Leadership Transformation: Embracing Authenticity and Balancing Polarities with Jim D'Angelo

Jim D’Angelo: “Neither of these is right or wrong, but because we identify with it, it's easy to label one as right or wrong. Instead, we have to look at and go what works today.”

Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. Let’s dive in.

Cristina Amigoni: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being.”

Alex Cullimore: Hello, Cristina.

Cristina Amigoni: Hello. We're back with a guest after a long time.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, it's been a bit. I mean, you've been across the world and back in this time.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Technically, I was too, but for a much briefer amount of time, so –

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. There's been lots of traveling in between.

Alex Cullimore: Well, we just had a conversation with a guest, which has been a little while since we did it, but a great way to come back into getting to talk to people in our space, and getting to talk to people who have such a similar aligned vision. This is Jim D’Angelo from Heartwired. Just a really fascinating conversation about not falling for polarities, which is a great way of putting like how to find nuance in life, how to find the actual balance between things like caring about people and having a high-performing team. How do you do this? What do you do? It was fascinating. Great re-intro into our guest offerings.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, definitely. Then, he has great analogies on how to explain all of this, and also just the understanding of, yes, we all have our own opinions, and we stick to them, and sometimes we stick to them a little bit too much, and what's the cost of that? So, how do we move away from this stubbornness that we attach our own identity to? It's like, if I let go of this opinion, then I lose my identity and credibility, or whatever it is that we think we're losing, as opposed to, like Adam Grant would say, what if we think again? What if there is another angle and we can learn and grow?

Alex Cullimore: And what if it's not a betrayal of ourselves, but our ego is just telling us we were attached to that thing and we can let go or see a wider picture. It's a good concept. It’s one of those that's simple to understand, hard to implement.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, especially because, as we talk about in the podcast, it's practice. It's not a one and done. We have come up with a few good products. We've now have a pill for trust. Everybody gets to take the trust pill, and they all trust each other. We have a pill for leadership. So, if you get promoted to a leader position, you are now automatically wired into the knowledge of how to lead people. As he was talking about the whole fuzziness around leadership, and I'm like, “Oh, there's a build to bear.” We could definitely start distributing little bears. Leader bears. You become a leader. Here's warm and fuzzy bear. I'm sure there's a few other products we could create in there.

Alex Cullimore: This is all part of our Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo line, where everything is magically solved.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Yes, we have magic wands too. We usually bring them to our workshops. We don't actually have to do anything. Nobody has to work. We just kind of spray some magic and you're all fixed. You're now a cohesive team.

Alex Cullimore: Oh, man. If it were so easy.

Cristina Amigoni: I think we would have just as much work. We would just see many different people and travel a lot.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. We'd just be snake oil salesmen at that point. But if it worked, it would be snake oil. We'd just be going door to door.

Cristina Amigoni: But that's usually the expectation, and that's the problem is that we expect things to work after once, even though we don't expect that anywhere else in life, I'm still trying to understand that expectation at work. We are like, “No. No. Work is not about practice. It's about just doing. It's being in the game every single day.” Yes, that doesn't happen in anywhere else in life. Don't just tell our two-year-old Mike, “As of tomorrow you're potty trained. Go.” And it just miraculously happens. It’s like we allow for practice and mistakes and trying over and over, everywhere else, but at work that's not at work. Either learn it once and know how to do it or not learn it at all and just know inherently how to do it, perfectly, every time.

Alex Cullimore: Obviously, a very tragic performance reviews with your two-year-old.

Cristina Amigoni: Sorry, you have now failed with the potty-training switch. You did not get the memo, or you did not understand the memo. Therefore, you are now no longer part of the family.

Alex Cullimore: I hope you find another good family that is good fit. Wish you the best. We'll give you a strong recommendation.

Cristina Amigoni: If only we treated people in companies that way or not treated them that way. We have a little more compassion and actually allow them to practice things that need to be practiced all the time.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Please enjoy this conversation with Jim on compassionate excellence.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Enjoy.

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. In a rare change of events. Now that we've had, like a few episodes of Cristina and I going on a different series, we are back with guests, and today we are joined by our guest, Jim D'Angelo. Welcome, Jim.

Jim D'Angelo: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Cristina Amigoni: Welcome, Jim. Yes. Thanks for joining us.

Jim D'Angelo: Excited for this. 

Alex Cullimore: Super excited to have you on. So, to give people a little context, who are you? What have you been up to? What's your story?

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. Well, I'm Jim, and I've been on the planet here for some years, but –

Cristina Amigoni: Which planet? That's the question, though.

Jim D'Angelo: This one that I'm on right now. So, that we’ve had an exercise for the reader. Yes. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I've been, Alex, you and I kind of connected some time back, just kind of really focused on leadership and management over the last too long. I've spent a lot of time in tech on the management side, in the IC side, and currently I have a company, Heartwired Consulting, to help people kind of level up their leadership teams and get unstuck. Polarities have been my kind of focus over the last bit, where we kind of get stuck in these spaces of identifying with one position really strongly at the detriment of its overuse, and helping people kind of navigate through that, and see that there's more to this than just the one right side.

