How Knowing Our Superloop Can Shape Better Leadership and Workplaces w/ Susan Leger Ferraro
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with speaker, executive coach, and CEO founder of G3 Works Susan Leger Ferrero on how understanding our Superloop can improve our leadership and workplace.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is a speaker, executive coach, senior advisor, and CEO founder of G3 Works, which builds on and offline customizable workplace training programs to elevate untapped leadership. She’s also the number one bestselling author of Superloop, How Understanding Beliefs, Biology And Behavior Creates a Business That Works For Everyone. A system that Dr. Deepak Chopra has called an inspiring and practical system for operating conscious businesses while being a conscientious leader.
Connect with Susan and learn more about her work…
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“When we understand Superloop, we can have it work for us. When we don’t understand our Superloop—how our beliefs are informing how our body shows up in our neurology, and then how our behaviors show up—it uses us.”
Susan Leger Ferrero
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Susan Leger Ferrero, and here is why she is awesome. She’s a speaker, executive coach, senior advisor, and CEO founder of G3 Works, which builds on and offline customizable workplace training programs to elevate untapped leadership.
She’s also the number one bestselling author of Superloop, How Understanding Beliefs, Biology And Behavior Creates a Business That Works For Everyone. A system that Dr. Deepak Chopra has called an inspiring and practical system for operating consciousness …? Conscious businesses while being a conscientious leader.
And Susan is also here with us today. Hello, Susan.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Hello, Russel. Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you so much. I am excited to talk about this. I loved. The SuperLoop. It’s an interesting framework. I can’t tell you how much, it’s sort of like one of those things you’re like, well, obviously, but at the same time it’s like, but nobody’s writing this down. Nobody’s connecting the dots. So super excited to dig into this.
But before we do, Susan, I have to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Well, I appreciate that Russel, and thank you for just the acknowledgement of understanding why beliefs, biology and behavior make a difference. And the fact that we’re gonna lead into that. And so the, my I’ll start with my, my best employee story, which is, about 15 years ago, we were expanding in our early childhood centers that I sold in 2012 called Little Sprout Child Enrichment Centers.
They were a award-winning early childhood program in north of Boston, but now they’ve expanded all over the east coast and beyond. We were looking to hire a a music person in a startup music program inside of our schools. And so because we’re in Boston and we’re next to Berkeley, we went to Berkeley School of Music and we interviewed a bunch of music therapists.
We found this wonderful young woman, her name was Gwen, or it still is Gwendolyn. And we affectionately called her teacher Wendy, and she was really excited about taking the position and I met her in Boston. We kind of did our thing. She came and did some of her just sampling for us to show us what she could do. And, on a weekend, the weekend after she came out to our school, she sent me a text message and told me that she was unfortunately not going to be able to take the position. And she was such a perfect fit for it, I thought that’s really strange. And so I said, would you be willing to talk about it?
And at first she was just like, no, Susan, I really appreciate the opportunity. I just, there was something about it that I thought, let me try one more time and go deeper. So, I sent her an email and I just said, Wendy, you have been amazing to work with. I’d love to hear how we might be able to meet your needs better.
Because I sensed that there was something. And sure enough, come to find out, she she, her car broke down between the time that she had come out to our schools to finalize her working interview and she didn’t have the money at that time to be able to pay for even the repairs on the car because it was an old car.
So after going through some conversations, we, we considered our leadership when I was running these businesses, very innovative and would be solution oriented. And so we worked out a deal with her where we helped her purchase a car. We financed it for her and she basically paid back the loan on a monthly basis.
She was one of the best musical teachers and now she, she went and got her master’s degree and she’s working in public schools as an educator. And it was just such a great story for us because. Had we done what most people usually do, which is just okay, it didn’t work out. But it’s that next level, going deeper and understanding the needs of the people that are trying to work in your institutions and can you actually meet their needs?
Can you do something innovative that’s going to light them up and make their world a better place? Not only did it add value to what we were doing, but it changed the trajectory of this person’s life. She was now in a field that she didn’t even know that she would love and be amazing in, and she’s working in Boston Public Schools in, with her master’s degree.
And so that to me is one of my, most precious employee stories.
Russel Lolacher: Quick question on that. What was the pivot for you on that. ’cause I’m guessing you’d never done that before for a prospective employee and your blueprint had been, as you’d said, modeled everywhere else was that’s not what people do. That’s not what leaders do. You are a great fit, but it’s just not gonna work out. Moving on. That would’ve been the absolute normality of that. But you didn’t, what was the, what was the pivot? What was the change mindset that sort of stuck out to you, that made you make that leap?
Susan Leger Ferraro: One that, I could tell she was a person of integrity and that she really wanted to do this and I sense that there was just something that I needed to understand better about her. And at G3 we have this process called Curious Questions. It’s one of our most precious, right, skill sets and competencies that we lean into when we don’t know something instead of getting into judgment instead of getting into really just, labeling people, labeling. Well, that didn’t work. It was, this person is valuable enough that let’s figure out what we can do. And at first my, my team was kind of like, come on, Susan. That’s just like ridiculous. It’s like, is it, is it ridiculous? Because that’s what she needs to be able to do this for us and being integrity.
And so, the pivot of it Russel is that I was the CEO. And so when you think about innovation and you think about creating opportunities for people, the people that are in those leadership positions, taking the risk and being courageous and doing something different. We all talk about innovation as it’s like this sexy thing and it is, but it’s only effing sexy if you do it right.
And so like really understanding that you have to be the pioneer in these things. You’ve gotta think about things differently to, to make that pivot. And yeah, I had to enroll the rest of my team on what, because then it was like, well, if we do it for them, we’re gonna have to do it for everybody. It’s like, why?
Who says? So it’s blowing up these, institutions and these dynamics that we think we are conditioned by. But it’s, the conditioning is in our mind, right? No, sure. You have to look at, we, we did. We have to ask our attorney, if we do this for this person, are we required to do it for everybody else so I human, everybody, and I did what I’m supposed to do as an executive.
