S5 E2: Featuring Sabina Nawaz

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Hello everyone and welcome to Traceability Podcast. I'm your host, Tracie Edwards, and I am thrilled today to be talking again with Sabina Nawaz. You may recall Sabina from her episode from season two of the show. Sabina is an elite executive coach and author of the new book, "You're the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)." She has advised C-level executives and teams of Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and academic institutions around the world. So Sabina Nawaz, welcome back. It's so great to have you here. Speaking of your book, maybe tell us what inspired you to write it? What were you seeing from your clients that you felt there was a need for?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Tracie, I saw some themes over and over again, over and over again as in in 12,000 pages of data. How did I arrive at that? I do a process called an interview-based 360 for many of my clients, which is I go and interview about a dozen of their colleagues, their peers, their management, their team members on how they perceive this person as a manager and as an employee, a co-worker and a colleague. From these thousands of interviews, I collected 12,000 pages of verbatim data and analyzed it. So I found that I have a unique perch here to understand across sectors, across organization sizes, across levels of seniority, what people think are the best traits of some of their managers, what people are in most pain about because of their managers and their characteristics. Consistently one of the strengths is the person is incredibly smart, which makes sense. Why be hired if you weren't smart and knowledgeable in that area? This person cares a lot about the business and has that passion. The two most common complaints, however, for bosses are, "This person has a really hard impact on me." In other words, "I feel belittled, not seen, not appreciated, not heard, not acknowledged. I lose motivation." So that hard impact. And the second piece was around communications. And when I looked at these themes and because they seemed fairly universal, I thought, why not write a book so that it can scale the message and it can proactively help managers recognize, "This might be happening for me and how can I raise my awareness if this is happening for me?" Here are the tools I've used with my clients on the heels of the 360 that have been road tested. So you then have a way to turn that around very tactical, well-tested ways. So that's why I decided to write the book. Think of it as executive coaching for $30.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That's fantastic. I would totally go for that if I was in need of coaching, which I'm always in need of coaching. You have said that being promoted can be one of the riskiest times in your career, and can we maybe talk about that a little bit? What makes it risky and what are some of the challenges that managers can face as they transition into these newer roles?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes. So when we get promoted, we're in a new level and what we don't realize is that every new level comes with a new set of rules. How the game is played is different and what you did previously might be the very thing that tanks you now. Especially as you rise in positions of power and you become a manager or you get promoted to a more senior manager or a manager of managers, ultimately to a CEO, this starts to develop what I call in the book a power gap or several power gaps. And that's the gap, that's the difference, the natural difference that hierarchy brings. Some of that is healthy because we need some sort of clarity, decisive, et cetera, but a lot of that is rife with misunderstandings, miscommunication, and missed results. So what happens is when I get promoted, I think I'm getting promoted because let's say I'm someone who's very calm and so, "Oh gosh, there are more crises, there's more pressure. As I've gotten promoted into this bigger role, I have to be even calmer." And that calmness of yours might be great a lot of the time, but in some of those cases now it's going to be translated in a very different way from people on the other side of the power gap. They're going to interpret that calmness as somebody who's distant but who's uninterested, somebody who lacks passion, maybe somebody who lacks conviction or a vision. So that very thing that was a strength now becomes a liability and pretty soon that's no longer the formula for your success that got you promoted. So it can be quite risky if you don't recognize that you're in a new level that has new rules and those new rules are not up to you to interpret. It's up to the people you're working with and who are following you.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Do you think there's a training component to it, that there's sort of being, "Here's your promotion and sort of let loose."

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Right. There is no user manual, is there? It's, "Congratulations, here's your promo," and then you might hear next time when it's too late. So of course, yes. This is very much time to pause and go, "What do I need to learn?" Obviously you were promoted because you know a lot that you don't know. So perhaps the most important skill here is an openness and openness to have peripheral vision to understand, "What do I not know about this new level, these new rules that to learn? Who do I seek out to learn those things?"