Often, these stances that we take are really good, they're strong, they're our strengths, until they're not, and it's hard to see like that stance getting in our way, because it's the one tool that we've used for such a long time. So, it's been fun.

Alex Cullimore: Definitely doesn't sound relatable to certain, I don't know, political realms and everybody's corporate experience.

Jim D'Angelo: Not at all. No. It's not applicable anywhere. It's just curious.

Alex Cullimore: That's very niche. Nobody's hit this before.

Jim D'Angelo: Never.

Cristina Amigoni: It's going to be hard to find potential clients who needs this.

Jim D'Angelo: It's interesting to find folks who can understand that they're struggling with that and need help. It’s very easy for us, because we touch on folks' identity going through this. It can be very easy to not be able to see that part of yourself and say, “I'm good. We're good. This is how we've always done it.” Sometimes it's borderline hubris. Sometimes it's just you don't know until somebody's there to kind of help you.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. As you point out, it can be such a strength for some time, right up until all of the weaknesses are finally have grown so large. It's now the detriment that got us here.

Jim D'Angelo: Absolutely. I think the biggest one that over the last year, that I really refined with folks is kind of getting stuck between we should care about people in work and like, just solely focused on the well-being of employee, and that's it. Then, of course, businesses exist to make money, and so care about performance, and we want performance at the detriment of everything else. We see people struggling with one side over the other there, and kind of viewing it as you're either about people, or you're about performance through Heartwired and kind of working with folks that came up with this concept of compassion excellence. So, we stop talking about one side or the other, and instead talk about the strengths of both.

What if we cared about people and held them to a higher standard? Which is funny, because when you read about psychological safety or high-performing teams, there's a requirement for both. It's not just splitting the difference. It's not halfway each. It's both. But we put them on this false dichotomy of it's just a spectrum, and so kind of tease that out into a matrix of I'd like to ask people. We talk about this on a spectrum, so what does the middle mean? If we just want to find the balance in the middle, what does that mean? Because I worked for the DOD for a bit, and they cared neither about performance nor people. Is that the middle we're aiming for?

Cristina Amigoni: That's off the spectrum.

Jim D'Angelo: When we break it into a quadrant, it's easier to see that that's a different space and it’s the opposite of where high-performing teams live.

Alex Cullimore: It's a great term, compassionate excellence, too. It's nice like, “Hey, how do we do this?” And what if it is compassionate to hold people to excellence, then you care about their growth, or you care about this. It's also always hilarious when people put that dichotomy out, because it's so often that unhappy people are such high performers.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. That happens all the time.

Jim D'Angelo: Yes, absolutely. To also kind of look at, when we get stuck in the space of everybody's welcome, we got to make everybody feel comfortable. I'm sure we've all been on a team where you or a handful of people are feeling like, “Okay, I want to go above and beyond,” but then you see that there's some behaviors that are tolerating from other people. “Why am I trying so hard?” So, I'm going to start lowering my standards and how I work. I see that all the time.

So, helping, especially new managers, new teams, people stuck in this space where it's new to understand that holding people accountable is actually also kind of being clear with what the standards are, talking to people about that, and you're not going to be perfect. I think there's a fear of being perfect through the conversation, that you can wind up creating an environment where, if everybody's welcome, really, nobody is welcome.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It's interesting. It is very common to see just everybody or a lot of people lower their standards because of what's been tolerated and getting to that point of, like, “Why am I trying so hard?” For myself, I found that, whenever I feel that way, I quickly find the exit door. I'm like, “Yes, I don't. That doesn't make me feel good. That's not how I operate. I don't lower my standards just because my high perform, my higher standards are not rewarded, or recognized, or seen, or valued. I'm just going to find a different place.”

Jim D'Angelo: Even if somebody does highlight, “Oh, I love the work that you're doing, and you're great, we need more of that.” If the other behaviors are allowed to exist, it undermines that. Okay, you could have more of that, but you're tolerating this other thing. So, do you really want it, or do you want to want it? It's like the start of the new year, right? How many people are, we always go, “I'm going to be healthy this year. This is a new year, new me.” Really, we just, we want to want it. Because the things that you want, you actually go do. If I want that bite of ice cream, guess what? Go get it.

If I want excellence, then I will have excellence. But it's more about wanting to want. I want to want to go to the gym more. If I wanted to go to the gym, I would go to the gym just as much as if I wanted that extra scoop of ice cream.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, the want is, it's a must. There has to be desire, and then there has to be choice after the desire. Wanting is not enough. Yes, I want to be healthy, but you're going to ask me to go and get ice cream. I'm going to go get ice cream. So, how? Which one is stronger?

Jim D'Angelo: Yes, and which one are you cultivating?

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Jim D'Angelo: It is definitely a must. So, I think the challenge is, we often look at building teams. There's a lot of literature about it. A lot of software development has the idea of Scrum and Agile, and these processes to follow, and they sound really good. But you're looking at the end product of maybe a team that worked really hard to get there, and you're missing all the pieces along the way. So, it's easy to have like a spray on framework of, if we just do this, now, we're great, right? Right guys? We're great. Rather than the effort and energy that it takes to get strong.

