LME011 – Self awareness and how to build better teams – Interview with Jessica Pettitt

With Jessica Pettitt I’ll talk about self awareness and how to build better teams.

Self awareness

Self awareness is most important for a good leader. Having the ability to recognize what you are good at and where you’re not so good at or where you’re even lousy – is crucial if you want to be a good leader.

If you want to lead, if you want to inspire others you need to be self aware. You need to be open to work on yourself.

Jessica Pettitt

Jessica Pettitt

That’s why I invited Jessica Pettitt for an interview. We are talking about self awareness and about how this influences building and leading teams.

Jessica lives in New York. She is a speaker and author and has been stirring up difficult conversations for over a decade.

She performed as a stand-up comedian, spoke on stage as a diversity educator, and today she is moving teams from abstract to action. Jessica is a member of the National Speakers Association and is a Certified Speaking Professional.

In her book „Good enough now“ she ties together best practices of conversations, team building and inclusive climates.

The inspiring quote

“If I could sell a formula made up of gratitude, empathy, and self-awareness it would be my billion-dollar coconut water idea.”

Gary Vaynerchuk

Links for further information

• Website of Jessica Pettitt
• “Freebies”: Jessicas Bonus Material
• Jessicas book: “Good Enough Now”
• How to give feedback

The transcript of my interview with Jessica Pettitt:

Bernd:

Jessica, leaders want to lead others, they want to inspire others and they want to influence others, but what’s often forgotten is, first of all, as a leader I need to take responsibility for who I am and how I am. I recently heard Gary Vaynerchuk pointing that out and he said,

“There is something that is really talked about in the business world and that’s self-awareness.”

In the first part of your great book Good Enough Now, you speak exactly about this self-awareness. What exactly is your definition of it and why is self-awareness so crucial?

Jessica:

Well, first off, thank you for having me and a great question to start off with. Self-awareness is the hardest and last thing we are likely to do, and the irony is that it’s free and it doesn’t take any additional tools or schooling to begin.

Ultimately, it’s about taking responsibility for who and how you are, and when you start noticing how you show up in relationships, or what your response patterns are, when you take responsibility for it you can keep the parts you really like about yourself. You can work on to develop or edit or change the parts of yourself you don’t like and then you can become aware of the incongruent pieces floating out in the middle.

Bernd:

But to do that, I think you need to go very deep and ask you, well, sometimes not very nice questions, at least, in some areas. What I would like to know from you, Jessica, is what can we do to become more self-aware? How do we do that?

Jessica:

It’s an interesting question because out of habit there’s a piece of us almost like a magic trick. When you see a magician perform you’re like: Whoa, how did that happen? And then there’s always that guy in the audience who’s like, “Oh, I know how it happened, first you do this, second you do this, third you do this, results magic trick.”

Self-awareness work is like a magic trick in the sense that from the outside it’s like, “How is this person so authentic, vulnerable, self-aware or confident? I don’t understand how they get that way.” And then somebody else is like, “Well.” When you start listing off what self-awareness steps are, it’s even worse than ruining a magic trick because to be self-aware means that you’re actually reflective. It means you’re listening and asking questions to people who know you better than you know you; you’re actually listening and responding to the answers that they give you – and that’s not as sexy as the magic trick.

Self-reflection literally means paying attention to how you show up and usually we can’t do it for ourselves at first consistently, so it means listening to other people. When people give you feedback, usually it’s negative feedback and the first thing we do is dismiss them. And then if someone gives you positive feedback, the first thing we do is deflect it because we don’t accept compliments. Both of those are places to start: stop deflecting and stop being defensive and really listen for patterns.

Bernd:

Yes, I understand that but isn’t it different from who’s giving the feedback?

Jessica:

In theory, I think depending on who it is, it depends how likely we are to validate the feedback or listen to it.

Bernd:

If I understand you correctly, you would say: But at least start with it and take it like a present if someone gives you this kind of feedback, independent if it’s “You’re doing great here,” or if it’s constructive feedback. Is that right?

Jessica:

Yes. What’s interesting is constructive feedback can come at you all the time and you can still blow it off as if it isn’t important, feedback that may or may not actually have anything to do with you, it may have to do with the person who’s giving the feedback’s personal agenda, maybe something that you really take in or are able to blow off, but you have to be able to notice those patterns to be able to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw out.

Bernd:

What I also observe very often is that people very long are not self-aware unless something happens in their life, something which changes their life totally. Maybe their partner left them or they were fired from their job and then something happens that they start to think more about themselves. Is that something which you also observe?

