Speaking and Communicating Podcast

It's about how communication leads to motivation and engagement, how that leads to performance and how that leads to results. So that is the link I'm talking about all the time. Welcome back to the speaking and communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta Ndlela. 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 an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us. By the end of this episode, log on to Apple and Spotify.
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Leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. Let's get communicating.
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today's episode, we have Anthony Lacinai, who is a workplace communication expert. He co wrote and wrote 14 books, one of which we will discuss on this episode. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Anthony. Hi, how are you? I'm doing fantastic. How are you? Very good. Thank you.
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Welcome to the show. Please tell all our listeners where you're from. Cause I think it's the first time I have a guest from that country. So I am, I live in Sweden, Scandinavia, way up North in Europe. I was born here as well, even though my parents are not from Sweden. So they came from other parts of Europe to Sweden. They met in Sweden and here I am more or less. And how cold is it there in the coldest winter?
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Oh, it's pretty vast country when it comes to size. So if the way up north, it's really cold. Then we are up in the Arctic circle. I live in the south of Sweden, so it doesn't become that cold. It's still minus degrees, but it's not like super cold. I think that where I live, we have, if it's really, really cold, it's 10, 10, 15 degrees Celsius, I mean, below freezing point, but that's very seldom. Normally it's, it's around freezing points. Right. In the winter.
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Very wise to live in the South indeed. So tell us a little bit about yourself. I am a husband, a father of two sons who the youngest one just left for universities. So we have this empty nest syndrome going on right now. Very, very proud and happy, but at the same time, there is some melancholy as well going on right now. So yeah, have a good life here. My background is basically I come from a working class environment. So as well, I had to.
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work hard, study hard to, to kind of become something. And since I haven't a gene for practicalities, I'm really bad when it comes to assembling or repairing things, I needed to be good at something else and I, I found I had a talent for communication, even though when I was very young, I didn't know that it was called communication or anything like that, it seemed that when I spoke, people listened, could have good conversations, even at a young age. Things like that kind of
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which mean the trajectory towards developing that side of me. And I have been actually ever since somehow in one way or another. That's interesting. I've had guests who, when they started this career, some of them had been told as kids, you talk too much. No kids should be talked this much. You need to be quiet. So that means grownups in Sweden are very good. They actually encourage kids to speak.
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Well, they do. You know, I remember being only seven or eight years old and in this parent teacher meeting where the principal talked and then she asked if anyone had any questions and a hundred people didn't say anything, didn't raise their hands. So I did because I had a question and just being seen and heard and respected and listened to. And I think that made an impact on me. And ever since.
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I've been working to develop that side of me, not only speaking, but also communicating in both ways. So, so both conversations and, and presentations. And I realized because I was like seven or eight years old, I'm, when we record this, I'm 55 and I'm still not the master of anything. I spent more time on this, but there's still so much to do, so much to do and to learn and so on. So it's an ongoing process for sure.
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It certainly is. None of us are, even when we talk about public speaking, we also make mistakes when we give speeches. Nobody is a master or is perfect at it. And then when you graduated from university, did you start doing this or did you have a different career before that? My career is a bit different. So after high school, I went into the military service and when I came out, I was just fed up of more studying. So I started to work.
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And then I started to educate myself while working. And after that, I've been taking university classes, but still working. So I've never been completely. Or at the university. It's always been like something I did as well as working. So, so I had a different type of career, perhaps I started off in the corporate way. You know, starting to work with in corporations, did that for about 16 years, climbing the ladder or whatever. And finally I decided to stop.
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all that and just, you know, go my own way and be self-employed and then do what I love most. I didn't have to go through all the internal politics of big large corporations and things like that, which is not really my thing. You can be a good communicator perhaps, but sometimes you just don't like some of the communication. And also I found that it was so stimulating to help other people as well get that sparkle in their eyes and so on.
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I quit that job, my last job in 2006 and started my own company and I haven't regretted it ever since I did that. So it's been 17 years now and I just keep going. I love what I do. I can see it in your eyes. So everybody listening, I hope they're going to also pick up that energy. So when you started, you were going to help people with what? I remember when I started the company, I had three offers. One was presentation skills training.
