficult conversations, how does minimize threat, maximize insight, activated growth mindset kind of really play out. And then we built these guides
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David Rock: and we came back to time. Warner Cable, they said, we can't believe it, but everyone's printed out those guides and put them on their wall, and using them as like a Bible, and literally following these guides and all the conversations are getting better. And can we please give you an insane amount of money to take this to 5,000 people in the next 3 months? And we said, heck! Yes.
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David Rock: and we measured that. And we got ridiculous results again.
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David Rock: And that became the 1st of our scalable digital solutions. We end up calling a distributed learning solution. And we basically bet the farm on that approach. And we've got 16 modules now in that approach. But it all started with this question of? Is there a general set of habits that people could learn one at a time, and that would stick?
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David Rock: That really makes all kinds of conversations that are difficult, better. And there's your answers, all kinds of difficult conversations. How do you make it less stressful with the other person thinking through scarf? How do you help them have their own insights? So you're less telling, more asking. And how do you do it? All focused on the future and getting better and growth not on, you know.
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David Rock: making someone feel attacked and justified, and all that. So those are very learnable one at a time. Then they weave together. Now you've got a better way of having conversations. So all of that goes into a solution called connect. It was that kind of first, st and you know, and and sort of most important one. If anyone's interested in learning about that for your organization, just put your company name and connect in the chat. Someone will follow up. We can give you more information on that. But it's gone to millions of people now, and it doesn't focus on candor.
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David Rock: it actually focuses on a different kind of conversation. It doesn't. It's not a complicated model. It's just 3 sort of general principles to follow. And we find you know, people can remember 3.
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David Rock: So it's but and it really really scales and then, you know, applies to all conversations. So that's that's kind of our so broad solution around performance is, turn down, threat, maximize insight, do it all in a growth way and just overall across, you know, average across thousands of people. Your conversations will be better.
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David Rock: So yeah, I see a few people in the chat. So yeah, company name, and the word connects and someone will will follow up with you about that. So you know. Lots to say, Emma, about all of that. But anything you want to weigh in before you sort of go to some of the hardest stuff. Maybe
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, I well, I do think we do have a poll right? That asks a bit about some other work.
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David Rock: Oh, yeah, let's get the poll up with people here we got a poll. So we know kind of how to support you. And
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David Rock: and then we'll get we'll get past. So just we'll do that alright. So let's shift gears a bit. So that's general performance. What about the really difficult conversations. And this starts to kind of go into de-escalation a little bit and the the really hard conversations. And, you know, telling someone they need to to address a little bit. Maybe that's really hard. Maybe it's not context dependent.
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David Rock: but what about the really hard conversations and
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David Rock: kind of how we address those. And
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David Rock: I go back to some work we did with a big pharmacy chain a few years ago, and they had, like 20,000 drugstores around the country, and when you have 20,000 drugstores, if things go wrong now and then that adds up, and what they found across 20,000 drugstores across 52 weeks was that every week there were quite a few incidents of actual violence, of physical violence against the pharmacist and the other staff.
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David Rock: and it's a pretty serious number. I don't remember the actual number now, but it was a pretty serious number every week of actual, you know, violent situations, and they came to us and said, Look, you know, can you help us to to turn this down? And we studied what was going on? And basically, it was almost all of the situations. Was the pharmacist telling someone that they couldn't have a prescription.
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David Rock: And usually that was a person that was suspicious that there was some suspicion of misuse or drug use. But they're gonna they were misusing this in some way, and there are certainly some pharmaceuticals that can be misused. And and also just like
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David Rock: Someone coming in. And just, you know, asking for something that they shouldn't be asking for. So
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David Rock: so we looked at it, and we said, All right, this is this is clearly a very difficult conversation like it's resulting in physical violence. And those things were, you know, going really badly for a lot of people? So we said, All right, how do we de-escalate
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David Rock: these situations? And and we went back, and there's no like growth mindset here. There's no like helping. People have insights here, but there is turning down the scarf thread. There is turning down the scar thread. And what we saw is that there's a process for
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David Rock: actually de-escalating that involves every domain of scarf.
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David Rock: So how do you have a conversation with someone, you know, asking for a prescription that that protects their sense of status.