And it’s like, no, not necessarily. And so it’s, it’s just being willing to say, I’m not too busy to think about something different. And, and what happened as a result of it is that it started getting everybody else on the team to stop thinking innovatively. Like, how could I make this work? And, and then, they’re bringing solutions to the table rather than getting stuck with traditional answers.
Russel Lolacher: Innovation, not as lip service, but is actually something you’re doing within the organization. I, I love that because you’ll hear people, we’ll drop innovation, adaptability, courage. We’ll drop those words like they’re on a poster or a website, but the minute there’s an opportunity, they’re like, yeah, it’s not gonna work for us.
We’re gonna do, like everybody has before us. The hypocrisy is a bit much.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah, absolutely. And, and as we think about our, our biology, right? Our brains are wired for the path of least resistance, right? It wants comfort, it wants what it, it knows. And so we’ve gotta push ourselves to do something outside of the box. And you’re right, we all talk about it all the time, and we want it, but we have to be the ones that we’ve been waiting for, right?
That Gandhi quote, we have to be the change we wanna see. And, and people are, they’re lazy with their thinking. They, and, and I say that with myself included, right? I have to say, Susan, think about this differently. I still have to call myself forward in, in those places. So yet you’re right. That is, but that is a chronic complaint across industries that they wanna put the blame out there.
Like, yeah, we wanna be innovative, but they won’t let us. We wanna be creative. But it’s like, so how are you trying to influence them? How are you coming up with a proposition that they can’t refuse? And, and so some of it, it’s that they’re like, well, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. It’s like, try it one more time.
Be, be a little bit more courageous to create the kind of environment that you know you wanna thrive in. And, and so it’s, it’s just that, that getting back to basics around our own accountability to ourself.
Russel Lolacher: This is such a nice segue into what we’re gonna talk about today. I, I love the book. Really, really enjoyed the book, but I wanna set the table to start because I mean, I could, I read the book so I can say, here’s what the Superloop is, but let’s talk to the person that originated it. So I’d love it for you to define in your words, what the Superloop framework is, especially as it pertains to the workplace.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Sure. And thank you for reading it, Russel. I really appreciate that. As you said at the beginning, the, the concept everybody reads. What it is, which is understanding how beliefs, biology and behaviors influence the outcomes in our lives. Okay. Influences us individually and influences us collectively as teams and influence us organizationally as the all, which is the concept we talk about in Superloop.
Always looking through the lens of I, we and all. And so when we understand Superloop, we can have it work for us. Okay? When it, when we don’t understand our superloop, how our beliefs are informing how our body shows up in our neurology, and then how our behaviors show up. It uses us, right? We people talk about getting triggered and they talk about it like it’s a problem out there when it’s really in here.
It’s our own neurology that we get to be responsible for. So when we understand that, how I believe, what I believe about this person, or the beliefs that I have been conditioned, right? Because they are conditioning. They’re conditioning from our childhood, that conditioning informs our neurology. It, and I’ll use this example.
One of my beliefs is about reciprocity. Okay. I grew up in a family, in an environment, in, in New England, in, north of Boston Catholic family that I, that I was conditioned on the right, that, do un to others that you want them to do, to you is about reciprocity, right? So I have a very strong biological wiring towards reciprocity.
And when it doesn’t happen the way that I think it’s supposed to happen, I, I can get judgy, right? Wrong, good, bad, yum, yuck happens in my brain without me even thinking about it. And all of a sudden I get this rush of adrenaline that is queuing me that something’s wrong in the environment and it’s because what’s happening in that relationship doesn’t align with my beliefs.
And if I don’t interrupt that, if I am not using metacognition and becoming aware of my thinking thinking about my thoughts, then I just go into it like, yeah, can you believe they did that? Like, I did this and, and they were gonna do this and it didn’t happen. All of that thing just happens in my brain.
That is the protective personality, right? Dr. Sue Morter, a term that she uses for ego, the protective personality. It’s trying to protect us. At that point, that is the, the vortex that if I interrupt that, that pattern, I’m going to get a different outcome. Most of us don’t, we don’t understand that that is not who I am.
That is who I have been conditioned to believe that I am, and I can change those beliefs if I want. What, what we look at Russel, is the behavior which is the third part of SuperLoop, right? We judge people based on behavior. We judge ourselves based off of intention and beliefs. So that other person, I’m judging them because they are not showing up in a reciprocal way, is that the right word?
We’re gonna leave it at that and, uh.
Russel Lolacher: It’s good communication. I knew what it meant.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Okay. They, they’re not showing up in a way that, jives with me. That align, aligns with it. And so I start shutting them down. I start not wanting to engage with them without even understanding that that’s what’s happening, and then they’re responding to my res, to my behavior.
They’re kind of like, what’s that vibe? You know what, what’s that feeling that’s going on? Because we know about mirror neurons, and mirror neurons are a really important part of our work environment. Our way that we show up. And essentially what, what mirror neurons are, we’ve known about ’em since the early 2000s, is that when we are in an environment, whether it’s virtually or in person with people, mirror neurons get asked to be doing and influenced by the behavior of other people. So if it, it is why I talk about that moods are contagious, right? If Russel’s not in a great mood and his cortisol, his stress hormones are high, it actually regulates to me, it, it influences my hormones based on how you are showing up. And so it’s really important that we understand it because when we’re thinking about team environments, it is contagious.
So, so as we look at, as we look at behavior, we want to be thinking about it in a way that we take responsibility for it. We understand that, hey, I’m gonna be in charge of interrupting myself so that the result that I want happens rather than it’s just always happening like this and I live in Groundhog Day and I don’t know what else to do.
And so Superloop was really created out of that, tens of thousands of hours in my own teams and in other organizations watching this dynamic happen. Watching people really not understand that their own beliefs were informing the way that they were showing up as leaders, as employees, and as team members. And once they took responsibility for that and understood that they could influence it, it changes the game.
Russel Lolacher: So, the SuperLoop from beliefs, biology to behavior. I wanna walk through it from a positive and negative because my immediate thought was, it’s always, it’s negative. It’s, this is bad, my beliefs are bad, so my biology is gonna impact psychological safety, which is gonna be bad in the workplace, but that isn’t the case.
