Shifting Our Leadership from Friction to Flow w/ Margaret Graziano
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author, keynote speaker and CEO/Found of Keen Alignment Margaret Graziano on shifting our leadership from friction to flow.
A few reasons why she is awesome — she is an author, keynote speaker, and CEO/Founder of KeenAlignment, a consultancy helping to integrate people and strategic resources to shape constructive high-performing cultures. She’s a Forbes contributor and member of their Coaches Council. And she’s a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Ignite Culture: Empowering and Leading a Healthy, High-Performance Organization from the Inside Out.
Connect with Margaret and learn more about her work…
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“Friction is any time there is not a state of courage and engagement you can count on. There is something in the space, either it’s a mood, it’s a process, it’s a behavior, it’s an action, it’s a reaction, and it slows things down.”
Margaret Graziono
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Margaret Graziano, and here’s why she is awesome. She’s an author, keynote speaker, and CEO founder of Keen Alignment, a consultancy helping to integrate people and strategic resources to shape constructive high performing cultures. She’s a Forbes contributor and member of their Coach’s Council, and she’s a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ignite Council. Ignite culture. It’s one of those important things you gotta get… the book. Ignite Culture, Empowering and Leading a Healthy, High Performance Organization From the Inside Out and we get to chat to her today. Hello Maji.
Margaret Graziano: Hello. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. I gotta adjust my lights, but I’ll deal with it for now.
Russel Lolacher: Totally get that. It’s all these things with the podcast now. You have to understand the visuals as much as the audio. It’s everything.
Margaret Graziano: Yep, yep.
Russel Lolacher: Excited to talk about friction and flow today, especially as a leader, especially as it pertains to relationships in the workplace. But first I have to ask the one question I ask all of my guests, Maji, to kick us off, which is from your experience, what’s your best or worst employee experience?
Margaret Graziano: I, I think my best employee experience, it doesn’t mean this was the best company. This was a experience inside the company. Unfortunately, it was my first job because it was a long time ago. And they hired people who were all really focused on achieving in the role. So we were all there for the right reasons.
We were all focused on placing people. I was in recruiting, and so the, they were, we were in a bullpen. Bullpen means no cubicles and desk one, desk two, desk three, desk four, desk five, desk six, desk seven. And so as a rookie, I got to watch these amazing producers in action, and I got to see how they did it and how they talked to people.
And and how they celebrated their success. They would ring a bell or one woman would take out her calculator and add a per commission. It was just, I don’t know what would’ve happened in my career had I not had that experience with the other women, they were all women, in that office. Now I’ve had many bad experiences in management or worst experiences in as an employee, but same company, I’ll just leave it at that. Same company wanted us to not be friends so they forough us from socializing after work, from doing things. And at that company you had to like raise your hand and ask to go to the bathroom. It was really crazy. And one day straight commission, single moms and single people, they hired for the most part.
My son was potty training and we were driving to daycare and he said, I have to go now. And I was on a time schedule and I was like, no, you can’t. I can’t stop. Because if you were late for work, every minute you were late for work, they would take you off a rotation for candidates and it and your straight commission. Right? So there was no leeway. There was so much. What do you want to call this?
Russel Lolacher: Rigidity?
Margaret Graziano: Yeah. And so just to share on a fun note, we would sneak out of work after work. All of us would drive 10 minutes in a different direction and then meet back at the baseball field and play baseball.
Russel Lolacher: On one hand, I love the idea that you’re seeing modeled behavior from your peers, especially brand new to… I mean, when I ask this question, it’s almost always from decades ago, which really shows how impactful those early experiences are to the rest of your career. Good? Modeled behavior. Bad? It’s trauma you’re carrying with you forever.
But also on the other side is this organization’s dehumanizing the hell out of you and your team and you’re going, you know what? We’re gonna make us humans to each other. We’re gonna make this network, this community. I love that fighting in the face of a horrible culture. And it will find, life will find a way.
Isn’t that the Jurassic Park quote? Life will find a way
Margaret Graziano: Yeah. Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s set the table, let’s find out what we’re talking about. Defining is such a big part of my show and I think it’s a really important thing to do, especially ’cause the workplace doesn’t do it. Friction and flow. How would you define both of those terms in a workplace, in a leadership context?
Margaret Graziono: All right, I am gonna show you first friction to flow. So friction, I will describe it and then I will give you examples of it from right now in, in, in my client life. Friction is you’re in a meeting and the boss is asking questions and you’re answering, and the boss doesn’t like the answers and so makes a snarky comment publicly.
