Quick Fixes: How to energize your team, level up your management skills, and fill a leadership vacuum (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Frances Frei: I feel like it's important to share with our listeners that you made your New York Times style section debut recently. 

Anne Morriss: Frances, thank you for bringing up this very important development. There was a terrific piece on Curtis Sittenfeld, who's also a dear friend of ours and, most important, former guest on Fixable. Curtis has a fantastic new book out called Show Don't Tell.

Curtis and I grew up together, and in this article about her going home and giving a talk about the book, the reporter described my hair as a Hillary Clinton bob. The reporter actually called and fact checked this line with me, and I told her that I would lose a lot of lesbian street cred if she moved forward with that description. And yet, here we are. 

Frances Frei: Do you feel like you can focus and still make the show today? 

Anne Morriss: I can't promise anything. I'm optimistic, so let's go fix some workplace problems. 

You are listening to Fixable, a podcast brought to you by TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. 

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: In this episode, we're gonna focus on how to set other people up for success at all levels in an organization.

We're answering questions from a first time manager who wants to get this leadership thing right, an employee who wants her teammates to be more ambitious about their work, and a senior executive who wants to help her CEO to be a more strategic leader. 

Frances Frei: We are going up and down and over and across. I love it, and we're doing it all lightning speed. 

Anne Morriss: Full spectrum fixing. Let's go.

Frances, our first question comes from a Fixer who is managing people for the very first time. Let's listen. 

Caller 1: Hi, Anne and Frances. I am calling because I am a new manager, actually, as of the last month, and I am going to be managing people for the first time in my life. Um, I didn't really plan on doing this, but I'm excited about the job, but I also just don't know what I'm doing.

So I would love your advice on how I can set myself up for success, set my team up for success, and just navigate this transition. Thanks so much. 

Anne Morriss: Oh. 

Frances Frei: It hurts, it's so good. It hurts, it's so good. 

Anne Morriss: I love this question so much and I love the idea of like a blank canvas here that we can just start from scratch with.

Frances Frei: I wanna begin with congratulations. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: Yes, on the job, but the other on having the confidence to acknowledge that you don't know, and then the resourcefulness to go and seek help. I am super optimistic about the future for our caller. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, and at this point in her career, it's most of the challenge will be around presence.

There's so much magical upside with stepping into this role, so you get to, like, all of your strengths get to be exaggerated, right? You get to have impact through other people. You get to extend your influence, your choices determine whether these other humans succeed or don't succeed. And so self-awareness matters more than it ever did before.

So much in this question that signals she's coming at this in the right posture. Humility, curiosity, reaching out to other people for help. And what I wanna say to her is, hold on to that curiosity, direct it at yourself. And the only watch out there is it, I don't want it to be self-consciousness, but I want it to be awareness.

And I think that's gonna be a balance-

Frances Frei: Important distinction.

Anne Morriss: -that she's gonna have to navigate her whole career. But if she can get that right, then she's gonna be unstoppable. 

Frances Frei: And you will not get it right. Let me just begin with that, and let me relieve you of any burden of perfectionism. Not only will it not exist, it's not the goal.

Anne Morriss: Yeah.

Frances Frei: 'Cause it's too self distracting. Instead, we just want you to have a nimbleness to you and we want you to learn from what's working. When things aren't working, learn to experiment and pivot and just be super responsive. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. So now let's get practical. 

Frances Frei: So a couple of things. I think that in the beginning, you are gonna meet with your team as a team, you're gonna have to decide what the cadence is. Whenever you don't know a cadence, weekly is a good stand-in, but you'll then adjust it as needed. So you're gonna have a weekly meeting with your team, and you're gonna have one-on-one meetings with your team members. So that's, I think, just the first thing is you wanna just set up an operating cadence. It's important that you bring in your team as co-designers as quickly as possible. So I can imagine you setting the agenda for these meetings in the beginning, but with the explicitly that you want to begin to share the agenda and then end up offloading the agenda to them. When you think about the one-on-ones, for example, I can imagine that of each of your four weekly meetings, one of them is solely dedicated to the development of that person. And you might think, well, I'm just a new manager. How can I possibly? It doesn't matter to them that you're a new manager, you're the manager. So one a month needs to be solely devoted to their development. Where do you wanna be in a year, in two years? What are the skills you wanna develop in the next quarter? How can I be helpful? That sort of thing. The other three is about the work to be done. And here you want to talk about their role in the work to be done and your ambitions for them and your ambitions for the team. 