When that process runs into an issue, how do you know which – do we just stick to the process because that's the process? Or do we know how to bend the rules in the right way, at the right time? Having that experience and knowing what to do at that point is really important and critical. If you just read about it, it's not good enough. It's like giving everybody radical candor and then wondering why you've got so many people treating each other poorly. I’m just being radical. Just being radical. You didn't really read the book. You need to do that in the spirit of the other person and how they receive information.

Alex Cullimore: Awesome. One of our favorites, just go do things. People are like, well, high performing teams trust each other, so let's trust each other. I'll just turn that switch. I forgot to turn that on today.

Jim D'Angelo: I’m so glad you reminded me to trust you. Gosh, how did we make it this far?

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Sorry. Let me take out the briefcase of trust pills that you can all take, so that we can then go to lunch and be done.

Alex Cullimore: I forgot my supplement.

Jim D'Angelo: So good, so true.

Alex Cullimore: But some of those are like, I appreciate you talking about things like performance and stuff too, because we look at outcomes. We want the high performance, but we just want the outcome, and we're not looking at what it takes to get there. I love that term you used, spray on process. Of course, we can have this, just like now we're agile. I think we just graffited that on ourselves, and now we're going to be super like – you have to also have the spirit of being able to change and move agilely and be able to shift when things need to shift, which means having the hard conversations about whether it's worth shifting right now, and all of the actual behaviors, which then goes back to like, we have to have enough trust in each other, and we can only do that by building some rapport and doing that enough times consistently –

Jim D'Angelo: And we just take a pill. 

Cristina Amigoni: There's a pill for everything. There's got to be a pill for trust.

Jim D'Angelo: I think there is. It's just not one that is legal.

Cristina Amigoni: Gummies.

Alex Cullimore: Sort of a weekend Ayahuasca retreat for your team. So, I'm curious. It is a kind of pervasive problem. We've all probably experienced this at some moment, if we haven't diagnosed, or haven't dived into it. What made you lean in and lean towards the hard conversations and working on this portion of work?

Jim D'Angelo: Good question. I was very lucky being naturally curious about stuff and how people work and how to engage with folks, and what does it mean to build trust. I spent just shy of seven years in the Air Force and went through formal leadership training, which a lot of managers, you don't get it. So, that experience, one, I think, going through the military, I did air traffic control, which is, exactly lines up with the work that I'm doing today. So –

Cristina Amigoni: It is the air traffic control leadership incorporations.

Jim D'Angelo: It is, yes.

Alex Cullimore: Running cats that are moving at 400 miles an hour.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. “Wait, somebody's taking off. Hold on.”

Jim D'Angelo: Yes, exactly.

Cristina Amigoni: “Oh, neither of you are listening. Okay, close your eyes.”

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. Lots of sequencing, lots of thinking ahead, lots of planning in the moment, and then also having 50 conversations all at the same time. I guess it is apropos. But going through that experience, I got the opportunity to see, I think, some of the world's best leadership, and also some of the world's worst leadership in that environment. Coming out of that space, it really skews your perspective on what to expect from one another.

So, going into my first job out of the military, I really had to learn how to temper my expectations and what I expect of the people around me, but found that, yes, that is true to a certain degree, and mostly because it's not a life or death situation that you're in when you're doing business. When you have an environment where people are held to a high standard, and you've got the leadership to back it up. I don't mean leadership as in, what you see on LinkedIn today, where it's all about the warm and fuzzy. Leadership makes me feel good, right? It's not that leadership often pushes you into a direction that challenges you, which is not comfortable. 

I don't know about you, but when I get an idea challenge, my first thought is not usually like, “It’s warmth, right here.” It's usually a little bit of a defensiveness, like, “Wait, what? No. Okay. I got to think of it. I got to work through this.”

So, having that experience, I found that going through my career, I was naturally, I would join as say an IC, I see a software developer, hands on, I'm just going to do software. I would leave as the lead of whatever. So, I joined as a senior software engineer. Leave as the head of engineering. Looked at that critically. I’m like, why is that happening? For a long time, I thought not a manager. I wouldn't do management. That's terrible. But found I was good at it. So, why? What was I good at?

It was, my focus tends to be on the environment, not the individual, but on the environment. What is the kind of – am I being able to be transparent with people in a way that's healthy? You can take all these things to an extreme, but I really reflected on my time in the Air Force was critical to my view today, understanding, and kind of being held to core values in a way that you actually live it, not just talk about it in the same way of that spray on process. I think a lot of times in business, we put those pretty words on the wall.

Cristina Amigoni: Spray on core values.

Jim D'Angelo: These are the things that we value. Yes. We have no way of pointing to anything that happens day to day to say, “Well, and here's how you can see that. Here's what it means to live up to that.” So, I've gone through my career, and I keep falling back onto a lot of the core principles from that, including the Air Force core values. So, it drilled into your head. You need to know them. You need to highlight how you're doing them. You get held to – you get your performance rating. That is a part of it. It’s how you're living up to those core values. So, you find ways to be really creative with, number one core value of the Air Force’s integrity.

