Welcome And Neuroconvergent Leadership

Tom Mueller 0:09

Welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and leadership. I'm Tom Mueller. Thanks for joining us again this week. If you want to email the show, drop me a line at Tom at LeadingInacrisis.com. On our show today, we're going to dive into the realm of management and leadership. And we're talking with uh a new author, Jeremy Doran, who has a book out called Neuroconvergent Leadership. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Tom Mueller 0:44

You know, it's fascinated to think about your concepts, Jeremy, in you know, sort of in the context of crisis management, crisis leadership, and all that. And we'll get to that in just a minute.

Jeremy’s Story Behind Communication Breakdowns

Tom Mueller 0:57

Um, but tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to write this book.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Well, uh, if you have a couple of minutes, uh, when I was growing up, math and science always seemed to make sense, and humans almost never did. And it felt like everybody had a code book that I never got and that they were purposefully being difficult for me to communicate with. And I was lucky enough in high school, I was a supervisor at an amusement park and they put us through a three-day-long Myers-Briggs course. And then I came to understand A, my brain works very differently than most people's does. And the differences in the way that we view and think and just receive information and share it causes so much communication problems. And I actually benefited from it being so difficult for me because it made me pay really close attention to what people are saying and what they actually meant and what's going on in communication. So that's been my passion for a long time. I've been doing leadership coaching for about 19 years now. And I've worked with a lot of engineers. The transition into management is difficult for everyone because it's such a mindset shift. But you also need to change the way you communicate. And communication for engineers is not always what other people want it to be. So I've been focused for about three years and have a podcast on communication, particularly in STEM workplaces. And the more I dig into it, the more I realize communication is an issue everywhere with everyone. It's just more pronounced and more noticeable sometimes.

Tom Mueller 2:42

Well, now you your book is really premised around, you know, managing the neurodiversity of individuals, right? Um, I think one of your uh quotes is you said you felt like you were always sort of a different person in the room or didn't quite fit in with teams. And out many of us out here have that feeling. It's a lot, you know, and so if you're leading a team that has, you know, all these different styles on it, what's the uh what's the sort of keys to success there?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

The key is embrace those differences and recognize just what a benefit and value they are. It can feel like that one person on your team who's especially challenging. We all have someone who we just find difficult to communicate with. When you can finally actually sit down and figure out how to communicate with that person, they often become your greatest ally because they're offering a perspective that you would not normally have. And when you can embrace that across all of the people on your team, all of a sudden you have a team of people who think differently and are fully engaged and sharing their different perspectives so that you can come to far better solutions, far more creative, and avoid many more mistakes. So the more you can embrace those differences, the better off your team will be.

Crisis Leadership Starts With Trust

Tom Mueller 4:12

Well, now that's a common theme, I think we've heard through, you know, sort of management leadership circles for a while, you know, embracing that diversity. Uh but when you are in an urgent situation and you've got to get things done, you know, there's this command and control versus participative leadership. So how does a leader sort of parse that or where's that line?

SPEAKER_01 4:39

One thing that I often say is when the building's burning down, you don't need to build consensus. You need to tell people what they're going to do and they're going to do it. But the way you get to that point is by building trust on your team. And the more often you tell people what they have to do, the less they want to do it. The more you can avoid that and build consensus by really engaging people, the more willing they are going to be to trust you so that when you say evacuate the building right now, they're not going to stop to ask you questions because they trust that you are telling them that for a good reason. So I think a lot of it starts before you get to that crisis of building the trust on your team. And the way you do that is by really engaging and understanding them better.

Match Your Message To The Person

Tom Mueller 5:29

So, how do you um how do you assess, you know, the team's qualities, capabilities in this neurocognizant mold? Um, you know, because if you're a new leader to a team, you've got this, you know, group of individuals in front of you who you're meant to be leading and directing, and you may not know them at all. So how do you sort of work your way into that?

SPEAKER_01 5:54

I think the first and most critical thing is understanding yourself and understanding how you like to communicate and then asking them how they like to communicate and not making an assumption. I've worked with people before and I was assigning a task and I realized the tasks weren't getting done. And I started asking the question when I give you this task or project or whatever it is, how do you want me to give you the information with all the details or just the end goal? And they didn't even understand the question because it had never once occurred to them that other people want information differently. And once I explained it, probably two-thirds of them looked at me like I was insane and said, Well, if you don't give me all the steps, how will I know what to do? Like, great, you want all the steps. But about a third said, if you try to micromanage me, then you can just do it yourself and I'm out of here. Like, great, you don't want all the steps, but it it never occurred to them that there's a way other than what they like. And so they didn't even understand the question. So it's hard to take a step back, figure out the way you like to communicate, and then ask each person on the team what works well for them. And while you're doing it, share what works for you because it's it's their responsibility to make an adjustment to you to some degree. But as the leader, you should take it as your responsibility to adapt to them.

