Hello and welcome to This Is Not What I Signed Up For, the podcast for new managers teaching you how to swim so you don't sink when you're in this new role. Now I am really excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. We're about to dive in. I am very, very happy to introduce our guest today, Shelle Rose Charvet. I've known Shelle for a few years now and she is just a wonderful, funny, dynamic person. And I can't wait for you guys as the listeners to meet her and hear what she has to say. She's authored four books, including an international bestseller, Words That Change Minds, which is also featured as a Forbes Best Management Book for Execs and Entrepreneurs. So I'm really excited to hear about that. And then, Shelle, there's a documentary on CBC/CNBC, Customer (Dis)Service, that features your work as well, which is great. was quite a few years ago. And that was all because I tried to take an airplane ride in during the Icelandic volcano and got put on hold. And I made a phone call to CBC Radio in Canada and talked to them about the failure of dealing with customer things. And then from that, I was on radio across the country. And then... a documentary person came up and wanted to use my models to help customers get better at customer service. So that was just a huge surprise and it got me tons of business. It was amazing. Yeah. All thanks to a volcano. I mean, who would guess, right? it erupted. So, the other thing that you sent me in your bio is you've created a persuasion app called Husband Motivator, and you've got two US patents for your AI software detecting motivation or what motivates people in text. It is, the geek in me is going wild for these two, and I'm having to contain myself knowing that we're going to be talking about management today, not these. Give me a little bit on this husband motivator. Husband Motivator is a quick and dirty free app. And the way it works is, I mean, we designed it for people with husbands, men and women with husbands, right? Because what do women complain about most about in marriages? Men don't complain about their marriages other than they don't get to do things they want to do. Women complain that they can't convince their husbands. So, it's a very simple little app. You put in your husband's name, you put in his... your favorite nickname, your nice nickname for them, your pet name, not the other one. And then you choose a context because one of the things that everybody gets to realize once you've been working with people or living with people is we don't do the same things all the time. Our behavior and motivation is context dependent. So do you want to talk to your husband about intimate relationships or about work or about fitness or about what? Choose a context. And then the app just asks you four quick little questions. about your husband that you choose an answer from. And then it gives you an irresistible motivation method. Four steps that you use them customized to what are the motivation triggers driving your husband. And of course, it's hard to remember that so you can email it to yourself. And of course, it's password protected so your husband can't get in. the big secret, don't tell everybody, is you can put in as many husbands as you like. So there's a little husband motivator app and that's something that we designed. That's so cool. I'm guessing some of what's in the background there of knowing the context and all that is going to feature in what we're discussing today. Totally, totally. Because we're going to be talking about motivation, which is absolutely critical for work. mean, you know that everybody knows that if you're not motivated, like you do crappy work and you don't even want to do it. So new managers really need to focus on what motivates them and what motivates the people that work for them. Excellent, I'm dying to dive into this, but I'm gonna stop us for a quick icebreaker that I do at the beginning of every episode. Shelle, what is one of the worst pieces of advice you've received when it comes to management or a bad mistake that you've made along the way? Give us something there. I can't remember how it was phrased, but somebody told me you need to really closely supervise your team. And this is a huge mistake because it goes almost immediately into micromanaging, which then your team concludes that you don't trust them. So then they don't trust you. And so, and then you become the total bottleneck because you have to approve everything. And so your team can only go as quickly as you can inspect everything and no one is happy. And I remember not wanting to do it, because I'm not that much of a detailed person, but thinking, this person has got some credibility with me. And we have to be careful of the people that have credibility in our eyes, because we tend to believe them sometimes too much. And I think I made some big mistakes and I hurt some people's feelings and I turned some people right off. as a young manager. So that was not a good piece of Yeah, and that so happens. I'm relating to that as well from my first time. but it happens because as a manager, your reputation depends on what your team does. So of course you're feeling a little nervous to begin with, but if you're Monsieur l'inspecteur, if you're the inspector, nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I love the fact that each week we're getting a different piece of advice. I think it's going to be great at the end of the season to put it all together as well, just thinking about this. yeah. So for everyone today, we're going to be speaking about words that change minds for managers. know, managers have a ton on their plates and finding and keeping the right people on the team is one of the things that you need to look at. And if you don't understand what keeps your team members motivated and keeps them productive and what's behind what they're doing, you risk not meeting your targets for the team, your own targets, things like that. So that's where we're going to be