Jessica:

It took me getting fired three different times in order to actually. The first time it was totally their fault, the second time I was super defensive and like, “I don’t get why this happened,” and then the third time, I was like, “Alright, there’s one common denominator in all three of these situations,” that was me. “Did I have anything to do with this?” And it’s a hard question to ask but you are ultimately the common denominator of everything that has gone right and everything that has gone wrong in your own life. So then we get back to you already have the tools to do this. It’s just really hard work. What if it’s not anybody’s fault? What it it’s you?

Bernd:

Very often it is at least helpful to think: Okay, it seems to be me, at least, if it comes the third time. Correct? It’s also some kind of feedback, if you like.

Jessica:

Yes. I think what happens as you work the self-reflection muscles is that the feedback can come from you and actually be constructive eventually, at some point. If we give ourselves feedback it’s usually puffy accolades or it’s being really hard on ourselves until we realise how important a skill self-reflection is. Then you can start saying, “Wait, wait, wait, what happened here? Did I do that thing again?” Or, “Did this thing get me upset again? Did I jump to conclusions?” Did I react in a way that’s from my lived-experience and not what actually happened in the actual moment? And then you can go from there.

Bernd:

If I don’t change myself and think why the hell do I always get the same results? That’s logic in itself. Right?

Jessica:

Right.

Bernd:

What I also very often observe are managers who think they know exactly what needs to be done in their company or in their department but their team, their employees, just don’t get it. They think their team needs to change, the employees need to change their behaviour, they need to change their work ethic and it’s going on.

They want them to change but rarely do they accept they need to change first. You’re an expert on this kind of change. What are typical excuses why we generally think we don’t need to change, and what are your tips to become more open and more aware that we, that I, need to start changing first?

Jessica:

This is the ultimate question and the reason why is that at the root of it, a person who does not practice self-reflection doesn’t actually feel like they need to change, so we’re in a predicament where obviously something needs to be happening. We look outside of ourselves – me included. I wrote a book about it and I still do this, I just now have to catch myself. Right?

So, we look outside of ourself for blame or reasoning, or something like that, as if we have any control over anything outside ourselves so then nothing changes and it’s not our fault. Bad situations, break-ups, poor relationships, things like that are complicated and it often can take somebody else other than you to get into the predicament, you would actually have general control over yourself. So, if you actually want to take responsibility or improve a relationship, or benefit a culture, well, what can I do with this; what pieces of this do I have control over? “Oh, look, it’s me.”

Then you can flip all those kind of laser beams that are outbound to other people that you blame everything on and put them towards yourself – not to instantly blame yourself but take those laser beams and focus them on yourself with-, the language I use is “genuine curiosity,” – listen to yourself, the multiple layers of the voices in your head and determine: What did I just do? Really, what did I just do? Take responsibility for it. Keep the parts that you like. Notice if there are parts of things of how you just responded – which maybe in action or silence, or something like that, it doesn’t always have to be something big and bold and external. How did you respond? Is that what you intended to do? – then you start noticing your role in making a connection with someone else, and that’s actually inside of our control – at least some of the time.

Bernd:

Yes, I fully agree with that. What I also see very often is that people want things from others which they don’t bring to the table. Like, if I want all my team to be on time, 9 o’clock sharp, but I have excuses because I’m the boss, I can once in a while come late five minutes but they are not allowed to come late. Then the whole thing is not working, why should they change?

Jessica:

Not only is it bad role-modelling, but how much of your ego lands on them for the five or seven minutes while they’re waiting on you and you’re spouting the importance of timeliness? How much of your ego splatters on them with that incongruence? You’re doing that to yourself, that’s not them.

Bernd:

When we’re talking about teams and managers, most of these managers want to have their employees working as a high-performing team with great results etc. What are the ingredients for such a high performing team, in your view?

Jessica:

Even the concept of “Ooh, look, there’s a high-performing team,” – some high-performing teams are successfully working in massive levels of dysfunction. The “high-performing” means the few variables you’re looking at are measuring up in the way you want them to but you’re not looking at other variables, so they may actually still be dysfunctional.

Bernd:

Do I understand you correctly? You say from the outside, yes, they have great results but they are not really a high performing team, only regarding the results, but inside, it’s a mess. Is that what you’re saying?