Being able to be true to yourself in the space, regardless of who's watching, service before self, understanding how you fit into this thing, and that this thing that's bigger than you to succeed. How do you fit into it? How do you add to it in a way that it's not always going to be about you? It's not always going to be comfortable to you. And then, excellence in all we do. Being able to have that standard of performance. Then, when all these three things like come together, it creates this environment that really cool things get to happen, whether you're pro military or anti-military. It doesn't really matter. These concepts, I think, are really important. So, when I started talking to folks, like, especially lately, we went through this weird thing, I don't know if you remember it, but a pandemic, and everybody kind of holed up and –

Alex Cullimore: A what?

Cristina Amigoni: Was that in our generation?

Jim D'Angelo: It was many, many, many, many, many generations ago.

Cristina Amigoni: That’s like 1820, I think, I heard something like that.

Alex Cullimore: Spanish flu, yes. Of course.

Jim D'Angelo: 1820 to 1823, I think, it’s about. 

As we're coming out of that, I noticed a lot of companies were trying to figure out what it means to have engaged employees, and kind of swung fully over to the side of like, “Whatever you want, whatever you need, we're here for you.” That's great, but the performance standard kind of degraded, and we don't talk about that.

So, when I started talking to folks about things like accountability, like it's really scary today to talk about accountability.

Cristina Amigoni: We know nothing about that.

Jim D'Angelo: Accountability means, “Oh, you're going to fire me.” Well, I mean, it actually can go that far. But what about day to day? What are the norms of your organization? Are they clear? So many places struggle with that. I'm really attracted to that space and like figuring out again, going back to polarities. These things that feel like they're contradictory, but you can go on to LinkedIn, and you can find again, leadership is this warm, fuzzy feeling. No, it's not. It's not always that and different contexts. You can be in one context if something works really well, and you look at other people and the way that they're doing business, be like, “Oh, that's stupid, that's terrible, that's immoral, that's wrong, that's whatever.” But then if you're in that context, you might be like, “Oh, this is what we need today and look at the other one.” “That's stupid and that's wrong.” So, finding the right balance in the context with the people toward a particular goal has been absolutely fascinating.

Alex Cullimore: It's a great way of looking at it. I appreciate you talking about core values and how you live them, because that's one of the first and most optimistic ingredients in core values. It’s things like excellence. We're going to have a good product like, “Hey, that's not a differentiator.” That's not different than other organizations. They probably also want a good product.

Cristina Amigoni: An organization actually tried to have bad products. So, good for you.

Alex Cullimore: You’re trying to make customers’ lives miserable every day. We get up and that gets us out of bed.

Jim D'Angelo: If you look at some products, I won't get many right now. I think that is what their core value is. We're going to embrace not having any competition, and so we don't have to care about the quality of our product. That’s only if we put up on the boardroom wall –

Cristina Amigoni: Can we make somebody waste 20 minutes on this one little thing. That’s probably a hackathon. It's like, “Make it as complicated as it gets.”

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. Let's design this for engineers.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, yes.

Alex Cullimore: But it's a good point that all these things have to be lived to be brought to fruition, and that it doesn't have to be lived in the same way. Just what is your cultural norm and alignment, and just as long as, if there is consistency and agreement towards that, that can be a very successful business, even if it's in the same space as something that does things differently. That other company has different core values, different norms. Both can actually be successful, just depending on what are you really trying to accomplish and how consistent are you with how you're going to deliver it. So often, I feel like that polarities is a good way of describing what ends up being to blame for missing the boat on one of those things, on what we're doing, or how we're doing it.

Jim D'Angelo: Absolutely. Isn't consistency one of the key tenets of building trust. If you know what to expect of me, if I continue to show up and what I say and what I do align, whether or not you actually agree with, you begin to trust that what I'm saying is true. That I will act in that manner and will behave that way. That's very powerful, I think, because it gives one thing that we tend to see pushed aside, which is agency. I define agency to be autonomy. We all want autonomy. That's great. But agency is autonomy with responsibility.

So, you get to then look and say, “Okay, well, Alex, your behavior is consistent with what you say. You're saying the same message. So, Cristina and I can then have agency decide what do we want to participate in this thing that you're creating?” It's scary sometimes, right? Because we like to put our identity in work, but if you're doing something and you're transparent, and you hold a particular set of values, and you're clear about that, I get to opt in or out. I get to make that decision as the person working with you, rather than saying, “I come in and you need to do things my way.”

Yes, okay, that's great. It would be amazing if we could create an environment where everybody's values were fully aligned all the time, and every decision ever made was going to make everybody happy, but that's just not the reality situation. If we're consistent and we can build trust, then it makes it easier to have conversations about like, “Hey, this is the direction that we're going. Do you want to go in that direction with us? And here's how we're going to do it, and we're going to be intentional about that. We're going to be transparent about it.” If that's not the direction you want to go, or that's not how you want to go, let's find a place where you can thrive. I can want to see you thrive, and not go in this particular direction.

Alex Cullimore: That's one of the other things that ends up getting. We get so scared about the limitations that if we start to put too many boundaries on it, people will leave, and maybe some people will. But maybe some people should, and not that they're like a bad person. It's just not their fit. There could be a place that they really do fit. If you're really clear and consistent with here's how we are and here's how we show up, not only will those people start to self-select out, because they don't want to be part of that, you'll also be gaining reputation where other people who are like that want to join in.