Anne Morriss: What I think is really powerful about that too is the signal that I think of my job as your manager as a deep responsibility to set you up for success, but also to participate in your ongoing evolution. And so, and I think particularly when we're doing this for the first time, again, back to that self distraction, we can, there can be a fair amount of performance anxiety that comes with it. And if you can stay in that other focused orientation where we started that "not about you" posture and keep that as your true north, then you're gonna be able to navigate the stuff that feels new and different. And making it into an explicit conversation, like, what do you need to be successful? How can I help? And what kinds of skills are you interested in developing and experiences are you interested in having? And how can I create an environment where you're gonna continue to grow? If she can find her way to those conversations with her direct reports, I think she's gonna find comfort in her leadership skin sooner rather than later. 

Frances Frei: And so if operating cadence is one of them, and I don't mean these are in priority sequence, it's just where my head goes to in the beginning. The second one is the scoreboard. These are the tasks we're doing. This is how, how we are on track or not. And I just, I don't want you to have private information that the team doesn't have.

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. 

Frances Frei: So if you go to a baseball game and you see the large scoreboard, we know what inning it is, who's, and we know what the score is. Your team might be working on one thing, in which case you wanna know, we're seven weeks in, we're 30% of the way there.

Or it might, you know, whatever it's doing. But do it for all the projects. Just have transparency so that everyone can see it. So that you don't have to say bad news, we're late. It's all self-evident. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. 

Frances Frei: And you can congratulate people for being on time, people for when the projects are getting behind, you can say, how can the team help? And I'm not saying put the individual names next to them. This is the scoreboard, uh, for all of it, which brings me after the operating cadence and the scoreboard to the work. You're gonna have some jobs that only one person can do, and you should. But to the extent that you don't have to have Task v Job as one person, try not to.

So you wanna set the conditions where one plus one is a number greater than two, and that it first, it builds valuable skills in other people that they learn to work together. And two, it gives people option to sign up for or not sign up for things. 

Anne Morriss: I, I love those three dimensions. They all signal, you know, the scoreboard or a dashboard.

Frances Frei: And dashboard is a better word. I was looking for it. 

Anne Morriss: I don't mind scoreboard. 

Frances Frei: Oh, good. 

Anne Morriss: Because what I also like is just the signals of I'm gonna set the bar high for performance. I'm gonna define excellence. I'm gonna make it very discussable whether we're there, we're not there. So that Y axis we often talk about, which is high standards, high expectations.

But if you combine this with the first step of what do you need to succeed? You're also hitting that deep devotion signal. And I would encourage whoever wrote this in to go back and listen to our episode on high standards and deep devotion because it really is that magical combination. And if you can make both of these things easier to achieve by making clear to everyone that this is a team sport, then you're more likely to get to that frontier on both of those dimensions.

So I love where you went with this, Frances.

Our next question comes from a Fixer who wants her colleagues to be more motivated. 

Caller 2: Hello. Something I've been observing in my workplace is that my peers and team members seem really fatigued and pretty down and not producing high quality work, and I think it's because there is not a culture of empowerment and motivation coming at the leadership level, amongst a lot of other just things happening in the world that's probably also bringing us all down. Um, and I'm curious how we can build each other up to still meet the same high quality objectives and have similar goals about how we wanna produce our work despite some of the external things and, and what I think is mostly a lot of just the work politics that are happening around us.

I'm not a leader, but a peer. And as someone who is in that position, how do you mobilize teams to achieve that, um, high quality work and how do you bring those people into a shared mission and ultimately, um, feel really good about what you're bringing to the table? 

Anne Morriss: I love this question too. 

Frances Frei: Me too. 

Anne Morriss: First, lemme say that I don't know where this caller is in the hierarchy, but obviously not at the top. And this kind of friction is really valuable, particularly early in our careers because it teaches us important things about ourselves. I learned, Frances, as you know, many painful lessons in my twenties about what I need from work and the types of cultures where I was not going to thrive. And whatever happens in this situation, this caller is gonna learn a whole bunch about herself and the environments that, that she wants to be in.

So I'm thrilled she's on this ride. I'm thrilled she's talking about this tension and of course, that she has a bias for action and wants to change it. 

Frances Frei: So a couple things. One is, um, if she learns how to unlock this for peers and team members, she is going to accelerate to the top of the hierarchy. So this is a hugely valuable skill. And we find ourselves coaching people on this all the time and seeing it as an obstacle. So I'd love to frame it. And the frame comes from our dear friend Ryan Buell, who is a beloved professor at the Harvard Business School, and he has found that whenever people aren't doing high quality work, there's only ever one of three things that get in the way. And those three things are capability, motivation, and license.

And I think that they map really well to what our caller said. So what I mean by that is I'm not doing a good job because I don't have the skills or the capability to do the job. You do one set of things. 