Jessica:

Let’s go back to the boss that’s five minutes late who spouts the importance of timeliness. There is a possibility that if every one of those people began to show up to work on time the supervisor would think they have a high-functioning team, but once you check that off you’re now not paying attention to any of the group dynamics that are happening in the team.

What could be happening is that every single one of those employees has made a pact to job-search together and then the supervisor is going to be completely blind-sided by the very timely resignation letters of their entire team. So then the supervisor’s going to go from: I have this high-functioning team I show off, to being blind-sided by the truth. In that scenario, who actually has the control of not being blind-sided?

Bernd:

It’s the manager who thinks he has a high performing team, but he hasn’t.

Jessica:

Right. I would say to answer your question, if you want a high performing team, first off, that definition probably should be developed by the team. What are you measuring high performance: is it just sales and just numbers but the team has an extraordinarily high amount of personal illness and sick days? Or mental health is really bad because everybody’s so stressed out but their sales numbers are great?

On a human level, as a manager, what does a high performing person in your responsibility look like? As a team member, flatten the hierarchy out of it. As a team member, everyone including you as a supervisor or manager, how do you define ‘high performing?’ Get all of those variable out – maybe over the next 365 days no-one gets divorced, no-one is surprised by someone having to go to rehab, no-one begins to job-search, every single person has found at least one person they wanted to recruit to be part of the team so, as a manager, you’re overflowing with really incredible options of new talent.

Whatever you decide is high-functioning of the group that you were trying to get to be high-functioning, now you have collective definitions to hold each other accountable to. Including yourself. You create an accountability system within that group that everyone is equally in charge of.

Bernd:

To start something like that, if I understand you correctly, it’s important that the manager starts with doing a group meeting and telling: Well, that’s my expectations. He needs to open and then he has a good chance that the others will follow him and talk about their expectations. Is that correct?

Jessica:

Sure. When we go back to self-reflection, there’s a really good chance that some manager or supervisor is going to walk into the staff meeting and be like: Hey, I read this book, great idea, we’re going to flatten the hierarchy and redefine things. And the people sitting around the table are going to have a meeting after the meeting like: What was that about, because I don’t believe you because you didn’t have a healthy relationship to begin with.

Bernd:

So it will take time. If you start this journey and you’ve done things wrong in the past, it will take time until your employees will open for this. Correct?

Jessica:

Yes, absolutely. I remember very early in my speaking career, a manager or supervisor kind of person, we were doing a pretty intensive retreat around staff dynamics and the supervisor came up with one rule, and the one rule was going to be: Speak your truth with care. Now, if you look at it at face value that sounds pretty good, right?

Always state your truth. Everyone else is going to assume that your intention is positive and you need to be responsible and take care that whenever you say your truth, it may hurt somebody else’s feelings, like, Oh, great! That’s sounds wonderful. But it was so inauthentic and so counter to how this manager actually related to anybody on their staff that when I checked in about six months after doing this training-, and I’m a consultant so I fly in and fly out, about six months later I happened to be in town and set up a lunch with some of the employees, anybody who wanted to come just to check in and see how things were going, and they all showed up wearing these t-shirts.

They had secretly made t-shirts that mocked this rule. On their t-shirts was: Speak your truth with care, and it became this mocking tagline because this supervisor really wasn’t doing it and when other people were doing it they were getting in trouble for speaking their mind. He would make insubordinate letters and things like this. So the role-modelling piece of it, what that means is that you’ve taken responsibility to be reflective enough to actually do what you’re asking other people to do. His staff were completely unified against him more six months after doing a training than they were when I was first there because he had just gotten that much more controlling, that much more inauthentic and that much more out of touch with his own employees.

Bernd:

So, could you do anything about it later on?

Jessica:

I talked to the employees about it and I was like: If you’re this unhappy, what are you doing? They said what’s interesting is that morale is at an all-time high because they were able to unify around the ludicrousness of their supervisor, so they actually weren’t looking to change jobs, they just had no respect. And if you don’t have any respect then your innovation and your creativity are completely stifled. You’ll keep cashing your pay checks because you like your co-workers.

Bernd:

But you’re not really doing a good job any longer.

Jessica:

Yes. And for some people who aren’t paying attention that looks like a high functioning team.

Bernd:

I get what you say, yes. It comes back to the beginning that this manager, this supervisor you mentioned, seems not to have the self-awareness because, I understood, he might think that everything is going correctly. Right?

Jessica:

Right. Like: No, sir, you’re really wrong.

Bernd:

Okay. So he needs some kind of different feedback. Jessica, if we’re talking about teams, what’s your take on diversity? I know you’re a diversity trainer, how diverse is normally a good team?