Jim D'Angelo: Want to join you. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: That's the part that's hard. It's like the burden hand doing a bush idea like, “Well, I don't know if those people are out there.” You might have to take that leap of faith, but as long as you're consistent in it, they'll at least know you're there. Better chance of them finding you, better chance of you finding them.

Jim D'Angelo: And if they’re not there, we get to figure that out, right? We get to then say, “Oh, well, how do we cultivate that?” If it's truly important to us. Or we get to reflect on ourselves and go, maybe my core values are off. Maybe operating this way doesn't work. So, what can I change about myself? What can I change about this? Now, I get this thing called agency as well.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, if we think about the spectrum of, do we focus on people? Do we focus on performance? That is one way to get to that middle. Because if we are clear on our expectations, on our values, this is the values, this is how we live them, this is what we expect, then we are people focused. Because now people are not in a fog, and it's not free for all anarchy.

Jim D'Angelo: Exactly.

Cristina Amigoni: It is rewarding the ones that do that, and it's helping the ones that don't either grow into whatever our environment is, and what needs to be, or find a better fit. It's not personal. I mean, this is where, it's not about liking people or not liking people on a personal level. It's more about like, I want to, like, you said, like, I want you to succeed. So how can we make that happen? And it may not be here. But if you're clear –

Jim D'Angelo: Right. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly, if you're clear, then you can make that, then you have agency to make that decision. If it's not clear, then you don't have that agency. Now, you're being lied to, almost. Like, there's this kind of covert, like, “Well, this is an environment for everybody.” “Well, does that help anyone, if it's an environment for everybody?”

Jim D'Angelo: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: It’s for nobody.

Jim D'Angelo: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: That's an interesting point. You mentioned the beginning, that there's some identity that gets wrapped up in some of our polarities. We're attached to some of that. I think that's a big part of this too. We ascend, not only our identity to, “Hey, this is how I think things should be.” But then we ascend – we try to ascribe some kind of universality to that. This is how it should be, and this is how all of the things should be. A good person for not fitting in, or it's not a good culture, if it's not our culture. Is that true? What if there is enough room for other cultures? What if there's enough room for other people, and what if that's actually a good thing, and can then refine your own culture later, too? What if it just can exist elsewhere? It's very hard to get that mindset when we're kind of taught to like, think about like, what does this mean for everybody? But what does it really mean for you? And is it okay that that's not what it might mean for everybody?

Jim D'Angelo: And understanding and accepting that there are consequences. So, if you want to be doggedly tied to your polarity, there's a consequence to that, and if you accept that consequence, then great. You can live in harmony with it. You might realize that maybe I can't scale my business or my team or my whatever, because I'm tied to this polarity, but I value it so much, I'm willing to give up everything else. Then you're not really dealing with a polarity. You're not struggling with it.

A good example of this is thinking through a lot of businesses like to have really centralized communication, and we need to be able to make decisions and pivot the business. Then, at some point, a manager just gets fed up because they can't make a localized decision. They get stuck there. It's just like, “We're playing this game of telephone. I have to ask my manager who has to ask their manager, who has to ask their manager. And by the time it comes back, it's like, that's not even what I asked for.” Somebody goes, “Okay, we're going to decentralize all of our communications so that frontline managers can make the decisions that they need to do. We're going to break everything apart. Managers can now make their decisions.” And then the people who are running the company go, “We need to go this way, but everybody's able to make their own decisions.”

All right, we're centralizing all of our communication, and it swings back, back, and forth. Really, the challenge here is communication is not a problem that can just be solved. It's not like there's a way to do communication, and we have solved the communication. We're good. So, polarities are not a thing to solve. All of this, by the way, is taken from the book Navigating Polarities, which is like a fantastic read, for folks who just want to understand a little bit more about the space. Instead, we can look at these two things and say centralized communication has a set of strengths. What are they?

If you're not somebody who aligns with that, I mean, like your values, your identity. When I ask you about centralized communication, you're going to come up with all the reasons why it's bad. Why it's terrible? It's too slow. It's sluggish. It keeps everything – people can make decisions, and it creates a shroud of secrecy, and who are the decision-makers? They are all management. So, it's terrible and it's wrong. It's very easy to make a values judgment like that. 

If you're somebody who values that centralized communication, because you're like, “I'm going to make decisions. We're going to move in this direction.” You get asked about or tell me about decentralized communication. Sloppy. It can't move in a particular direction. It's diffuse. What do you even stand for? It's easy to view the other through its overuses, but not see your own overuse and not see that a lot of challenges that you're running into because of the overuse of your own – the clarity with which you align.

So, working through this, you get forced to look at the strengths of both. What are the strengths of these two, and how do you then combine them in the context of what you're doing with the people, with the tools, with whatever that you have today, and understand you're going to have to come back to this over and over and over again? Because it cannot be solved. Neither of these is right or wrong, but because we identify with it, it's easy to label one as right or wrong. Instead, we have to look at it and go, “What works today?”

