Speaking and Communicating Podcast

And before you get into the interview, part of your preparation is not just, what's the question I wanna ask, but what do I expect the answer to be? What's a good answer? What's a bad answer? 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.
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Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work, pitch to investors, or are an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us. Let's get communicating!
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And speaking of being the best version of yourself, my guest today, Dr. Orin Davis, hailing all the way from New York, is here to talk to us about how to do just that and so many other things pertaining to the workplace and how to bring out the best out of your talent. Dr. Davis is a computational neuroscientist turned HR consultant.
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because he loves people so much he decided to abandon STEM. Very unusual. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Dr. Davis. Hi, Roberta. Thanks for having me tonight. Thank you for being here. Welcome. Please introduce yourself. Sure. I'm a self-actualization engineer who makes workplaces great places to work and enables people to do and be their best. Self-actualization.
01:49
we remember that from Maslow's hierarchy. Is that where that came from? Well it came from Maslow and he did sort of talk about a hierarchy of needs although he didn't make that whole pyramid thing that was somebody else but yes definitely Maslavian concept and is also found in many many cultures like if you look into let's say Hindu culture, Jewish culture, Islam, Christianity, many of the world religions and even many indigenous cultures.
02:16
you do find this concept of like finding your purpose, doing your best, being your best. And there are words for it all over the place. It's sort of in the Western world that sort of got formalized through, you know, Maslowian psychology, but yeah. Mm-hmm. And speaking of religion, a lot of us were raised, I was also raised Christian, you know, would visit my grandma and she'll take us to her Methodist branch. There's always this idea of we're trying to be better. I'm trying to be better than I was yesterday. I'm working on my weaknesses.
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Why do we always have that quest as humans? Well, so I want to add one more piece to the quest, not just working on our weaknesses, but also bolstering our strengths. Right. Because often our strengths are the things that people most know us for and where we can often create the most good in the world. So, showing up our weaknesses, important because we don't want to mess anything up, but we also want to make these positive contributions. And so, yes, we see that a lot.
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And part of it is the sacredness and uniqueness of our lives. And all that sacred, you can define sacred based on any concept you want. Many people draw that from a deity if they believe in one. But certainly the fact that we're unique creatures on this spinning bit of rock comes with an implication that we should probably make our contributions. We're here to contribute.
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and we should probably contribute in a way that nobody else can contribute. That's part of what makes us sacred. That's part of what makes us unique. Like sacredness is directly related to that uniqueness. There's nobody like you in the world. There's nobody like me in the world. And for each and every one of your listeners, there's nobody like them in the world. So the only they can make this contribution, which is going to be based on a combination of their strengths and their experiences and the context in which they find themselves. And so you can even have two people that have like
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similar personality strengths, similar profiles, but they're not in the same place or they're not in the same time. And so they'll contribute in their way, in their context, in their time. Have you noticed how if you do something for someone else that is positive, that makes them smile, you help them in some way, you are the more happier one by doing the act for someone else, by making that contribution.
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Often yes, in part because that's where we engage in activities that resonate most with our self identities. Like when you're giving, especially when you're giving in a unique way that other people may not be able to do, it's a moment when you're most Roberta. And I'm most Orin when I'm able to do things that are uniquely mine. And then I'm able to contribute in ways that others don't. And so like when we do for others, we feel that resonance of self and that really does make us a lot.
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feel a lot better, it feels a lot happier, and it feels like we're aligned. You know, the great something or other as it were, because we feel like we're fulfilling our universal purpose. And that's why we feel so happy. So how did you get started on this journey? Because like I said, you were more a science guy and you decided, you know what, people are my thing.
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Well, actually, I would say people were always my thing. I was always interested, you know, my parents tell me that I've been asking questions about self-actualization and, you know, curiosities about that ever since I was a kid. I'm Jewish and I drew on that from my religion. And then I was really interested on how people fulfill their potential, how people understand what their potential is, how they fill it, what are the conditions that impede it, what are the conditions that foster it. And I've been studying that the whole time, but part of what I wanted to understand was the inside of a person.
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It's not just a mind, it's also a brain. And so how does that brain work? What's the chemistry? What's the physics? And that's why my undergraduate work was in computational neuroscience. I was studying also the biology and the chemistry of the brain, but also like, what's the difference between a human brain and a computer? To what extent can we make a computer act like a brain?
