How Leaders Can Improve Performance

Transcript

Beth Almes:

Hi leaders and welcome back to the Leadership 480 podcast. I'm your host, Beth Almes, and today I'm asking the question that I think every single manager really wants to know, how do I boost performance both for myself and my team? And I can tell you that I've been the person who goes about this the absolute wrong way, which is just trying to work harder, put in more hours, get more reps in, and eventually you will get better.

But our guest today has a much better and much more scientific approach that really works. So I'm very excited to welcome Eduardo Briceño to the podcast today. Eduardo is a learning expert, keynote speaker and author, best known for his TED Talk, How to Get Better at the Things You Care About, and as the author of his brand new book, The Performance Paradox: Turning The Power of Mindset Into Action. His book was actually just selected as a must read by the Next Big Idea Club, which is curated by the likes of Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Daniel Pink, all those big people. So Eduardo, we are lucky to have you. Welcome to the Leadership 480 podcast.

Eduardo Briceño:

Thank you, Beth. Great to be here.

Beth Almes:

So let's start with the thing that I've done wrong, which is the idea that working harder is necessarily the path to better performance for yourself or for your team. What's a better way to think about improving performance?

Eduardo Briceño:

Well, I got into that trap too. I just had the sense, like I think many of us do that in order to succeed and to grow and to improve, we just have to work hard, do things as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes all the time. And what I've learned in my journey is that that was misguided. It actually leads to stagnation because there's two different forms of effort that I wasn't aware of and I think most people aren't aware of is what I've learned through the work that I do. There's effort to perform, which I call the performance zone and effort to improve, which I call the learning zone, and most of us are stuck in the performance zone in work and life, just trying to do everything as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes.

And yet the research shows pretty clearly that that works okay while we're novices, when we don't know how to do something and we just try to do it, we'll get better. But once we become proficient, we'll stagnate. And we'll think that we can't get better. We'll develop what's called a fixed mindset, that we can't improve, the belief that we can't improve because we're trying hard and we're not improving and we don't realize that the actual reason is that we're not going about improvement in the right way, which is to also engage in the learning zone.

The learning zone is when we try things that are beyond the known that may or may not work, we experiment, we solicit feedback, we look at our mistakes and reflect on them and talk about them with other people so that we can extract their lessons and what to do differently going forward. Those are all things that are different from just going through our task list as best as we know how, trying to minimize mistakes. And both of these zones are really important. The performance zone is how we get things done and the main way that we contribute to others, but we need to incorporate the learning zone into our systems and habits as individual, teams and organizations so that we can increase our performance over time and so that it also makes the journey, the process more enjoyable and with less anxiety, with much better relationships along the way.

Beth Almes:

So the first thing I'm going to ask you is, how do you know if you are the one suffering from this? So when I was reading your book, I was thinking about some of this and as you started to describe somebody who's stuck in the chronic performance zone you were talking about, it's almost like getting stuck in a rip current. How do you start to recognize that maybe this is your problem?

Eduardo Briceño:

Well, some questions to ask ourselves, first, what am I working to improve? If your answer is, I don't know, or if you're not aware of what that is on a daily basis as you go about your days, then you're probably stuck in chronic performance, because not being deliberate about what I'm working to improve and also how I'm going about that improvement. If I think that I'm just going about that improvement just by doing that activity, then we're also stuck in chronic performance rather than thinking about, what am I going to be doing to deliberately work on this? It's a different strategy than just getting things done. Also, if our colleagues or the people around us don't know what we're working to improve, then we're missing out on a huge source of learning and performance, which is other people's brains and other people's perspectives and what they see and what they know. And so sharing what I'm working to improve with others and how they can support me along the way is also something to think about in terms of accelerating more deliberately our rate of growth and performance.