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That was an easy one because I've done so much of it myself, you know, being trained and I've talked so many other coaches and so on saying, just go for it, go for it. So I did that early on. I also acted as an MC because I had done that lots of times internally for the company I worked for. And then I also facilitated some workshops. So I did those three in the beginning and I found them really interesting, really fun. And when I left then the corporate world, that's what I did in the beginning.
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And then after a while, people say, okay, this is good. You know, it's always good to have like a two day or three day training for instance. But can you give us something? We have a conference for instance, can give us something like in an hour or something like that. And that's how I started to do more and more speaking engagement. And then I joined just like five, six, seven years ago, I joined the national speakers association in Sweden.
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And so I met like-minded people, other professional speakers and moderators. And I found that they are so generous with their ideas and thoughts and everything like that. So I just enjoyed it so much. And I decided to, you know what, I'm going to do much more of the speaking side, not only the training and facilitation side. That's been a transformation. So for the last five years or so, I do much more speaking gigs than anything else right now. So speaking is my main.
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business, you can say I speak for a living and then I also still do trainings and facilitations and so on, but it's kind of the second leg. So my first one is keynoting actually. What do you think gives you that just excites you about speaking compared to you love the other things as well, but what about speaking is that extra special for you? There are a couple of things that I really enjoy when it comes to it. One is
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It is, I mean, to be, I mean, I'm going to be honest, it's an ego boost. How, how many jobs do you have when you get applause for doing your job? I mean, that's, that's just amazing. You know, pinch my arm. I get paid to do this, but apart from my ego trip, it's also finding ways where I can see how people digest what I talk about when they internalize it, when they feel that, you know, this is useful. I can use this in my day to day work.
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whatever communication insights or engagement tips or goal setting strategies I can offer and they can just embrace it and do something with it. I just love it. You know, if you, if you give something, you can be happy too. It's like altruism. You are happy when you give something. That's not a bad thing. Why not have a win-win situation? So I am happy when I can give something, but I also get something back. Of course, it certainly is a win-win situation. And therefore when you.
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are with the audience and obviously the topics that you mentioned that you usually speak about, you don't talk about all of them in one speech. So you pick based on the audience that today I'll focus on goal setting, today I'll focus on this. How do you decide or how do you do the level of research where you say this audience needs this right now? That has been done before. I have somebody who actually assigns, oh, it gives me the assignments.
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So let's say that it's one company, they have a conference, for instance, an internal conference, they want to have an inspirational speech about something and they ask me. So obviously when they ask me, they know that they will not have anything about Excel sheets or CRM systems or AI, because that's not my expertise. So they know what they want, but then we talk, then I found out that this is what they want, they want to talk about how to meet, greet and treat each other. For instance, fine. Let's go that direction and then give, say, give examples of.
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when people are doing this really well, or some crash and burn stories as well. And then give them some tips and insights around that. Or they say, you know, this is a sales audience. We need to talk more about how to build relationships with customers. Okay, fine. It's still communication. It's just another target audience, so to say. And then I give examples for them specifically. It's more like me giving the right examples because the core is the same. It's about how communication leads to motivation and engagement, how that leads to performance.
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and how that leads to results. So that is the link I'm talking about all the time. And sometimes they wanna focus on the performance development side. And then we talk about motivational boosters, meaningful goals, self leadership. Sometimes they wanna focus on engagement first and foremost. And then we start there and then we expand from there into what you need in order to get engagement going. Well, for instance, you need to communicate well.
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And then we talk about communication. It depends on where they are. I just asked the questions. What do you want to have and why do you want to have it? What is, what is your goal? What is the purpose of this event? How can I contribute? We start there and then finding out, you know, who is in the audience. What are they thinking about right now? What is there and dreams and hopes and aspirations and worries and so on. If it's an audience with like 500 people, I cannot pick everyone's brain. I need to.