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And to what extent is a brain just different from a computer, you know, irrevocably so? This is something we're even wrestling with right now as we look at, you know- AI. AI, and you know, the fact that people keep asking me about this because I do creativity research and you know, can AI ever be creative? And what I keep pointing out is at least thus far no, but it can certainly recycle and you can get into whether, you know, art is just, you know, imitative all the way and you know, whether there's ever anything really new under the sun, but-
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to paraphrase the Bible on that. But still in all, these were interesting questions to me. And so as I was building up my understanding of human beings from the molecular all the way to the social, but I kept moving more towards the social side, the cognitive side, the stuff that is fuzzier, has fewer rules, has a lot more nuance, has a lot more context. I always thought that ordered chaos was very, very interesting. And
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that's also sort of grew out of interest of quantum mechanics, just didn't get the time to take all the math that I needed to do to actually understand it. I think it was Niels Bohr, David Bohm, I forget, I think it was Bohr who said that if thinking about quantum mechanics doesn't give you a headache, you don't understand it. Oh yeah. And then you became the first person to have a doctorate in positive psychology. How did that happen?
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Partly by serendipity. So when I joined Claremont for the PhD program, I heard about the fact that they were starting this new positive psychology program. And one of my colleagues, Yojen Rowe, was the first person to join the positive psychology doctoral program. And so she was the first to jump in the pool. I heard about this. I was like, this sounds cool. And my advisor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was the person who is heading the program anyway. So I was like, sure, let me do this. And sounded interesting. And I ended up
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graduating earlier than Yojin. So I ended up being the first one to get the doctorate in positive psychology. Wow. What did that mean? And here's a quote from you from your TEDx talk, you said, when we go to these motivational seminars, we pay people to tell us what to do. And yet we don't like being told what to do. So what exactly are we doing there?
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You know, in a TED Talk, you don't have time to get into the nuance of everything. There's a bit of an irony because we simultaneously do and don't like being told what to do. This is a constant thing. We like being told what to do if we think that's going to get us the easy, quick fix. And that's where people go to the motivational speakers and so on. They want the easy, quick fix. And what's funny is research actually shows that the effect of those wears off relatively quickly. It feels good, but it doesn't do good. Generally not at length.
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And when people talk about how something is a life-changing thing, like it can seem like it's life-changing in the moment, but then you sort of snap back later. Back to your old habits. It's like you never even went there in the first place. Well, you still remember it, but the effect of it doesn't, doesn't really take root because we don't like, I mean, it's a standard thing with like change management also. If you don't change the rest of the context, then it doesn't really matter because context is going to demand that you sort of change back. Like you can change.
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But if the context is still pressuring you to be who you were, you'll snap right back. Right. Which brings us to the question we're always asking those podcasts regarding leadership executive coaching, the trainings and corporate organizations. Why do those ideas not stick after spending so much money and days in training? I'm in training, I'm in training, and then I'll go back to my old ways at work.
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because you can change the person, but if you don't change the context, human beings adapt. And this is actually a very fundamental thing. We adapt. So if I help somebody to change, but I don't change their environment, you're putting them right back to an environment with a context that rewards the old system. So if we don't change, you have to change the whole thing and you have to provide opportunities to preserve the transfer of training. Otherwise, yeah, you're wasting your money and it looks good cosmetically. And part of what we think when we do that is that
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will change the leader and then the leader will come in and change the context. And what we often find is that contexts don't change so easily and actually need to do people because they'll imagine, you know, a CEO, I put them through a training and then they come back and they're like, I've got all these brand new, great ideas for the company and I am, I am the CEO and I've got the leadership and I am going to make people follow me. You can't really make people follow you. You've got to inspire people to follow you. You've got to motivate people to follow you. That's not so easy to do.
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And you also have to think about the context, the incentives in particular, right? What incentivizes people to keep doing what they've been doing. And what's gonna incentivize them to do something different? The CEO now wants to do something different, but their followers may not have any incentive to do anything different. So what incentives is the leader going to create to get something different to happen? Is it all up to the CEO or?
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Is there some way the way I can be intrinsically motivated to want to do better as well? Well, so part of it is when we're talking about this model of training the CEO, that's sort of how we're thinking of the model. You're absolutely right that better than that is to train a whole bunch of people and for the CEO to light other fires as well, and to motivate a whole bunch of other people to come along as change agents. And that's really how change happens. But that's the whole thing. And we try to put training in only one person.