Beth Almes:

That idea is really interesting. If you asked somebody around you, what do you think I'm working on? I'd be really curious to know what people would say of what I think I'm trying to develop and is that at all matching what I think I'm working on? Or, it's a little scary of a question. You might think of something that you're like, "I didn't even know I was supposed to be working on that." So do you find that's a super helpful way that people get feedback? Do they ever get the really bad answers of like, "Oh, I didn't know that I was supposed to be doing that. I didn't even know I was doing poorly there?"

Eduardo Briceño:

Well, we can make that an easy question for us to listen to if we've been deliberate about sharing what we're working to improve, and that's really powerful in teams. If I'm a leader and I want to foster a culture of learning in my team and I want everybody to be deliberate about what they're working on and how we're supporting with each other toward that, then a really powerful strategy is to just go around the table and say, "First, we're going to think about what each of us wants to improve, based on all the feedback and all the information we've received. And so each of us is going to choose one thing and we're going to go around the table just sharing, here's what I'm going to be working on for the next three months, or whatever period, and here's how I want to work on it. Here's how you can support me." With the leader going first, so that it creates safety for the other people to do that too.

And once we've shared that conversation and it's something that we can then solicit and receive feedback all the time as we go work together along our days, then that question is not scary and it's very clear. If I ask you, "What am I working on?" I am pretty sure that you're going to know because we've been talking about it pretty regularly.

Beth Almes:

Yeah, so that proactive approach. And I think a lot of our listeners would totally agree with the idea of, of course there needs to be time to grow and learn and improve, but, and the big but that stands in all of our ways is, I've got a set of deadlines, I've got a bunch of things and performance metrics that I'm on the hook for, and it really scares me the idea of taking time away both for myself or to kind of say, find for anyone on my team to go and spend time, as you say, in the learning zone. So how do you go about finding the right balance between the two?

Eduardo Briceño:

So first, that's a very common concern that people have. People want more learning zone in their lives and their teams, but they feel like, "Oh my God, I'm so busy. How could I fit that in?" So that's very normal, and it's also progress in identifying, here's something that would be helpful for me, but I don't quite see how to fit it in.

For most of us, the greatest opportunity on how to start is not by blocking large blocks of time on our calendar to work deliberately on only learning, deliberate practice or reading books or listening to podcasts. Those things are super, super useful. But if somebody's feeling like, I have too much to do and I don't have time to read a book, then the biggest opportunity is to shift the way we work so that we do the things that we do, not only with the sole goal of getting things done, but getting things done with two goals, getting things done and improving along the way.

And so when you see people who get things done in ways that lead to insight and improved skills, their brain is paying attention not only to what they're doing well, that's where people are in a fixed mindset, they tend to pay the most attention to what they're doing well. And they don't tend to pay much attention, they tend to disregard the mistakes that they make, the things that they don't do well. And to think about, what did I do? What could I change so that I can avoid this mistake in the future?

And so as we're doing our daily work, we're not going to do things flawlessly. We're going to upset some people, we're going to miss some things. We can solicit feedback based on the work that we do, which doesn't take any time at all. It's like we can solicit feedback on something very specific and quick so that we make it easy for the other person to not spend a lot of time to share something with us that we can learn from and then we can listen and think about, is this an opportunity for me to improve and is this something that I want to work on? And those are things that are really, really quick. They don't take a lot of time.

And what we see time and time again is that we tend to think that we have too much to perform in order to embed the learning zone into our life. But what we see is the reverse, is that the people who find ways to embed the learning zone into the way they work and live, they achieve higher performance. They find ways to get more done in less time.

And so first, if you recognize that you're in chronic performance, you're only focused on performance and not engaging in the learning zone, then trying to find something easy that you can do that doesn't take much time, but that you can do frequently, ideally every day. And one very easy thing that any of us can do is just identify, what am I working to improve, and remind myself of what that is every morning. So when in my morning routine will I remind myself of what one thing I'm working to improve and how I'm going about it, just that very simple strategy that probably takes like 10 seconds. It will prime a growth mindset. It will prime the learning zone, and it will enable us over time to notice more and more opportunities as we go throughout our day on what surprises us, what mistakes we make so that we can learn as we do because we can learn while doing and that's the biggest opportunity most of us ask to get started.