Tom Mueller 7:29

And you know, how long how long does that take, Jeremy? Months, years?

SPEAKER_01 7:35

It's it's probably an ongoing process. Um, you know, I know I know that I've been in personal relationships for many, many years, and there are constantly things to learn. So it it takes a lot of paying attention and constantly making the effort and never resting on your laurels saying, oh, this relationship's all set now. I don't need to work on it anymore.

Tom Mueller 8:00

I love the the sound of this and you know, tapping all the skills and the personality traits of your team to make them an effective, you know, team together. But when you're you know stepping into a new role, I'm thinking about a crisis manager who's uh you know got to manage a team now have been pulled together from different departments or different regulatory agencies, perhaps, and now it's you know it's providing the leadership for that team. Can you apply these principles in that kind of a makeshift situation that maybe is going to go on for three or four weeks?

Success Criteria Nobody Says Out Loud

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Yeah, I think it depends on how critical it is when you first walk in. But I often talk about project management, which is not exactly the same thing. But in project management, you have people from different departments, sometimes different companies, who all need to work together to get a thing done. And it's very easy to just be surfaced and say, here's the goal, here's the big goal, because everyone can agree on that big goal. But if you actually learn what each person thinks it requires to be successful at the end of it, you will find that they are wildly different from person to person. And they are rarely, they rarely bother to share them. And people rarely bother to ask the smaller criteria for success. And I think once you start digging into the smaller criteria for success within the big goal, you start really understanding where the other people are coming from. And when you understand where each person is coming from, it can guide your path to help make sure everyone feels successful.

Tom Mueller 9:41

So you talk about smaller criteria uh for success there. So can you expand on that a little bit? What is what does that mean to your average manager?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Uh, if you think about, well, in I'm in Rhode Island and we had a bridge that got shut down and it's been shut down for years. And when you think about what everyone wants, is everyone wants the bridge up and running, right? But if you ask the government, their criteria for success is that it gets done on time, on budget, and citizens won't have anything to complain about. That's what they want. The engineers want it to be a technically sound solution, and the contractors want it to get done in a way that they can get it done on time and still make a profit. And the citizens want it done as soon as possible, and they want to be told what's happening as it goes. So the big goal is the same for everybody, but within each department or each organization, there are other smaller goals that are required for success. And on top of that, each of them probably communicates in a very different way. The way a politician communicates and the way an engineer communicates are not necessarily the same. So in addition to understanding smaller criteria, you need to understand their method of communication so that you can tie it all together.

Tom Mueller 11:11

Any uh any good stories you can share with us about successes or failures that um you know could benefit from this type of approach.

How Leaders Shut Down Great Ideas

SPEAKER_01 11:24

I think a lot of it comes to listening and being willing to hear a different opinion than your own and accept it and make changes because of it. I once worked in corporate America and the question was how can we um encourage people to say we have, you know, this bucket of resources that we can give them in bonuses or some other thing? And everyone was simply talking about the calculation for how much money to give them in a bonus. And I said, Well, you know, studies have shown that what people will ask for is money, but what actually motivates them are things or experiences. So maybe we should consider spending less money, but give them experiences or things. And they all looked at me like I was a moron and ignored me and moved on. And you know, later on, I was vindicated, but it it absolutely didn't matter at that point. And a study came out afterwards, which shows that when you give someone money in their brain, it goes into the paying off bills. When you give them a thing or an experience, it goes to this is a bonus.

Tom Mueller 12:43

Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

But they had no interest in a differing opinion at all. And guess what? The next time a meeting came up on something, I was far less willing to share my ideas.

Tom Mueller 12:58

Yeah, that's the well, that's every manager's challenge, right? Is you know, trying to keep an open, an open door, an open microphone so that when somebody steps up, you can hear what they want to say and they feel free to do that. Um yeah, it doesn't take much to shut down an employee though, does it? Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And it it's a balance. You can't, you know, it's not a town hall where everyone gets to share an opinion just because they have an opinion. There needs to be some rigor to it's worth sharing this idea because there's something to back it up, not just my opinion on things. So it's it's a tough balance.