speaking today. So Shelle, I want to dive in. to where the problem happens here. What happens when teams start losing motivation and productivity and productivity is dropping? What are the cascade effects of this? What are the things that happen? No, motivation is so important. Why? Because if you are inspired and motivated about the work you do, you'll even do the boring, awful stuff joyfully because you are working towards a purpose that you believe in. OK, that's the idea. Well, what happens when people are not motivated? Well, every task becomes a burden. Managers will say, people don't care about the quality of their work. They just throw anything in. They write a report with mistakes. They don't double check their numbers when they're doing spreadsheets. because everything becomes a burden, productivity, the cascade effect is that productivity and quality fall. And then the manager becomes a taskmaster trying to get people to upgrade what they're doing or fix it or... If you're not working on understanding your people and what motivates them and what will make them want to work joyfully, then your job is going to be an awful burden. So it cascades back on you. I mean, it's obvious that productivity falls when nobody really wants to do what they're supposed to do. But as a manager, it cascades back on you and your job becomes horrendous after that. And nobody becomes a manager to cycle. to be beating slaves to do what they don't want to do. Nobody takes that on willingly. So the worst thing. totally. And the worst thing. that productivity down, the next thing hits, and then the next, and then the next. you look like a bad manager because your team's not motivated, they don't produce good quality work, they don't produce a good level of quantity, et cetera. You're a bad manager. That's how the rest of the world will perceive that. Yeah. So if we're looking at this motivation and productivity, and we've mentioned a couple of them now, what are some of the warning signs that a new manager can be on the lookout for? And this is something I've had a couple of discussions in the last few days with various people as to how do you start noticing this? What are the signs, the early warnings? Okay, there's two ways that you can start to notice this. One is in the behavior and attitude and second is in the language. Let's start with the behavior and attitude. If your people are walking around with their shoulders drooped or you can see it in meetings because you don't see them because they're still all working remotely. they're, you know, if everybody's not really back in yet. If they're expressing frustration, you know, those kind of noises in meetings where people go. or annoyance. So you're looking for fatigue, frustration, and annoyance. That's the kind of behavior that you're looking at. There is an issue here. And it may be an issue with somebody else. Like if somebody else is not carrying their load, this is really frustrating for part of your team. So you need to get in there, create rapport and credibility and trust with the staff member, your team member that's manifesting these things. and find out what's really going on. Because if you don't take that initiative, it becomes clear that nobody respects them and nobody comes in terms of their perception. Nobody cares about how they feel. So it just gets worse and worse and worse. So when you see those signs, you need to act. It's like new managers also don't tend to confront. Canada is a real... conflict avoidance kind of culture. I most people would rather die than have to say, I'm not happy with how you handled that, you know. Please let me die, don't make me do this, you know. But if you don't have mechanisms to talk to people about issues that they're having or that they're having with other people, people lose respect for you, but they also lose the will to work. So looking for those kinds of things is really, really important. So that's the behavior aspect. yeah, and it's very important what you're saying there about dealing with this, because I think something I see a lot of as well is managers will put this off until the review time or something like that. And you end up with this festering over a long period of time and you're not building rapport. So that review gets worse. meeting, you're not meeting people's basic fundamental needs, one of which is, how well are we doing here? If I have to wait till once a year for anybody to give me any kind of appreciation of the quality of my work for a category of people, this is totally off -putting. For another category of people, they don't care. They don't even care what you think when you tell them. So you mentioned two things there and the second one being language. I want to pull us back to that. yeah, this is my area of expertise is understanding what's hidden beneath the language patterns that people use. So when people are beginning to get frustrated, they tend to use what we call away from language. Away from language is when you talk about the things you don't want. we're going to do that won't work because we don't have enough time. And they tell you everything that's wrong with everything. Now, having an away from pattern is really, or being in that mode, because we shift, can be a good thing. Like if you're an auditor or you're trying to find a bug in a program, you need to be in an away from mode where you see what's wrong, as opposed to a toward mode when you're looking for what you're trying to gain or achieve. But if everybody shifts their language patterns to that won't work because, so that's one pattern they've gone into this away from, this is not what we want. That's not going to work. The customer is not happy. Like everything that's going wrong. And that's all they talk about. That's a big indicator. The second pattern they go into in combination with that is something we call internal. Internal is when I'm in a mode where I make my own decisions based on what's important to me. And I decide whether it's right or wrong. Well, I'm not happy with that. Would be somebody talking in internal. Hmm. But they might say, well, I think the best thing to do is, and one of the worst things to do to someone who's in eternal mode is to tell them what they should do or what they have to do because they don't want to be told what to do. hey, Ross, I know what you should do to fix this. Hahaha feel like that's akin to saying someone like, just breathe and calm down. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this command language only works if the person puts you on a pedestal or you are incredibly credible to them. So if I've established credibility and trust and rapport, and then I say to you, Ross, this is what I would do. I think you should do this in this situation. That's acceptable. But if you've got an unhappy person who decides for themselves about all the things they don't like, the worst thing you can do is tell them what to do. Instead, what I teach people how to do in my work is how to go to the bus stop of the other person. So if the bus stop of the other person is, I'm not happy about this, that's where you start. And you say, I can see that there's a number of things you're not happy about. Would you like to tell me how you're feeling about this? You don't have to solve the world. Just go to their bus stop and get them to talk about it. In fact, half of what they're going to say will be eye -opening for you. because it's a different perspective. And then the other thing is that'll tell you, it'll give you something to hook onto to figure out what needs to do next. And they may even know. You could even say, well, you summarize what they said. So this and this and this has been a problem as far as you're concerned. What do you think the objective should be? What do you think we should aim for instead? Now, the question was not how do we solve this? That's a different question. The system thinking, et cetera. It's what should our objective be? And then how do you think we should get there? So this is going wrong. You're not happy with this. What should our objective about this be? And then get the person journey to finding out more. Well, I love the fact that you said journey because I think conversations are a journey. You go to where the other person is, that's your starting point. You invite them on the bus, they'll get on the bus if they feel welcome, right? It's their decision, but if you can make them feel welcome. And then your journey is to where do we want to be and how do we want to get there? And if you see a conversation as a journey, you know that you can make a mistake and say, hey, That's not what I meant, or that came across badly. You don't have to be perfect. All you have to do is be available and respectful of where they're coming from. So if somebody's in that away from internal thing, I don't like this and I don't like that, don't tell them what to do. Ask them what they think. Ask them what they think the issues are. And then to motivate them to want to go towards an outcome, you can say, well, in order to prevent and avoid these problems in the future, What do you think our objective should be? Now notice I use the same language as they were using. And the reason you do that is so they go inside and they go, yeah, this person gets where I'm coming from. And it opens their mind to then think about what you want them to think about is, what should we aim for instead? And then how should we get there? If you just say, OK, OK, OK, and you listen to them and then you say, well, what should our objective be? They won't necessarily stay on your bus. They need to know that you've heard them. And I'd like to look at these hidden motivation triggers, these hidden language patterns, because that gives us an idea of what language we should use. So if someone's in a way from, we also need to stay in the language of prevention and fixing and getting rid of these issues, overcoming these obstacles. That language goes right to their heart and goes right in. But if you use goal -oriented language, what we call toward language, is, well, we need to be making things better and improving things. When they're talking about all what is going wrong, no match. That's right. And it's so unconscious. People don't realize they're using one or the other. And that's why I like to bring these different language patterns up to conscious awareness so that the next time you're in a conversation, you'll be able to tell if somebody is saying, all the things they want to get rid of and shouldn't be happening versus somebody who's talking about the benefits and the advantages of something and where we're trying to get to and the goal toward language versus away from language. So if you can hear that and you want to go to their bus stop, now you know what to do. Wonderful. When we were chatting to prepare for this, I feel like I'm processing so much of what you've just said. It's so cool. But I want to keep us going. We also spoke about attracting people and getting the right people involved. What is the right people? Where does this come into all of this? You know, one of the things to be able to determine the right people, knowledge and skills, okay, you need to know what the knowledge and skills are, but that's not enough. The third thing to look at is fit. Does the person fit the environment and the tasks? So one of the things to look at when you want to attract the right people is the job, mainly away from job, for example, or mainly toward job. Is the job about preventing and fixing problems? is the job about achieving goals. Now, obviously there's some of each, but in order to be successful, what do you spend most of your time doing? So just an example from everyday life. Most family doctors have a way from motivation about their work. They're there to help you prevent and solve health problems. You would never go and see your family doctor and have them say, so Ross, what are your goals for your health? This just wouldn't happen. They say, so what's