Says that’s wrong. Publicly berates, pushes, thwarts. But usually it shows up as sarcasm, snideness, comments after the fact. Oh, look at you being innovative and condescending. That causes friction, not just for the person who’s on the receiving end, but everybody else witnessing it says, I don’t wanna be in that firing line.
Other friction is new guy coming in and not assessing the situation and making all these changes and not really understanding. So it’s, it’s when people are operating below the power and freedom line, it’s when they’re in a state of frustration, fear. I actually did opposite of what I was gonna say.
I’m, I’m giving you examples and then describing, but in frustration, fear, or hopelessness or any of those below the power in freedom line moods or feelings or experiences. When a person is below the power in freedom line, they do not feel empowered. They feel trapped. They feel stuck. When that happens to a person, the body releases at a toxic level, stress hormones, chemicals like adrenaline, cortisol, neurophin, and we go into our lowest survival state. So it’s like sand in the gears to get things done. You’re, you’re trying to get something done and you’re approaching somebody from a different department and they’re stonewalling you or I’m, now I’m going back to giving examples.
Somebody wants to communicate to you, but they cc everybody involved so that they can cover their own ass and that they can call you out for not doing your job. It can be a process that’s cumbersome. It can be a meeting that’s hard to get through. It could be a meeting where nobody is doing anything bad to each other.
It’s just another boring meeting, talking about nothing. And nothing gets done and everybody’s on their phones or they’re typing. That’s friction. When, when you’re trying to talk to me and I’m talking to someone else or I’m on my phone and you feel what you have to say, doesn’t matter. Friction. So friction is any time there is not a state of courage and engagement you can count on. There is something in the space, either it’s a mood, it’s a process, it’s a behavior, it’s an action, it’s a reaction, and it slows things down. As a matter of fact, when we go into companies and we see that we, or we’re called in, right, we, we don’t just show up out, out of the clear blue sky we’re called in. Either there was a complaint or there was a lawsuit, or there’s a change in leadership. And the new leader is smart enough to know, oh my gosh, we need to reset the, the table here. Like we gotta start over. When I sit down and talk to people and interview people, turns up that almost 30 to 40% of their time is not being spent being productive when there’s a state of friction. Because when there’s a state of friction, depending on how low down that vibrational scale you go. Like if you’re in hopelessness, you’ll reach out to other people. So now you’re sharing the wealth of your trauma so you can trauma bond and you’re bringing others in, which is just as much friction as the original incident that happened between two people.
But now I’m bringing people with me ’cause it makes me feel better, but I’m actually taking away from the company. Is this making sense?
Russel Lolacher: Absolutely, absolutely. My, my curiosity is what’s causing, what’s, what triggers friction?
Margaret Graziano: So in a client we’re working with right now, they have a big hairy audacious goal. The number’s super high. It’s not realistic, which is okay for a BHAG, but the CEO has confused BHAG and must get it done.
So now all these people think we’re reaching for the stars. We’ll wind up at the moon. The moon’s not enough. So you’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad, you’re bad. You all suck. You’re all not capable of doing this. And the CEO is making promises to stakeholders and shareholders and funders that we’re gonna hit. You know this happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Happens everywhere.
And so there’s this mass disconnection between goal and reality. Big source of friction. Another source of friction is poor behavior from leadership at all levels that’s been allowed to, to metastasize. So if, if I am rough on people and it works, like my first company, they were harsh with us. Yes, we rang the bell.
Yes, we got big commissions, but if we were late, we were punished, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I couldn’t go to the bathroom. If that works and your brain is saying, oh, that works, keep doing it. You’re gonna keep doing it. So that poor behavior. Also what causes friction is the interaction. Between these multiple people on the executive team.
Let’s say you have a stickler for details and you have a perfectionist that it must be done her way or no other way, and then you have a controller, not like the title, but personality trait. I wanna know what you’re doing. So you have these three maniacal over the top saboteur behaviors. Now let’s throw in for shits and giggles you have a hyper achiever. So you have all these people with these over-emphasized strengths to the point where they’re using them and they are weaknesses, and together they’re toxic. And we’ve got a client right now, almost the entire executive team has toxic behaviors. And then you’ve got these aggressive defensive behaviors.
But then, and everyone likes the passive defensive ’cause they’re nice, but it’s just as bad. So you have the aggressive behaviors, let’s say on half of the team, which is very typical. Then you have passive behaviors on the other half of the team. So they, they don’t say anything. They have cordial hypocrisy.