You can, you can have good SuperLoops. So first, as an example, can we go through something, say like career limiting beliefs? How does that show up through that sort of framework?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and that, that’s a good one to be thinking about Russel. Because we all do have career limiting beliefs. If I, if I do not see myself as a leader, whatever, my belief of what a leader is, okay. And, at G3, we ask this question when we start right away, which is who here is a leader?
Okay? And you’ll have the people that have positional leadership, right? They will raise their hand. And then we talk about, so what does leadership do? And we do this exercise and we all start with these, they make decisions and they, support people. So who in this team does those things?
Then they start thinking about it, then about, two thirds of them raise their hand. Then we get deeper and say, so at G3 our definition of leadership is anyone who influences.
Russel Lolacher: Okay.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Okay? Because that’s what a leader is doing. I cannot make Russel do anything actually. If Russel doesn’t wanna do it, he ain’t gonna do it.
That’s just how humans are, and especially in this environment. But if I influence you to align with the strategic goals that we’re committed to, to make sure that the project that we’re working on, that the deliverables that you have, if you need support, I’m there. That if you individually are having a tough time, that I’m able to influence and say, Hey, I know your car’s broken down.
You want me to pick you up when you go into work? That is leadership, right? That is looking at a situation and taking responsibility for it. So people, and let’s just use that one as our example, if I do not see myself as a leader, because I believe that leadership is about a, a position that if I don’t have the title of senior manager or anything that looks like a traditional leader, I actually don’t contribute. The, the negative of it is I’m sitting at meetings and I’m like, yeah, not my place, right?
All these terms that we have above my pay grade. Don’t get paid to do that. There’s all of this BS that we have, have created to feed into that, which doesn’t serve us anymore, but it takes courage to do something different. So if I believe that I’m not a leader, I’m sitting at meetings, I’m not contributing, I’m not part of the solution. I’m not using my creative energies to create solutions that are going to help create the working environment that I wanna be in. As, as a, as a team member, I’m not leaning into supporting my team members in a way that’s getting their KPIs done, that’s getting their deliverables done, because I’m like, I don’t wanna make them feel bad.
They’re doing okay. They’ll be fine. Because I, I’m not a leader, i’m just on the team individually. Something comes up, I work with an opportunity to move up and I don’t wanna interview for it. ’cause it’s like, I’m good here. I’m just gonna stay here. And we, at G3 we call it, human survival skills.
Keeping ourselves small is one of those human survival skills, based on Kali Young’s work. It’s easier to do that because I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna feel pain. Because we are still very worried about pleasure and pain. That is painful. Or I can interpret it as it’s painful if I interview for a job and I don’t get hired, so I’m not gonna go there.
So that’s the negative part of Superloop. Let’s use that same thing, the positive part of Superloop. I do look at myself as a leader. I’m, I’m an entry level employee right now, but I know that I have leadership capability. I know that I want to learn. I’m willing to learn. I’m taking, listening to podcasts like this, I’m doing my own reading on the side, right? Because I know I wanna get there, which is really how I came up as a leader. I read and read and took courses. I’m an autodidact, I still read five books a month. So I, I believe that I have leadership capabilities. So when they’re talking about things at the table, I say, Hey, I’ve got something to say, can I contribute to that?
And they’re like, wow. Look at Susan. She kind of understands this. Like, what is she doing? Can we develop her more? So the way I show up in a group environment informs how other people relate to me, right? On teams. Okay. I could, if I am a leader, I am going to say, Hey Russel, I saw like on your, KPIs on Friday, you’re struggling in that area. Do you want me to help you with that? I, I have like three hours this week. I could do some of that with you. Would that be helpful to you? So, so why show up as collaborative and not controlling? Which is a very different dynamic in leaders. And, and then as, as an individual, I am taking responsibility for my career, for who I wanna be in the world and what I’m willing and not willing to do.
And so it totally informs every outcome we have and it starts at the root cause level of the belief, what it is that I believe about myself and, and what I want to, to be leaning into more all unfolds. And, and this happens in, split second, right? Our neurology is kicking in, doing all of these things before we even realize it’s there.
Russel Lolacher: When you wrote the book, obviously you were looking at the workplace or just our lives. I mean, this is a, a it’s a development book. I mean, it’s here to help us develop as humans, which I always love the idea we talk about leadership development. I’m like, no, it’s human development. It’s, it’s just, we call it leadership, but it’s really, are you being a better human? Are you listening?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Absolutely.
Russel Lolacher: All that sort of thing. What were you trying to fix with this book? Like obviously there’s a problem you saw out there and you’re like, I’ve got the solution and I can see this in a way that maybe isn’t being, in a way that people are. What, what is Superloop fixing?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah. I will tell you that the, the, the hypothesis that I used in the thesis of this work was can we be good humans and run good businesses? That was it, because that’s what I’ve been wondering too in my career watching it. But because I had a firsthand experience and like we talked about at the beginning of this, I knew that I could do it because I had been doing it, but what, the Stars, moon and Sun aligned in 2012. And although I I walked away from my organization that I had founded for 30 years, Little Sprouts, it gave me the, the opportunity to go out and iterate this work of Superloop in over 30 different industries.
I went into media, I went into tech, I went into healthcare, I went into retail, I went into hospitality. I went into the restaurant business. I tried to get into any industry that I could to see does this translate? Is this just an education piece or is this about human development? And my sense was I knew I knew myself, but I needed to prove it.
And so I went out and did case studies. I worked in with a lot of politicians and I brought it into government, which was really interesting and challenging. I’ve worked in higher Ed right at, at the university level. And so, that was what I was trying to solve for. One. Is this about exactly what you said, Russel?
This is about human development and we get all caught up on this, well, is that, executive function is a great example of that. We’ve been talking about executive function forever and in many cases they wanna look at it as well. That’s something you do in child development, right?
In adolescent development. It’s like, nope, we like disproved that a long time ago. Grownups and you too need executive function. You need to have cognitive flexibility. You need to have working memory, you need to have impulse control. All those things as leaders that I’m trying to do myself, but I also want my team to develop, there is a way to build that capacity and that competency.