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figure out some sort of common denominator here or what the organizer is asking, telling me to focus on and so on. But then when we speak and when I give my stories and so on, they are so, I wouldn't say generic, but they are in such a way that it kind of, most people will relate to it somehow. Most people have been really happy or really disappointed or run into problems of one kind or another or bad, or bad behavior from somebody or bad customer service or whatever.
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They have done that. They have all experienced it. So it makes it easy for me to do that, connect with them and build from there. Yeah, certainly. When you gave your TEDx talk, six communication truths. One of the exercises you did to engage your audience was that one inch nose up and it looks arrogant versus.
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That was really fun to watch and they really enjoyed it as well. You could tell they were having fun. Can you please explain that exercise to us? Yeah, so what I say is that I've discovered that the difference between looking arrogant or normal is only one inch. One inch in centimeters is about 2.54 centimeters. So depending on where in the world you are, now you know both. And then I asked them to look at each other and say something like, hi, nice to meet you.
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And then they have to do it one more time, but this time the lift their nose one inch and feel the difference, how they all of a sudden look arrogant or superior or something like that. And they just start to laugh. Of course, this was like in 2017 that I did my TEDx. So it's been a while now. But what I say nowadays, I follow this up by saying, this is what you have been doing throughout the pandemic and on every video meeting since you put your laptop in your lap.
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And now I have to look at your untrimmed nostrils. I have seen too many of them. We talk about that. We have a fun time about them with that as well. A great example of audience engagement. What would you say is important about making sure your audience is engaged while you give your keynote? I mean, if they're not engaged, they will zone out. It's that easy, especially in the virtual environment that we've been living through a couple of years. There's so many other distractions going on.
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They can do so many other things. And even if this is an in-person event, if I don't engage them somehow, they don't feel that whatever I say is relevant or interesting or the way I speak is without energy, they will zone out, they will think about other things. I will lose them. Everyone who speaks will lose them at one point or another. You cannot keep them, you know, 100% concentrated or what you say for like an hour. You can't, they will drift off. You say something that will remind them of something else.
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But the more you focus on helping them co-create, for instance, asking them questions, you know, it could be a rhetorical question. What is the meaning of this? Just by asking that question, they will start to think about the meaning of that. And then I can deliver an answer and they will say, oh, okay. Yeah, that's, that's what. And so, so I tried to kind of engage them as much as I can and also interact with them. So even if it's a pure keynote, it's not, it's not a training or anything like that. It's a keynote. I still want them to feel that they are with me in that journey.
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and co-create from time to time if they can. Doesn't mean that they have to do beehives. It's just a matter of making them feel that they are part of the experience somehow. Or you don't come with, hey, I know I'm the authority on this topic. You should listen to me for the next 45 minutes. You know, but sometimes I say there is no such thing as a communication expert, and I'm one of them, which is kind of strange. But it means that it's such a vast topic.
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such an enormous topic once you open that door, that you cannot claim to be an expert in everything. I have friends who focus completely on the voice. You know, it's all they talk about. It's the voice. They can tell me things like, Anthony, some people say that the eye is the entrance to the soul. It's wrong. It's the voice they say and they talk about the voice and all the things about the voice. And they are such nerds and I love them for it. It's just so fun to listen to them.
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Or they talk about something else within communication. It could be conflict management or resolution. It could be talking only about that or only about feedback or only about something else. But I've decided since I always work with people that are in the workplace, that's my kind of area where I work. I decided to take a step back or a step up and just look at it more holistically first. You know, what is it we talk about here? We talk about how we meet, greet and treat each other. Okay, fine. In that space, we need to communicate in order to get.
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people motivated and engaged. How do you do that? How do we do with work with conversations? How do we work with presentations? How do we work with, and so on, how do we work with meetings? How can we make sure that we have engaging meetings? And I build it from a higher level, so to say more holistic level. And then I deep dive into certain areas and then we can talk about voice or we can talk about feedback or we can talk about whatever, but it's kind of two different ways of looking at it. I decided to be more of a generalist within my specific field.