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Got it. So then as they transition into this role, we've talked about maybe openness, but are there some other things they should watch out for or be aware of as they're making this transition?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

I think one of the things as they make this transition is to look at the reactions of the people around you. The end of my book has a tool, an instrument called "360 Yourself," that is generate some diagnostics, some cues, some clues about what might actually be going on. And there's a set of 42 different questions there. But some of those could be things like people aren't pushing back anymore. They agree with everything I say. On the one hand, that could be great, and you go, "Oh yes, onward and upward. We can move fast, we can be agile, we can crush it." Really what's going on?

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Right.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Or are we all buying into the singular story I'm telling myself and posing valuable perspectives. So that could be one piece of it. No more pushing back. Another could be suddenly you appear funnier than you think you are. Everybody's laughing at your jokes, everybody's smiling, everybody's saying, "Oh boss, that's so cool. I want to do what you do on your weekends" and so on and so forth. That's another clue. The ratio of truth to pandering to you might be going down. So there are a number of clues to look at to ask yourself these questions about not just about you, but what's happening in the system around you and how people are responding to you.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So there's definitely some politics at play as far as communication and how people respond to you. I think there's also some increased pressure and responsibility that comes with the new role and maybe got used to it at a level at our previous role and it's maybe exponential in the new one. How do you advise managers to sort of handle that increased pressure and the responsibility?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

You've really hit upon a core piece, which is pressure. We've been talking about power so far, and a combination of power and pressure that can be very heady, intoxicating and beneficial, at the same time, it can also be a deadly cocktail. There's a lot of great things about power. You get to have your vision come true. You also get the corner office and some other perks. Also, wonderful things about pressure, people tell me how they do their best work under a tight deadline, under high pressure. Things get done, creativity starts to spark. And at the same time, pressure can corrupt. So people say power corrupt, I actually think pressure corrupts and then power blinds you to the actions that you're taking. And what I mean by corrupt is being short in your answers, being abrasive, belittling others, bullying, meaning them, or even simply being negligent in how you communicate. So it has that harder impact on them, that number one finding of what people don't like about their bosses lots of interviews I've done. There's a number of power gaps, which we talked about. There's also a number of pressure pitfalls. And of the several pressure pitfalls, there are tools that I've created and road tested with my clients for over two decades now to continue to perfect it and make it more and more practical and tactical in today's of how they deal with those pressure pitfalls. A couple of things there. One is this pressure to be everything to everybody, what I call being the sole provider. I might do it because I want to care take everyone else. "Oh, my teen is under so much pressure, I've got to jump in and work the weekend." Or I have an exceptionally high standard and I'm a straight A student or I'm just moving lightning fast and I don't want to slow down, bring others along or delegate. So one of the tools I have is called the delegation dial. This is the number one mistake people make. They treat patient as an on-off switch. "I'm going to delegate this to you, Tracie, and now you're on your own. Let me know if you need help." And who is going to come to their boss and say, "I don't know what I'm doing. I need help." But delegation is not a switch, it's a dial. It's a dial you turn off slowly based on the capabilities of that person.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That makes total sense. Either we can get into trouble by being delegated to and not having enough context, enough detail, or we end up being a lone wolf for something. Right?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Exactly. Exactly. That's one. And the other thing, in the face of pressure, many of us much of the time tend to do more, "Oh, I'm going to double down on my email. I'm going to double down on my Slack. I'm going to work all weekend through." And my advice to people is actually to do a lot less, in fact, to do almost nothing. And there's this practice I call "Blank space," which I talked about in episode two as well. And that is about really actually unplugging from the franticness, the [inaudible 00:11:52] to get head back in the right space and recognize what really matters so that the pressures that are squeezing the littler stuff melt away.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

I love the concept of blank space. I actually try to use it myself.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Good.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