Anne Morriss: But that's not what we're hearing here. 

Frances Frei: That's not what we're hearing here. Yep. So then we go to level two. And level two is the word she explicitly said, which was motivation.

So how can we motivate somebody? And we'll do that. But it was in her description of motivation that she brought up empowerment, and that's license. So the reason I'm bringing up Ryan's framework is I think we're gonna be hitting on motivation and license in the answer to this. 

Anne Morriss: What I love about this question is I think a lot of the work on motivation is focused on people who have formal decision rights over motivating other people. So what do you do when you don't have that kind of formal authority? Is I think one really interesting question that this caller is asking. 

Frances Frei: And motivation can in general be split up into instrumental and normative motivation. And lemme tell you what those are. The normative is the norms and pride and the flip side of that can be shame, associated with things, the, like, really getting into our hearts. What's good about that is you can be anywhere in the hierarchy and address that. The other thing that's good about that is it tends to be way more powerful. If you have direct control in the hierarchy, you can then also use what's unfortunately named instrumental controls or instrumental motivation, and that's the carrots and the sticks and the compensation and the things like that. So what I would say for her is focus on normative, tap into people's pride and tap into the norms around us for doing things.

Anne Morriss: And I'll offer an example for inspiration from Ryan's research, which we just learned about was when a restaurant wanted to motivate the team making food in the back, one of the things they did was they set up very low cost iPads in the dining room so that the chefs and the sous chefs and everybody on the line could actually see the human beings that they were cooking for.

And it had a dramatic impact in both the quality of the food and the speed at which the food was coming out of the kitchen. And satisfaction from customers also rose pretty dramatically. 

Frances Frei: And so speed of the work, quality of the work, satisfaction all rose. This was not instrumental. This was firmly normative. And it was to give them, they got to see, they got transparency into who it was they were cooking for, made a world of difference. 

Anne Morriss: And I think that's a really interesting sandbox here because she can't control the lever of, of what the senior team does, and that's how she's diagnosed the problem. But what might be within her power to motivate herself and her peers, that's how I would invite her to think about herself and her peers to wanna do excellent work. But I go back to this story again and again because to your point, anyone in this example, in the example of the dining room and the kitchen, anyone in that ecosystem could have come up with that idea, and you could imagine taking steps to make it happen didn't cost much. Fair, not disruptive, not asking anyone to, to change their behavior. Just bringing some operational transparency to the work and that was deeply motivating to the stakeholders in the room. 

Frances Frei: And everybody's work has a customer, whether it's an end customer or someone else within the value chain. And this is just, I think, a generally really nice one.

Here's the other one. I'm really glad that the person who put this system in place did not focus on instrumental controls. 'Cause someone else could have seen that maybe the turnaround time wasn't fast enough or the, and they would've said, here, let's give you a raise, or let's give you a bonus, and it doesn't work as well.

So normative tends to be more powerful than instrumental. So I'm delighted you can only go after normative from your position. 

Anne Morriss: And we actually get a version of this question all the time from people, which is how do I influence my managers, my peers, the people that I don't have any right to change their behavior according to the hierarchy? But what they do and the choices they make have a big impact on me, have a big impact on my team, have a big impact on our collective performance. One place we will often invite people to look because often, and I have been there, we're sitting in our own isolated box here, we have selective access to data and we are drawing a conclusion 'cause that's what human beings do.

Right? We, like, our judgment muscle is firing and we have diagnosed the, the problem. If you can tamp down that judgey side, right, and invite some curiosity into your own thinking, uh, then often options will open up for you. So the other thing I would invite this caller to do is, is okay, she has a working theory of the case, right?

That there's this absence of empowerment and absence of motivation, and you can trace it all the way back to the senior team. Okay, that's a reasonable starting place, but let's go talk to some of the other people, like what is going on with her peers? That's what I wanna know. What is really getting in the way, and can she start to gather some more data points, have some conversation?

Those conversations will also reveal where some of those motivational footholds might be. And to your opening point, if it is a license issue, if some of these people aren't totally sure what their jobs are, what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do, do they have permission to take action and be entrepreneurial in this environment and solve problems?

If that's getting in the way, then there might be a like simple communication solve for some of this stuff where it's just about transparency and kind of job design and distribution of labor. Can we now have a, some kind of a conversation where everybody has a better understanding of their essential role in delivering excellence in the system?

There can be a surprising amount of ambiguity about that. 

Frances Frei: Yeah, and it's, that's in the formal job design. I also find informally, a lot of us have good ideas and we don't say them unless asked. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. 