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And most people. So you do the overview of this is what I focus on the workplace and then what is needed there specifically. Yes. And then within that area, I still have kind of blind spots where I don't believe that I'm very good. And then I say so, so to my clients and other places I'm really good at. So, so I'd focus more on that. Like presentation skills training. I can do that for any client more or less tomorrow. And what I've done for so many years. Right.
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And not only is communication very vast as a topic, but also you can go to one, unless this has not been your experience, you can go to one corporate client. You talk about goal setting, but because of what they need at the time, it can take a bit of a different angle than a different corporate client who's also discussing goal setting, no. Oh yeah. Because again, words have different meanings for different people.
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We can use the exact same word, but we talk about different things. So we really have some sort of parallel communication going on. I think that I understand what you're saying. You think that I understand what you're saying, but we don't. And I have experienced this. I mean, it wasn't that long ago when I had an assignment where I was completely sure that I understood what the customer wanted. We kept talking and then I realized that no, she wants something completely different. She thought that when I took on that assignment, I would also do
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XYZ. And for me, that was clearly not the case. I did ABC, but it was just like the same words meant different things to us. So I'm so happy that we figured that one out before the actual delivery because then we can do something about it. But it took us a while to realize that we're not talking the same language, even though we're using the same language, so to say. Very interesting and very easy to fall into that trap. We certainly do. And I think that's one of the reasons sometimes you have conflict.
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because the one person is thinking, but this is so clear. And you are actually saying it back to me, which means you understood it the way I intended for the message to be interpreted. But you find that their filter took them on a whole different trajectory. The word conflict is one of those words that we misinterpreted so many times as well. Because conflict, when I look into the dictionary of conflict, I see battle, I see war, I see Putin, what he's doing against Zelensky right now.
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That's a conflict. But most of us use conflict as every type of disagreements or misunderstanding. And then people say that it's really good to have conflicts because then we develop. I don't believe that at all. When I have an interpretation of conflicts as being something really bad, when I have to win in order and you have to lose, then I don't want any conflict. I want to be afraid of conflicts because I want people to be solving the problem before it becomes infectious, before it becomes a conflict.
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So I say, be very brave when you disagree, make sure that you have a psychological safety and respect when you disagree, because then you can develop. But as soon as you let it become a conflict, it's too late. So using the word conflict, you know, again, we need to figure out what do we mean? Do we talk about general disagreement or do we talk about real war? What is it that we talk about? Or is it a scale in between those two? That's just one word where we need to figure out what we really mean.
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in order for us to have a good conversation afterwards. That is so interesting. It's the first time I had a guest when we talk about that concept, who has that perspective? Because you know how even when you say, let me Google the 10 soft skills a leader needs, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, they don't say disagreement resolution. Conflict resolution. Disagreement development instead or something like that, because then it makes sense.
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You're right. It does sound like war and there's going to be a casualty in any war, which means whatever I say, when I'm disagreeing with you, if my mindset is already on a conflict, I have to win. You're going to have to lose for me to feel like something was achieved. Obviously in any team, that's not going to be very productive. No, it's not. So I disagree with people who talks about constructive conflicts. I don't see conflicts as constructive at all.
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But that's because my view of conflicts is what I read in the dictionary. Because at the end of the day we want a win-win situation. Wouldn't that be really nice if we can achieve that? For sure, for sure. And then you say when it comes to leadership, empathy is the new black. That was, I said he has to copyright this as the first time I've heard of such a beautiful phrase about empathy. How did you come up with that?
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I don't know. I cannot remember how I came up with that. Well, perhaps I watched Orange is the New Black a few years ago or something on Netflix, but empathy is the new black. Yeah. Okay. So after my decades of studying the topic of communication, I've kind of aggregated everything into three communicative superpowers on the highest level. So you have empathy, which I believe is number one empathy so that you feel that I get you, or at least that I try. I'm curious. I'm interested in you.