They do this. But really they mean this. So they tell these people on this side of the aggressive defensive equation that they’re gonna get the work done, it’ll be done. They make promises they don’t keep, then they don’t tell them the whole story. They hide. So part of passive defensiveness is compliance, complacency, avoiding, and conforming. Did I? Yeah. And conforming. So they don’t tell the truth. This is where cordial hypocrisy sits. They’re so afraid of the aggressive defensive. And because of Trump and others, maybe Elon too. Everyone doesn’t like the aggressive defensive, but they don’t pay attention of what got the aggressive defensive to be even more aggressive and defensive.
And when the passive is passive, when they hide numbers, when they lie, when they don’t do what they say they’re gonna do, because they’re in self-protection mode, it sets this group off even worse. So you have this. It’s just like our political system. The, the, the pendulum swings too far. We give too much.
We, we have so, so much bloat in government that the new people come in and say, everybody’s fired. We’re gonna, you know, it’s extreme behavior. This is a long way for me to say extreme behavior, and you can point it down if you study human systems. Not saying all you guys need to study human systems, but if you just look at like family systems, relationship systems, it’s behavior, it’s moods, it’s consequence. And when there is no rules of engagement, we’re not gonna yell, we’re not gonna scream, we’re gonna speak to people with respect, we’re gonna do what we say we’re gonna do, we’re gonna be accountable, we’re going to tell people to their face what’s not working, we’re going to have a rubber chicken that we throw in the middle of the meeting. When things have gotten off base, when it’s gotten rough, somebody needs to stand up for what’s right. And in most of these organizations, no one says a word. They just say, I can’t wait to get outta here. Including the aggressive people.
The aggressive people are just as unhappy as the defensive. They’re both defensive, by the way. It’s aggressive, defensive versus passive defensive. And you said it earlier, most of this behavior that we’re seeing in the workplace that is counterproductive is leftover from wounds from childhood between the ages of three and seven, nine and 13 and 18 and the first time we leave home, all children, Erickson’s Eight Stages of Development, have big incidents that happen to them that help them form their personality. Their personality is created as Joe Dispenza says, through their personal reality. Well, something happened. I had to yell at my son, my 2-year-old son to that he couldn’t go poo poo, and, and we couldn’t stop until we got to the daycare.
The kid was potty training. I mean, I was 20 and he’s, you know, 22. But still I didn’t know any better. I was just like, please hold it. Like he can’t hold it. He’s learning. Now i’m 60, so now I see all that stuff. The point is that that, oh my God, I’m gonna lose my job. I’m gonna take, get taken off rotation, like there’s punishment for me.
You know? Can you imagine what this does to your nervous system? At 22 years old, I was an aggressive defensive leader of a recruiting company. I had 14 people. I never wanted anyone to have to work under the pressure I worked under, so nobody was straight commission. How well do you think that works in a recruiting company when no one’s straight commission?
Nobody produced. I had a, I brought a consultant and he says, which one of your parents was the alcoholic? I said, why do you say that? He says, you’re running your company like a codependent. So, and I had both sides. I had aggressive, defensive and passive. Father, my father was aggressive, defensive, a Taurus, a Sicilian, and an addict.
And he was, was a, an owner of his own company and he produced and he had food in the refrigerator all the time, but he was not a nice person. My mother was codependent, super sweet, pretended everything was great, ignored the problems. You know, every one of us can say, we’ve got examples like this in our life.
So as kids, something happens, we cope. Our amygdala tells us something is wrong. We scan the environment and say, this doesn’t feel good. I wanna be more like this. I want to feel better. Maybe I’m more like that. And boom, we put it in. That’s how we become hyper achievers, restless, avoiders. People pleasers controllers because whatever we were being was not enough.
So we have a compensatory personality trait or behavior. We lead with that and we’ve got three of them. We lead with it. And until we get to the point that what got us here is no longer sufficient to get us there, then we know I’ve got an intervention right now. I don’t know if, I don’t know if the board is gonna let this person stay. I’ve interviewed 28 people. They use words like bully, condescending, aggressive, avenger. And, and the thing is, this person has saved this company from going out of business. They’ve raised all sorts of money, they’ve done wonderful things, but all the things that make them successful in the field are eating them alive with their own people. And the board called me because they wanted the person to transform, but now they’re really second guessing. Is she capable and does she really want to?
Russel Lolacher: It is funny that, so, and we don’t talk about this enough, that leaders aren’t generally made and born in the workplace. They are made and born at home. They are made and born through their experiences growing up to create the person. That’s why I always find it funny when we talk about leadership development.