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and then have one person come in and like make magic happen, that's the problem with the model. It's exactly what you say. If we come back and we say, okay, now I've gone through this training, I've learned all these things, now my first task is to get other people on board with this. I need to get other change makers and that's gonna take a while and that's the thing. You've got to start negotiating with people about changing their context.
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changing their reward structure, changing their incentives, changing the way that they do things, you gotta get them on board with the fact that that's all going to happen. Not so easy. Not at all. Especially, let me ask you something. When it comes to reward, are we talking money here? Go ahead. Not every reward is money. And the reason why I say that is, in a very real sense, money is a means, not an end. Think about it this way. Imagine if you could tell me that you are perfectly satisfied with the money that you make right now.
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then offering you more money isn't going to be much of an incentive to you because you're like, well, I have enough right now. And like, but, but that's the thing is like, you need to know what you're going to spend it on and let's say that I would offer you two things to one of two possible rewards, one's money and the other's the thing you'd probably want to buy with that money. Then you might say, you know what? Up or go the money. I want the thing I'm going to buy with it anyway. Right. For example, things like pay raises and remote work and all of these challenges. Part of the discussion is.
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how much would you pay not to have to commute every day? And so like, you know, think about, you know, two jobs, you have the exact same job and it's being offered to you two ways and one is remote and the other's in office. What salary cut would you take just to keep the job remote and not have to go to the office? Cause now you're buying your way in that sense, you're literally buying your way out of the commute. That's right. But also let's say for example, opportunities for mastery. So...
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somebody offers you a job, but you realize that like, there's gonna be no pay increase, but all of a sudden you're gonna get training or you're going to get new experiences or it's going to be lower stress or it's going to be more interesting. Again, what would you do to have a more interesting job? What would you pay or what would you forgo to have a more interesting job? So there's all these little perks and all these little motivators. And some of them are not so little, some of them are very important, but money is only one.
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But part of the way we can think of money, because money is such a fungible means, we can say that money can be converted into other things. It's like, why forgo this money in order to buy, so to speak, this thing. And the reason I ask, actually, is because you know how when they have exit interviews, I say, why are people leaving? Majority of the time, companies will say, oh, but you're so valuable here. We're going to pay you more. And a person says, I'm still leaving. Money is not the number one reason people leave, actually. So to support what you were saying just now.
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Yeah, yes, you can't just put money in as a problem, which by the way, we're not against. We love it. However, the other problems like your relationship with your boss, are you doing meaningful work? Are you doing work that feeds into your values? Is the workplace the kind of place where you want to wake up in the morning and go to every day? Ironically, people can hate their jobs as long as they've got something else that they love from it.
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And this is something I find a lot of workplaces really don't get about employees. You can be motivated to do the job because you like the job, but you can also be motivated to do the job because you love what the job funds your ability to do. So let's say you're the kind of person that absolutely loves volunteering. You may hate your day job, but it pays you enough money that you can spend a lot of your remaining time volunteering. So let's say you've got a job, it pays very well, it's 40 hours a week, and you just...
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you know, tolerate your way through that, but you're motivated to do the job well because it's going to pay. It allows for that other thing that brings you joy. That's right. Yeah. And that can be a very strong motivator. So sometimes things outside of work or think about how many people do jobs they hate because they're motivated to care for their families and to provide the family. How many people go through hell in the workplace? And you ask yourself, like, how could they tolerate this? They hate their job so much.
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Ah, yes, but they love their families so much more. There's a personal incentive outside of this workspace. That's right. We honor that a lot. Actually, I would say, I don't even know if we honor that enough. And we think about the sacrifices that people make in our lives. For a lot of us, we were either related to folks and we know folks who have made a lot of personal sacrifices, sometimes dealing with jobs that they absolutely despise because they see a greater good to that. And so that's how they put up with it.
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But the problem is that we see workplaces sometimes trying to capitalize on that, take advantage of that. And when they do that, they often find that that's where they can run into trouble. People will tolerate that, but like when they start to feel that they're getting taken too much advantage of, things go down the hole. And that's where you see people like quitting and it's like, well, we could pay you more. It's not the money, you're taking advantage of me. And you're taking advantage of me, not just in monetary ways, but in other ways. In the way I get treated and the whole dynamic of the work culture.