Beth Almes:

So I love the idea of one, just reminding yourself every day of what you're working on, what you're trying to move forward. I am curious, can you go too far the other direction? So we talked about chronic performance, can you go too far in the learning zone?

Eduardo Briceño:

You can. The people who learn this framework, the vast majority of people realize, "Oh, I'm stuck in chronic performance. I'm spending too much time in the performance zone and not enough time in the learning zone." But there's definitely a few who have the opposite insight. They say, "Wow, I'm realizing that I'm spending all my time in the learning zone and I need to put more performance zone in my life." The performance zone is how we get things done, it's how we make a difference. And so absolutely, we have so much to do in so little time, most of us do, that we need to be spending most of our time in the performance zone, but we also need to be spending most of that time not just in the pure performance zone with only the goal of getting things done, but with two goals of getting things done while improving along the way. We need to be most of the time engaging and learning while doing. And yeah, the performance zone is definitely critical and something we need in our lives.

Beth Almes:

So one of the things that you've mentioned a couple of times here is a fixed mindset. Can you explain a little bit about what that is and what the alternative would be?

Eduardo Briceño:

Yeah, I started this journey when I was introduced to Carol Dweck, who wrote the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and she discovered this phenomenon called growth mindset, which is the belief that we can change, the belief that our abilities and qualities are malleable and things that we build over time, as opposed to a fixed mindset, which is when we see our abilities and qualities as fixed. For example, if we think that intelligence is something that people have at a certain level and intelligence doesn't change, that would be a fixed mindset about intelligence. Or if we think that the reason some leaders are fantastic leaders is because they're natural leaders, that would be a fixed mindset about leadership versus everybody can become smarter and everybody can become a better leader, that would be a growth mindset.

And a growth mindset is really important, the belief that we can change because if we don't believe that we can change, we won't do anything to change. And without change there cannot be improvement. So we need a growth mindset, but a growth mindset is also not sufficient. In addition to believing that we can change, we also need to know how to change. And too many of us, like we've been talking about feel that, all we need to do in order to change is to work hard, we need to find effective strategies to engage in the learning zone. And so we need both of these things. We need the belief that we can change, but also the strategies for how to change and these two things reinforce each other.

Beth Almes:

I was interested in the book, when you were talking about growth and fixed mindsets a little bit, you mentioned actually the common fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, and that it's actually kind of not what you think it is. It's not the story of perseverance that you might have thought, right?

Eduardo Briceño:

Yeah. It's so easy to distort growth mindset because it's such a powerful concept. We tend to distort it into whatever we already believe, and often we try to reinforce it in ways that are ineffective. And so with The Tortoise and the Hare as an example, a lot of parents and teachers tell that story thinking that they're promoting a growth mindset, but they're not. The story doesn't do that. The story is a story about perseverance. It's a story where the tortoise, which is slower than the hare, just steadily moves forward in a race with the hare. And then the hare is so fast that the hare becomes too confident, and they take a nap because they feel like they can take a nap in the middle of the race and they oversleep, and the tortoise wins the race.

And people tell that story to tell the value of hard work and perseverance, thinking that they're fostering a growth mindset. But in the story, nobody engages in the learning zone and strategies to improve. Nobody improves, nobody becomes faster or better. It's just the story tells the story of a fixed mindset, that people can change their abilities and that the people who have low abilities need to work harder and hope that the people with high abilities don't get too cocky. And so it's important when we want to foster a culture of growth mindset, it's important to foster the belief that people can change and their abilities can change and how to change those abilities, those learning zone strategies and systems and habits. It is easy for us to just tell a story about hard work or perseverance, but without clarity around what's really needed in order to improve and to evolve ourselves over time.