I’m like, it’s not though, it’s personal development. We are actually teaching you to be better people. It’s not as much about leadership in a corporate sense. It’s are you somebody that people we’re gonna follow? Do you know how to relate and engage and empathize and, and compassionate? So I love that you’re bringing this up from the historical, you know, traumatic or also good sense, like you can be, you can have amazing experiences which you can bring into the workplace as well. So
Margaret Graziano: It’s traumatic experiences though, that create toxicity.
Russel Lolacher: And the friction for sure abs. So let’s fix everything, Magi!
Margaret Graziano: Yeah. So let’s talk about, let’s talk about flow. Let’s talk about flow. So first and foremost great parenting and conscious parenting creates better humans. Unfortunately, the sixties were an interesting time and a lot of in the seventies and the eighties, and a lot of people that are running companies right now are running companies from their highest level of what works in their behavior and that doesn’t work interpersonally. All you have to do is look at the divorce rate among leaders of companies so well in, in the world. So you’re a hundred percent right. I think leadership development is a waste of money if you don’t first teach people response agility.
How am I being when circumstances are stressful, volatile, uncertain, chaotic, complex, confusing, ambiguous, when I don’t get what I want, when when I’m failing, how do I behave? When we just react, that’s Daniel Goldman like, emotional intelligence. And if you look back at his roots, he was, he was one of the people that met with Maharaji in India to learn meditation.
He comes back to this country and writes this book about how people can calm down their nervous system, calm down their, their self. So in a state of flow, your body, your mind and your spirit need to be in homeostasis. There’s a lot of research out there from the Flow Research Collective. I’ve taken training with them.
It’s very, very good, but it flow begins with me. Flow begins with me understanding my triggers and not falling prey to my ego. It’s just the ego saying, you know, Margaret, those people are in your way. You are not gonna be successful with those people. This person’s doing that. And then I’m, no, I have to say thank you for sharing. Goodbye. Who I am. Is that people are liberated, and that includes myself. That’s why I have that compass there. That’s why I have that compass here. My North star is, people are liberated and it begins with me. Liberated from what? My own ego, my own chains, from my own past, my own stories, my own judgments. If I can be liberated and shift and teach people to shift and they can be their highest and best self, then people can be liberated, especially at work.
So flow is a peak state that Anthony Robbins talks about that, that Stephen Cutler talks about. That the man who wrote the book, the original book on flow, which I can’t pronounce his name, looks German or whatever, but you can just look it up anyway. Flow is a peak state. We’re in a state of belief. We know things will improve. We’re engaged, we’re all in, and we’re trying new things. On the vibrational scale, we’re in the state of 5-50 Hertz, which means we’re expanding instead of adrenaline, cortisol, and neurophin. We’ve got serotonin, oxytocin dopamine and endorphins, and so we could see more clearly. We’re open to new ideas.
We’re not threatened by our own ego and our own insecurity. We know that the collective intelligence is way better than our own limited perspective. So in a state of flow, you see what you can’t see. You accomplish much, much more, and you’re happy. And when people are happy and in a state of joy, they are 70% more effective.
The Flow Research Collective says 200% more effective. David Hawkins work on, on neuroscience and consciousness says minimum 70% more effective. But when you’re in a state of flow, you don’t touch things six times. You don’t do rework. You look at one thing and you see the domino effect of, if I do this, I’ve also done this, this, this, and this.
Which makes you much more productive. When you are in a state of friction. You look at the same index card, look at it again. Look at it again. Look at it again. Move it over here. Move it over here. Move it over here. You spill your coffee. You do, you do a lot of things over, and so you’re less productive because your brain, you have no access to your prefrontal cortex when you’re in a state of friction. When you’re in a state of flow, your left and right hemisphere is completely integrated.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m a leader in flow. I have a team in flow. You gave such great examples of friction. What does it look like to be in flow in the workplace?
Margaret Graziano: So good. So you are solving a problem together with a group of five to eight people. That’s the magic number, and usually you’re not on the executive team and you are fully empowered to analyze the problem, to collect data on the problem and to collaborate and affiliate on potential solutions.
There are no bad solutions. You put ’em all up on the board, then you talk and you prioritize ’em. We know this process. This is Agile 101, but now we’re implement. And we’re implementing and we’re having fun. So you see these pictures of people high fiving. They’re not just high fiving, they’re disagreeing and laughing.