And so that’s really what I was trying to prove that these things, Russel, that we call soft skills, right? Which drives me batshit crazy, by the way, because they’re the hardest thing that we can do. The, this is the underpinnings of being in strong relationships at home with my partner, being a good parent, being a good neighbor, being a good community member.
All of these skills inform that same type of quality of life that we all allegedly say that we want, but it’s a practice and we have to interrupt habits, and it takes intention to do it.
Russel Lolacher: I’ve always found it funny that we look at work and life as others. So for instance, we’ll have trust strategies and respect strategies, and I’m like, have you ever made a friend in your life? Because it’s the exact same skillset at home, building a community, your partners, and then you’re supposed to do it completely differently when you walk through a door, turn on a computer.
That’s just not how humans work. And yet, and yet we treat it like it’s a strategic plan that we need to do.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yep.
Russel Lolacher: I’m gonna follow your path here a bit in how we navigate the rest of this conversation with the, the I, we, and all. And, and I really wanna start with ourselves because to get into a Superloop, I think self-awareness is, well, I’ve said it tons on the show.
It’s everything. It’s, it is, the relationship with yourself is the most important relationship we have in the organization. How can you recognize you are in the SuperLoop? How can you, how can you look at yourself going, I’m in it? Good or bad? Maybe good. You can reinforce these habits or bad and try to derail yourself.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah, it’s a great question and, and, and it, so many people ask me this, Russel, right? And, and what I say to them is this, when you look at areas that there are chronic complaints in your life, from your life partner, from your friends, potentially from your parents, from your employee employer. telling you all the time, you’re, I, you’re really great at this, but this other thing, right?
You’re late all the time. You don’t follow through when you say you’re going to. Your significant other asks you to do something and they’re frustrated with you chronically because you say you’re gonna do something and you’re not and, and you are going to have whatever excuses that you have around all of these things.
But that is where that human behavior is giving you an opportunity with a red flag going, Hey, right here, this is where you can do some work. That’s gonna make a huge change in your life. But what we do is we make excuses, we avoid it. We may, we, justify it. We get defensive, all the things that humans do really.
And, and, and let me take it one cut deeper, which is, we, we now have created this term that was typically used in, in the psychology and, and social worker field about triggers. Okay? And so now it’s become, layman’s terms in the last five years and that triggers me, or you trigger me.
And what we don’t understand about triggers is triggers are actually a wonderful thing. It’s your neurology telling you that there’s something here for you where you could get better at it, but you’re gonna have to take a step back. Do some self-reflection. Okay. Another really important executive function skill.
I’m gonna reflect on that. Why is it that bothers me? And, and I think, you said you read the book. One of the stories that I share in there is about, two coworkers that you know Marguerite and Katie, and you know, Katie, uh, Margarite is um, Katie’s supervisor. And this, this was a real thing that happened to me in one, in one of my schools. And marguerite was really, really harsh. She was tough to work for, but she was brilliant. Okay. And, and Katie came and wanted to be like, she’s wrong. She shouldn’t treat people like this, da da da da da, right? And I just stepped back and one of our human vibes at G3 is I’m never upset for the reason I think.
Okay. And, and that principle is correlates with what we want people to understand about triggers. That when you are heated at a way that that is more elevated than the people around you, that is a great sign for you to go, Hmm, this, this is here for me, this is learning from me spiritually, emotionally, in my human relationship and to go, why does that bother me so much?
In this situation with Marguerite and Katie, what bothered her so much was she realized that she had a third grade teacher that was really controlling and really abrasive, and that this person, her leader Marguerite, was triggering that in her. And instead of like owning it and going, wow, like that is bothering me and I need to think about that third grader that was overwhelmed by this controlling teacher and heal that instead of projecting it on Margarite and going, let’s just fire her. And all of these things that we do. And so that cue of looking at places that are consistent themes coming up in our life. That’s it. That’s the place where you intersect the your own SuperLoop work and say, I’m gonna do this.
I’m just gonna practice it with this one thing. And, and what I tell people, I have journaled my entire life. Every single morning I get up and I journal, and when there’s something going on that I’m particularly stressed about., Once a month, I will take time on a Saturday and give myself three hours, Russel, and I just go, all right, this thing, and this is what I’m interpreting from it.
This is how it impacted me, and this is what I’m not going to do anymore. And it, it is your own work. You can do it by yourself. You can do it with a therapist, you can get a support group. There’s all kinds of ways, but not doing it keeps us stuck.
Russel Lolacher: I’m so glad you clarified some things people can do. ’cause I know immediately any leader’s, like I don’t either ha, don’t have the tools to do the self-reflection to understand themselves well enough. They’re too busy, and I’m using air quotes for anybody that can’t see my fingers because, again, too busy is a thing that you are putting on yourself or your culture is putting on yourself, and you’re not bound providing boundaries to allow yourself the time to do these really important things.
So I was really curious as to what you’d recommend that’s sort of been the, I guess, move the needle for a lot of leaders who are giving you excuses for them not to do the work.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, and I, I think the other, salient point is and my, my brother Jack Daley talks about this all the time. He, he has a few great books out there Hyper Sales and, we all have the same 168 hours in the week, all of us, right? Whether it’s Richard Branson, whether it’s Brene Brown, whether it, we all have the same amount of time.
And yes, there’s some of us that have had environments and upbringings that give us more access to resources. It gives us more, access to those experiences. But we are grownups now and we can make different decisions. And so understanding that. This gets to be as important as taking a shower and brushing my teeth.
This is about emotional hygiene. It really is and, and, and owning that same responsibility that we have to our physical wellbeing. We call it mental health Russel, which I think is such a ridiculous term because we’re doing it because emotions are, are, are funky and people don’t like them.
They’re messy, they’re complicated. You feel, you feel young, you feel like inadequate, but it is emotional wellbeing and emotional help. It’s not mental. It’s really not. But mentally, right? Yes. You’ve gotta discipline yourself to organize and prioritize those things, but even in relationship when we’re doing supervisions with within our teams, right?