I find that if I have say a fair hour or two in the day, I sort of block it out for focus time and a sort of a do not disturb and I'm trying to be in the zone and get something finished and that kind of thing. I found if I don't, then the calendar, as you are well aware, the calendar just gets packed and you have no time throughout the rest of your day.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yeah, and how has that worked for you when you are able to successfully do that, Tracie? Speaker 1_Tracie: Oh my gosh, it makes so much difference. I feel like I can focus, I can get the brain power going in the right direction.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes. Yes. Even recognizing what the right direction is. If we're just going, going, going... And the research shows that our biggest insights come in the shower, on our commute, during a run. Why? Because we're not doing doing. We forget that we're human beings, not human doings. And when we allow ourselves to be, then we have the answers inside us. And the big answers, those are the ones that help ease the biggest pressure valves, open up the biggest pressure valves that we have. So it's great that you're thinking about doing it on a daily basis. I usually ask my clients to block out two hours a week, actually unplug from things and go out and think about the bigger pieces that they need to work on and focus.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So it may not even be to complete a certain task, it may just be to have head space where you can visualize.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Got it. You got it. And it depends on where you are and what your comfort level is with accessing this. So some people might take a certain topic and just work on that in a very focused manner. I might collect notes over the course of a week and then bring those notes and suddenly start to see the bigger connection between the items and the notes. And some people might just do nothing. That practice of doing nothing is highly uncomfortable for most people in our-

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Yes.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

So that's a more advanced version of blank space. But you can get there. For example, somebody I worked with got there and he actually switched careers.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Really?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

He realized that he didn't want to do what he was doing anymore. He had been very, very successful with highest levels possible, and now it was time for him to switch and thriving in a whole different profession.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That's fantastic when you're able to realize that and feel that you have the opportunity to course correct. I think maybe we don't always feel like we have that opportunity to course correct. Sometimes we feel like we're in too deep or we've got too many commitments where we are and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So one of the ideas you talk about in your book is something called a time portfolio. So I wanted to ask you, what is a time portfolio and how can that help?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

We often say that time is one of our most precious resources. We don't always act that way. And some people maybe think about their financial management and perhaps have a money portfolio. Based on their level of risk and their goals, they take different chunks of money and invest it in different kinds of ways, high risk, low risk, high yield, et cetera, et cetera. What if we did the same thing with time? The time portfolio is a tool where you come up with somewhere between five to nine, eight or nine chunks of time that you spend at work. Well, you can do this for home as well. So for example, you might say one big chunk of time I spend is around emails and other means of communication. Another chunk is managing my team, staff meetings, performance assessments. So on another one might be external conferences and thought leadership. Another one would be paying my managers taxes. In other words, their leadership team, the thing that they want done. Another might be project reviews. So let's say we have these time categories. Roughly, without making this a very onerous task, write down that the relative percentage of time you spend on each of these. Here's where my clients make the first mistake is they add up and it's more than a hundred percent. And I say, "Well, you have to go back to a hundred. So how do you apportion your time between these things? All right, great. Now let's look at the future. Where do you want to shift these things?" So let's say someone is spending 30% of their time on emails and communication and they want it to be ultimately 15% of their time. So let's write down that future column and again, have it add up to a hundred. Now the second mistake my clients make at this point is then they want to go from that 30% to 15% overnight, does not work. It's not reality. So be an intermediate column. So if you're at 30% now, what would it look like for you to get to say 27% and then identify one action step you're going to take to go from 30 to 27 because that's easy, easier. You're breaking it down into smaller action steps till you ultimately whittle your way down to 15. So for example, someone might say, "I'm going to turn off all notifications," or "I'm going to turn off all notifications between eight and 10 AM which is when I'm going to try and have some focus time or some blank space." So the idea of that time portfolio is to more consciously manage the different chunks where you spend most of your time and the relative focus and attention you give them. Because otherwise most of us are at risk of becoming what's jokingly called CEO, chief email officer.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So I think you bring up a point that it doesn't always work to change overnight because the other people have expectations of you. Right? And so there's sort of some expectation management that probably has to happen before you can really get down to say that 15%.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Exactly right. And that expectation management comes with delegation, it comes with setting boundaries, it comes with clear communication. So there are many ways you can do that. One of the ways I think you and I were chatting before the show is around using this tool called a mapping tool. It has functions beyond expectation setting, but one of the ways we can use it is to set expectations and boundaries, which is mapping what I do with what that means. So for example, I might say I like to create focus time for my strategic priority of the week. What you will notice me doing is not responding to any pop-ups and message IMs between eight and 10 AM every day. It doesn't mean I'm not interested in what you have to say, it just means I'm single tasking. "If it is a true emergency, here's how you can reach me." So it both creates a boundary, but it also decodes for the person the reason why you're not responding to them. So they don't sit and worry about, "Oh, she mustn't like what I had to say."