Flow, my son playing basketball now. He’s a lot older now, but when he was young, let’s say 13 years old, he would steal the ball. He was the point guard. He would steal the ball from the other player. He would laugh while he is dribbling the ball. All the other players would be laughing. The parents on in the stands would be cheering, and Zach would be entertaining people as he’s dribbling that ball down the court. That’s flow. Steph Curry when he plays basketball. Flow. The gymnast, I forget her name right now, Simone, when she’s doing her thing. A state of flow. A team working together. Bringing in a new executive and onboarding that executive, instead of having it be one person onboards them, the team creates the executive onboarding process and the team and our levels of the organization are meeting with this CEO and sharing their world with the CEO.
And, and there’s no, you know, I, I don’t wanna talk about what there’s not so, there’s direct communication, direct feedback. Love is in the air. Joy is, I swear to God, joy is in the air. One of the clients I’m working with, I, I, ’cause I work, a lot of times the board brings me in. Either it’s the board or someone on the executive team.
It’s rare. That the CEO, his or herself, will call me and say, I’ve screwed up. I need to fix this. It does happen, and it has happened at least 10 times in my career, but a lot of times it’s the board. So, when the board starts to take responsibility that they’ve created this monster, that they’ve allowed it to get outta hand, that’s flow.
When people take personal responsibility, when you’re in a meeting that’s going south and somebody throws the, the rubber chicken, when you’re in a meeting that’s going south and someone says, time out. We’ve lost sight of our noble cause. Let’s realign on the intent and why we’re here. And you bring people back into the zone.
Russel Lolacher: You sort of mentioned earlier about the pendulum and you’re giving great examples, but they are of an extreme nature and that’s why I’m kind of, we’re kind of doing the pendulum thing here a bit. So the reason I bring that up is because I’ve heard friction used, but I’ve also heard degrees of friction where it’s people are saying.
But it’s just slowing things down so we can be more considerate or we are just putting barriers up so we can be more thoughtful while an employee might be going, you’re getting in the way of me being able to do my job. Well, the leader’s going, but no, I’m just trying to help the process more. Are there degrees to this?
Margaret Graziano: Yeah, so actually when you’re in a state of frustration, which is friction, if you’re there for a dip. That’s actually good. A little bit of friction ignites a fire. When the friction becomes a barrier to progress, that’s, that’s when you stop it. And there extreme degrees of flow are, we’re in a state of love. We every, we love everybody, even our competitors. We’re just love, love, love, love, love, love, love. Extreme friction is despair. Things will never get better, but you, then you’ve got fear and you’ve got innovation. Two opposite sides, because innovation is risk taking. Fear is we’re not taking any risk, we’re protecting ourselves.
Then you have frustration and engagement. If any of these stages last too long, when a mood lasts too long with an individual, it becomes a behavior. When a mood in a department lasts too long, it becomes the culture.
Russel Lolacher: Hmm.
Margaret Graziano: And so you, you need to be monitoring progress. In the change theory, in, in how do you make change happen and cultivate the environment for emergence, which is where things are always flowing and things are always changing. How do you cultivate an environment ripe for emergence? You’re checking in with people, not these pulse surveys. You’re actually having. All hands, meetings and communication where you’re saying on a scale of one to 10, how emergent are we?
How is our environment supporting or thwarting you getting work done? How is our architecture supporting or obstructing your ability to optimize your genius at work? You know, there’s these three pieces to creating an emergent culture. One is intent. Why are we here? What are we up to? The next is environment.
How do we treat each other? Are we moving from friction to flow? And the third is architecture. What are the systems that help our people thrive? When we, and this is interesting because I have a client right now, small company, 20 million. Small.
Russel Lolacher: Yeah.
Margaret Graziano: One of the leaders came from one of the biggest organizations in the world.
They have over-engineered how things get done, so there’s 87 spreadsheets, 150 metrics, a process for making decisions, a process for having a meeting, a process for thinking, and it’s like, it’s like you’re in a maze. You cannot get a clear answer. And if I, as the consultant can’t get a clear answer, how’d you like to be the CEO and not get a clear answer?
And that causes friction. Obstruction of progress is friction. And when you set, gave your example of, you know, the executive thinks they’re doing a good job because they set up this process to slow the role. Why is the executive setting up a process? Why aren’t the people that are at the front lines working closer to the situation. Why aren’t they affiliating on solving a problem? That’s how you bring it in flow. When you let people solve the problems that impact them most, they move into a state of courage. Oh, thank goodness. They trust me. Oh my gosh, I feel empowered. I feel like I’ve got authority.
Over my experience, they’re giving us autonomy to solve our own problem. Now we’ll solve it, we’ll test it, and then we’ll report in. But most companies don’t do that. They top down and they have the same problem that they’ve had. I have another client dealing with the same problems they’ve had for four years. New CEO came in, identified all these challenges everybody told, but everything stayed with the executive team. The executive team has to hold tight, but if the executive team could have fixed the problems, they wouldn’t have created the problems in the first place. And so it’s it takes a lot of courage to give up power to empower people to solve their own problems.