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Earlier we were talking about do people follow you as a leader? There's an example, I think it was John Maxwell, who said, the next time you have an idea, try this, just put the end result or whatever the idea goal you have in mind on the screen and just be quiet. Don't say anything. Let the team come up with ideas on how to get there because the minute you start talking, everybody's going to agree with what you're saying.
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even though they had different ideas because, you know, we wanna protect our jobs, we wanna feel secure and not feel like we have a target on our back because we said something different. So what do you think of that of just saying, we're gonna get there, but what do you guys think we should do or use as a vehicle in order to get there? So it's a general principle we see in a lot of workplace leadership recommendations that the leaders speak last for exactly that reason. Yeah, leaders speak last.
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Put it out there, let everybody speak, and then you be the last one to talk. I think Simon Sinek, he also, don't be like that, lead us, eat last. That may be possible. I don't know Sinek's work as well. He's not a scientist. I'm mostly reading the scientists, the folks that actually do the underpinning work of what people call thought leadership. So borrowing from a whole lot of other scientists that are out there and many, many other business thinkers, they're borrowing from that. Now, some of them are also borrowing from experience. And so they're...
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One of the things that makes many business thought leaders who they are is that they're borrowing both from the research as well as their experience and they're putting the two together. And then what is the quality of life lab? I've never heard of that kind of lab before. So since a lot of my research is based on making workplaces great places to work and empowering people to do and be their best, that's really about the quality of people's lives. And self-actualization is about living a high quality life.
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It was also a tribute to my advisor, Mia Chiksetnihai and also Gina Kimura. They ran the Quality of Life Research Center. And so, being one of their students is sort of an offshoot of their lab. As a student that they launched, that was also just a hat tip to my mentors and my advisors. Chiksetnihai may rest in peace, has now gone, but I did want that hat tip to live on and commemorate who my teachers were. And...
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Also, I really appreciate the concept of like having a good quality of life. It's not just about the number of years that you live or the number of hours or minutes that you live. It's what's the nature of that experience during that time. So the things that I study, mentoring, creativity, flow, and then, you know, I apply it in topics relating to human capital, also do some research on hypnosis and looking at trans states, which also very much relates to flow experiences.
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because many flow experiences are built on top of the trance state. What we're doing with our attention, what we're paying attention to in our lives, that's the quality of our lives. Which brings the question, because we usually think there's this gray area between how much of my personal self do I bring to work? Because obviously at home, you're a different person at work, you're a different person. We were talking about how sometimes work is the motivator for you to take care of something at home. How much do I bring to work?
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If I'm going through so much at home, do I step into the office, put on this new persona, smile as if everything is okay? Do I have a trusted colleague? I sometimes just a little bit give them 10% of what I'm going through so they understand in case they see me, you know, standing on a corner sometimes. Do you bring any of that to work at all? Or this work persona and then when I leave the office, put on a new mask and then go home?
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I guess what I would say is in every context in which we find ourselves, we show different faces no matter where we go. When we go to the place where we do our hobbies, I'm religious, so there's a place where I go to worship and then there's the work that I go to and there's my time as a professor, there's my time as an HR consultant, there's my time as a scientist, my time as a writer, my time as a spouse, my time as a friend.
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It's always the same person, but different features are brought up or brought down. You might think of it as like, we've all got a personal equalizer that we can, you know, bring up, bring, you know, bring aspect up, bring frequencies down. It's always the same thing going, but we'll emphasize or de-emphasize things as we go. And as I said before, human beings are adaptable. So we adapt to our workplace. We figure out over, you know, some trial and error and information that we gathered, just how much of that personal side to bring in.
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If you work a day job, right, or night job or whatever else, like if you work a job, you find out, how much of myself do I bring here? How much of this skill do I bring? How much of that skill do I bring? How much of this attitude do I bring? How much of that attitude do I not bring? Yeah. So we'll dial parts of ourselves down and parts of ourselves up, but it's true for every context in which we find ourselves. Adaptability.
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And then speaking of workplace culture, so obviously in the last three years, things have changed so much with a lot of it going to Zoom. There are teams that have never met in person and they've probably worked together for like two to three years. Yeah. We have this little screen where we have our own biases and judgments and I've never met you in person, we've never had a water cooler conversation. Say instances where some have been judged
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unfairly on their performance based on how they act on screen. Because some people are not good on screen. Some people are a little shy. Some people are introverted. But it doesn't mean it affects their productivity. I mean, it happens on the screen. It happens off the screen. Like erroneous judgments happen everywhere. It shouldn't be a surprise. We make erroneous judgments in person when we have a lot more information. Some people might say that's the problem. We make erroneous judgments because we have too much information.