Stress, Amygdala, And The Power Pause

Tom Mueller 13:40

Uh let's talk stress for a minute here, Jeremy. Um, you know, oftentimes when people are in crisis situations, there's a lot of stress, right? Whether you're a regulatory agency, you know, looking into something that's happening, or you know, you're a manager's put in charge of managing this particular incident. A lot of stress goes into that. So the team's going to be under stress. How might that affect our sort of cognitive approaches? And does it make a difference for a manager who's stepping into that kind of leadership position?

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah, again, time frames are a tricky thing, but for immediate conflict, your brain, when you get into fight or flight mode because something caused you a lot of immediate stress, all the processing power goes to your amygdala and it goes away from your prefrontal cortex where you make logical decisions that make sense. And so, in that type of situation, you know, people say count to 10, and I say breathe deeply five times because the amygdala only takes over for a limited period of time. And after six or so seconds, then power starts going back to your logical brain. So that time is crucial, but also breathing is crucial because it tricks your body into relaxing. When you breathe deeply, your body thinks that it's in a calmer situation, so it calms everything down. And that's, you know, a micro situation. That's just a 15-second confrontation. But I think the principles still apply is when in doubt, just take a little pause and work things through, give yourself time. And I think that sometimes you need to be able to walk away from something and come back to it with fresh eyes. Because I know for myself, if I'm working on whatever, an Excel spreadsheet and I get stuck, I will keep cycling and keep cycling, and I cannot resolve my problem until I'm willing to step back for a little bit. Then I come back and I look at the spreadsheet, and it's so obvious, but I needed that little break. So I think time and being willing to just pause are important in all the situations. Okay.

Tom Mueller 16:01

Yeah, one other question I had for you. I was thinking back to a um an incident that I worked, and I had some people who um, you know, kept coming in and bringing bringing me problems. Rather than coming in with solutions, right? And they just kept coming in and complaining about you know whatever the the issue was. And um I finally just politely demobilized that person and sent them home, right? Because I didn't need more problems on my desk. I needed people who could help solve problems, right? But their mindset wasn't really working in this crisis management, hurry up, let's get things going mode. What's your take on an employee like that who just isn't sort of getting it?

Train People To Bring Solutions

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Uh one thing that I implemented, and it was a game changer for me. When I was a manager, people would come to me with problems all the time. And I got to where I was because I was good at solving problems. So I did. And that simply encouraged them to come to me with more problems. And eventually I started saying, if I weren't here, what would you do? And they say, Oh, I'd call you. I'm like, no, no, you don't get to call me. You don't get to call anyone. What would you do? And they resist it so much because they are they've been so trained to just come with problems. And eventually they would come up with something. And if it were anywhere close to what I would do, I'd say, Great, go ahead and try that. Report back to me on how it goes. And they report back, oh, that it worked. I said, Great. And eventually they would come to me with a problem and a proposed solution. And eventually they would come to me with, here's the problem I had, here's what I did, here's how it went. And I think sometimes we enable people to just come to us with problems by solving it for them rather than encouraging them to at least go as far as they can towards solving it themselves.

Tom Mueller 18:06

Yeah, I love that approach. I mean, it's empowering people, but to your point, you've got to give people space to work problems so you can't micromanage them. But you also have to make it clear what your expectations are around deliverables for that. Um yeah, that's uh interesting. I love that story uh because it just makes perfect sense. You're just retraining people who were accustomed to coming to you for the answers. But but you know, that's a real cultural issue too, right? Some cultures are very hierarchical. And so you you know, you end up with, well, the boss is the decision maker uh on everything. And so that's the way it works. Any any experience with corporate cultures in trying to help transition that or to be more effective, you know, using these principles?

SPEAKER_01 19:02

It often I one time had someone I was coaching and he worked in a large corporation, and he was working at least 60 hours a week. He hadn't had a full day off in more than seven weeks, and he hadn't had a full weekend off in like four months. And it required me to force him to stop answering his phone every time it rang and say, How long can you go without you know checking voicemail? He said, I need to check it all the time. I said, Do you check it when you're in a meeting? He said, Well, no. Do you check email? No. How long's your longest meeting? Two hours. Like, then you can go two hours without checking voicemail or email. And it stressed him out so much because he knew there were going to be problems that he needed to solve. At the end of a week, I said, How many phone calls did you miss? He said, about 37 a day. Like, wow, that must be awful. He said, It was. I said, How many left voicemails? He said, about 12. Like, oh, so 25 didn't even bother to leave a voicemail. He said, How many of them had a problem that they could not resolve? He said, Well, I called those 12 and eight of them had already resolved it, but four of them really needed my help. He said, And he's like, Well, I guess I don't need to answer my phone every single time it rings. And within a month, he had a full weekend off. So he was looking at it from the point of view of how can he get control of his time because it was just so wildly out of control. But what was actually happening was he was teaching and empowering his people at the same time. So I you you need to find the pain point. Is the pain point that your people aren't learning the things they need, or is the pain point you don't have time because they're taking so much of it? You find that pain point, and then you can kind of spread it out to resolve all the structural issues.