When you think about the team aspect of this work, the I is doing your own work, the teamwork is, let’s say the unsaid, another term that we use at G3 because we are so conditioned in this society to not say what we’re thinking. One, because we’re not good at communicating. Challenging conversations and we get to get better at it so we don’t feel confident.
And two, it’s a lot of work and I’d rather just come to the meeting, keep my mouth shut and walk outta here so I can get work done. And so we, we are creating the environment that we don’t wanna be in anymore, and that doesn’t work.
Russel Lolacher: What would you say to those that may be blaming external factors? So, for instance, I work a really stressful job. What it sounds like from a beliefs, biology and behavior standpoint is it’s all internal, but there are things outside of me that I can’t control, which is a horrible boss or unrealistic expectations.
So I have no control over that. And I know I have control over the SuperLoop, but that influences it. How do you, how do you respond to that?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Great question again, and because that, that is true, that is an absolute truth for everyone, right? That you cannot control what’s out there. It, it, it can influence you, but it only controls you if you let it. So what, what we talk about in our coaching work, when we coach individuals and at G3, we not only coach individuals, but we find it more important to coach teams, collectively.
So we do independent coaching, and then we do what we call on the field coaching, which is the entire team together because so often in the world of coaching, people commit to doing something individually, and then they show up the same way on their teams. Because trying on something new is hard. And so what, what I say to them is, what could you do?
Give me three actions that you could do that would get empower you. You are trying to give yourself agency and empower yourself. Have you talked about it in a way that that other person, that mean boss, that terrible boss actually understands how they’re impacting you? Have you done that? Well, I feel like I have, and enough people have, and there’s all of this dancing around it.
It’s like, no, no, no, no. Have you done it? Have you dedicated the time to make sure that that person understands, when you interrupt us in the middle of a meeting and you, say that’s not what it is and you cut. That is really discouraging to the whole team. I don’t know if you’re aware of it and, and the B-part of this Russel, which is really important. Okay. We are all human beings. Trying to make it through this world, and although your boss may be a lousy human. At most of the time, they are still humans and they are fighting a fight that you had no idea about. And could you give them a place to show up differently? Could you create an environment where they felt heard and seen and loved and supported?
Because I promise you, they don’t. I promise you they don’t. I work with them, right? They are fried outta their minds because of all the people that are reporting to them and they’re trying to do the best that they can. They don’t know what else to do, and they just need someone to give them an opportunity to do that.
You may be that person. And if you’re not, at least you can say, I did everything I tried. When you give your notice and you learn something from that and take it with you, because those are circumstances, Russel, and, and we all have those circumstances around us. We are in marriages that maybe that person does this thing all the time, right?
This is the human condition that we live in, and so we, we get to figure out a way to move these things forward gently, yet firmly.
Russel Lolacher: I love the idea of empathy and compassion up as much as leaders. We are responsible for our teams accountable to our teams. But as I’ve certainly learned on the show very early on, leaders need leaders and a lot of leaders have had no leadership development. They’ve just been put as a bum in a seat to go now you’re responsible. You have no tools, but figure it out. And. I’ve been in those situations with horrible bosses and I paint them this, I give them the horns and the mustache immediately. I’m like, they’re evil people. Immediately that’s the, that’s because that’s my beliefs that I am perpetuating based on my own experience as well or how, how they’re showing up.
So thank you for that.
I wanna move to the we as well, because now we’re responsible for a team. We’re in the SuperLoop, we’re understanding the SuperLoop. We’re journaling. We get it. You bring up a couple of practices that I think are really great tools to get us out of these SuperLoops, like, feed forward clearing conversation and pathmakers.
I hate to bundle them all at once, but I, because I wanna jump on each of them a little bit, but can you sort of give me a, sort of set the table on what those are?
Susan Leger Ferraro: Sure. So you said feed forward clearing conversations and, and pathmaker. Okay. So I’ll start in the reverse because the pathmaker is a position that we recommend that people put in place that are dedicated to supportive services for their team members. And when I mean team members, I’m talking about the entire institution, the CEO, all the way to the entry level person.
They are looking at support systems in the community. And I’m not just talking about, if you need support with food insecurity and you need food stamps or you need transportation, right? Those are some of the challenges that some people have. But there’s other ones such as how do I navigate my insurance so I can find a good therapist. Okay, I might need help with that. How do I deal with this situation of, my team members, right? I’m, I’m a, I’m a CFO. Let’s call CFO. They, they always get, labeled as being lousy humans, right? Because they think that they care about finance. What they think they’re telling me that I, that I don’t understand them and that I don’t listen to them.
Can you help me pathmaker, find a course that would be valuable for me so that I can make improvements there? So, back in the old days, that’s what the HR people used to do, right? They were, they were human resources looking at how do we develop humans? HR has now become an administrative function that is basically about benefits and liability and protecting the internal functioning and, and managing liability.
We, that’s why people have now changed and there’s now chief people officers and all of those positions because the HR has gone in a different way. And, and yes, we need someone that is looking out for the best interest of the development. Again, back to that development of everybody, including the CEO, that we are all learning.
I just turned 60, I’ve never been a 60-year-old person in my life with, with the, what I have on my plate. I, I haven’t. Why we think that we should just understand these things when this is, the human experience is about constantly learning something new. So the pathmaker solves for that inside of the system.
Now people say, well, we don’t, we don’t have a budget. We can’t afford it. So you add that onto someone that’s interested in doing it as a part-time responsibility. Maybe they do it 10 hours a week. Maybe they do it five hours a week, but there’s someone now that’s developing the, the wherewithal and, and the, the insight and eyesight to start thinking about those needs through the lens of that position.
That’s the pathmaker role, and it’s, it’s a really beautiful position.
Russel Lolacher: Before we get into the other two, I, I’m just curious about what the pathmaker is. What was wrong with mentorship? What was wrong with coaching that you thought that this is a way that we really need to be redefining? Because I mean, you can’t go five minutes without somebody mentioning, oh, we should have a coaching conversation.
Oh, if you found, tried to find a mentor. Pathmaker, never part of the conversation, but I completely get it. So what, what wasn’t working?