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I focus on being interested instead of interesting. So that's empathy then. And studies have shown that if you have leaders with high perceived level of empathy, you will have much more engagement within the teams than, than if you don't much more like 70, 80% compared to 15 to 30% and again, engagement leads to performance and performance leads to results. So you want people to be engaged. So that's where I start. Also, when I talk about presentation skills, unless you have an interest in who you talk to.
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How can you make sure that what you then say makes sense to them? So empathy is number one. Empathy is the new black. But then there's two more superpowers. The second superpower then is clarity. So if empathy is you understanding me, then clarity is for me to understand you. Let's have a conversation, you and I, and then I'm supposed to say something to you that makes sense. So first I need to be empathetic. I need to understand where you're coming from.
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Now, when I've done that, now it's time for me to turn it around and be clear to you. And I can't be clear unless I know where you are. Unless I know your communication style, unless I know your preferences, unless I know the words you want to use, I don't know anything about you unless I ask you and listen to the response. So empathy first, clarity second, and energy as well. Then as a third perhaps, energy is mostly visible in the nonverbal communication. So now we're talking about
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how you use your voice, your body language, your symbolic language, things like that. All of the things that can ooze energy, positive, negative, or no energy. If you look at those three, people want to follow you if you have high empathy. They will trust you. They will feel more loyal to you because they realize that you're really interested in people. You care about them. They will also follow you if you make them feel smart, which is clarity. If you can make them feel smart, they will follow you. Just look at the political system.
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People who are too academic lose people and their voters immediately. People are really simple in the language, you know, gain voters. That's why they use a lot of simple language many times, sometimes dumb language, but we don't have to go into that. And then energy again, you know, if you have high energy, you would be like a magnet, people would be drawn to you. And of course I would love to help people with positive, good, kind, warm energy rather than the negative cold.
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one, but both actually engage people because now emotions are at play and if emotions are at play, then things can happen. When you describe energy like that, is that executive presence or do we sometimes confuse executive presence with, hey, this guy when he enters the room, everything changes or everybody stops and stares? Executive presence, when I talk about this, it's about having a
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balance between high energy and high control. So if you have only high energy, but no control, you become a clown. That is not executive presence. And if you have high control, but low energy, that is boring. That is not the executive presence. You want to have both of them pretty high. Adam, you come from South Africa. It's always said that when Nelson Mandela entered the room, people would just turn towards him. He had something going on.
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And I'm guessing that that is executive presence in that case. It could of course be subtle things like one person started turn around another one, another one. And then everyone turns around to watch him. He was the one, right? But it's, it's about kind of finding that balance and controlling your energy, but while still keeping it high. That's what I personally believe is some sort of executive presence. Does it make sense to you when I say that? It does. And speaking of former president, Nelson Mandela, I remember.
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There was someone who worked at a hospital and the president had to go for some procedure. So they were standing there saying, how are the president Mandela is coming? She said you can almost tangibly feel his energy when he walked right past her. She said you can almost touch it. That's rare, but he was also a rare person. Otherwise we wouldn't remember him so much. Right, yes.
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And then there's a clip of yours that I like on YouTube where, so you were an MC at an event and you were telling this joke about how to tell different nationalities, some of the nationalities in Europe, how to make them shut up, which I thought was very interesting. So please tell our listeners the joke again.
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Okay. Here's the, here's the background to the story. I was being an MC for a two day business event of an arena. It's about 11,000 people. So it's big. You have Simon Sinek on the stage. You have John Maxwell on the stage, Gary Caspar of, you know, big names, Ariana Huffington, all of those. And it was a two day thing. After the first day, the organizer came to me and said, thank you so much, Anthony, for today, tomorrow, tomorrow morning. He said he was from Finland. Yes. Can you make a joke? And I said,
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Uh, yes, I'm not a comedian, but I can get by, I guess in this role, I didn't decide to make any jokes, but he wanted me to make a joke. So I woke up four o'clock in the morning. I couldn't go back to sleep. I needed to figure out a joke. So when everyone came back in, this was an international crowd. I said something like, how can you make an Italian person shut up? And then I said, you tied the hands behind their back. Now they can't speak. We all know this, that stereotyping of.
