Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to iTunes and Spotify, and leave us a rating and a review.

Let's get communicating.

Communicating.

My guest today, he's a qualified engineer who throughout his career realized the leadership gaps in the corporate industry and realized that he needed to do something about it.

He is the CEO of Pinnacle Performance and the keynote speaker.

And one of his speeches, he does talk about his experiences with engineers and the crucial communication skills that they need to work on.

Please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Jeremy.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you for being here today.

Welcome.

Please tell us a little bit about you.

Well, you were just talking about the keynote speech and it's called How Great Engineers Become Great Leaders by Reprogramming Their Communication Style.

I grew up loving math and science.

People never really made any sense to me.

So I spent years paying very close attention to what people do.

And by paying attention, I actually found that there's times when I could communicate better than people who are naturally good at it, because I really paid a lot of attention and learned some things that most people just take for granted.

So I've been trying to share the things that I've learned to help make it easier for everyone who becomes a manager, but especially engineers to make that transition from doing to enabling other people to do.

So first of all, what got you started on this?

I didn't start out specifically with engineers.

It just kind of happened.

So leadership training is always about the transition from being so good at what you do that someone promotes you, and then no one really teaches you how to do the next thing, which is managing and leading.

So that's what I did, but I found myself working with engineers quite a bit.

And so that's why I boiled it down to that one talk.

So it's important for everyone.

The lessons are similar for everybody, but I feel like I connect better with engineers than most people do.

And so that's why I focused on that.

Why do you think engineers, which we also focus on, why do you think they struggle so much with communication skills?

And it seems like they've been picked on compared to every other profession.

It's not like other professionals are good at it, or all of them at least, you know what I mean?

So why is it that the usually the focus is on that profession?

Well, I focus on that because I've got an engineering background, and so it makes more sense to me, but I think they tend to be so logic based, and many, many people communicate emotionally that that is an automatic way that they're gonna get tripped up when they're communicating with people.

And when you are building things or designing things, all that logic is okay.

When you're now a manager, and you have to deal with the human side, and the emotions, then it's just not something that they've been trained to do.

And do you think in that case then, I'm not sure if organizations are always on board with this, but some will say I'm really good at my job, and I enjoy it, and I enjoy working alone.

So can I have a more horizontal growth path rather than vertical going up the ladder?

Oh, that's a great question.

One thing that I always work with people on is what their long-term goal is, because as you said, you can climb a ladder, but if you get to the top of it and you realize it's against the wrong wall, then it was no good.

So I help people figure out where they want to be in one, three, five, and 10 years.

And one of the things I have them do is figure out their personal mission statement.

Every company has one, but every person should have one too.

It helps make it a lot more clear when someone offers you a promotion, whether it's taking you where you want to go or it's going to actually detract from your longer term goals.

When you know that and you can make the decision, I could make more money being a manager, but I'd rather wait and get this other job, even if it's gonna take an extra year because it's more aligned with what's going to make me the best I can be and as happy as I can be.

Yeah, because let's not underestimate how important money and a higher package is in influencing you to make those kinds of decisions.

If you take that path, it obviously won't come with the same perks as going up and managing people.

Aren't we all ambitious and looking to do more and earn more?

Yep, it really takes someone stepping back and understanding.

I know plenty of people who have gone up the ladder and then have realized that they are just so miserable and they're on anti-anxiety medicine.

They're making a lot of money, but nothing else in their life is going well.

And they actually end up stepping back because they realize that life is too short to make a lot of money, but be miserable the whole time.

Having some examples to give people to help them really understand it's okay and why do you want to make money?

And if you want to make money because you think it's going to make you happier, well, guess what?

You're not happier because you're miserable at your job.

Well, the pandemic certainly opened our eyes to a lot of that.

We only say life is short, suddenly it really looked short.

Short and strange for a while there, yeah.

It did, so it shifted a lot of our values and we had to rethink some things and say, wait a minute, this thing I was taught to want all my life, do I really want it?

Yep, family and your surroundings became a lot more important.

So let's talk about your keynote speech, the one you were mentioning earlier.

What is the first thing that you think our listeners especially need to know about and think about when it comes to communication skills?

Well, they do surveys at corporations often of people who are there and they do surveys of people who have left the company.

And there are a top 10 list of the complaints that employees have.

In every survey I've ever seen, communication is the number one complaint of employees at corporations.

And large and small companies.

So communication is the reason why people leave companies and you know how expensive turnover is.