And when you do that. You turn on the switch for flow.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s get into that because we talked right off the bat that it’s about us. We, it has to start with us in order for the modeling to continue, in order for setting the, the example that we need for the rest of the organization. Where do we start with us? Like if we’re a leader trying to figure out our self-awareness, trying to create, or trying to understand our contribution to friction.
What are, what can we be doing?
Margaret Graziano: First. Hmm. I would take a psychometrics assessment that would tell me, I mean, we offer these, so, but a lot of other people do too. Not only tell me what my strengths are. But where are my blind spots? The, the assessment I use and I’m happy to share it with you. The assessment I use not only looks at your personality, it also looks at your behavior.
It also looks at what you value, and then it also looks at how you see the world. When I understand that, I see the world as people, as obstacles. And I get it through data, I can say, wow, I, I don’t wanna see my kids and my family as obstacles. ’cause that’s usually. This is where people lie to themself. They think they’re different at home.
They’re not different at home. When in the divorce court you find out they are not different at home. When the kids are 35 years old, you find out you are not different at home. Or you, or you’re estranged from them, right? So, so an assessment. There’s also something called the saboteur assessment. It’s through positive intelligence.
You can go online, positiveintelligence.com/ saboteur and you can find out how your strengths are being overutilized. So collecting in all change, the first step is a willingness. The second step is collecting sound and current data. Dr. Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book called What Got You Here, won’t Get You There.
We have every person in our deep alignment retreats read that book. Halfway through the book, there’s a list of behaviors that estranged people to you, behaviors that keep you separate, behaviors that create this dualistic of us versus them. You read that book, you go down and you circle all the things that you’re doing that are creating separation. So collecting data. Goldsmith also recommends that you interview people. Landmark education and their self-expression leadership course gives you an interview guide it. It’s two questions. What about my leadership works? What about my leadership doesn’t work? If you wanna do an extra question for extra credit, have I ever done or said anything that has had you feel less than? Another extra credit. What do I do that gets in your way of being and utilizing your genius? So you’ve got to collect data. Now, when collecting data, understand that when you’re interviewing others, everything someone says to you is a reflection of something going on with them. So you have to understand.
But if one person calls you a horse. You can say, eh, they called me a horse. Two people call you a horse. You wanna look in the mirror and see if you’re growing ears. Three people call you a horse. You wanna look behind you and see if you’re growing a tail. Four people call you a horse. You need to buy a saddle.
Russel Lolacher: You’re a horse.
Margaret Graziano: So collecting sound and current data. Then the next step, once you collect the data, is to analyze it and say, what can I fix? What’s the lowest hanging fruit in my behavior that I can stop doing? Then you pick five, five behaviors. Then you go back to people and you say, here’s the things that I learned.
Here’s the five things I’m doing that don’t work. I can’t change them all. I’m human. It’s gonna take me a year to improve one behavior, but I wanna work as fast as I can. Here’s the five things. What do you think? What would make the biggest difference? You collect that data, then you pick one behavior with five supporting ways of being that support that behavior.
So let’s say I make meetings uncomfortable for people in the one behavior I’m going to improve is my behavior in meetings. I am going to create courage and engagement in every meeting. That’s my behavioral improvement. What are the five things I can do? I can start the meeting with a weather report, a check-in.
How’s everybody doing? Instead of, how’s everybody doing? If you are a boat on the Pacific Atlantic Indian Ocean, what’s going on on the seas right now inside of you? People love that. At least, you know, everybody’s in choppy waves. We need to calm down. You need to connect with people. So let’s just say one of the first things is a check-in.
Another thing is connection. Have everybody share a success. This is just to support, have meetings, put people in a state of courage and engagement. Then whatever you’re talking about, your meeting should be one item. Don’t interrupt, don’t comment when people are talking. That’s another behavior. Give people space, acknowledge them at the end.
I don’t know. For everybody it’ll be different, but if you wanna improve one behavior, you need five leading indicators that show people you are changing and then you check in with them, how do I do this week? Thumbs up or thumbs down. Marshall Goldsmith has a great process. We’d add a lot more to that and we have the coaches support.