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people from the Mediterranean always using their hands. And when I, when I talked to you about this right now, I'm using my hands a lot because my parents are from that area. And then I got some laughter of that one. And then I said, how do you make a Swede shut up my country? Uh, well, you just turn off PowerPoint. I said, and the people, this was in Finland, the neighboring country. They know all about Sweden. So they just laughed as well. But then I asked what you need to do to make a Finn shut up. And the stereotypes of Finns are that they are really.
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They don't speak much at all. They are harsh and quiet. So I asked them, what do you need to do to make a Finch shut up? And you had like five, six thousand people in the audience just from Finland. And then I said, nothing. And that was enough for them to just burst out in laughter. And everyone was just having a good time with that one. Now, when I tell this story now, it's not the same than if you have like thousands of people in the audience. Everyone starts to laugh. It was a good feeling. I can tell you it was good because I had some anxiety before that.
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What should I say to these people? You know, what joke should I give them right now? But it worked. So it was fun. It certainly worked. And yes, the reaction was amazing to be assigned a joke or to feel like you do need humor when you think, Oh, that's not my strong suit. What am I going to say? It does feel like a bit of pressure. And speaking of Italians, I had a guest before this and he said to me, Roberta.
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I have a phobia for podiums, you know, sometimes when you present, they give you a podium and the mic is especially for an MC. He said, I'm Italian. I have to move my hands. Podiums scare me. When I first heard that about Italians, I'm like, oh yeah, that's exactly what Steve said. Yeah. You know, I remember I was coaching and a Brazilian woman, she was a dancer from Brazil and she was all over the place. And I said to her, your, your next task.
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is to stand absolutely still and deliver your message. No movements. And this is the first time I've ever asked anyone to do that because normally I have to ask them to do more movements because especially in the Nordic countries, they are kind of pretty stiff when it comes to body language. But for her, I said the opposite. I said to her, just stand still, do nothing with your body and deliver your message to get that clarity because it wasn't clear because she was, again, she was almost dancing on the stage. And she stood there like for 10 silent seconds.
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trying to say something without moving her body. And finally she said, I can't do it. She said, she was too much for her to do that exercise. And we had a laugh about that as well. And then we just kept on going because I wanted her to be in control of her body language. So she didn't have control of her energy. So I wanted to, you know, the balance between energy and control. She didn't have that. She had all the words, but it was kind of lost in translation, lost in her dance more
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make sure that she was much more focused. So yeah, it's a challenge for some, but then it's a challenge for other people to even express themselves non-verbally because they don't know how to do it. And that's another challenge that we need to help them with meaningful gestures and talk about unzipping. You know, there's a zipper from the armpit to the wrist sometimes, sometimes, and people just don't move much. And then they unzip it to the elbow and then they have one gesture all the time, one gesture.
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moving their lower arms out and then back out and then back. You have some people, it looks like they are washing their hands all the time because they're nervous and they just have their hands in front of them and just always look at it like they're washing their hands or they're rolling meatballs or they just do something in order to get that excess energy out. And I want them to get it out with meaningful gestures instead of nervous tics. Those are definitely nervous tics. In fact, you know, when you're in trouble as a kid,
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And when your parents ask you what happened, if you do this too much, you are basically telling them you did it. Whatever they are potentially accusing you of. That's one body language they used to read. Yeah. I don't know if you ever see that. Do you, I don't know if you watch soccer. I do. Yes. So you see right now we had the, you know, recently we had the world cup, the women's world cup. It was fantastic. I watched so many games. It was just great. But you can see when somebody makes a foul.
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Is it called making a foul? Is that the right way of saying it? Yeah. Foul somebody and you just make sure that they trip over your, your leg or something. Every time that happens, you will see that the soccer player will lift their hands up in the air. Like I did nothing, but what they really expressing is that I'm guilty. So just look at that next time you watch a football game, every time somebody would put their arms up like that and try to keep playing, it means that, oh, I'm guilty.