Beth Almes:

Yeah, a better story would've been the tortoise learns to run really fast somehow through practice. Interesting. I love the simplicity of that story and thinking about a growth mindset. The other thing that struck me as I was reading your book was a lot of people, if you ask them if they had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset, regardless of what they actually have, most people would tell you, "Oh, of course I believe in people. I believe people can change and grow." But there are a lot of things you mentioned that people sometimes get wrong about the growth mindset, that they don't quite understand it or they're misinterpreting it. So what do we get wrong about it?

Eduardo Briceño:

Well, often when I ask people at the beginning of my keynotes, I use live polling. So if people have done work on a growth mindset before, I ask them to write down, in my own words, what does growth mindset mean? And people write very positive things. They might write, being open-minded or working hard or perseverance. And those are wonderful things, but they're not a growth mindset, and it's hard to foster a growth mindset culture without being clear about what it is. And so a growth mindset is not a behavior like those things, it's a specific belief about the nature of human beings. It's the belief that we can change. And in order to foster a culture of learning and growth, we need to be deliberate about working both at the behaviors level and at the beliefs level. And often we only work at the behaviors level because that's more visible.

So for example, if somebody's not working hard, we might encourage them to work hard. But if we don't also send a message that abilities can change, in a fixed mindset, if we need to work hard, it makes us feel badly about ourselves because in a fixed mindset, effort is something that people with low ability need, people with high ability don't need. And so if we're just talking about the need to work hard, we're not changing mindsets, we're only trying to change behavior and what the research shows is that that's not very effective. So that's an example of how we need to also send the messages and model that our abilities can change and how we can do that.

Something else, we often have our own ideas as leaders or mental models of what things are, and we are not explicit about helping other people change their mental models. So for example, if I solicit feedback from somebody, if they see feedback as something that is only people who have low competence or confidence, who solicit feedback, not something that even Olympic gold medalists use all the time to get even better, then if we solicit feedback, they might actually lose confidence in us. They might say, "Oh, this person's insecure, that's why they're soliciting feedback." And so it's important for us to set the stage and to frame and to think about, just have very clear core values, key behaviors and reinforce those things. And I think great leaders are great learners, but they're also great teachers. They help other people change their understanding about what mistakes are, what feedback is, how do we engage in learning behaviors, which is going to make us stronger to navigate the fast changing world that we live in and to create the change that we want to affect.

So we want to make our implicit assumptions explicit so that when we say, "We need to work hard," for example, we might be saying that in a growth mindset, but if somebody's in a fixed mindset, they might interpret that as we need to work hard because we're incapable. And so we need to make sure that we are making the implicit explicit and say, "We need to work hard because this is a fast-changing world, we're going after ambitious goals and we need to work hard in both the learning zone and the performance zone in order to discover new strategies and new ways that we can achieve our goals," as an example.

Beth Almes:

So let's talk a little bit about the idea of the leader being the teacher. I really like that concept of... And that's hard, by the way, for a lot of first time even experienced leaders I would say, of not thinking of your role, a lot of us, you get there or you get promoted because really good at what you do and it switches from being a great performer to being a teacher and fostering a learning culture. So what are some of the ways that if you want your team to engage more in the learning zone, how do you start to make that contagious and really set the tone for your team culture?

Eduardo Briceño:

Well, first we want to set the stage by talking very explicitly about what are our values and what are the behaviors that we want to engage in together and why? And we can engage in that conversation in different ways. Sometimes the executives in our company might have identified those core values and key behaviors very clearly. Maybe those are not used very much in the organization and nobody really knows what those are, so as a team leader, I can take those values and really start talking about them a lot more with the team that I lead and help people make sense of those things.

And what do those things mean to us? What behaviors do they entail? What behaviors do they not entail? And then reinforce those things and remind people of those things. When people do those desired behaviors, we want to point that out and say, "This is what we mean by being bold. What Beth did in this situation, yeah, she took a risk. It was a smart risk. We didn't know if it was going to work out or not. It didn't work out, but here's what we learned from it and this is what we want to do more of." So just being very clear about the behaviors that we value and what they look like. And that's one.