Speaker 1_Tracie:

I love that. Too often I think having worked many years in projects and coaching and too many of us sort of forget about the communication piece of it, though I know there've been times when I have ended up worried, "Oh, I'm not hearing from my boss. I hope everything's okay."

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes. And here's the challenge, especially when it's your boss that you don't hear from, we tend to personalize it that it's something about me that's deficient, lacking or not enough, and we tend to catastrophize it. We make it much worse than it is.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Yeah, so true. But then there's sort of the reverse aspect of that. So we've sort of talked about the managing down, but we also have to sort of create those boundaries with our bosses.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think just about every tool that's in this book can be used to manage up just as it could be to manage down. So for example, this mapping tool as an employee. And I've done this with many leadership teams where the whole leadership team has done it, not just the CEO, taken some time to create this map of how I like to work and what it means. And so that your boss knows, "Hey, when I don't respond between four and six, it's because I have these other responsibilities." You will know that you will hear back from me within 24 hours or whatever the appropriate time boundary is that I want to set.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That's great. I think otherwise there's this other trap that we end up in and that's the trap in, you and I talked about this before about the fallacy of multitasking where you're not really multitasking, you're focus multitasking in three or four different places every few seconds. And I think that one of the biggest challenges of our day is our attempts to multitask and our being prone to distract them.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Absolutely. Absolutely. We've seen study after study of how multitasking doesn't really work. We see it these days, particularly in video meetings where obvious the person didn't hear the question and suddenly they're caught, but they fool themselves into thinking, "Oh yeah, I'm multitasking, but I'm very good at it." So it does not help and there's a huge cost to distraction and interruptions in terms of your efficiency. So the you're trying to do get faster, get slower when you're multitasking. But pressure causes us to multitask more as well because coming from all ends. So it makes sense we want to do that. Unfortunately, it backfires.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Yeah. Do you think that there's maybe an emotional toll that some of that takes with that multitasking?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

I think so. I'm curious to know what you think, Tracie. Because to me, I feel less of a sense of satisfaction that I got anything done or anything done because I've spread out in so many different ways. And I see this over again, you probably see this in your focus time, is when I am able to simply take one thing and get it done. It feels so good to check that off the list, to know that that big thing, that's the thing that's going to wake me up in the middle of the night if left undone, that's taken care of. Emails, Slack messages, Teams messages, those are never ending. They're always going to be there.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So true. And I think I always feel some sort of, I'm letting someone down if I'm not getting back to them right away, I'm causing somebody a problem if I'm not doing this and that on their timetable. And so that I think is some of that emotional toll as well, is it can really sort of mess with our feelings about ourselves.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Absolutely. And there are so many assumptions and fallacies baked into that because we actually make assumptions about what someone else's timeline is. We rarely ask, "Well, by when would you like it?" And sometimes you'd be surprised that it's not as urgent as you thought it was. Especially if your manager is asking, you think, "There goes my weekend." When they're actually going, "Eventually get it to me at some point." Asking for that clarity before you jump in and take that on yourself and make it a burden is super important.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Well, this might be a good time to sort of dive into what you say is a Yes list. So maybe what is a Yes list and how can that help?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Well, to go into the Yes list, I also need to go into a topic called micro habits. One way I started to hint at this with the time portfolio is don't make that big swing from 30% to 15%, but make smaller step changes. And the best way to make changes that stick is to make them incredibly tiny. That's the best way to make big change, is to make it at a micro level. So and a micro habit is something that has two components to it. One, it is so small, it is so ridiculously small that not doing it would cost you more energy than doing it. And second, you do it every day. For example, if somebody says they want to have better physical health, a micro habit is not going from the couch to 30 minutes every day to the gym. That is very unlikely to succeed. We are in the first part of the year, and by now most New Year's resolutions have fizzled for those who even make them anymore because people have learned that they don't stick anyways. So going to the gym 30 minutes a day is not the habit to adopt. But doing one push-up a day, it should be so small that you kind of laugh out loud going, "But that's ridiculous." That's a micro. A Yes list this then tracks a few of your micro habits every single day. Here's how it works. Let's say I have three micro habits I'm working on. Maybe this person is doing one push-up a day. They're working on the fact that they interrupt a lot. So they're one meeting a day, they make sure they're the third or later person to speak and say they're working on being a better listener so they paraphrase once a day.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Okay.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