But let’s go back to something you said earlier, leadership development. What you don’t do is throw someone in a leadership development course and here’s why. I’m gonna learn all these things that I should be doing. All of that is icing, plopped on a poo poo pie If I’ve got some basic fundamental flaws in how I work with people. And we all have basic fundamental flaws. All of us are flawed. Human beings are flawed. So maybe I’m too nice. Maybe I talk too much. Maybe I’m a nervous Nelly. Maybe I’m too controlling. Maybe I’m too aggressive with having to win at all cost. Maybe I’m not realistic. Maybe I, I seek approval. I mean, I have another CEO I’m working with… nice person. They tell everybody what they wanna hear. And they never make decisions that’s just as toxic as the other stuff because then people don’t trust them. It’s the, the 12 ,faces of Sybil. Like, who am I gonna get today? So personal awareness, self-awareness. Number one thing to start with, if you really want change, if you’re serious about change, and then I would either hire a coach or do a large group self-awareness immersion like the Hoffman Process or the Landmark Forum or Pathways or Sigh or Lifespring, they’re, they’re out there. And it’s an immersion, whether it’s seven days like the Hoffman, or three days like Landmark, where you examine what’s behind your personality, what are the undercurrents of what’s going on, what’s remnants from childhood that you are projecting and reflecting on people in the workplace.
This is the work that needs to be done across the board before you even do a strategy session. That’s why at my company, we do deep alignment first, which is where we learn about responsibility, we learn about ego, we learn about projection, reflection, and we learn. That the way we’re showing up at work is impacting our entire life, and we’re lying to ourself if we say we’re not, and then we create the future.
You don’t create the future on top of a poo poop pie.
Russel Lolacher: So from the poo poo pie to the future, how So, we’ve done the work as leaders. We’re getting the data, we’re moving the needle. We focused on these five things. How do we start bringing the flow into the team? ’cause they’re on very different paths and they may be seeing very different things?
Margaret Graziano: Very good. So in my book, Ignite Culture, the whole first third is about the leader’s development. And there’s a lot we didn’t cover because it’s a short podcast, but one of the things is the leader creates a vision for their life, like a calling a, a Dharma, a purpose. And then they define their values and the environment that they wanna create inside and out in the family and at work, in the community, all of it.
And then they look at what structure they’re gonna take on, like the five things to improve or the getting a coach or having different kinds of meetings or having an accountability partner. Now they take that triangle the same. Triangle and they look at what’s our noble cause for our organization, what will have people connect to our purpose so they could be more interested in purpose and less interested in their own individual goals.
Then the leader needs to take that out to the community. Meaning the employees in either small group meetings or all hands-on meetings, and then the leader needs to take responsibility for the environment that has been created and that needs to change. If the leader pretends that they have not been a perpetuator of friction, people will not trust the leader.
They will think it’s all bullshit. So the leader needs to take a hundred percent responsibility. I’d love to get this video from you because I’m going into a intervention tomorrow and I’d love to play it for them. The leader needs to take a hundred percent responsibility for the environment that they’ve caused and then promise a new environment and stake their job on the new environment and give themself a consequence.
If I cannot create this environment, I will resign. No shit, sherlock. And then what’s the architecture that the organization needs? What’s the loose structure? Architecture is like rough framing that the organization needs to, to support people in thriving. Well, one of the, the, the disciplines of change is sound and current data.
Another is feedback loops.
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Margaret Graziano: Regular feedback. How are we doing? What’s working? What’s not working to transform a culture? Depending on if it’s transactional culture and tangled culture or toxic culture can take between one and three years. And sometimes the leader that started the transformation that took responsibility, actually get so enlightened that they leave the organization and they go do work in what they shared, they move forward. Like for example, I interviewed this woman named Mirabai Bush, and Mirabai was along with Danny, they call him Danny Goldman and they all went to see Maharishi in India years and years and years ago. And they came home and Mirabai started a company, the Center for Contemplative Studies, and she got the head, the CEO of Monsanto.
That guy was all in. He was doing all his work. He was developing himself, and one day he woke up and said, I don’t wanna run a food company anymore. He left. Unfortunately, the transformation below him crumbled because the new CEO didn’t want that kind of environment. And now we know what Monsanto has become.
Russel Lolacher: So how do you know it’s working or not working as you’re getting through flow with you and your team? Because I’m thinking consistency. You got a perfect example there of somebody’s left and it crumbles well. Then they didn’t do a great job of instilling it into the organization.