Number two is setting up... And that first situation, one very simple way that you can get started with your team is by leveraging the values and the behaviors that your company has already identified. Another way, you could share the TED Talk that you mentioned that I did is called, How to Get Better at the Things You Care About. It's 11 minutes. You can either watch it together with your team or you can do it asynchronously and come together and think about, okay, this thing that we learned about, the learning zone, is that something that we would like more of in our team? Or how are we doing? Are we already engaging in this very much? Can we improve? Do people want to improve? And what do we start on first?

So you start a conversation to see how is this landing with everybody here around this table and what do we want to work on? And what we find consistently is that people want the learning zone, they want more of it. And so if you start a conversation, a lot of people are going to be really excited to engage. They might be fearful of showing themselves as not flawless, and so those are things to work on together. We can talk about how to create psychological safety. They might feel like they have too much on their plate, so we need to figure out what are the systems and habits and tools that can make it easy for all of us? So that's number one, it's kind of setting the stage.

Number two is making sure that there are systems and habits that make engaging the learning zone the easy default, because often we have performance zone systems all over the place, which are important. So what we talk about in meetings is often about, what do we need to get done, by what deadline? How do we keep ourselves accountable to performance? But we can also embed in those meetings and systems, what are we learning? What can we learn? What questions do we have for each other? What did we learn from customers this week? What did we learn that we're going to do differently? What am I struggling with? So that by changing the agenda, we can change the conversation, just as an example.

And number three, leaders can model learning so that we're not just talking about the importance of learning, but we are showing that we ourselves are learners, we can show that visibly and explicitly. Like we said before, sharing what I'm working to improve by soliciting feedback all the time from my team by talking about the mistakes that I'm making and what I'm learning from those mistakes. By talking about some resource, like I went to a conference and I learned about this topic that I found really interesting, just sharing that with your team. And those are things that sometimes leaders are afraid of doing because they feel like others will lose confidence in them or in the company if they don't show themselves as know-it-alls. But these are the behaviors that make us stronger. These are the behaviors that enable us to be very agile and learn from whatever challenges come our way and so we can first come to understand that ourselves and then regularly communicate that with our team because that can give the team more confidence that if we do these things, the probability of success is actually higher.

Beth Almes:

The modeling of it is such an important piece of saying, this is what I'm learning, this is what I'm doing better with. The other thing that comes to mind, and you've brought this up a couple of times, is mistakes. It's hard sometimes to admit when we've made a mistake and while a lot of us get the concept of yes, you should admit when you've made a mistake and move on, it's really hard to do that. And sometimes part of that is how we think about and frame mistakes. We say it's okay to do that, but it's also very different in the type of mistake that you make.

And I thought you had a really helpful framework for thinking about some of the categories of mistakes, because sometimes... And there are areas where you might make a mistake, it could be anything from a typo that maybe you overreact to of, it's a huge issue. It could be anything from that to you messed up brain surgery. And it does kind of feel like in that situation, there is no room for error on those things. So how do you think about categorizing mistakes and then reframing them to find opportunities to appropriately integrate learning?

Eduardo Briceño:

Yeah, so mistakes are so powerful. They are the main way that we can drive our own growth and neuroplasticity once we are adults. And if you look at top performers in their fields, they engage in deliberate practice, which involves taking a very specific sub skill and trying something that's beyond what they can do, which is going to lead to mistakes. It's going to lead to the ball going too much to the right or to the left so that they make adjustments based on that feedback. And that's really central to improvement. The brain changes when it makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, that's when the neurochemicals in the brain and start rewiring our brain, which changes our intelligence, it changes our thinking.

So I think at some level we all understand that mistakes are things we can learn from, that we're human, we can make a mistake at any point in time. But first of all, we don't learn from mistakes, we learn from reflecting on mistakes. So whenever we make a mistake, it's really important to think about, what could I do differently to avoid this mistake in the future? Often if our company makes a mistake and it leads to a customer problem, we focus on solving that specific customer's problem, which is a good thing, we need to do that, but we don't make the step of thinking about, how do we change our systems or processes to avoid this same problem happening to another customer in the future? And sometimes we also problem solve only in our silo, our department and not share the insights or collaborate with other departments around, what can other departments learn from this insight that I am learning from observing and talking to this customer and thinking about this mistake. So those are some things around mistakes.