Susan Leger Ferraro: So let me, let me say this as tenderly as possible. Okay. There are a lot of people that call themselves, mentors and or coaches. Okay. This whole, life coaching model that has come out there, I’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands of them. Okay? I would tell you there’s 10 to 12% of them that are actually really effective.
The rest of them are nice to talk to, but they don’t understand the developmental milestones of human beings in a way that they are helping. Everybody likes it because people like to talk about themselves. So, so the men, and that’s true with the mentor piece of it and the coaching piece of it, it wasn’t established enough where people were, some of them were, I’m not saying they weren’t all, but some of them were.
And even, the kind of, supportive resource groups, right? The employee resource groups. Those are, that’s another model, and I like all of them. But someone has to be managing all that and understanding what’s happening with the individuals that are getting those services, and are we actually meeting their needs?
Because most people don’t reveal themselves at a way because they, they feel shame about it, right? I am sorry that I need help doing this. I feel uncomfortable about it, and. What’s been interesting about the pathmaker role that people didn’t expect, but we knew what would happen, they thought that they were designing this for the entry level populations in, in their workplaces, right?
Then all of a sudden, the mid-level manager the person that’s actually, the director of HR that’s trying to come back from maternity leave, that now can’t figure out how do I make ends meet because I’m paying $30,000 now for my infant child so that I can go back to work and it doesn’t really make sense for me to do that.
Can we figure something out? And then all of a sudden the mid-level manager started saying, Hey, can I have some 20 minutes with the pathmaker? Then the, the senior leaders started, so everybody is looking for, Hey, can I, these challenges that formally I was asked to leave at the door.
Just leave him at the door. You don’t, cross personal and professional. And again, all of that kind of urban legend, dynamic that we’ve created around the workplace that has left our humanity at the door with all of us feeling like, why am I doing this?
And, and to your point, I need the money, so that’s why I’m doing it. But we’re selling our soul because our environments at work do not create that supportive environment. And it’s scary. I will tell you that most people that want to create healthy environments like you Russel say, wow, these are great ideas.
When they go to practice them, they are really hard for them to do it. I know that this is not easy. I get it, right? The other option of leaving things as they are doesn’t work for me. I’ve got kids, I’ve got grandkids. I don’t want them growing up in this environment. They’re in it right now.
They are dealing with some of these things and so the pathmaker role comprehensively is one that is supporting those other supportive services of mentoring and coaching so that they’re, they are as important as marketing data, as important as finance data, right? We are measuring the KPIs of the development of our people in the same way that we’re measuring finances, growth, all of those other things that are important. Not, yeah we’ll report on that once a year. No, no, no. This, every month we’re gonna talk about this. What’s working, what’s not. It has to be held as that sacred and that serious as everything else. That is important to us.
Russel Lolacher: That’s a great connection to clearing conversations because what’s working and what’s not is usually ignored a lot of the times. Or it is just like, oh, it’ll work itself out. Which is a horrible thing to say ’cause it never, never ever does. So when it comes to clearing conversations, could you first sort of explain this in contrast to tough conversations or conflict resolution?
And I’m also kind of curious as to your thoughts of how it improves relationships with your team going through an initiative like this.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Mm-hmm. So clearing conversations I is a specific tool that is a little bit different than conflict resolution, although that is part of what it’s doing. What it is doing is it? It is again, establishing right from the beginning what’s working, what’s not. As you said, Russel, it’s establishing what my intention is, right?
You and I have a conflict and I say, Hey, Russel, I’d love to have a clearing conversation with you. Are you open to that? You go, yes, Susan, right? So we decide we’re gonna do this. I start off with my own vulnerability and say, Russel, you and I have worked together for two years now and we haven’t spent that much time, and there’s things that I really enjoy about working with you, but what I’ve realized is that there’s been some things that have not felt right to me, and I have not prioritized bringing them to you to have a conversation.
And so my intention for doing this right now is to build a stronger relationship between you and I, to understand what it is that’s working for you and may not be working for you, and for us to make sure that we’re rowing in the same direction and that we’re building patterns of behavior and systems and processes that serve you, serve me and serve what we’re both doing here. So I get very real at the beginning of this conversation and I, I take responsibility for what I have and haven’t done and, and, it starts modeling that behavior. Then I get into, when I walked into the room the other day and I was, it was my turn to speak and we were bringing up this new theory that you and I had discussed and you interrupted me, that really is not supportive for me. Russel, I, I really want to make sure that when you and I are in the room, that we’re holding space for the leadership of each other. Then I get into the specifics about what’s not working and what’s working.
Then I offer solutions. This is what I’m thinking about, right? This is how I think that this would work for me. I’m interested in how it’s gonna work for you. This is not a monologue, Russel? This is a dialogue. And that’s the other thing is that people get so hyped up and anxious and uncomfortable.
They go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They vomit all over the person. They walk out the room and you’re like, what just happened? So a clearing conversation, to your point, it takes time. Like this doesn’t happen in 30 minutes. You schedule sacred time to make sure that you are getting it and that they’re getting it. And what it’s gonna do, it’s going to save you hours and hours and hours for the next six months of you being pissed off at this person, not getting deliverables, not working together. And so that’s what I tell people. Yes, the investment may be right here, but you are saving hours and hours of conflict resolution and your own emotional wellbeing.
Nevermind significant other at home that needs to listen to you pontificate about this over and over again because you haven’t done something effective about it.
Russel Lolacher: How does this help with shaking up the SuperLoop, having a clearing conversation to impact our beliefs, biology, and behavior? Where does that fit in that it sort of, we can, is it a, is it a recheck? Is it a derailment? Like what is this?
Susan Leger Ferraro: It, it is the practice of beliefs, biology, and behavior. I am now saying what I realized about my beliefs, Russel, was that I had assumptions. Okay. Which is a, a pretty common one about the way that you should be showing up. Yet, I never communicated those to you. So I am, I am taking responsibility for my beliefs about what should be wor, what works and what doesn’t work.
And I am clear the reason we call it a clearing conversation. We think about it like a clearing in, in a field, right? I am creating this space for us to show up differently right at the end of SuperLoop, there’s the Rumi quote, which is, out beyond the field of, out beyond right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.