The Yes list is a table that has these three items as rows, and then the columns are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. All they're doing at the end of the day, which takes them less than 60 seconds to do is saying yes or no. Did I do this today or not? And you count the number of yeses. Over the course of the week, if you have more nos than yeses, something is going on. Or perhaps you never get yeses on Thursdays, and you might get curious about why. Maybe Thursday is more of a pressure-filled day. And when the pressure is, "Because I'm in my boss's meetings all the time, I revert to bad behavior," that might be a clue. And recognizing that will help you manage it differently. So a Yes list is a way to track how you're doing on your habits because simply it's gamifying things. Most of us now are tracking things on our watches, how many steps we take. My husband the other day was walking around the bed in the bedroom and, "What are you doing?" "Well, I have 276 steps left. I'm not going to go to bed before I hit my 10 000." So it's a way to track that says, "Yeah, oh, I can give myself a gold star." We love that Pavlovian nature, that aspect. And so a Yes list helps us with that, but it also helps us get smarter about our habits because we start to see trends and themes.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

I love it. And that gives us probably more self-awareness. And that was another topic that I wanted to get into a little bit. Are there things that you see about managers and self-awareness and how does your book sort of help them in this area?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yeah. The one big piece here is that people around you are not going to help you become more self-aware. Because of the power that you occupy in your role, you're not going to get the full truth and nor should you put that pressure on that. So how do you become more aware when you cannot fully trust the input that you're getting from others and where not everybody's going to hire a coach where I can go do an interview based 360 process and unearth that? This more asking yourself to read the room, to understand what are the cues in the meetings, in the conversations that you're having to raise your awareness. So the things that I talked about before about nobody's pushing back, people are thinking you're funny, your jokes are funnier than they should be. The work product that your team is providing is not matching your directives. Your team repeatedly asked for clarification on what you mean, even though you thought you were clear the first three times. They might explaining it the fourth time is not going to solve the problem. What else is going on? So raising awareness of what's going on so that you can then say, "Hm, if that's the case, I'm likely victim to this particular power gap or this particular pressure pitfall, and then here's a tool I can use to offset that."

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Okay. I like that concept of reading the room and sometimes that backfires on us a little bit and we maybe internalize, "Oh, I must be doing something wrong" when really maybe it's more an opportunity to be curious.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes. Because we might then over personalize it versus recognizing that these are the dynamics. Look, you can never be pressure free. The jobs come with pressure and we cannot just wave a wand. It's more about how can you be pressure proof as opposed to pressure free. And so reading the room is more about actually collecting objective data. And how, as people are disagreeing with me, how many times people are agreeing with me? How many times are they asking a repeated question of clarification? Collecting that data as opposed to making assumptions about what you might be, "Oh, they look sideways, they mustn't like what I'm doing. They must think I'm a weak, ineffective manager."

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So how has the, sort of the landscape of management changed, especially in the last 10 years? I know that we sort of have a history as for this command and control style of management. There's been all sorts of trends toward more agility and that kind of thing. So how have you seen management change and how does the book help sort of take into account some of the changes we've seen and the expectations of management?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes. So many changes. I think there are some foundational elements that have remained true at the same time as we've seen with remote work and hybrid work and the mandates for people to go back to work that are not working. A lot of things are becoming less positional, as in, "Because I'm the boss and I said so" and more about the people, that there's a voice of the people that comes up regardless of the hierarchy from where it's coming. Does it mean the people in positions of power still have power? Yes, absolutely. But they need to do things more collaboratively that works better. That also works better with say, a Gen Z workforce that's been shown to value collaboration and teamwork more than of the older generations. And of course I'm generalizing here, but going by overall, because you asked about overall trends. I think there's another concept that's going on with Gen Z for example, is this term of conscious unbossing, having less quote unquote "Management" or being managed and they're showing less desire to be in positions of management. Coupled with that, corporations are cutting down management jobs at a quite fast clip. So there are fewer managers in organizations. Those are all trends that I'm noticing happening right now.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

It would seem that as organizations are becoming flatter, that that could put even more pressure. Right? And allow us to get into some of the same communication and busyness traps and that kind of thing because you just don't have the layers that you use to have.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

And therefore you need to manage in a very different way, less and control way less in a way where I've got to have my finger in every pot, less in a way of you've got to be here 24 by seven in front of my eyes. How can we treat our workforce more as adults and allow them to be in charge of their output and still keep the focus on results, productivity output, but in a very different way?