But on the other hand, mistakes are super helpful, but they're also lower performance. Great performances involve few mistakes or indiscernible mistakes, and that can create a bit of a conflicting relationship with mistakes. We are saying that they're good, but we want to avoid them, so how do we make sense of that? And so yeah, chapter five, I share a framework around different kinds of mistakes which helps us develop a more nuanced understanding. So the first kind of mistake is the stretch mistake, which is when we're doing something beyond what we already know how to do, we can't expect to do it perfectly. We have to expect to make mistakes. So we want to be trying those things, thinking about, when do we want to engage in the learning zone? It has to be at a time when the mistakes are not going to create a lot of damage.

Then there's the high stakes mistakes, which is the mistakes that do create a lot of damage. Like you talked about brain surgery. If I'm doing brain surgery, I want to put my best foot forward, I want to do the things that I already know. I don't want to be taking risks on this patient. So that's the time for the performance zone. When the stakes are high, we want to be in our performance zone, try to minimize mistakes. And of course we're human, the world is complex, so we might still make mistakes at that time, we want to still reflect when we make mistakes, but there's a time to try to minimize mistakes.

The third kind of mistake is a sloppy mistake, which is when we do something that we already should have known better, we've already learned this lesson before. And anytime we make a mistake, we can think about, what can I do differently going forward? How can I change my habits and systems? And with sloppy mistakes, often the lesson tends to be ways to foster more focus or to change my environment or my system so I create less collateral damage as I'm focused on the one thing that I want to be focused on.

And finally, there's the aha moment mistake, which is when we do things as we expect, as we meant to do, but we realized it was the wrong thing to do. And we've all experienced that, these are precious moments of insight where somebody shares something with us that we just completely we're unaware of. And when we experience these aha moments, we want to really pay attention to them, think about what we can learn from them, and also we can try to elicit more aha moments by soliciting more feedback. Because when people share what's in their mind, it often leads to aha moments from us.

But the key is what we can do most proactively is to try to elicit more stretch mistakes, not by trying to do things incorrectly, but by trying to do things that are challenging by engaging in our learning zone and be mindful of, to create the habits and systems that make us clear of when do we want to be in the performance zone and when do we want to be in the learning zone and how.

The last thing I'll say about mistakes is that it's important to not weaponize them. When somebody else makes a mistake, I might see it as a sloppy mistake, for example, as a manager, but they might see it as a stretch mistake or as an aha moment mistake. And so it's important to approach those conversations with curiosity and ask other people how they see the situation, what they're learning from the situation. Ideally, they want to be the ones reflecting and sharing what they're seeing, and if they're not, we can help them reflect. But if we just punish people when they make mistakes, then they're going to try to minimize mistakes all the time. And the only way to do that is to just be in the performance zone all the time, to be stuck in chronic performance, and that's going to keep our team stagnant.

Beth Almes:

I think that makes so much sense. And I have to say there are so few jobs I can think of anymore where you can just go in every day and do the same thing and do that for more than almost a year or two at a time. It feels like a set of skills is so short-lived now as everything continues to evolve and change really, really rapidly. Almost everybody has to think about the learning zone. And one of the questions that came to my mind is, I see a lot of, it's around hiring, because I see a lot of job descriptions out there. When you're the hiring manager for something, a lot of job descriptions sound to me like they only want to hire people who have done exactly that job, are doing that job now and already know everything rather than assuming that there's going to be some learning taking place. How do you think that managers might flip the way they think a little bit about really what's required for performance on day one versus what can we assume might be part of learning on the job?