So if you can improve the communication, then it's gonna go a long way towards reducing that.

I've had several HR guests and they usually say, we want you to stay there as long as possible.

It's exhausting to keep looking for a new candidate, please.

If there's any indication that you might leave, we don't want you just because we're tired.

Yeah.

And it's not just the finding of a new person.

When they start, they're not productive for a while.

It's a huge drain on organization.

In those exit interviews, it looks like you can't throw money at the problem anymore and say, oh, we'll pay you more, Jeremy, just stay.

People still leave because of the actual interpersonal dynamics rather than the money.

Are those results then shared with the leader who probably is the reason why the person left or is just collecting data for HR to say, oh yeah, 80% of people leave to go to their manager?

Do they share that with them to bring that to their awareness?

I'm not sure that they know how to.

There's two other things on the list.

Number two is being underpaid.

And so companies do a lot of studies and benchmarking to figure out what compensation packages make sense.

And number six is being overworked.

And so they focused a lot on vacation time and time off and that sort of thing, because those are very quantifiable.

So those are the things that they tend to focus on.

But communication and some of the other things aren't as quantifiable.

So I'm not sure how much they're able to do with them.

And when it comes to overworked work-life balance, if that even exists, have we got to a point in society where we don't have that boundary of Jeremy's my boss, I switch off my phone at 5 p.m., so if he suddenly thinks, wait a minute, I forgot to tell this to Roberta, and you message me at 7 p.m.

while I have dinner with my family, should I respond immediately or wait till tomorrow morning at 7?

Oh, you should wait.

So you have to come to an understanding.

But I want that promotion.

You got to train your manager sometime.

If you let them know I'm going to be as productive as I can be during these hours, and then maybe you have an emergency line, say if you absolutely need me, send me a text and have it start with urgent, and then I'll respond to it.

If it's not that, then I'm going to wait until tomorrow.

But everyone deserves time off.

If you're not getting the rest and the break outside of work, you're not going to be as productive at work as you could have been.

So it benefits everyone.

True, which we know intellectually, but we don't seem to make those changes, and we don't seem to change those habits.

It's so prevalent that it takes a lot of dedication on each individual's part not to get caught into it.

I turn off my alerts on my computer, so I don't see when an email comes in, because otherwise it will distract me.

If it takes me 10 seconds to respond to an email, it takes me three to five minutes to really get back in the headspace I was in before that and be productive again.

So I turn off those notifications.

I don't answer my phone.

I return calls every two to four hours.

I turn off text notification until I am taking a break and I wanna look at them.

So as much as you can do to turn off the notifications, the more you can focus on being productive on the things that you really should be focusing on.

That is so true.

So you control your own agenda and schedule.

Yeah, no one's going to stop reaching out to you.

So it's up to you to control that.

Yes, that's right.

So what is the next thing from your speech that we need to learn?

You know, I broke it down.

They did another study on what parts of communication are the real issue.

One is not sharing the spotlight.

So when people become managers, they're used to the pride of building a thing, making a thing, designing it, whatever it is.

And that's no longer their job.

Their job is no longer to design that thing.

It's not their product.

They were always proud of the product they made, but now the product is your team.

So you have to figure out how to switch from being proud of designing something or building something to being proud of your team being successful because that's your product.

That's what you take pride in.

Because imagine the psychological effect of knowing that I came up with this idea and now my boss is the one looking really good in front of the CEO.

The great thing about being a boss is the more credit you give away to people on your team, the more everyone understands that you were what was behind it.

So the more credit you give away, the more you'll end up getting in the backend.

And then what is the next thing?

The next one was communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with.

Oh, what we call the platinum rule.

The platinum rule, that's right.

Everyone wants to say they want to be treated the way they treat others or treat others the way they treat themselves.

But people want to be treated the way they want to be treated.

For instance, like I said, if you call me on the phone, I am not going to answer it.

But if you send me an email and schedule a time to talk, I'm happy to talk to you.

One of the big complaints people have is that their boss refuses to talk to them in person or on the phone.

They will only communicate by email.

And that makes people not feel like they can communicate the way that they want to communicate.

Why do some of the bosses do that?

Because wouldn't that be part of relationship building, actually having some time to communicate in person?

Yeah, you know the saying about you can't be efficient with your employees.

You have to be effective with them.

A lot of people fall back to efficiency.

And they think that just sending an email is the most efficient way to communicate.

It just may not be the most effective way.