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David Rock: 1st of all, right. And you can sort of do it in any order, but just to do it in scarf order. Right, you know, protects their sense of status, you know. Tells, you know, you're saying that you respect them. And do you understand? This is important to them, and you don't need to be offensive in any way. Right
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David Rock: also in, you know, addresses their sense of certainty by explaining what your process is, gives them some options with autonomy rather just saying, no, actually give them some choices that they can make right with relatedness. Really, you know, showing empathy, showing that you're on their side, that you understand their goals and
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David Rock: And then also fairness. So so literally, we worked out a script, not a prescript. I guess it's a prescription, but we did a prescription in the form of a script, for how to have a conversation that otherwise was going really badly, and it had a big big improvement in there, so so that so you know, scarf gives you a lens
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David Rock: for turning down really tough threats, and you can apply that to you know any of those really harder conversations. And in and in particular, if if you can't address all 5. Which one of those domains could you really address the most? Is the question
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Emma Sarro: yeah. And I think a part of that whole process is also working to kind of understand what would. What could be your threat going into that
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Emma Sarro: scenario as well, and kind of regulating your own emotion. So I think the whole process involves a deep understanding of scarf, both for yourself and and the right signals to send, and maybe also trying to take their perspective on what exactly would be like the most sensitive pillar right here with with what they're asking for, how they're asking, or you know. What they're saying is, maybe I'll try to dampen that one
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Emma Sarro: as much as possible just to get them to a manageable level, you might not be able to completely reduce a threat depending on the kinds of conversation, but at least to a point where you can have the conversation, and they can maybe listen to what you're saying. And and you can have something more productive. Because when you're at such a high level of threat, no matter what you necessarily say, not everything is being
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David Rock: Right.
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David Rock: Yeah, no, absolutely. I was just looking at some of the questions there quickly. So my my previous book called Your Brain at work which is the title of this of this event. This is your brain at work. Live which we invented in March around this time 5 years ago. Around this time in 2020, we invented this Friday session noon every Friday to help with people's sense of certainty and autonomy, and relatedness. In the in the sort of state of the pandemic that's when we we launched this
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David Rock: but my book called Your Brain at Work, walks through scarf in the last 3rd of the book, and then I'm now working on a new book which will take another year or so to come out, but that just kind of walks through scarf directly. We don't have something on Gpa. Directly. We've been doing some events on Gpa. We'll probably do another one on Gpa. In the next month or so.
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David Rock: But it's it's it's maybe we'll do a Mini summit a virtual mini summit on Gpa, so it's essentially Gpa growth, mindset, psych safety, accountability. Essentially, the 3 sets of habits that are super kind of most relevant. So if you're being essential, not exhaustive, and said, what 3 broad habits are necessary now, and a lot of what I'm talking about with
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David Rock: turning down threat is, is, you know, really central to psych safety.
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David Rock: But Psyche goes even further. You're not just turning down threat. You're actually creating the conditions that people argue well, and that takes a little nuance. It takes a little kind of intentionality to really, you know, get people really, really arguing? Well, that's important. I wanted to go back to one thing because we talked a lot about feedback and about asking for feedback, and I noticed there was quite a lot of interest in connecting here the other solution that we built, which anchors just on feedback is called improve
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David Rock: and it literally teaches large numbers of people how to ask for feedback. And, by the way, when when you need to give some feedback to someone, and they've not asked. A great thing to do is ask them and make it a dialogue. Ask them for feedback. They'll give you some, and then they'll naturally ask you, and you'll have a much more authentic easy conversation. But if people are interested in in specifically our feedback.
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David Rock: Tool, our feedback model. It's called improve just for your company name and improve in the chat, and someone will follow up on that as well. So connect was the first, st literally the 1st scalable solution that we built that focused on better conversations. Improve came soon after. We also built a team which came out just last year, which is is the more intentional psychological safety work.
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David Rock: We haven't done much with calm, which is the neuroscience of de-escalation. But that exists, and that kind of may come back. And then we've been thinking a lot about civility and respect and those kinds of things, you know kinds of things as well. And what's what's coming up for you in the chat? Where do you want to dig into more
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Emma Sarro: Well, everything that you're talking about with psych safety and even civility. One thing that I found in my research and this is not going to be a surprise to anyone, but in organizations that have a high level of psychological safety and civility, those difficult conversations are happening often, and people perceive them as constructive, productive, informative, whereas the opposite is true of psych safety is low or civility is low. They view those
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Emma Sarro: conversations as pointless. They're frustrating, they're uncomfortable. Everything that you can imagine. So just flipping the script on what the environment is changes the direction of the conversations and psychological safety allows you to take that kind of social risk. It gives you that buffer so that you can do that. So you can imagine those conversations will be happening more often, and they'll be more productive. So I just think that is such a critical piece of if you
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Emma Sarro: to have these conversations, make sure your environment is right first, st so that they happen in the way that's informative. Yeah.
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David Rock: Yeah. So you know, going back to kind of where we started in this conversation, we're talking about, you know, difficult conversations. We know that people avoid them. It's something like 3 quarters of the people. Avoid them for some time and a quarter of people avoid them for a year. We now, you know, we've been talking about. The reason they avoid them is they predict pretty accurately that it's gonna cause us a threat response for the other person.
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David Rock: and if you don't do it right, that threat response could turn them from a friend to a foe could make them not want to collaborate with you and not listen to you and you know, when you create a strong threat response in someone, you do create a bit of an enemy. So you know, people pretty accurately predict it's not a great idea to just lean in and have a hard conversation the way you just want to have right
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David Rock: like, what's the way? We often want to say something to someone like, you know. Why did you mess that up? Why, did you know, like the natural sort of knee jerk response we have when when we we go to have a difficult conversation involves a lot of status threat, often right? It's making that person wrong. It's asking them why they messed up. It's digging into so so there's sort of a natural inclination. If we just blurt out candidly what we want to say is, we will accidentally create a lot of threat responses.