That’s where all of this kind of place, it’s like, let’s leave the judgments that we have and the assumptions of even about ourselves and let’s get together as human beings, out of love and support, and a passion to do good shit in the world. And that’s why we’re gonna have this conversation.
Russel Lolacher: I wanna just briefly talking about Feedforward, ’cause I want to get into the all bit of it. So, Feedforward is and I’m probably simplifying a bit, it feels much more about let’s not look at the past. Let’s look at the future and give advice rather than really actually feedback. Wait, is, am I wrong with that?
Susan Leger Ferraro: You’re not, you’re not totally wrong, but let me add some, some, a of clarity to it.
Russel Lolacher: You’re here. Please.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Great. It’s great. So, so we coined the term and trademarked Feedforward because what it was actually an organization called the NeuroLeadership Institute in New York. And in, they have done a lot of research, even on the term and how it activates people’s cortisol level, right?
Their fight, flight, or freeze. When they hear the word feedback immediately goes up. So what we know about neurology in the brain is that the, if your amygdala right, which is where your emotional center is, shuts down, it’s called an amygdala hijack, and you cannot access your executive function.
The pre-frontal cortex in your brain, that is basically the CEO of your brain, right, is, is your prefrontal cortex. It shuts it down so you can’t access it when you are in that fight, flight, or freeze, and your amygdala shuts down. So we are trying to create an environment, exactly what you’re saying. This is about what we wanna do going forward rather than about, elaborating on, this is what happened before and we don’t want that to happen anymore.
We’re gonna, we’re gonna establish that, but we’re gonna talk about. I’m establishing this now so that we can move forward in a way that we are in, in better alignment. That’s the purpose of Feedforward. It has three prompts to it, right? It’s not like we don’t use the term feedback because feedback is used in, it’s used in music, it reverberates, there’s all kinds of, it’s used in PT, right?
You want feedback from props and all kinds of things. We’re talking about the way that we use feedback and the human systems that we work in. The three prompts that we created are one, to bring acknowledgement, love, and gratitude into the workplace, which is what I love about working with you, Russel.
So, and, and we do this on our teams every single week that we open. What I love about working with you is that you show up on these calls in a way that tells me that you’re prepared and that you are interested in what I do, because we all want acknowledgement, but yet we don’t create the intentional environment, right?
A community of practice where those things are happening. So we’ve created systems out of it. This is the prompt. So every week I’m now telling the people on my team what it is that I like about working with them. Right? Now what that does for you is it tells you, wow, I should do more of that because it seems to be valuable to Susan.
I wonder if I did more of it, if it would be valuable on the team. The second prompt is what I think you can do to improve your impact. Okay. We believe that peer-to-peer accountability changes the environment of auth, authoritative leadership to an authentic leadership environment. And, and what does that mean?
It means that the boss is not the only person that is holding people high and accountable. That’s all of our jobs, right? And we don’t like it. We’d rather not… above my pay grade, not doing that, but that doesn’t work. We want to be heard. And so I watch you and I say, Russel, what I think you can do to improve your impact is, you might wanna do a little bit more marketing about what you do because you know it’s fabulous, but there’s not enough people that know about the work that you do.
So just something to consider. So that’s just from my engagement of you. The third prompt is, and we do this one as people get comfortable with it, is the pattern of behavior that I observed that you may or may not, be aware of. Okay? Because what we also know about chronic behavior is that most of the time Russel, other people know this, right?
You ask someone else about Susan, they’ll be like, yep, she does that all the time, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and yet we don’t take the time to help people see patterns of behavior. And what we know in the world of developmental psychology is that those patterns of behavior are typically our blind spots.
Things that we are not even aware of, right? That we, we don’t even know that we don’t know them, but everybody else can see them like, blah, glaring. But no one takes the time to, to support each other and give each other and call each other forward like that. So we’ve created this system that we do that consistently.
It, it has changed the game for so many organizations that practice it.
Russel Lolacher: The whole book is about human centricity, and you’re bringing in this SuperLoop, which obviously is a lot of internal work, but also how it connects to our relationships. And you’re talking about organizations that embrace this will be transformative, but not every organization is ready to just flick the switch and take this on.
What is the groundwork? What is the foundational culture that organizations need to even have before they can embrace this understanding?
Susan Leger Ferraro: That is a huge point right there, Russel, which is as many organizations as I do this work in every year, I probably walk away from as many on the other side because they wanna do it. They think that they’re ready, and, and part of what we do as our, our opening work is called an equity audit. And not equity in a, diversity, equity, and inclusion type of way, but equity as far as what is happening inside of the system right now.
And how do the participants in the system see it as equitable or not equitable? What do they have access to that they think that they do or they don’t? And so we, we do, depending on the size of the organization, we’ll do five to 10 in-person interviews and then we, we do a survey to the entire organization.
We aggregate that information and we bring it back to the executives that are making the decision about this work. Depending on how they receive that information, Russel tells us that they are ready to do the work or not do the work. And so there’s some that, and, and I’ll just give you like two examples.
One team that we recently met with that actually is known, their mission, their their entire, they’re a nonprofit, their entire model and, embodies that they want to do this work. We did this equity audit. We sat on the executive team. Three times for about an hour to an hour and a half each time. The entire executive team, all they did was argue the entire time themselves. They, not respectful, not allowing people to speak, just negative. And I’m like, okay. So after the third time, we just have a, a, a conversation and say, you’re all not ready to do this. If you want to do some independent coaching with your team, and then we’ll do some on the field coaching, that’ll be what you need to do before we get into this work.
Because the biggest thing that sabotages this kind of work, Russel, and I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, is that people see it as disingenuous. They’re like, yeah, they want us to do this work, but they’re not willing to practice it and look at the way they treat each other. They, they feel like that there is duplicity there and they, they’re just like, that’s not fair. And so we require the executive team to be doing the work at the table with us. If they’re not committed to it, we don’t work with them. And so that’s the beginning of where we create the assessment and where they can start making gains in creating the environment that this investment, because it is an investment of time and money, is going to lead to cultural change.