23:03
But we make erroneous judgments on the screen, exactly as you said, we have too little information. So it is happening all the time. We misapprehend what a person is really like. We make the mistake of thinking that if we know them on screen, we know them in real life. But we also make the mistake of saying, if I know you at work, then I know you in real life. Or if I know you in real life, then I know you at work. Or like one of the things I was talking with a colleague of mine once who mostly sees me as a scientist.
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and you know he made a comment about what my personality must be like and I said you've only ever seen me as a scientist. And you've seen the ballroom dancer in you? You've never met the ballroom dancer version of me. You've never seen me on the dance floor. You've never seen me skate. You've never seen me as a teacher. Each of these things, you know again I've got my own personal equalizer. Things that dial up, things that dial down. And as a scientist there's certain things that dial up.
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And I don't necessarily bring that everywhere I go. I can bring dial down versions of it. I can bring non-existent versions of it. We all do that. And therefore, if you're a leader and you have this team that you only see on Zoom, are there things you can do in order to bring more people in to get to know your team better, to get them more engaged? You can, absolutely. And I always recommend, it was much as possible. Whenever you've got a remote team...
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make sure that as early as possible, like you've got off-sites, like you have times when you're getting together and yes, you're saving money, you don't have an office, all the rest of that stuff. Take some of that money and invest it in making sure that people can be in the same room. And I'll just give you a very silly example, like when people are in a room with me versus when people are on Zoom with me, one of the things is that this little box you see doesn't usually show my hand gestures.
24:46
I happen to be one of those people that uses a lot of hand gestures. I gesture with my hands a lot. I say a lot of things. They use it for emphasis. None of that's coming through on the screen. I'm like, I'm looking down and making a gesture with my hands right now. That's like, as I'm saying, none of that's going through on the screen. It's like, but you can't see me do that with my hands. And so there's a whole piece to this conversation that you and I aren't getting in the same thing for you. I have no idea. There's a whole lot of things you're doing with your hands on this that I just cannot see. And so like, what?
25:15
is hidden in your communication that I may not be getting. What nuances, what incredible pieces of information are being lost to me. When you talk about hand gestures, you remind me, I had a previous guest, his name is Steve Carvatota, and he said the one thing when he's doing a public speech, sometimes they give you a podium. He says, there's nothing I fear more than podiums. I'm like, I've never heard someone say that before. What's going on? He says,
25:43
Roberta, I'm Italian, I need my hands to move and the podium restricts me. I agree with him. Funnily enough, I was just at the International Positive Psychology Conference in Vancouver and I gave a talk on flow. Anybody who's heard me give a talk before, they all know, I don't stand in front of the podium. I took a portable mic and I walked away from the podium and I'm walking around waving my hands saying stuff. Similar thing, like I speak with my hands a lot and I use a lot of hand gestures and so...
26:09
I want to be away from the podium. The podium you see just, you know, about the same as what you see on a Zoom screen. But I'm not here to give you a speech. You're not here to give me a speech. Free yourself, Dr. Davis. There you go. Exactly. But we have to think about the fact that when we're taking electronic communications, even things as personal, so to speak, as Zoom, we actually are losing a lot of information. We don't have that information.
26:36
Research has actually shown that we're not so good at assessing the tones of email. We don't really know. We don't know what the tone is. And just think about the fact that there's so many neutral things that you can say. And when it's just text, you have no idea what the tone is and you're inferring it. You think you know, but you don't always. And sometimes even emojis don't help to show that, Hey, I'm actually in a good mood, I'm smiling while I'm sending you this.
27:03
Yeah, and sometimes we'll even misspeak or we'll say something that's erroneous, but our facial expressions or our tone and so on, like we say the wrong words, but we say them with a smile. And like, so what does that mean? Is that an ironic smile? Is that a friendly smile? But we're better reading that information, whereas if it's just words, we don't know. And even in Zoom, like if I say something that's somewhat ambiguous, so you're going to draw on your knowledge of me as to what that actually means.