Tom Mueller 21:06

Yeah, that's a great story. I love that. And you know, because we all wrestle with uh how you know, when can I turn off this phone? When can I put it on do not disturb? What am I gonna miss? It is so hard. But give it a try, everybody. See what happens. Take the weekend off. And only you VPs and above take some time off. Let your people be empowered to make those decisions. All right. Hey, uh Jeremy, I know that uh for a long time. Now you're a mechanical engineer by background, and um for a long time you uh felt like you were the odd person out in the room. And I'm curious, you know, were you how did you get to the point of actually deciding that you were going to build a career? On this, on coaching and leadership versus the mechanical engineering thing? Or are you doing both?

SPEAKER_01 22:09

You know, I've been doing this for quite a while now. And I worked in corporate America. I was able to get coaching and I loved it. It just, I was able to learn so much about myself. And then a number of years later, that person could no longer do the coaching because of a health issue and asked if I would like to take it over. And it just, it was like a bell rang in my head. It felt like, oh, this is where I belong. This is what I need to do. And I think a benefit I have is I've got a wide range of experience. So mechanical engineering with a minor in psychology from the youngest of 10 kids. So I dealt with that. I worked overseas. And generally I can see a person's point and I can see the counterpoint to it. So I think that is what has really helped me. And the reason why I love it so much is I look at myself early on in my career and I so wish there had been someone to share the things that I now know to make that transition easier. And I think, especially technical people who move into leadership roles, that change in the way you communicate is a struggle for a lot of us. So I I would like to make that easier. So no one has to struggle as much as I do.

Tom Mueller 23:31

Okay.

Three Tenets For Hard Conversations

Tom Mueller 23:32

Well, what's the um what's sort of the top three tenets of the book that you want people to walk away from with? And again, the book is called Neuroconversion Leadership.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

I think the first one is stop assuming other people communicate the we do, the way you do. Uh the second one would be uh ask more questions. People are afraid to ask questions if they don't understand something or if they're not even 100% sure the conversation was clear, they will rarely stop to ask the questions to make sure. So ask more questions and get to the why behind the what. If you and someone else disagree, it's very easy to try to change their mind. But if you accept that it's their truth and you accept you are not going to change their mind. Instead relax into it and try to find out why they believe what they believe. And when you get to the why behind the what, very often you will find much more alignment than you expected. And when you find that alignment, there still may be some things you disagree on, but you're aligned enough that you can work together to move things forward. And often you're going to come to a third solution that neither one of you had thought of that's better than either one.

Tom Mueller 24:48

Okay. Jeremy, I'm just thinking now about the the divided political climate that we live in today.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

Oh boy, I was hoping we wouldn't go there.

Tom Mueller 25:02

And and I'm just curious, um uh uh anything anything to learn, you know, it's uh from from your book, from you about, hey, how do we get along better, right? Any principles we can apply to, you know, our spouse or our friends who are just politically different than we are these days?

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Uh, you know, there's only so much you can do. There's some people that it's just not going to, you're you're never going to agree. And sometimes the answer is just don't talk about it. But the asking more questions and more of the why. When I watch political conversations, usually it's people just going like this and trying to convince the other. And if not, it's someone asking a question trying to trap the other one. But if you actually go into it with curiosity, like I really, really disagree with you on this, but I know you're a smart person and you're my friend. You must have a good reason for for that thought. Can you explain what's behind it? The more you can ask questions, the more you're going to genuine questions with curiosity. The more you will learn about them, and the more you will get them to relax enough that maybe they will then be interested in hearing why you think what you do.

Tom Mueller 26:26

All right. Great advice there, Jeremy. Thanks for pulling that rabbit out of the hat for us today.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

All right. Thanksgiving's coming, so it's an important topic.

Tom Mueller 26:38

It is indeed. It's with us 24-7, it seems like now. All

Wrap Up And How To Email

Tom Mueller 26:43

right. Hey, Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and kind of sharing your tips for leaders and crisis leaders. I really appreciate that and wish you the best of luck going forward.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

This has been great. Thanks for having me.

Tom Mueller 26:56

And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks again for joining us. Again, if you want to email us, don't drop me a line at tom at leadinginacrisis.com, and we will see you again soon for another episode. Thank you.