Frances Frei: And it doesn't much matter who asks us. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. 

Frances Frei: And so I can imagine if she wants to start a culture of people taking more advantage of the empowerment that they already have, just ask people that have done a good job, are good at this. What makes you so good at this? 

Anne Morriss: Yeah.

Frances Frei: What is it that you are feeling? And if you could spread magic dust on others, so they're feeling it too, what advice do you have? Like go use your high performers to talk about it. And I remember the first time when I, somebody asked me to give them feedback, and I was so surprised I got asked.

Now I had great feedback for them, but I have great feedback for everyone. And I, well, I used to wait until I was asked before giving it. And so just imagine that people have beautiful things with inside them and they just need to be asked. And so I would also take a little initiative and, uh, go around and do some really kind, genuine, curious asking for their ideas. 

Anne Morriss: Frances, I think the very simple place I would invite this caller to start is to come up, take an idea that she has that would get the team closer to that excellence mark as defined by the customer, may be an internal customer. And this point to your point, everyone has a customer. And then bring that to a peer on her team who she thinks, uh, may be probably...

Frances Frei: The silent awesomeness. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. The most receptive audience here. Right. Yeah. Because the these things also there, there's probably a spectrum of motivational potential Yeah. Right. In her environment. So find someone who she thinks might be into the idea of coming to work and doing something that matters even more.

Bring them an idea and test it out and see if we can get some bottom up momentum here. 

Frances Frei: Love it.

Anne Morriss: Our last question comes from a senior leader at a company that's had a really good run for decades. This Fixer wants to help their CEO set the company up for continued success at a tricky point in its growth. She writes: 

"Our company has been in existence for over 30 years with great success along the way. In the past five years, we've more than tripled in size through the number of employees joining, new service offerings, and new geographies we're operating in. While this growth has been positive in many ways, it can't continue at its current pace without substantial resource depletion. Investments in new jurisdictions, business lines, and people have proven to be massively expensive, and it feels like we have several mini startups that won't turn a profit for several years.

We're also dealing with a succession transition, and our current leader is increasingly looking to the next generation to make decisions on how to use the company's resources wisely. We now have too many goals and not enough resources to achieve them all, and we don't know which goals should be prioritized despite asking in many different ways. Most decisions are made in isolation and through direct advocacy. Leaders at my level are craving more direction, and most importantly, help with enforcing decisions that help us move in that direction profitably.

How do we assist our current senior leaders in setting direction and standing by that direction?"

Oh! I, uh, we're gonna give this a shot, but I, I'm tempted to bring this person on the show. There's a lot of good stuff here. 

Frances Frei: So let's consider this the beginning of the conversation. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. So what's your reaction?

Frances Frei: Well, there are really wonderful upsides of growth, and when you've had a lot of growth, particularly at a fast pace, you usually end up with tech debt. And that's when you just didn't have time to fix the technology along the way and you wake up one morning and you're like, oh my gosh, I have outdated systems.

And that, that is a pretty commonly understood word. You also end up with org debt, which is you've grown so fast that you've got your systems out from under you. And sometimes outside eyes can help us see these two things. So it sounds to me like there is some tech debt and org debt accumulating, and so you can go after those two in a pretty systematic way.

Here's what I can tell you. Engineers love working on new things, not so much on fixing the tech debt things, which is why you almost never have a vice president in charge of tech debt. It, you make it part of everyone's job as opposed to solely some people's job. But I think they have tech debt and org debt.

We're not gonna be able to address it here, but I just wanna acknowledge that usually happens when a really cool thing has happened, which is you have had sustainable growth and your customers love you so much, they ask you to do more things and you love your customers and you do more things. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, I like starting with framing here because I think it really informs what happens next.

So my, my headline here is that there is a leadership vacuum, and it's partly that whoever's leading the company is thinking about the next chapter in their life. And there's a lot of core leadership jobs that are not being done here. Someone needs to bring their can-do Hillary Clinton bob into this situation and take charge. I think whoever has written this deeply thoughtful note to us is a pretty strong contender. 

Frances Frei: An application for the job. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. It's not clear to me that she sees herself that way. She sounds like she has lots of ideas for what other people could do. I think if she were here and I were coaching her, she were in this conversation with us, I suspect where you and I would get is convince her that this is a job that she could do and should consider.