27:32
But the reality is, especially we've never met face to face, you don't know me that well. You don't know my hand gestures. But if you've seen me speak with hand gestures, you might even see my shoulders move, which you can do. And if anybody's watching this on video and they see it very carefully, they'll see my shoulders have been moving a lot throughout this whole conversation. And those who've seen me in person, they know that there's a whole bunch of hand gestures that are below those shoulders. As they get to know those, they start to infer what's going on and they're better at it.
28:02
We get those subtleties of communication and we can remember those. That's why they say it's only 7% verbal, the rest of it is body language and tone. I don't know the numbers, not a linguist on that one, but certainly there's a lot that is beyond the words and the tone and things like that. But it's also body language and context. And ironically, even credibility. So for instance, you know, you say something, do I believe you?
28:30
You say, I'm going to X or you say, I think X. Do I believe that you're the kind of person who says what they think? If you say, I think X, can I believe you? Or to what extent might I think that you're trying to tell me what I want to hear? Are you the kind of person that tells me what you think I want to hear? Or are you the kind of person that tries to provoke me? Or are you the kind of person that tries to just put themselves out there? And I am who I am and that's it. I just gave three possibilities, but there are so many more.
29:00
And so like that's also context that people have to get to know. For instance, I'm often known as a straight shooter. Like people don't always expect straight shooters. And so I'll say stuff and sometimes they're like, well, if I'm taking you at face value and I'm like, yes, take that at face value, I'm shooting straight here. But they don't necessarily expect to do that. And so if you take that straight shooting and put it on text by email, will the other person think, Oh, this is Datsun here.
29:28
Yeah, but I also do want to point out that being a straight shooter doesn't mean you can't be diplomatic. You can, like, you can still be a straight shooter and be diplomatic. For one of my favorite examples of this is Damien with Faint Phrase. I can say something like, Yep, that's okay. And you know what I mean. And that's the whole point. I've been a very straight shooter about something, you know what I mean? But the tone, see, the that's okay is the 7%, it's the verbal. The tone is the biggest message underlying there, for sure.
29:57
And then when you work with your clients, you help them with hiring back to the pandemic. There's so much global working together, offices in different countries. Would you like to share some of the experiences you've had or some of the challenges they have with hiring, getting the best talent for their organizations? Sure, I would say that the number one challenge is, people don't know what they want. Oh. That's often the biggest thing is to say, you know,
30:23
they think that they want a certain kind of person, or they think they need certain skills, or they think that they're trying to produce certain things in certain ways, they get overly specific, or in other cases, they don't get specific enough. And so as they're trying to figure out whom to hire and they wanna figure out what their hiring process is going to be, I'll sort of come in and I'll help them out with like, okay, let's take a look at the job description, let's take a look at the nature of the job, let's take a look at like, what are you doing in your hiring process?
30:53
And where are you introducing bias, for example, since some of my work in DEI is really picking apart the hiring process and saying, where might you be introducing unnecessary bias? And here I'm not even just talking about demographic bias. I'm talking about all that, as well as many other unnecessary biases that might be getting you the wrong candidates or the wrong hires. Okay, so you found the right person. How are you making sure that they plug in correctly?
31:19
What kind of culture are you advertising? And what is the discrepancy between the kind of culture you're advertising and the kind of culture you're living? So I've talked with managers sometimes even about performance reviews. And people say, what does a performance review have to do with hiring? Well, you hire the person and then they're gonna perform and then you're gonna review them. You might wanna be thinking about how you're going to assess their performance as you're building out that hiring document. And as you're building out that hiring document. Reverse engineer, yes. Exactly. Which is what you said on your tech talk.
31:48
funnily enough, you know, the times when I was, you know, applying for jobs and you know, people would ask me about this, like part of what I'd ask is, how would you know that I've done an amazing job? Now, assume you hired me and six months from now, I'm getting a performance review. How do you know that I did a good job? Yeah. I'm asking that during the job interview. I want to know six months down the line, you know, how are you going to evaluate my performance? Because part of this is like, you know, you're asking, can I do a good job? But I'm also asking myself, can I do a good job? Will I do a good job? Because if I'm not going to do a good job,
32:17
I don't want to work for you. I don't belong here and that's okay. Right. We sometimes divorce the hiring criteria from the performance management criteria. But they're interrelated literally. Yes, but a lot of companies don't actually think that way. And so people can sometimes get surprised during their performance review with like, why was that more important? Most commonly where they divorce is the weight that things are giving.