Eduardo Briceño:

Yeah, so we want to be thinking when we are assessing candidates of assessing our domain competence, which is what you're talking about, of how well-prepared is this person for this on-the-job skills to hit the ground running from day one, and that's something to think about. But we often don't assess as much the learning competence. Is this person somebody who is, again, deliberate about what they're always working to improve? About how they go about improvement? Are they thoughtful about how they solicit feedback? Are they thoughtful about how they give feedback? If I ask them what they've learned and who they've learned it from and what lessons they've learned over the last year, do they have thoughtful answers? What habits, if I ask them about what habits do you use in order to continue to learn, do they have thoughtful answers? Is learning something that they even want, or do they present themselves as know-it-alls?

Because we could hire somebody, to your point, who knows the skills to hit the ground running from day one, but is very scared to show that there's something they don't know or to think that they need to engage in any form of improvement. And that's going to be a very dangerous colleague. Or if they don't start thinking differently, they're going to get stuck. The world's going to change, the technology is going to change. They're going to be reacting defensively to feedback, and it's just going to be problematic if we want to create a learning culture.

And so we want to assess both of those dimensions, and we also want people to self-select. So we want to be clear in our employer branding about what we stand for, what we value, what kinds of behaviors we value in each other, what does that look like here so that the people who really love that can self-select and want that job versus the people who are scared of it and can say, "This is not for me. I want to go somewhere else because I don't like soliciting feedback all the time and that's what they expect in this place."

So we want to think about being clear about what we value, assessing for those things both from... We can do that by interviewing people. We can do that by giving them performance assessments. So, "Hey, we're going to work on a project together, a mini project," and a project that requires them to learn and maybe to solicit feedback. And so we see how they behave, how they work with us in that project. We can do reference checks and ask other people how they have experienced this person in the past. So those are some of the things that we can do to assess not only their technical skills, but also their dispositions toward learning.

Beth Almes:

That's so helpful. And I will say from experience, probably one of the worst interviews I ever had was someone who told me... And I probably didn't ask the best questions, I wasn't the best interviewer at the time, but I asked the old question of, "What weaknesses do you have?" Which I wouldn't ask today, but I asked then. And they said, "I really don't take feedback well." And I was like, "Oh man, that's a disqualifier. I don't think this is going to work. If you can't take feedback..." It was the immediate thing that I was like, "We could almost end the interview right here if you can't do that, it's so crucial for moving forward."

Eduardo Briceño:

I agree. And I'll offer Beth also that one of the best interviews that I had was where I didn't get the job, but I got immediate feedback from the interviewer saying, "You're not a good candidate for this job for these reasons, and here's what you could do in order to prepare yourself for this kind of opportunity in the future." So I would hope that if I am being interviewed and I say, "I react very poorly to feedback," after the interview...

And I wouldn't have done this before, this was modeled for me, but just sharing with a person at some point, "Hey, here's something that was really a deal killer for us, is how you would describe your relationship with feedback. I really appreciate how honest you were, that's really great that you have identified that as a weakness for yourself. But I really encourage you to really work on that and read books on feedback. Here's some resources," because feedback is the most powerful learning strategy in the workplace, and it's something that we can change. If we're fearful of feedback, we can change completely that relationship and the skills around feedback. I think it's going to serve you really well. So it's just something to think about. You can take that or leave that, but I just want to share with you what the issue was because it's something that you could consider working on." And that can be a really life-changing piece of information for the person.

Beth Almes:

Maybe in the future you'll end up hiring them after they've gone and learned and fixed and... I know a lot of us can be afraid to give feedback like that too, you don't want to offend anyone, but it's hard when you're searching for a job of, you thought everything went well and you have no idea what went wrong and you go onto your next interview and you do the exact same thing because you had no idea what you did wrong. What a gift it would be to interviewers and maybe future employees, not today, but maybe in the future to tell them why something didn't work out.

Eduardo Briceño:

Yeah, to your point, I love your point that, I mean, if that person really hears that and works at it and changes, how much would they want to work with you in the future and say, "Hey, that thing that you told me was really life-changing for me, and here has been my journey ever since, and I would love to work with you because I want to learn so much from you."