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David Rock: Even when you study like apologies. We've been studying like how to apologize well for our accountability solution called deliver and kind of looking at the science. It's really hard for people to like let go of the status situation in an apology and actually apologize in a way that doesn't try to protect their own status. It's such a reflex action. So we're very, very conscious of status. It's playing out in every way imaginable. So
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David Rock: so it's it's accurate to pause and not just blurt things out right. That's a good thing. And then the question becomes, you want? Should you wait a year? No. Should you wait a quarter? No, what you probably should wait is to is till you know just enough time that you've worked out a way to have this conversation that minimizes how threatening it is.
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David Rock: and if it's a really difficult conversation, it's still going to be pretty threatening, but you just try not to make it a totally overwhelming threat. So maybe they really know that you're on their side, and that you really care about them. But you're delivering tough news. So that's about balancing
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David Rock: the scarf threats. Right you are. You're gonna attack their status. But you're gonna make sure you got relatedness first, st right? And that you're being really fair. So if those harder conversations now for general performance conversations, what we're saying is minimize threat, maximize insight to it all with a growth mindset. So that central for feedback conversations, it's like
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David Rock: asking for feedback
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David Rock: or, you know, getting the other person to ask feedback, or you asking them first, st and then they ask you that literally halves the stress response for both sides. So it's such a helpful tool for feedback itself. And then finally, the
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David Rock: you know people saying, Well, what about all the you know? Really complicated conversations right now about politics, about the government about what's happening, and I just think the workplace is not a place for those conversations at the moment. It's too heated. It's not to say there are not things to talk about but
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David Rock: the potential for divisive and aggressive conversations that really cause conflict is very, very high, and I would say there's never been a time to talk about politics, religion, or sex in the workplace, and now is definitely not the time to start
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David Rock: and so we really don't want to have those conversations. Maybe the hard conversation is.
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David Rock: we're not talking about this stuff at work. That's the hard conversation. You know. We're not. We're not gonna discuss this stuff at work. Overall. So we're coming up to the end. Emma. Anything jumping out in the chat. Anything in the QA. Or chat any other final questions that we wanted to address for you
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Emma Sarro: Well, there's something coming up. Laura's asked. A few people have asked just about, you know the financial impact, and there are plenty of studies showing the the link between poor communication in an organization. If this is, if we generalize this just to
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Emma Sarro: just productive communication, or, you know, constant communication has a direct line to how levels of stress productivity, you know, level like, how often are you ruminating on this conversation or this problem that you have to face satisfaction level. So all of those then link to financial performance performance of an organization. So it's clearly important, right for the financial
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Emma Sarro: impact
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David Rock: Yeah, you know what we might do. Is, we might send out some other recordings that are super relevant to this session to folks who kind of want to dig in more. See? It's a topic that you know interested in. We might take a look at our archives, of of the podcast I know we've had some, you know, relevant topics and include those in the follow up resources to this, a few people asking about the recording. So these sessions do get recorded and turned into the podcast
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David Rock: which you can download on spotify or apple anywhere. You just Google, your brain at work. But you know for us, I think the the cliff note here is there is a better way to have difficult conversations.
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David Rock: Whether they're general performance ones separately. If they're feedback separately, if they're really difficult things, there's a better way. I don't think candid's the answer.
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David Rock: I think the answer is respecting how stressful these things are, and giving people, you know, 3 habits to work on, or just one. And you know, really embedding those
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David Rock: and then, in in the heat of the moment people can remember simple things. They won't remember 5 to 7 step process. So that's you know. That's that's my summary overall. Otherwise. Just thanks everyone for being here. Emma, thanks. As always, Erin, I appreciate your work in the background, and everyone else in the background have a great week. Take care of yourselves, and look forward to connecting again soon. Bye, bye.
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Emma Sarro: Hi! Thanks, David, thank you. Erin.
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Erin Wickham: You. Thanks, David and Emma. That was a great conversation. We thank you for your time and preparation. I will pivot to some closing comments now. So if you haven't already, please take a look at the poll that is up on your screen, and let us know how analyze can help you out in the future the poll will stay up. As I talk through my final announcements. We are
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Erin Wickham: 4 weeks into our 5 week, De and I, Webinar series, where we share in 30 min the right way to approach de. And I. Today you can see the schedule in the chat, and we have 2 final sessions next week, which are build a business case today, we're offering those at 10 Am. Eastern and 5 Pm. Eastern, so that if you are joining from Emea, or joining from Apac or the West Coast. There is a time that works for you. We look forward to seeing
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Erin Wickham: you there on our final session. And as David just mentioned, if you enjoyed today's conversation, you'll love our podcast so make sure. You can subscribe anywhere you find podcasts available. Look for your brain at work on spotify apple podcasts and etc.
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Erin Wickham: This is where we officially say farewell for the week on behalf of today's guests and the Nli team behind the scenes. Thank you for being here, and we'll see you back here same time next week.
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Erin Wickham: See you? Then