I've had people who have come to me, I've been coaching them, and I've been trying to get them to be as efficient with their time as possible.

And then they said, oh, but I broke down yesterday and I actually went and had a in-person conversation with someone.

I'm like, that's great, why did you do it?

And they said, because it was going to get too confusing over email.

So having that conversation in person ended up saving them a lot of time because it got rid of a lot of the miscommunication.

But I think people just are always trying to save time as much as they can.

And they're not realizing that talking to someone in person is an investment in time.

It's not wasted time.

And there's so much that gets lost in translation with the written word.

You know, even people you've known all your life, Jeremy, I'm sure you've had times they misunderstood what you said.

They're like, I should have put the smiling emoji to say it's just a joke.

Yeah, it's really tough because you have a tone of voice in your head when you're typing the email.

They have a tone of voice in their head when they're reading it, but that might not be the same tone of voice that you have.

That is so true.

Hence the loss in translation.

And therefore, as I said, it saves time to actually speak about it in person.

And talking about communicated to the way you want to be communicated to, there's sometimes this debate of, let's say you have two people in a team.

If you and I are in a team, you are the, I wanna know the end of how this project is gonna look when we are done tight.

And I'm the, oh no, I wanna know every detail on how we're gonna do this, Jeremy.

Otherwise, this is driving me crazy.

If two people are in the same team and they have those extreme different ways of thinking, how could you navigate that?

That's a great question because this has happened to me before.

And what I learned as a manager of people, well, let me tell you the story, is I was incredibly busy.

One of my employees came into my office.

She was new.

And so I said, all right, I'm gonna give her as much time as she needs.

And she was giving me all these details about what had happened and what was going on.

And after about 10 minutes, I said, okay, what do you need from me?

And she said, oh, nothing.

I just wanted to let you know.

And I did not have that 10 minutes to spend.

So I just put a pin in that.

And when I was no longer frazzly because of that conversation, I just calmly talked to her and I said, okay, here is what I need from you.

If you come to me when I'm busy, I need you to tell me exactly what you want.

If I want details, I'll ask for them.

Otherwise, don't give them to me.

She said, really?

I said, yeah, that's the way I want it.

And so what I learned from that, when I'm managing people, when I first hire them, I always ask, if you're given a project, do you just want to know what the end goal is, or do you want to be given all the steps?

And almost no one knows what I'm talking about because no one ever thinks about it.

They assume what they want is what everyone else wants.

Some people will look at me and say, well, how will I get there if you don't tell me all the steps on getting there?

Like, great, now I know you want all those steps.

And some people are like, oh, I don't wanna be micromanaged.

Just tell me where you want me to get to and I will get there.

Like, great, that's how I'll manage you then.

But having the conversation when you're not in the middle of a situation is the way to figure out what works for the other person and then you both just need to figure out how to adapt.

That's a very practical case that some people say, you know what, boss, just give it to me straight on how it's gonna be done.

Or just tell me what the end result is and I'm the creative type, I'm innovative, I'll have my own Google searches in order to get us there.

So that's very interesting.

You have to be careful.

If you do that, you just have to make sure they're extremely clear on exactly what the outcome is.

They don't get to interpret the outcome.

They get to figure out the steps to get there.

Right, clear communication.

Yes.

What a bummer.

Why is it so challenging to clearly communicate?

We've been doing it all our lives and still it's an issue.

Why do we struggle to, especially if you're a leader and like you just said, explain that if I want the full story, why is it that leaders sometimes struggle with clearly communicating expectations?

I think they make a lot of assumptions is the problem.

I've had times when I would give someone a task to do and I assumed that they understood various things that I wanted.

Also, I asked them if they understood it and they said they did.

People will rarely admit that they don't understand.

So you have to make sure that they do.

You know, I gave them a week and on Thursday, I said, how's this project coming along?

They said, oh, I haven't really started yet.

I can't figure it out.

I'm like, oh.

Right.

So then I realized, okay, I'm going to do this very differently.

When I give people tasks, I'm going to tell them exactly what I want, exactly when I want it, how I want it, and I'm going to schedule a check-in time.

Because if I just after one day say, hey, how's it going?

Then it seems like I'm micromanaging.

But if I say after two days, you give me a report on how it's going and what you need from me, then I'm not micromanaging, but I'm having that safety check-in with enough time to fix any problems that are going on.

So it'll still get done on time.

If people are not feeling I can just tell my boss, is that a thing you remember at school?