Okay. These are the decisions that frontline managers can make, totally decentralized. They can make these decisions that doesn't need to make it all the way up to the CEO and back. These decisions have to be centralized and we're defining it that way. It's not right or wrong that it's just it is, and now we get to communicate about that. But rather than getting stuck on that clarity, now we're going to come up with a phrase, a word that we're going to use that describes our way of communicating. That way we don't hit on people's polarities and hit on the identity aspect, and that's where like compassionate excellence comes in. I'm not talking about do you care about people or do you care about performance? It's easy to pick a polarity there and want one or the other. Instead, compassionate excellence is the way that we're going to operate that blends the strengths of both of those.

Cristina Amigoni: Those are great examples, for sure. The communication piece is very relatable.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It makes me think that, especially on something like communication, there's some value in considering it as an intent. Considering good and key communication as an intent, not an end goal. We're now good communicators, that's like saying, “We now trust each other.” As you’re doing all the behaviors, it's not there.

Cristina Amigoni: It's also set in stone. Once you're good and you trust, that's it. You're done.

Jim D'Angelo: Right. Again, it goes back to identity. If I view myself as a good communicator, as soon as I'm not a good communicator in a particular context, it's easy to point fingers and say, “No, it's you.” But if I say I'm a good communicator, that means I'm able to deliver a message. Well, I found a space where that's a struggle, that's a challenge, and so that's something I get to work on. But it's easy to also get stuck in a polarity there. I'm either good or I'm not.

Alex Cullimore: And then we can do all kinds of unhealthy justification if we feel like we're not like. Well, no, that's because this person, that was this and that, that eroding trust or doing something else. If we're really tied to that identity, instead of tied to the attention of like, “I want to continue to be a good continue to be a good communicator,” and looking back and like, “Oof, yes, I missed the boat on that one. I'm going to have to do better.” It's a very different reaction than, “No. Actually, I think it's everybody else's fault. I'm a good communicator. I've been a good communicator for years.”

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. I think even that language, “I missed the boat on this one,” can cause that sense of defensiveness. So, if we rather look at it as, in general, maybe I'm a good communicator, and if we view this instead as like a dance. The three of us are trying to move together. I put my foot down right after, Cristina, you put your foot down, which means I stepped on your toe. It doesn't mean that I intentionally did that. It also doesn't mean that either of us was wrong. But if we keep doing it, then it offers us an opportunity to say, “Okay, I keep putting my foot there and stepping on you. How can we avoid this in the future?”

Let's practice that. Let's practice that step. Let's really focus on it and see, in the context of this dance, why do we keep doing that? I say, why, but I don't mean like getting into the well, because you're a bad person, or because I was raised this way, or I'm triggered. I mean instead, to look at the context of our movements and say, like, “Oh, well, how about we avoid when we're in this state, getting close to each other? What if we give each other a little bit more space, and then we're able to continue the dance, we're able to continue the movement?” Then, it's not, “Oh, I messed up here.” Instead, it's an opportunity to learn, and we get to focus on the positive aspect of, “Well, here's a great opportunity to learn,” without triggering our own internal defensiveness.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it definitely takes a fairly strong internal confidence and detachment almost to that, this is about me, our own self-identity, when things don't work out as intended. So, like you said, we don't normally have the intention to cause harm. We don't have the intention to miscommunicate or not communicate, or miss the boat, or step on somebody's toes. It happens that the key piece that you mentioned is that reflection like, this is happening. This happened and it's now either happening again or just happened the one time, and that that wasn't the intention. So, what went wrong?

But the externalization of what went wrong is not I am wrong, I were wrong, or you were wrong, or they were wrong. It's more like what caused this so that we can prevent it the next time, by figuring out what needs to change. I think there's definitely some sort of value in pausing and even having that conversation, because that’s also, most of the times missed, is things don't go the right way. They kind of get derailed and nobody says anything, and now it becomes this big elephant in the room that nobody's addressing and they're secretly pointing fingers. Or I read an article recently on how, if you want to understand how teams are actually connecting with each other, especially in a remote work in the remote world, you need to pay attention to the offline conversations, not the in-meeting conversations, because that's when you know there's trust and respect with the people on the other side.

That's also like, we have these conversations. We all have them. We get offline and we're like, “Oh, my God. I can't believe this and this and this, and this person and that.” You're eroding that collaboration and that trust, and you're polarizing even more. So, having that self-reflection of like, “Okay, yes. Something went wrong here.” It doesn't necessarily have to be me being a failure, but something went wrong. Let's say it out loud.

It happened to us recently where we were going through a – we started a new initiative, and in the midst of putting it together and getting everybody on board, we forgot our own change management components, of like, “Oh, we need to get buy-in from the people that are going to be supporting this.” We somehow – in the middle of it, we thought we could quickly go through it. Then, as we were about to launch, we realized, like, “Oh, wait. We actually didn't do it. We were supposed to do here.” We didn't have enough conversations. So, we paused. We were like, “Okay, let's postpone the launch by another week, because we need to go back and figure out how do we not just pretend that we didn't step on anybody's toes and keep dancing?”

Jim D'Angelo: Right.