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But they think it means the opposite. So if they are smart and if they, if they do that foul and make somebody trip, keep going, pretend nothing, if you have both of them are doing that. Yeah. So, so the one who is the bad person in this case, they also do that up with their hands in the air, like, Oh, I give up. I surrender. It's a fun way of looking at the body language in soccer. For sure. And then Anthony, you wrote and co-wrote 14 books.
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all communication related, but your latest one is employee engagement. And like you said, you focus on workplace communication. What are some of the things that create what we call a high performance team and how does communication play a role in creating a high performance team? Well, you know what? First of all, today, when we are recording this,
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I have again written a chapter in a book that came out today. So I'm actually launching a new book today. It's called the circle of excellence. So, so I feel pretty happy about that. It's, it's fun. I did it together with 14 other entrepreneurs and leaders. So it's, it's a great book about how leaders play a bigger game. And we have a chapter each. So, so I'm, I'm actually pretty stoked about that. It's, it's fun, but yes, I did write a book about call it employee engagement, but I probably should have just called it workplace communication because it's about 20.
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communication insights that will help you build relationships quicker, and be more influential, have a better impact and so on. And the three communicative superpowers I mentioned are also mentioned in that book. So that's, I can see that almost like a condensed wisdom of what I found during the decades that I've been looking into the topic of communication in the workplace. It's super short. Every chapter is really short. I put a limit on myself in order to be more creative of.
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maximum 1200 characters per page, just to make sure that I make it super clear, super condensed, super structured and so on. It's a fun book to write and hopefully people find it's a fun book to read as well. And not only fun, but also useful. Right. We talked about trust earlier, that if they trust their leader, then they're intrinsically motivated to perform. But is there anything else that you feel that should be...
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in the workplace when it comes to a high performing team. Yeah. So I mean, your question before was what is the effect or what was the impact of having that? And really, I think I said it in the beginning also that communication leads to motivation. Bad communication leads to low motivation. Good communication leads to high motivation. And motivation in itself is not enough. Just like communication isn't enough. It's the effect you want to reach. It's the result you want.
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So by being really good at communicating, you do create a possibility for high engagement and we know if you look at the studies around that, if you have a team with high engagement, they will have a higher productivity, they will have higher profitability, they will have a higher stock market price if they are in the stock exchange, it's just a win. But also if you have low engagement within your team, because you have a toxic environment or things like that.
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Then you will have more accidents. You will have more errors. You will have lower engagement, of course, but also lower creativity, which will affect the renovation capabilities of that company. So you have nothing to lose by caring for your people and being nice and create a safe space and with high energy and courage that you can try things. It doesn't have to work every time. You know, you will not get yelled at just because you tried something. For instance, you can raise your hand and say, I disagree.
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Again, it's not a conflict if you disagree in a respectful environment. It's a conflict if it's a bad environment where you have backstabbing or trash talking and things like that. Oh, so certainly a war machine. Yeah. And then we talk about conflicts. Then it's really bad. When it comes to that as well, when people are intrinsically motivated, I use this analogy of back in the industrial revolution, they used to make shirts at a factory.
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If you knock off at 4.30 at 4.29, even if you did the call is halfway done through the sewing machine. You're like, I'm gone. Even though we work in office environments, if it's toxic, that's exactly how you feel at 4.29. Your bag is packed and you're gone and you're ready to leave. Even if the project is not even halfway down. Yeah. And I guess that's what's called quiet quitting today where people do minimum efforts and I have mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, if I do what I'm paid for, why are you angry at me?
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If you pay me to do work until 4.30 and I do it until 4.30 and I'm not finished and I'll keep doing it tomorrow, why are you angry at me? You know, from one perspective, I don't see the problem, but because you pay me to do something, I do it. But on the other hand, if that is the attitude, it means that something is missing. You don't have the higher purpose. You don't have the same passion for what you're doing. I don't believe that they are the biggest problem. The biggest problems are those real slackers.
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who pretend they do the work, but they don't trash talk you behind your back. Who creates an environment where everyone feels lousy and do less. Those are the real problems. You know, we should really be careful about them because they, they kind of take away their productivity, about 30% for the whole team. And I'm not so sure about the other ones. I'm not so sure. The quiet. Perhaps they just have a great life outside of work and then they do their shirt until four 30 and then they go home.