32:44
So the way that they'll weight something on the hiring process, for example, in hiring processes, you see a very, very heavy weight on technical skills, but then you'll see during the performance review, it's a lot more emphasis on people skills. This is why we're here. You get promoted because Erin, you are so good at your technical skills. You're a subject matter expert. The reason clients come to the company is because of you. And then to reward you, we give you this promotion to manage 10 people.
33:13
And people are not your thing. And now suddenly we come around and we tell you, you're not good at your job. Well, the Peter principle that you get promoted to your level of incompetence. But besides that, funnily enough, companies need to start creating exactly as you say, two tracks. One is what I call the consultant track or the client track, and the other is the wizard track. And companies need to start creating the wizard track. Now, the thing with wizards is they're often very solitary, highly skilled people.
33:42
who can do anything, but they don't want to be bothered. Yes. And we have to start creating tracks of people, especially in the technical skills, where it's like, these people need an interface. They don't want to be bothered with most people, and they like it that way. And they're the best when they talk to no one. They just need to dive in and make their thing, and they're extremely good at it. You never want to lose those people. I'm not talking about people that have zero people skills. Those people, yeah, you don't want those anyway.
34:10
But the ones that you don't necessarily interface well, and what a lot of consulting is, is translating between the very technical stuff and everybody else, like the people that don't have the technical knowledge. A lot of that is the bridge building. So you have like the wizards and you have the bridge builders. And so you have the wizard track where, you're really good at the technical stuff, we promote you, we'll keep giving you more money, more responsibility, we'll give you harder challenges. And...
34:37
There's the bridge building track. You've got technical skills. You can build things. You can do things, but you've also got people skills. So you know how to interface with wizards. You know how to interface with clients. You know how to interface with subordinates. You know how to interface with seniors. And like you can translate strategy into action. And that's that translation, that bridge building is the track we usually think about, but we've got to start adding that wizard track. Which I'll be honest and I admit confession time.
35:04
When we talk about leadership skills here, that, oh, when you build those relationship soft skills, interpersonal skills, and you're good with people, and you translate strategy into action, that's how you're gonna accelerate your career. But we don't emphasize the wizard trick enough. They should be allowed to just keep diving deeper into that rather than, oh, we're gonna reward you by letting you manage 20 people.
35:29
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, ironically, sometimes like having that interface is the best part. And there's a whole lot of really amazing interfaces out there that don't have wizards and a whole lot of wizards that don't have interfaces. And part of what we could be doing is we're evolving the workplace. And part of what we've been discovering during the pandemic is many of us have started getting this stronger identity of wizard versus bridge builder.
35:54
And like, it's one of the things I was talking about before about like business thought leaders, right? So some people, like there's a lot of the scientists out there. Like I didn't, I don't know Simon Sinek's work as well because he's more of a bridge builder, whereas I know more of the wizards. Yes, the scientists and those are the ones we learn from them. Yeah. But they, many scientists, for example, are not always the best writers for the public. And so often they need those bridge builders. Some writers are actually really, really good. Chick-Sent-Ni Hai was a very good writer.
36:24
That's one of the reasons why he was writing both New York Times bestsellers and he was doing cutting edge science. There are some people like that. And I've met quite a few, but then there are some people that are just, they're just wizards. They're brilliant. They can come up with amazing ideas that almost nobody understands. I finally, I was talking with a colleague last week at the Positive Psychology Conference. She is super brilliant. But one of the things that she and I were talking about is that not a lot of people understand her work.
36:52
It's hard to understand and I was actually... To translate it in layman's terms. It's hard to translate her work into layman's terms. Like I was, and part of like our discussion was I was actually asking her a few questions that I had about her work that I was still trying to like understand because she's just one of those, you know, super brilliant esoteric scientists. Right. I think that her work will become more influential over the years. People will start to understand what she's saying. Mm-hmm.
37:18
Any last word for leaders who lead global organizations, especially in this Zoom era? Go for the core values. Lead from core values because one of the things that we find is that many, many, many values can be understood universally, even if they're not agreed upon. Let's say we talk about something like, let's say communal versus individualistic. So if a CEO is able to lead explaining the company's values,
37:46
Even if they're individualistic, if they explain why that is, and they hold to that deeply and they really dig deep into the value of the individualism that the company is reporting, there'll be ways to build bridges from that individualism to the collectivism, or vice versa. Because people do understand what this all means. You can find ways to build a bridge if you understand why it is individualistic, because then you can take the spirit of that ethos and translate it into the pragmatism.