We used to have that, oh, you must ask the stupid question.

More than half the class have the same question in mind.

They just think it's a stupid question to ask.

It should be obvious.

Why are we afraid even at work to ask the stupid question?

I think it's just built into us.

So from all those times in school, but I will tell you I asked the stupid question.

Stupid question all the time.

And just like you said, I was afraid to ask the question and I would ask the people around me, I'd say, what does he mean by that?

And they said, I don't know.

So once I started asking the question, I could see the relief in everyone else's face because they say, oh, thank God someone asked that question.

So then I just realized, I'm always gonna ask the question.

And it turns out the more questions I ask, the smarter people think I am.

That is so true, visibility.

It's almost like you can read people's minds and they feel safe with you.

It's like you can relate to them.

You know what they are thinking and going through and you like the pain relief.

There's this prison thing of, I don't wanna ask and look stupid and my ego is gonna be bruised.

Cause that's all that is.

But if you pay attention to the really good charismatic leaders in an organization, they have no problem asking questions.

The more confident someone is, the more likely they are to ask a question.

And asking that question makes you look more confident.

It's counterintuitive, but it's true.

If you're willing to do that and go out on a ledge to ask the question everyone else is afraid to, it shows how confident and courageous you are.

That's very true.

Speaking of confidence, does working on your communication skills increase your level of confidence?

I've never thought about it that way, but I would absolutely think so.

Yeah, if you can share exactly what you want and be able to get more clear information out of other people, the more clear things are, the more confident you're gonna be.

When things are cloudy and murky, or you're not sure if they understand you or you understand them, things get a lot more tense and nervous.

Which then you sound even emotionally intelligent because you can clearly express what you're thinking, what you're feeling to the other person.

Yep, I agree.

So tell us about the work that Pinnacle Performance does.

Well, largely that is leadership training and coaching.

We like to do it over an extended period of time.

We don't believe that a one and done workshop is usually the best way because you get a ton of information from the fire hose and then when you get back to work, that book goes on the shelf and you get busy again and you might have picked something up.

But we like to meet with people once a week for nine to 12 weeks.

And that way they learn a lesson, they practice it, they check in with us on how it went in case they need to make tweaks and then they start moving on to the next one.

So they're really building habits as they go.

That's the way we like to do that.

And we'll do it for personal productivity, for individuals, for newer managers, their leadership or strategic development for the executives.

What have you seen as some of the reasons positive change starts to happen during and after the coaching program?

Well, going back to the issue of turnover in companies, turnover happens a lot because, like I said, people were good at what they did, they get promoted to being managers, and then they're not good at it because no one really has walked them through how to be a good manager.

So they're not happy and their employees are not happy.

And so things start going poorly unless they can find a way to pull themselves up and become good managers.

So once you start getting things a little bit under control, then you realize that management is my job now, and you start working on those skills, then it really builds on itself.

It takes small steps in the beginning to build the momentum to really start working on the management skills.

And I always start with time management.

I think of time management as the oxygen mask on an airplane.

If you can't take care of yourself first by controlling your time, you're not going to be able to help anyone else.

Yeah, those boundaries.

Which back to what we said earlier, that the fear is that it might jeopardize your workplace environment if you don't answer that email at 12 a.m.

in the morning.

So does that catch 22?

What do I do?

What's the right thing?

So what I always tell people, I always ask them, what's the longest meeting you go to in a week?

And normally the answer is one or two hours that they may have a team meeting that say it's two hours.

Say, do you answer emails when you're in your meeting?

They say, oh no, I'll never answer emails in the meeting.

I'm like, okay, then you can definitely go two hours without responding to an email.

And then I will have them turn off their phone and I'll try to get them to only answer voicemails every four hours.

Usually they start with every two hours and it makes them so nervous.

They really feel like they're gonna miss something.

I'm like, you know, if the building's burning down, they're not gonna send you an email.

So it's gonna be okay.

And one great example I had, I made them only answer every two hours.

And after a week, I asked him how it's going.

He said, it's terrible.

I've missed so many calls.

I said, really?

Tell me about the calls.

How many calls would you miss in two hours?

He said, I would miss like seven calls.

I said, how many left you voicemails?

He said, three.

Said, oh, so the other four weren't important enough to leave a voicemail.

Said, what happened?

So it turns out he started getting fewer and fewer calls because people started solving their own problems by the time he got back to them.

He was enabling them by just always answering their question without them having to do any work.