Jessica:

Well, that’s a great question, too. I do come from a diversity training background and, certainly, I would say that my topic area is around diversity and inclusion. The trick to your question, going back to magic tricks, is often, organisations in their strategic plans or governing documents or something, will declare, with their fist in the air, they will declare that: We will make things 10% more diverse than they currently are. And what’s problematic with that is twofold: 1) By when and how; can I get some specifics? And, 2) If you don’t actually know how diverse your current team is, increasing it by 10% is impossible.

Bernd:

Yes, I agree.

Jessica:

If you haven’t had a real conversation about what does diversity and inclusion mean in this group, then you can’t increase it by 10% Often we immediately default to gender and race. That’s it. But you can have a very diverse group of people across gender and race and still have a very unsuccessful inclusive-based culture. It just depends. Again, I think this is a definition that needs to be created by everyone it impacts but the first step of inclusion is acknowledging: Who is not welcome here? Who are the outliers of the people that already exist and why is that the case?

If you have a staff of introverts, the really perky extrovert who brings cake for everybody’s birthday and has mandatory fun things set up, is going to be an outlier even though they may have the external skills that again somebody somewhere in a Sales Book said is a high-functioning person. So the subjectivity of fit needs to be discovered as to what “fit” actually means currently with the team, and what needs to improve with that.

Bernd:

Would you say a team itself would do that, the kind of team culture we have? Or is it even bigger that the company has to do that first, in your view?

Jessica:

Yes. The answer is yes.

Bernd:

Both.

Jessica:

If the higher level echelons-, Let’s take some megalomaniac company like Amazon. If the top five people sitting at a table were to determine how they’re going to make Amazon more diverse, how is that going to trickle down to their 6 million employees around the world?

Bernd:

It’s a challenge.

Jessica:

Right. I will cash that check, I will help you have that conversation but you are probably not going to be successful at it because you don’t have the relationships with the people who are directly impacted by the policies you’re making, because they make you feel good. Now flip it around. If 6 million employees, let’s say they have a union, or they have an employee resource group where they have leaders of multiple employee resource groups, who can then trickle and communicate a joint message against the bulk of the people who are involved in these employee resource groups;

they may not hit 6 million people but let’s say they hit 200,000 people and out of those 200,000 people back-and-forth keeps happening and the 200,000 people trust these six people who are in leadership of these employee resource groups, and those six people collaborate and communicate back-and-forth to the people they represent, and then a collective definition, or a collective list of things that need to occur, is developed and then that gets passed up. The top five people sitting at some very polished table could receive that list. Are they confident enough and are they self-reflective enough to receive that list and go: Oh, wow, thanks for all that work. This is amazing. We’ll get right on this.

Bernd:

I would say, maybe 20% with 80% of the top management, I would assume, are not able to do that.

Jessica:

I’m surprised you stopped at 80. I think it’s very hard, out of context, to take a list and not see a list as some kind of ransom demands. You get really defensive, you’re like: What are you talking about? – and more importantly, in a lot of corporate structures, you turn to Denise because it’s Denise’s job to make sure that these things are handled.

But Denise does not have the community or the social capital or the resources or, likely, the full respect from the other people at the shiny table to be able to address the situation and, if anything, she gets blamed for these things so then nothing happens. So, we’ve created these living, corporate organisms and we expect one person, or one particular outlet, to basically:

Don’t get the company sued. And that’s not an environment of self-reflection, that’s not an environment of responsibility and betterment, that’s an environment for capital gains. I mean, I’m a controversial person but even Starbucks recently did a company-wide anti-racism training in response to one situation that made the news, at least here in the United States, and the training they did was two hours long-, and you can’t fix bias, unconscious bias, conscious bias, racism – you can’t fix that in two hours but, as a company, they closed down and had a company-wide two hour training, which is an amazing initiative.

Bernd:

It’s a first step, isn’t it?

Jessica:

Yes. And if the goal is, in this case, I think the primarily upper-class white people who feel safe at Starbucks, who no longer can get in their Subaru’s with their “co-exist” bumper stickers and feel like a progressive liberal because Starbucks is a bad place – closing down for two hours to make those progressive, liberal white folks feel like they can go back to Starbucks, that’s good for business. But does it actually address racism and anti-bias, and is it starting a self-reflective conversation to role-model with other major corporations about what they’re doing around anti-racism work? That is yet to be seen.