Because that’s what we’re hired for, right? We are there to help cultures transform into the organization that leaders want. And so we’re not gonna go in and do it if we know it’s not gonna stick, and it’s only gonna stick if they’re on board and willing to do the work themselves.
Russel Lolacher: And they’re demonstrating the culture of the organization. I, I, one of my biggest pet peeves is you’ll go to an executive and they’re like, whose responsibility is it for a healthy culture? And they’re like, everybody’s. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes. I get that. Everybody’s part of the culture and how they show up is contributing to it.
But at the top, you’re modeling and not only responsible, you’re accountable for it. So to hear you tell a story of basically they’re just fighting. I’m like, well, you are just in real time demonstrating how badly you need this shift. You’re just not ready for it.
Susan Leger Ferraro: And they could be right. So, I, I have had, that that organization that I just gave you the example, they just came back to the table three years later. And, and so, we all wake up at different times right to our own reality. And, and it does take some time, but you know, some of the leadership shifted, some people left, new people came in and they, they come back and they’re like, Hey, you think you could, you could come back and consider working with us again?
And I love people Russel, like I truly believe that humans are the most amazing creatures on the planet. And we, we keep ourselves small and we do not live into the own power and majesty that we have. And so that is what I am in service to. I’m in service to your greatness in the world. And so if you’re ready to do it, we are the ones to do it with, right? If you’re not, we’re not go hire some other group because they may, wanna be working with people that are just not a hundred percent committed. So you’re absolutely right. It, it starts at the top, right? And, leaders have to be practicing this stuff or not, not be misleading their, their team members and thinking that they really wanna make change.
Russel Lolacher: As we’re wrapping this up, I’m kind of curious then, what is a Superloop aligned organization look like? Where are you going in and going, oh, you get it. Yep. We’re flicking the switch on this. The we’re gonna hit the ground running.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yep. Yep. So, what I would tell you is that our kind of, litmus test around this, and our baseline is they probably are doing it at like 65% of the time. We don’t really walk into too many, and, and this is everything from V Corporations to conscious capitalist corporations, to all of the organizations that are, mission driven and all that kind of stuff.
This stuff is hard and unless you have a framework, which is really what the precipice of doing SuperLoop was, was that there was a lot of theories out there. Russel, a lot of theories and what, what I knew as a leader that I needed, I needed all these frameworks and actual practices that I could operationalize on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annualized basis.
It needed to be that serious, just like finance and marketing and, and advertising is right. We didn’t have that, and that’s really what Superloop is. I am giving people, these are the practices to start with right now, our second book is going to be about a field guide, and so we are going to reveal all of the practice proxies in our SUPERLOOP courses and our practices, and so, people that are at 65%, they have already used a couple of consultants, right? Over the past couple of years. They wanted to do something and they thought it was gonna work and it didn’t really work. And they invested most of the time, hundreds of thousands of dollars into consultants that they are investing in.
And yet nothing really has changed, right? So they’ve already kind of done a little bit of that. Th there’s a commitment about, they understand it. The CEO and everybody else in the C-suite knows they need to sit at the table. I know they’re ready, right? They are willing to let me talk to entry-level, mid-level managers by themselves.
Because that is also another one. Yeah. We’re not so sure about that. Okay. That tells me a lot, when they’re not willing to do that. They are willing to do, to sit in on some of our trainings to see if they’re the right fit. I like people that wanna do that. I’m not threatened by it. I want them to understand what they’re getting into.
They’re willing to devote at least four hours a month minimum. Okay. Four to six is what we usually tell people to training up their employees. That is really important. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s gotta be in the calendar. They need to know that they’re going to get paid during that time and that there is going to be what, what we call integration work.
After they leave the course, there’s going to be things that they need to do that whoever they report to, we want them to know They’re all willing to integrate these systems into their day-to-day operations. If they’re not, I tell ’em, don’t waste your money.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah.
Susan Leger Ferraro: So those are kind of the key indicators.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m an individual leader listening to this and going, I get it. I understand it, I wanna do the work. I am eager, but I only have control of me. I have control of my team. Besides, obviously picking up the book, what would you recommend they do tomorrow? Just one little something to at least dip their toe into understanding the impact of understanding Superloop, what would you recommend?
Susan Leger Ferraro: We have a practice that we call curious questions, Russel. And what I tell people all the time is, you asked me about how do I, really interject my own SuperLoop, right? How do I interfere with this chronic thinking in my head? Asking curious questions is some of the most important work that you’re ever going to do.
So as soon as you feel judgment coming in, as soon as you feel like I’m starting to like, form opinions and you know what we know about. First first looks, and, first opinions is that it takes seven to eight seconds to form that initial opinion. That quick, our brain starts going, yum. Yeah. Good, bad, wrong all that stuff. You go, Hey, you lean into asking curious questions. You genuinely say there’s something I don’t know about this person or this situation, and I’m gonna take a step back before I start judging all this. And I’m gonna ask them two or three curious questions.
Tell me a little bit more about that. You use that term. Explain that to me. You seem frustrated with this. Can you like dig a little bit deeper? Like that’s really important precious work. People want to be seen and heard, but yet we are talking too much and not asking enough really good questions to help get to get to this place where we’re getting on the same page.
Russel Lolacher: That is Susan Leger Ferrero, a speaker, executive coach, senior advisor, and CEO of G3 Works. Check out her book, it’s called Superloop, how Understanding Beliefs, Biology and Behavior Creates a Business that Works for Everyone. And I’ve heard that there is a field book coming out soon that will, you should check out as well.
Thank you so much for being here, Susan.
Susan Leger Ferraro: You too, Russel. Thank you for this work. Thank you for the contribution that you’re making. The fact that you’re really understanding, you know the name of it says it all, relationships at Work. That relationships, are the conversation as Susan Scott says, right? The conversation is the relationship.
The relationship is the conversation, and I really appreciate what you’re doing to help people understand that there are options out there. We now know how to do things better. We just get to practice it.
Russel Lolacher: Thank you so much for this. That’s it.
Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah. No, that was great.