So when they started realizing that it was going to be two hours, they started solving their own problem, which made them much better at their jobs, and it saved him a ton of time.

So sometimes you have to train your people to what they're going to expect in terms of a response time.

So it saved him time and also increased employee engagement.

Yeah, engagement and productivity.

And productivity, that's right.

So it has its benefits, definitely.

But I think that there's that element of feeling like they are needed, when he felt like, oh, I missed those calls, the world's gonna fall apart because somebody needed me and I wasn't there as a leader because they think that's the expectation on them in that position.

Yeah, what I tell everyone is that their job is to obsolete themselves.

If you can make everyone around you so productive that they don't need you, then you are free to be promoted.

Maybe I should think I would be fired.

They're not gonna need me.

Isn't that a psychological thing that I must always make sure the organization need me for my job to be secure?

Right, so yeah, that's a psychological thing, but it's very fear-based and it's not reality-based.

If you have a team that's incredibly productive, the executives aren't gonna look at you and say, oh, your team's incredible, we don't need you anymore.

They're gonna say, what other team can you also make incredible?

I like that.

Now, when it comes to presentations and communication skills, if you're a leader and you manage people, you now go to the boardroom and somebody has to make a presentation.

If you are in a situation where a lot of your team are afraid to speak in public, and these are just their teammates, it's not even strangers.

How do you navigate that and help them get over that hump?

It's a lot of practice.

So the more you do it, the better you'll get at it.

There are a lot of things that you can learn, but nothing will trump practice.

I got good at speaking in ninth grade because I had a social studies teacher who every week made us do a presentation in front of the class, and I hated it.

It was the scariest, most awful thing I could imagine for a couple of months, and then I started liking it, and then it started being the reason why I got good grades in social studies, which wasn't my strong suit, and that has stayed with me.

So if someone needs to speak in front of people, join a Toastmasters, join some other group, where you're going to get used to speaking and listening to other people speak and learning from them, that kind of practice goes a long, long way.

That's so true, because I think the first time when you hate it, there are these imagined fears, at least, that are in your head, thinking the world's gonna fall apart now that I'm here, I'm gonna freeze, they're gonna throw tomatoes at me.

And you find that a lot of the time, I don't know if this has been your experience, but people root for you to be successful.

Yeah, everybody in the audience wants you to do well.

And if you can remember that, that helps a lot.

And then practice, not just practicing speaking in front of people in general, but practice the content for that specific talk.

I've actually had people say they don't wanna practice too much because then it might seem stiff and too practiced.

I said, the more you know it, the more you can go off script.

If you know everything backwards and forwards, and someone asks you a question from something 10 slides ahead, you can just go 10 slides ahead and everything will be fine.

If you don't know it well enough and you haven't practiced it long enough, then you can't just make those jumps around.

I think when they say that, are they probably confusing sounding rehearsed and sounding like I know my material?

I think they're afraid of sounding scripted.

They don't want to sound like they're reading a script.

Or that they memorized it.

And so they're gonna say everything word for word.

Right.

So that's what they fear is going to happen if they practice it too many times.

But in reality, it gives you much more flexibility to change things up as you go.

That is so true, yes.

Practice, practice, practice.

It doesn't mean memorize and you're gonna forget a word.

You know how in high school, you might forget a word and then you forget everything else in the essay.

I think that's the fear some people have when we say to them practice, practice, practice.

Absolutely.

Now you wrote a book about your family.

So you said you're the youngest of 10.

Yep.

That must have been quite an adventure having all those bigger brothers and sisters.

And did everybody beat up on you?

Didn't beat me up, but we did have pig piles and pink bellies.

So if you were sitting on the floor in the living room and someone just declared a pig pile, then there could easily be nine other people like lying on top of you.

Oh my goodness.

So like a wrestling match.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I learned to pay attention very, very early.

You don't want to be at the bottom of that pile.

So what are some of the lessons that if you feel free to share them with us that you shared in the book regarding your upbringing?

One of them is finding your niche.

So as you can imagine as the youngest of 10, finding your identity wasn't always the easiest thing.

My oldest brother went to the Air Force Academy.

When I was looking at schools, I thought about one of the military schools and then I said, nope, I'm not gonna do it because it's already been done.

So we're also all very, very competitive.

And one of my brothers is a better runner than I'll ever be.

One of my brothers is a better biker than I'll ever be, but no one does triathlons.

So I got into doing triathlons because it ended up being a niche that people could do the individual aspects of it, but no one in the family could do all three.