38:16
of something else. You can figure out how to translate that. Again, you need the bridge builders. And I've met plenty of people, by the way, who are really good managers and horrible leaders and vice versa. I know people that are good leaders and good managers, bad leaders and bad managers. And part of what you need to think about is that management is a lot more the bridge building. Leadership is about the defining. So in some ways, you can have a leader that's a wizard, you can have a leader that's a bridge builder. Obviously it's best if they can do both.
38:44
But if you're not one of those people that does both, that's fine, but then surround yourself with the bridge builders. That's like when people talk about Steve Jobs as being such a great leader, he was not a bridge builder. He was a wizard. And part of what made Apple successful is that Jobs had a team of bridge builders around him. In some cases, they were interfacing for it. To translate whatever was going on here, yeah. And that's it. And so if you're a leader that's working in a global organization, you know.
39:12
great if you've got that, you know, multicultural competence. There's a number of thought leaders out there that are, you know, talking about cultural competence, including a scientist, Andy Malinsky at Brandeis University, alma mater. He's doing a lot on, you know, cultural competence and, you know, cross-medical training and, you know, code switching and things like that. He does great work on that. But if you're not one of the folks that's good at that, then surround yourself with people who are and who can understand you and translate, you know, across those boundaries.
39:41
And many people are much better at that than they think. Because nobody expects you to be good at everything or know everything. Well, actually, a lot of people expect us to be good at everything. You know, that's actually part of the problem. Orin said that, not me. Yeah, but I actually do point out that that is a big problem in the workplace. We expect unicorns. We expect everybody to be unicorns. It's something I also do when I'm advising companies and hiring them. Like, you know, this is a human being you're looking for, right? I want somebody.
40:09
who can magically do technical things, human things, and this thing and that thing and that thing and that thing and they'll take a salary of $50,000 a year. No, they won't. Sometimes I have to explain that to clients and just say to them, like, no, that's not going to happen. Or like, we in the HR recruiting space, we tell like, you know, really funny stories of like job descriptions that say things like, we want somebody with 10 years of experience with ChatGPT. ChatGPT hasn't existed for 10 years.
40:39
to work or where was it 10 years? Well, that's exactly my point. It's like when we get good laughs out of these, like, yeah, I was something who's got 10 years experience with this. They're experts at it. You mean you want the inventors of it? I mean, sure, but they're not gonna work for $50,000 a year plus equity. Dr. Oren Davis, the computational neuroscientist and HR consultant whose mission is to make workplaces great places to work. One last thing.
41:08
If I want to work for an organization and possibly not have all the information about them because they're going to interview me on Zoom, they're going to hire me on Zoom, what is another way I can best prepare myself to see that this is the place I want to be in? So I think a lot of it is the questions that you bring forth, you know, doing your research on the company. Avoid public review sites. I mean, everybody says, you know, go look on Glassdoor or whatever. In general, take reviews with a grain of salt.
41:36
but rather come with your own questions. But before you ask the questions and before you get into the interview, part of your preparation is not just, what's the question I wanna ask, but what do I expect the answer to be? What's a good answer? What's a bad answer? Because they're gonna have answers to the questions, but not always are they good answers. And not always are we prepared for ascertaining what's a good answer or a bad answer. So I think that the extra step people need to take, do your research,
42:05
come up with your questions. But before you get on that interview, ask yourself, like, what answers are good answers and what answers are bad answers? And recognize that sometimes, you know, if you're doing that level of research and homework, they may not be prepared to answer some of those questions. Be okay with that. But then also make sure you find the answers to the questions before you start. That's a good one. What answers would be good? That is actually very good. I've never heard it boom-boom like that.
42:32
Thank you so much, Dr. Orin Davis, Chief Science Officer of the Quality of Life Lab and Self-Extralization Engineer. And before you go, where can we find you if we want to hear more of this wisdom? So you can check out my work on my website. It's www.qllab.org, Q-L-L-A-B.org. Q-L-L-A-B.org.
42:58
Thank you for being on the show. This has been amazing and very educational. Thank you. It's been wonderful. Thanks. My pleasure. Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show, please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network where there are many other podcasts that support you.
43:27
in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network, go to bepodcastnetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.