Beth Almes:

And, "I fixed it." I can prove that I learned, and in so many ways, if you can prove that you learned and grew, that's, I don't know, 60% of the job. That's not a scientific number, but it's a huge amount.

Eduardo Briceño:

Yes.

Beth Almes:

So what haven't I asked you that I should? Are there any other key points that you think, as you've watched people struggle with this flip between the learning and performance zones, what else should they take away from this concept?

Eduardo Briceño:

There's a lot we could talk about, but I think you've hit the important thing, so I really appreciate that. A couple of things that might come to my mind is first, we sometimes are trying to do this on our own. We try to engage in the learning zone when other people aren't watching. And if we feel unsafe in an environment, that might be okay, but if we can try to find people in our lives that we can be in collaboration with, both in the learning zone and the performance zone, we are so much smarter when we have different brains and tapping the intelligence of different brains with different backgrounds, different perspectives, different skills, different perceptions. People can see different things that we don't see in our behavior or in other things, and we can be in collaboration, learning with them and performing with them, that is super powerful. And it also helps us continue to build these beliefs and habits when we surround ourselves with people who have those same interests and who are in the same journey than we are. So that's one thing I would offer.

And the other thing I would offer is that incorporating the learning zone into our work and lives improves the outcomes, the performance, we can be more successful, but in terms of the results, and the numeric, the revenues, the growth and all that stuff. But it also improves the journey. It just makes us less anxious because we understand that if we struggle or we don't do something perfectly, we can learn from it and we'll adapt and that's part of taking on challenging tasks and challenging projects. We experience more joy and happiness from exploration and discovery and aha moments, and then we get to know each other better because we're more curious about each other, we ask more questions, we listen better, and we self-disclose more. So we get to understand each other better and deepen our relationship, build trust. So it changes not just the results, but also the journey along the way.

Beth Almes:

Those are really great tips. So thank you for touching on those points too. The very last question I have for you is one that I ask all of our guests on the show. Can you share with me a moment of leadership that changed your life, whether for good, for bad, it was something you observed or something you did, just a moment of leadership that changed you?

Eduardo Briceño:

One moment, there's been many, but one is I was doing an internship at a nonprofit called New Leaders for New Schools. Now they're called New Leaders. And I was tasked for a project in Oakland, I was based in Oakland at the time for this internship, to help the local schools. But about a week or two into the internship, a summer internship, I was pulled into a completely different project that was coming out of headquarters in New York that was driven by their CEO, a man by the name of Jon Schnur. And it was a grant application, a federal grant application that was over $200 million, and I had never worked in a grant application before. And they were just proposing this very ambitious project to surface wonderful practices done in schools and award rewards and awards to these schools that were doing amazing work so that it was a learning zone system to surface strategies that great schools were using and be able to disseminate those practices and celebrate those practices.

And what the leadership lesson that I took from that is, and they did get this over $200 million grant, and I was part of that. And to me, the idea that you could envision something that didn't exist and paint an exciting vision of the future and what that could look like and what the benefits could be, it's such an important part of leadership, of envisioning how the future could be different and painting a vision and inspiring vision so that people get motivated to work together toward that. And it's something that we can do as it relates to our culture too. We can get a vision for what we want our culture to be, how we want to behave with each other, and then paint that picture with our colleagues and inspire them and start collaborating with them to work together toward it.

Beth Almes:

I love that story. Thank you so much. And I really appreciate you being here today on The Leadership 480 podcast with us. So thank you so much for your time. And your book came at, I think I told you before we started recording together that this book came at a great time for me thinking about things that I'm trying to do and accomplish. So I highly recommend reading the book and shifting your zones. Thank you so much, Eduardo.

Eduardo Briceño:

Thank you, Beth, for all you do and for having me. It was great to speak with you.

Beth Almes:

And thank you to our listeners who took part of their 480 minutes today to be with us. And I just ask that you remember to make every moment of leadership count.