Bernd:

If I understand you correctly, it can be a first step but in the end it has to come from all the people inside the company? So we’re back on that. Even as a manager or a supervisor of one of your teams, if you start that and others will follow, it can change. Even if it’s slow working, at least in some of the teams, right?

Jessica:

Yes. You’re touching on the most critical part. It is very easy to get overwhelmed and just be, “Well, how am I supposed to get everybody to do this? Well, never mind.” Yes, it’s really overwhelming, and sometimes doing individual self-reflection work is really underwhelming so neither of them happens. But you have control over yourself. If you’ve decided this is important and you start your own work, eventually that will shift the culture and it will shift how you show up in those relationships enough that other people might start doing it.

Bernd:

Yes. That’s also what I see very often that managers say “Well, what can I do? I only have my team here of ten people but the company is 10,000 people, I cannot change anything.” But that’s not true. If you change at least in your way, in your small universe, if others do that aswell then things can change.

Jessica:

Yes. And if you look at whoever your role models are, whoever your role model is, at the heart of it is one individual person who hits news, has had some horrible break-ups, probably has some addiction issues and is not liked by every human being they like but they’re still doing good work, they just have to do the self-reflection work to balance those things out.

Bernd:

Jessica, we were talking about more serious and tough issues which are normal if we’re thinking about the corporate world. There seems to be no place, very often, for funny things and jokes, etc. You know how to be in this serious business world, but I also saw that you were not just a professional speaker but also you’ve done stand-up comedy.

You’re an expert on stand-up comedy aswell, and I would like to know from you, what’s your take on how to get more humour into this very serious business world? What can a typical manager do to make a lot of boring meetings and sometimes tough work a little bit more easy and enjoyable with some kind of humour? What tips to you have here?

Jessica:

I think that’s an incredibly important asset in my own work, and what I find is that humour is the great equaliser. It has to be the right humour with the right people, at the right way, at the right time. And that’s the really hard part. So I don’t have any super secrets on what that is except when you try a joke and it doesn’t work, take responsibility for it, and really reflect on the joke: Is it at someone else’s expense?

Is it self-deprecating in a way that you really shared too much about yourself with someone else? Or do you not have the relationship with the people you’re trying to do the humour with so they don’t understand how to react? Some people’s leadership style – my language, is so tyrannical that when a tyrant cracks a joke, you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh or not.

Bernd:

Then it’s not working at all. Yes, I understand.

Jessica:

Right. So if you have more authentic conversations and more authentic, vulnerable connections with other people, then you can actually bring their sense of humour out. You don’t have to be the person to stick it into the room all the time. You could provide a space for people to play and joke, and if they’re not currently doing it at that really boring staff meeting, it’s because you’re in the room, the person with the power. As soon as you leave, they’ll start cracking jokes again.

Bernd:

It clicked with me because I was thinking if I’m not a very humorous person how can I still work with humour? And I think you’ve said it very rightly. If you give a situation, if you give the room that people who are very funny can be funny, or funny is not the right word – then this is also a way to bring in the humour without being very funny by yourself.

Jessica:

Yes. Take television and the late night shows. The later they get the funnier they tend to be. Not everybody on those shows is funny 100% of the time and you watch those shows expecting funny, so even when a skit or something like that doesn’t land on you, or it’s not particularly funny, you keep watching because you have a relationship with that program that it is going to be humorous. If that foundational relationship doesn’t exist, then humour can often be like:

What? Where did that come from? What is going on? You don’t start off at a ten, and I think that’s really important. Oftentimes, humour gets into a kind of scary zone because people are worried about sexual harassment or saying the wrong thing or being offensive, and humour has an edge to it and, depending on what kind of relationships you have in the workplace, you might need to stay far away from certain edges. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be light-hearted.

If I were to give advice to a leader of how do you bring some of that into the space, don’t lead with personal, vulnerable questions but start sharing some personal, vulnerable things. It might take people a while to adjust to: Why is this happening? – but if you start talking about this really amazing, funny thing that you saw one of your employee’s kids do on the kid’s soccer field and you’re highlighting how great somebody’s kid is, unless you threaten violence or potentially come off like a stalker: What were you doing at the soccer game? – there’s something familial about that that will allow more room for humour to exist. There is no topic that I have found where humour can’t have some presence.

Bernd:

Jessica, thank you very much for a lot of insights regarding team, regarding diversity and especially also regarding humour. It was a pleasure to have you in this interview. Thank you very much.

Jessica:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.