I think the framing is that the last five years have been a fantastic experiment in how to create value. That's a better hit rate than most of the businesses that are started, but now they have to capture it for the business to be sustainable. And so to me, why I'm drawn to that framing is it also frees up the judgment about whatever happened. Because what matters to this team is what happens next. You know, why they made the choices to go to these different geographies and build these team? It doesn't matter. They made them. Let's use the data we have and then let's figure out what, uh, a sustainable growth path for the company is in the future. But we also have to build a team that's gonna take the ball. The sequence, I think, is gonna be that critical here is the who and then the what, if this is an organization that has the stomach for it, as succession dynamics can get really tricky, but I am most troubled in this story by the inaction, by the absence of leadership. And I think until you fill that gap, you're not gonna be able to make meaningful progress on the strategy questions. 

Frances Frei: I'm gonna take this caller as representative of other people in the organization, which is we don't get the master game plan, right? You're starting a bunch of things. You're doing these things, we're watching resources go by. We are worried that it doesn't all make sense. To me, that means it's our job to create a dashboard of how things are going, showing early stage, mid stage, late stage. Here are our resources and we got this everyone, and you don't have to believe me, I'm verifying it to you. Or because of this snapshot, we're gonna need to ask you to do this and that. So I feel like the absence of the holistic narrative is what's missing from the leadership. And as our friend Tom DeLong has taught many people in the world, all ambiguous information is interpreted negatively.

So by not giving the meta narrative, we interpret that you don't have it under control. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, there's tells about that kind of anxiety in her note. I think to me one of the big red flags is direct advocacy. Like when we see that kind of a decision culture where people are territorial, they're just, they're just, they're looking out for number one, they're going direct to the person close enough to being in charge and trying to get what they need.

There's not, it's very fixed pie. There's not a sense that we win if when we win collectively. And because of the growth scenario, I think this is a situation where you can get seduced into thinking everything's going to be okay. And what I'm encouraged by is the person writing here does have a sense of urgency and has concluded that something is wrong and I wanna put a cape on her and tell her to get after because there are red flags here and you know, the status quo is the problem. Inaction is the enemy, and this is a system that needs to be in motion solving these core leadership problems. So it can create the future for this organization, which I think is very bright from a lot of the data that we have. But somebody and some bodies really have to step into that leadership vacuum.

Frances Frei: You know, an example of direct advocacy gone wrong. I was working with a company that was ruled almost exclusively through direct advocacy by design. 

Anne Morriss: We see that in a lot of founder, founder led.

Frances Frei: It was a founder led company. Yeah. Yeah. So it was exactly what you would expect. And it feels great when you're directly advocating and they say yes. But what I got to watch is when that person walked out the door and the next person comes in and directly advocates against you, you've just lost.

And that happened again and again. So direct advocacy actually helps no one. Which means that you, if advocacy is gonna occur, it should occur at the team level. Because you wanna be able to see and hear what other people are saying. 'Cause direct is inefficient and destabilizing. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. I mean, we've seen some leaders refuse to have, for this very reason, because they know this is their own weakness. They get convinced by the last person to come through the door. They refuse to have one-on-one meetings. Yeah. This is how I, I, one leader that we worked with solved it. No one-on-one meetings. If you have a case to make, make it in the room. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. Well, no one-on-one advocacy. You probably still need to meet with people individually.

Anne Morriss: Well, this guy was quite serious about this boundary. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. Well, and maybe it was all he could do, but I wanna just tell our leader, our Fixers out there, that should not be your aspiration, but boy, does it work to solve this problem.

Anne Morriss: I don't know. I'm not ruling it out. Yeah. This is a very common organizational behavior.

Very, and to your point, you take comfort in the relationship with the leader, but you're not like integrating into your comfort level, the fact that they have the same relationship with 12 other humans. 

Frances Frei: Oh, I used to watch there, there was a long time ago, the lore at the Harvard Business School was that you would go and make a direct advocacy to the dean.

He'd almost always say yes, and then the deputy dean would show up at your office later on that day and tell you no. 

Anne Morriss: No. Like this is like the, this is super common in the public sector where you have elected officials who always say yes to every single thing.

Frances Frei: And the person walks around. It's like, that's not gonna work.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. And the chief of staff swings by afterwards, that's not happening. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. 

Anne Morriss: And so what I'm encouraged by in this letter is I think she has identified the red flags and has a sense of urgency about fixing them. I hope she listens to this conversation, takes action, and then comes on the show. 

Frances Frei: We can help her from that point. 

Anne Morriss: And be even better thought partners.

Frances Frei: We're working on a future Quick Fix focused around people. And we're gonna get help from our beloved Master Fixer Tia Silas. So please send us all your burning questions about people management, and the three of us will solve them together. 

Anne Morriss: Email, call, text us. Reach out at fixable@ted.com or 234-FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253.

Fixable is a podcast from TED. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Balarezo, and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

Frances Frei: And our show is mixed by Louis at Story Yard.