And so competitive wise, that's a niche that I found.

And business wise, sometimes combining two different things that don't seem like they necessarily go together can really give you a competitive advantage over someone who's just doing one portion of it or the other.

Those are really interesting ones.

Did it also teach you some conflict resolution skills?

It did, going back to paying attention again, because as the littlest, I was never the one in charge or control of anything.

But it taught me that if I pay attention to the way other people handle various situations, then I could avoid conflict by doing certain things.

So if I knew the way they like to communicate when something was going wrong, and I paid attention to that, then that's the way that I would work with them on it.

So I tried to always form partnerships so that we were solving a problem together.

We were both solving the same problem rather than trying to clash with people.

So you became a master collaborator.

I tried to, yes.

Wow, how does collaboration play into leadership?

I always tell people to sit on the same side of the table.

And that's both literally and figuratively.

If you are starting a conversation that seems like a conflict and you physically sit on the same side of the table in terms of across from each other, it absolutely changes your mindset.

It makes you more want to collaborate and it makes them feel like you are working with them.

When you're sitting face to face, if you can actually start pointing at someone, then oh boy, that's a conflict at that point.

Once you are physically doing it, then you start speaking that way and saying what is our issue and how can we solve this problem?

And once you start doing that, people's defenses go down, you start getting much more creative, you can potentially come up with a better solution than what either of you wanted initially.

So that's the difference between negotiation and collaboration.

Negotiation, no one's really happy.

You get to the thing that everyone can tolerate, but it's not as good as what either one of you wanted.

When you collaborate, a lot of times you can come up with a solution that's even better than what you had originally thought.

So negotiation, is it more like compromise?

Yeah.

Whereas collaboration is let's find a win-win situation.

Right.

So yeah, negotiation is getting to the lowest common denominator, collaborating is how good can we make this?

That sounds like a much better option for sure.

Jeremy, are there any other things that you would like to share today that I didn't ask you?

The third part of my talk is about making people feel seen and heard.

And every company wants engaged employees.

Employees who feel seen and heard are three times more likely to actually be engaged in the work that they do.

And the other thing, and this is the big one, is that companies who have employees who feel seen and heard far outperform their competitors financially.

So you can look at this and just say, oh, that's nice that people feel seen and heard.

It's not just nice.

It is financially important to the company to make their employees feel seen and heard.

I had a guest who also does executive leadership coaching talking about that aspect of being seen and heard.

He mentioned how things that happen in society, politically, communities, things that affect us, we always say, oh, don't bring that at work.

Let's just focus on the actual project and work.

You have two sides to that.

You have leaders who'll say, listen, let's just focus, take that home and then the community and society and we don't have time for that here.

I understand, but we don't have time for it.

Or those who say, even though I may not understand, but let's just at least send a memo and say, we see that.

I may not fully get it, but we acknowledge that this happens.

Is it necessary for leaders to make others, especially cause you also have the diversity, equity and inclusion debate.

If you have diverse workforce, do you need to even mention stuff that goes on in the news, especially if it affects people who are in the organization or should we just focus on productivity?

I think it's a balance and I like to look at what is going to cause the most productivity gain.

If people are being wildly distracted by something that's going on outside of work, then it at least needs to be addressed so that they can get back to it.

But sometimes I will tell people for their own benefit to use work as a way to get away from those things.

If you've got a bunch of problems outside of work and you can use work as a time when you can just focus on this thing and not just be soaked up into this other thing that's happening outside, then that can be a benefit to you.

So you have to feel it out and it's a balance.

Sometimes it's great to do, sometimes you want to do a little bit of it, and sometimes you do want to stay away.

But is it fair to expect leaders to even mention anything that might have happened?

I think it's necessary if it's something that is being distracting at work.

If it's something that's making people be less productive, it's up to the leader to figure out how to address it and either put it behind or really dive into it and see what needs to happen.

Because that could be the people feeling sin and hurt and then going back to be fully engaged in the work and increase their productivity.

Last words of wisdom, Jeremy Doran.

Listen actively, pay attention and actively listen to people and you're going to learn a lot more.

They're gonna feel a lot more seen and heard and you'll all get along better.

Words of wisdom from Jeremy Doran, the CEO of Pinnacle Performance and the keynote speaker who is a lover of math and science.

Thank you so much Jeremy for being on our show today.

This has been wonderful.

Thanks for having me.

It's been great.

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