Alex Cullimore: I usually, to keep those in mind, and to keep those like, when we do mess it up, not to use language like, why, and try and get into it, just because why can’t it become that? Oh, it's a cause-and-effect thing and try and get into that curiosity. What happens that resulted in this is semantically the same, but is received differently from people. I'm curious what other strategies you'd think of, if you want to either give yourself the mindset of not kind of falling into the identity trap? Or what can organizations do that might help promote that kind of mindset with people?

Jim D'Angelo: I think number one is that you have to be intentional about it. So, if as an organization, you say, “This is what we want,” then you need to start training. You have to make this flow through the organization, and like other things, trust culture, it's a top-down. I can't expect you to behave one way, and I get to behave another way because of position of privilege, or power, or whatever. So, figuring out what this means in your context is extremely important.

I think, we often – I hate using this word, but promote people into roles of management and just expect them to magically know how to handle this stuff.

Cristina Amigoni: It’s a pill. Do we have a pill for that one too?

Jim D'Angelo: Yes, exactly. So, helping folks understand what's expected of them and that tends, there's great research on this that highlights onboarding programs that really instill in folks the values of the organization, and not just we value this, but, “And here's a demonstration of it, and here's how you can demonstrate it.” Practice, practice, practice, practice.

When I was in the Air Force, if we weren't practicing, we were practicing. It was a non-stop thing. So, when I joined this boot camp, get through boot camp. Go to [inaudible 0:39:27]. I'm learning and practicing how to do my job. Go to my first base. I was in training, learning how to do my job. Got rated. I was learning how to train people to do my job, and then I was training people. When I got my promotions, and I started being a supervisor. I had to go to Airman Leadership School and learn how to do this. It was always practice. Always practice.

Even when I was rated, you still had to practice. You still were either running simulations or you had to have a couple because you had to take proficiency. We like to use the military. We like to use sports teams as these great metaphors for high performance and what we expect from people. But I think we tend to draw the wrong things, and it's like on the military, it's command and control. Great. There's a little bit of that, but you're also missing all the steps that lead up to that being effective. I'm confident that if anybody up the street were to just go and grab a bunch of 18 to 21-year-olds and like, “Go climb that hill.” They're going to look at you like, “What? What? No.”

So, just saying like, “Well, I'm the boss, so you have to,” and then wonder why people are looking at you like, “Those steps are missing.” So, onboarding programs, regular trainings where you're helping people actually practice these concepts. One of the things that we do at Heartwired is we help teams create the space to practice that. Having norms in place, rather, where you can have a thing called like a redo. Let's say, I just read the book Radical Candor. I have it up here. I have it in my head. I understand it, but I've not felt the anxiety or the stress of, like, actually using it in a way to provide feedback, in a way that you know is going to connect with you, Cristina, differently than you, Alex.

I might come up to Alex and say, “Okay, I have some feedback, and I'd like to give this to you in a way that resonates with you, but I don't quite know, like I don't have the words. I'm curious, would you be willing for me to work through this?” I might stop myself and back up because I want to say, make sure I say right, but I'm not sure how to do it yet. Is this a good time for you? Hopefully, you can answer yes or whatever.

But as I'm talking, giving the feedback, I might say something that just comes out completely wrong. And you know those things that sounds really good in your head until you say it out loud, and then you're like, “I want that back.” No. This is a way to preemptively say, “That's probably going to happen.” And it's not because I mean it, it's because I'm practicing. Sometimes that's scary in a reporting situation, right? If somebody's reporting to me, I don't want to mess that up. So, we help folks create a space where they can go practice those conversations elsewhere. 

Okay, so we say that we value radical candor. We say we value say, non-violent communication. Let's practice it. Let's say you mess up a conversation. You have the safe place to actually back and practice it again. Teaching people that if you're not messing up, you're not learning. So, you're going to make mistakes. That's part of learning. Let's learn together. Let's make those mistakes and create an environment where you're able to say, “Oh, sorry, that came out wrong. That's not what I meant.” When you practice that, then other people start recognizing you're sincere, like you didn't mean that. Then, you can have a mental reset. And then, people start actually practicing that within the organization, and seeing like, two individual contributors go and say, “Your pull request was gar – no, sorry. Let me have a redo. I didn't like the way that you commented this. I think there's a different way. It's something that starts to permeate the rest of the organization.” So, practicing, having redos, and non-violent communication, I think, are just huge. They're game-changers.

Alex Cullimore: Absolutely makes sense. We just were reading the book called The Advantage. It’s Patrick Lencioni’s, one of the latest books, and just kind of a conglomeration of a bunch of his other ideas. But a lot of it goes back to similar to what you're saying, like some of the simple things that just get overlooked. I think, we almost try and make things too complex. I think he called it like the sophistication bias, or something. We think it should be more complex than this, but realistically, it's the hours of practice. It's the hours of just putting in some of that intention and some of that work, and it almost feels like it's too simple to be effective, or we just are too hardwired to try and get into like, “I have to finish this thing right now.” Well, but what are what are we shortchanging in the future if we don't do the practice steps that will get us to the more sustainable success?