Margaret Graziano: Right. That’s right. So how Michael Lowe did it, which is one of my clients and now he’s partnering with me in consulting and bringing this to other people. He retired. He was working with that company in the CEO role for eight years, best eight years by the way, in the company history. What he did is he level set it with the executive team, then he level set it with the senior management team. Then he level set it with every single department in the organization. 20 people at a time went through this response agility training, so everybody got the training and there’s many organizations that do it that way. Then he brought in leadership training after people got to the root. Then he had a culture catalyst group of people that were five to eight. I think he had seven. But we recommend five to eight people who are your kind of your task force in the organization. They’re the fire keepers and they’re meeting with different departments and different groups and tracking progress. The measures of success, change happens 180 days faster.
So if you have a change initiative, that would’ve taken a year. It gets cut in half. You measure how fast are we, what’s our rate of change? How fast are we adopting change? Because when people are free, when they experience autonomy, agency and authority, they are much more productive. So production numbers will go up At his company, profitability went up by eight points to the bottom line.
That’s a lot. So you’ll see less bS in the system, you’ll see fluidity, you’ll see things flowing like water flowing higher profits, reduced time to change, reduced go to market for new products. Flow Research Collective says 200% improvement in productivity and 400% improvement in problem solving. So at Michael’s company, they had to do a plant shutdown because there was something going on in the, in the, for the environment because they were a hard metal hard manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, and they needed to do a shutdown because they needed an inspection. Normally that would be a six month planning process.
We did it in two days and Michael was the director of the play. He, he was actually, he wasn’t directing, he was witnessing sitting back, watching them work and just giving them feedback on, on track, off track. It was beautiful. All of those people have moved on to higher level roles. That’s another piece of evidence.
When you are in a state of flow, there’s more people to promote. It’s succession planning is not like, oh my God, this sucks. Nobody’s capable. And that’s, that’s another thing we see is when there’s a lot of friction, there’s a lot of talent that is being overlooked. A lot of genius that is not optimized.
So I think it’s important for me to say, I started my career in recruiting. I went into executive coaching and then wound up in organizational effectiveness IE culture and change. Not culture change, but culture and change. Because as a recruiter I saw firsthand how many people quit jobs because they were underutilized, because they felt they didn’t have autonomy.
They felt they didn’t have agency or authority in their role. People leave, people get disengaged. In recruiting, it was all about how do we, how do we hire? Then I got a certification in retention and my eyes opened and I started actually doing consulting. This is way back in the day. 25 years. I mean, probably 18 years ago I became the person leading the certification and retention for the National Association, and that got into more of organizational curiosity and behavior.
Then I went into psychometrics. The point is, along this journey, why I can do what I do now is because I saw firsthand the impact. So if retention is a problem for you, if recruiting is a problem for you, if organizational effectiveness is a problem for you, you need to look at the root of those behaviors because you can throw money at people.
I have a person in my family who makes more money than I’ve ever made every year, and if he got an opportunity for a couple hundred or even half the money he’s making to go work for a better company, to work for a company who valued humans, he would bolt. It isn’t the money when it, when it’s your life at stake and your happiness.
And the last thing I’ll say is. We have 112 waking hours in our life. If we wake at 5:00 AM and sleep at 10:00 PM every day, 112. If you’re working 70 hours out of 112, you can do the math. Is it worth being miserable?
Russel Lolacher: Right.
Margaret Graziano: Life goes fast. A few weeks ago, I was 25 and I opened my eyes and my grown sons are having kids. It, it, it went like that. And it went like that, and I stayed at that first job long enough to learn and as soon as I saw there was a better world, I left and I took all my clients with me.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s wrap it up with a question. Thank you for this so much, by the way. Really appreciate just the understanding of friction to flow and the value of it. So if somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, I don’t know my role in friction, I don’t know how much flow I have, I don’t even know who I am as a leader to understand my connection to this.
What’s the baby step like? What’s the thing tomorrow, besides, you know, doing a full analysis or picking up a book, what is that? Just that first little step?
Margaret Graziano: Yeah. So I was gonna, I was going to say, pick up the book Ignite Culture or What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. But if you don’t wanna read, I would let your fingers do the walking and ask ChatGPT, describe friction and how I might be part of it. And then I would say describe flow and how I might be part of it.
The other thing you can do is go to your very, very best friend or spouse, your best spouse, and ask when things are in a state of courage and engagement in the family, how are you being, what are the traits that you have that help that? And when things are in a state of stress, of aggravation, agitation, anxiety, how are you being that’s causing that?
Russel Lolacher: That is Margaret Graziano. She’s an author, keynote speaker, CEO, founder of Keen Alignment and author of Ignite Culture, which you, you should pick up the book, Empowering and Leading a Healthy High Performance Organization from the Inside Out. Thank you so much for being here, Maji.
Margaret Graziano: Thank you. Bye-bye.