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So speaking of those results, are there metrics or indicators that you suggest the managers use to sort of evaluate their effectiveness and their ability to maybe break free of some of the pressure?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

I think going back to the time portfolio that we talked about, looking at how that shifts. One indicator of am I breaking free of the pressure or I'm still in that chief email officer role. That's my own data from my own calendar one way to look at indicators of am I caving into the pressure and falling squarely into that pitfall or am I able to rise above it? Another would be the growth of my team, how my team growing and are they getting promoted? Are they getting able to step up and take on bigger sets of responsibilities? If so, that's a huge indicator of success. It means I can step up and take bigger responsibilities.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That's a really great point. I have not considered that, but thank you for sharing that. So most of my career has been spent in technology. And is there a role that you see for technology in helping managers deal with some of these things?

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Well, of course, everybody's talking about AI. And the emotional detection and conversation AI business is projected to grow to the tune of $55 billion.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Wow.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

So I think not just in getting tasks done, but in actually supplementing our emotional intelligence ironically, we can use technology to help with that. There are tools that help like Yoodli, for example, that help us understand our non-verbals in meetings, our presence, our presentation skills. So we can use technology. And if communication is the number two problem that people have with bosses in the interviews that I've conducted, we can technology hugely to make us more emotionally intelligent and aware of how we communicate in a way that both lands and has the desired effect on the people and therefore on the business results.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

I love it. Yeah. I think we have a tendency to sort of blame technology sometimes because of the proliferation of tools that are available, especially when it comes to communication, but managing the technology so that the technology is not managing you, so to speak.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So as we wrap up, and this has been such a fantastic conversation, I'd love to talk for another couple of hours, but can you share an example of a transformation that you've seen in a manager and who maybe applied the principles in your book or who inspired you in writing the book.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Tracie, that would be so many people. We would take more than a couple of hours, probably a couple of days. One story is of this manager who was incredible at generating business results. He thought he was hot and he was hot in terms of, at least initially, and then he got call to his boss's office where he was told that people around him hated working with him and they were leaving the team because of him. Essentially, they called him far less polite versions of a bully and a jerk. And what's surprising is that this was all a complete surprise and shock to him. He had no idea that this was the damage he was wreaking on his peers and on his team. He would make jokes because he thought that would lighten the heaviness of the situation and make people feel better. He would be sarcastic because he thought that was the way to motivate people. And so he learned to actually stop making jokes for a while until he could understand when it was appropriate and when it wasn't. He started to listen a lot more deeply to people and recognize what were the cues when they were stuck as opposed to making fun of it. He started to think, ask questions like, "How can I unblock you?" So these sound very simple on the face of it, they're hard to do. The biggest step is recognizing, "Oh my gosh, this is how it's being seen on the other side of the power gap." So once this guy was able to see that, I actually did a 360 for him a couple of years after, and it went from one of the worst 360s to one of the best 360s where people described him as a thousand percent better.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

That's amazing. And it kind of speaks to the power of the Yes list that you were talking about. I'm sure it took concentrated micro habit as he went along.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

So.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Yes.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Fantastic. Well, I'm super excited about the book and my congratulations again. That's fantastic. And you have quite a group of individuals recommending it for you, and so that's super special. So thank you for spending some time with me and with Traceability today.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

Thank you for having me, Tracie. It's so nice to see you again.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Thank you.

Speaker 2_Sabina Nawaz:

And I look forward to hearing and reading comments from your listeners on these. Happy to answer any questions, info@sabinanawaz.com.

Speaker 1_Tracie:

Sounds great. And for those of you listening, your call to action today is to share, comment with Sabina, check out her book when it becomes available, and as always, give us a like on Spotify or Apple and let us know how you like the podcast. Thanks again.