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And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'm South African, you're from Europe and I'd like you to make this distinction because now that I'm in America, there's a lot of just doing extra work, extra work, extra work. I know TV exaggerates things, but there's this show called Emily in Paris where I remember one time they said, oh, it's illegal in France to call you after office hours or to call someone on weekends talking about work.
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Because you need that life balance. And in America, I feel like a lot more of my friends who in corporate America don't have that balance. Everything is just about work, work, work all the time. Is that true? Is that a true comparison? It could be to some extent, but it's more, I think about, uh, if I generalize, it's more about blue color or white color. Most people who live in some sort of office environment tend to think about work more even after hours.
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I'm generalizing here somewhat, but it rings true to me, at least my experience is like that, but there are countries in Europe where you are more or less, you know, your work phone turns off. You can't do emails after a certain hour, just because you want to have more of a work-life balance. All through my career, I have not really made that distinction. I work when I need to work more or less. I've never had a particular hour where I have to get an assembly line or anything like that, I have to be there at exactly...
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Oh, 800 and leave at exactly 1700. I don't have that type of work. I never had more or less. I think about work all the time. Nowadays, I think about work all the time. Especially because it's your business. Yeah. You know, and so, so for me, I can put the dishwasher on in the middle of the day or because I have my office in my house and it doesn't bother me on the other hand, I can sit there at night and do some emails and it doesn't bother me because it's a lifestyle that I've chosen.
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But I have chosen it and that makes a big difference. If I am employed somewhere and you expect me to be present or available 24 7, well, you better pay me pretty good money in order to be available 24 7. And probably I wouldn't even take the job because I want to have some sort of possibility to do whatever I want as well in my free time. Sounds like I'm a slacker too, but I'm really not. I know you're not. No, no, no, you're not. But I want to do it on my terms. So, you know, there is something called the self-determination theory in, in psychology.
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And it talks about the ABC of needs. So you have autonomy, belonging and competence. So you want to have autonomy. You want to make, you know, be able to make your own decisions about processes or times when you do things or, or, or, you know, decisions and so on. And then you want to belonging. So you want to be part of something in a group tribe, and then you want to grow your competence and show your competence. So you're significant in that space and autonomy then is one of those things.
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If you micromanage me, I will not be very happy. Not a lot of people do. If you abdicate from your leadership, I won't, I won't be happy either, but it's something you have to find that middle ground where it works. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but for me, Yeah, the balance, the balance. Yes. Is there anything I haven't asked you to do you were hoping to share with our listeners before I let you go? Roberta, we can, we can talk for hours at any time. I know, right?
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There's so many things that I've kind of learned and discovered along the way. I don't even know where to begin with that one. I'm just, you know, this is a dance where you lead and I follow. Okay. I appreciate the feedback. No problem at all, but cause you've shared so much with us, you have a different way of looking at disagreements. So hopefully our vocabulary change in that regard. Thank you so much for being on our show today. And before you go, please tell us where to find you on the interwebs and social media.
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All right. So my name is pretty unusual. I'm the only one I think in the world with that name, Anthony Lacinai. So my webpage is AnthonyLacinai.com. There you can find, you know, videos of full length keynotes. You can find the books, downloadable checklists and all sorts of things. So that's the one channel. The other one is LinkedIn. So if you find Anthony Lassini, actually here's what we do, Roberta, find me on LinkedIn and add me on LinkedIn and tell me that you've been on this podcast. And then I will give you a gift.
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Yes, we love gifts. Excellent. Find Anthony Lacinai on LinkedIn, and you will receive a gift courtesy of the Speaking and Communicating podcast. Thank you so much, Anthony. You're welcome. It's been fun talking to you. I've had a great time myself. Thank you for being here today. 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,
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please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Bee Podcast Network, where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Bee Podcast Network, go to beepodcastnetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned.
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for more episodes to come.