It's not easy. It's the same thing as, like the New Year's example. You do have to continue to do these things consistently and that can be hard to continue to show up. So, you find the reasons that you want to show. Find the reasons that there is the actual motivation to make this part of who you are, that you are intentionally continuing, and that's difficult to decide, especially difficult on an organizational level. It's already hard on an individual level, and then trying to inspire that in others.

Jim D'Angelo: Right. Absolutely.

Alex Cullimore: But it's such the key to like, success is all these small, just continual practices, and it feels almost so dull. It can't possibly be making the difference, or it can't possibly be the thing that we should focus on right now. So, often it is the thing that is make or break or won't let us continue until we address it.

Jim D'Angelo: Yes, it's organizational hygiene. I just recently, I have a 13-year-old, and ensuring that things like flossing happen can be a challenge. Regular showers, whatever. I was recently related to that. I was reading on Reddit, somebody was struggling with this, and their dentist had told their kid, “Okay, listen. You don't have to floss. Just floss the teeth that you want to keep.” It's organizational. Hygiene is the same way. Flossing doesn't feel like maybe it's doing anything. Brushing your teeth every single day, twice a day, three times, whatever your habit is, might not feel like, okay, I can miss it here and there. But if you make a habit out of missing it, if you make a habit out of not doing it, it has a long-term impact.

So, we put systems in place to make like, just brush your teeth, right? Wake up, make it part of your routine. Make it part of your habit. It's systems. Making sure that we put systems in place that help us do this hygiene, keep it in place, and assess. I don't go to the dentist to clean my teeth. They'll pick stuff off where I'm missing. It's really a check-in and an accountability point of like, you need to floss, you need to do this. You're not cleaning here, whatever it is. So, having those check-in points. But I think we often treat like performance reviews as going to the dentist. 

Okay, we're going to clean everything and make it better now. You could have been brushing your teeth all along the way. All it would have taken was maybe a little bit of feedback and some courage, scary to give feedback, some courage to go and say, “Hey, you got something in your teeth there. You need to brush more.” And then have that dentist appointment of the actual check-in. Well, here's a place where you could do better. Here's where you're doing great. This is amazing. Keep that up. When we treat these things as like the once-a-year performance review, you have to have done it perfectly, or it's a failure. You’re making things so much more difficult for yourself as an organization, not just the individual, not just the manager, but as an organization.

Cristina Amigoni: So, where can people find you to do all this wonderful work?

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. I've spent most of my time on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, it can be exhausting there, but I'm on LinkedIn. Open messages can reach out. Shoot me an email, or my website, heartwired.co, and on a lovely podcast like this. This is amazing,

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We will have everything in the show notes so you can find Jim.

Alex Cullimore: One final question for you that we ask all of our guests, and that would be, what is your definition of authenticity?

Jim D'Angelo: So, authenticity is something that I had said for a long time that I valued, and I listened to a podcast. It was one with Adam Grant, and I don't remember which one, but he was interviewing somebody who, “I don't like authenticity.” Okay, I was curious why. She said, “Because authentic to what?” And I was like, “Oh, that's actually a really good point.” I'm assuming authenticity means like to something positive.

So, it made me kind of reassess my view of authenticity, and I think where I've landed is authenticity is being true to your core values in a way that you can go to sleep at night, right? Where you care enough about this that if you deviate from your values, you can authentically say, “I fell short of who I want to be,” and have some kind of baked-on accountability. So, it's not authentic to just, “I'm just being myself. This is just who I am.” But rather, the ability to be a little bit more open to your values in a way that brings a sense of accountability.

Cristina Amigoni: Fascinating. Because, as you were saying, asking that question like, authentic to what? My answer was like, well, to the true self that you want to be. That's where the authenticity is. It's not an external thing.

Jim D'Angelo: Definitely. But I think it's easy to externalize. It is easy to say, “I'm just being my authentic self.” When you say something, you're crude, you're not thinking of the people around you, and making that choice intentionally, then you're okay. You're self-selecting the people who are going to spend time with you, who are going to identify with and put up with that. But I don't think that's the spirit of –

Cristina Amigoni: Well, and I would challenge anybody that does that, because it is a shortcut. I mean, the challenge is like, so your authentic self is to insult other people. That's your true self. That's where it motivates you every day and let’s you sleep at night. Then, that's when you could, hopefully, see some like, “Oh, well no.”

Jim D'Angelo: “Oh, I'm just being funny, though. That's just a joke.”

Cristina Amigoni: Nobody's laughing. I teach my kids that whenever they make a joke in quotes, that is really an insult to somebody else, I tell them like, “Who's laughing? Is anybody laughing? Then it's not funny.”

Jim D'Angelo: I agree.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, thank you so much, Jim.

Jim D'Angelo: Thank you. This is wonderful.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Let’s definitely stay in touch. Our paths are parallel. 

Jim D'Angelo: Wonderful.

Cristina Amigoni: There's plenty to do out there.

Jim D'Angelo: Yes. Love it. Thank you so much.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much everybody for listening. Cheers.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Thanks everybody for listening.

[OUTRO]

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo podcast. 

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Lara; and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood. 

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com, or at our website, wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. We Are Siamo is spelled W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others and always Uncover the Human.

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