up? What's wrong? What's going on? Because they're problem focused. They're problem solvers. A lot of engineering jobs are problem solving jobs. You need to be able to have that problem focused. And if you accidentally attract and hire a goal setter, they don't see the problem. So let give you an example. Let's say you wrote a draft of a report, but you want some feedback on it, and you send it over to a friend. If they happen to be a toward reader, because this can change by context. They read it and they say, Ross looks great to me. You go, what? But if they have an away from hat and they read it, all of the mistakes or errors in logic or things that were left out jump off the screen and they see them immediately because their brain at that moment is wired to notice what's wrong. Yeah. And so some of us are natural editors. We see immediately what's wrong with the text. Well, if that's the nature of a job, you want to attract somebody who loves to solve problems. If you accidentally assault a goal getter, someone with a toward preference in their work, they will feel stressed by problems. Yeah. that's fascinating. I'm like thinking back to hires I've had in the past now. Like, hmm, yes, that makes sense. That makes sense. you go, how come they didn't notice what was wrong with this? Well, because they were looking at what they were trying to achieve, right? And some jobs, it's go get this thing done. And there's two other language patterns, motivation patterns that we look at. If you want someone to take a creative approach to things, they need to have what we call an options pattern, where if you say black, they say, well, there's orange and yellow and green and blue. Right? So these, they like to have lots of possibilities and they're incredibly creative and they're motivated to not follow standard operating procedures. So you can see where they get into problems in some organizations. They like to think outside of the box. And one of the things is that they like to start projects and then they like to start another project. These are not great, complete or finish or sort. So we call those people with an options motivation trigger and they use optiony words. They talk about alternatives and choices and potentials and possibilities. And then on the other side of that equation is someone who has a procedure pattern. And they like a step -by -step standard operating procedure. And the most motivating thing is when they've started a procedure is to finish it. And they're driven to complete. Right? Now, obviously, if you have those two people working together, they can really piss each other off unless they kind of understand what each brings to the table. Mmm. Because somebody who wants standard operating procedure doesn't like exceptions to rules. No, we let you do it, we'd have to let everybody else do it. Because they believe that there's a right way to do things. But they get stuff done. Now, some people have combination of both. But you can see in an organization, depending on the job, you might need to have somebody who's in the middle who can do both, or somebody who's more procedural, or somebody who likes options a bit more. So the right person depends on how you would decode the major tasks and responsibilities. And those are a couple of examples that are important to get right. I would like to give you one other quick example. If your job is about serving customers, either internal or external, and the job is about making the customers happy, you need someone who has a pattern we call external. That means they're not happy if the customer's not happy. And one question we ask to find out is, how do you know you've done a good job? They say, well, when my customer says so, or when my boss is happy, or when nobody complains. In other words, the judgment comes from the outside. It's external. And you'd want to avoid hiring someone who's very internal. Because when the customer is not happy, they say the customers are just so ridiculous. Like, they're so unreasonable to deal with. where somebody who's external, my God, they're not happy, I better do something. And a lot of my work is helping set up systems so you can easily have your customer service reps make the customers happy. And a piece of that is hiring the right people. But you may want somebody who's managing that team to be much more internal, to hold the standards and to give feedback when needed, et cetera. I'm so glad you bring in the word systems there and like systems thinking and design thinking is something I love. I'm just visualizing what you're describing here with different people at different points on a grid and the distance between them and knowing what each of the roles are in each of the sides and defining that and knowing what you want. But then how does that communication happen between all of them? How do they relate to each other? Because it's relationships that we're working That's right, absolutely. And I can show people how to listen to somebody's language and watch their body language and see what are the motivators and how to go to that bus stop. And I show organizations how to do that with their primary customers. And what are the processes, like you hear procedure there, that they need to follow to meet those needs of their customers. But you can also do this internally with your team as a manager. So even those few patterns we just mentioned, you can notice if a team member isn't very away from their problem focus, well, give them problems to solve. That's what they love to do. If they're more goal -focused, give them targets to achieve. If they're more internal, get them to do tasks that involve deciding about things, evaluating for themselves. If they're more external, give them jobs that make them have to please other people and get other people's input. I mean, it would be perfect for them. Creative people want more optiony things to do. They don't want to have to follow a step -by -step procedure. They want to find alternative ways to do things. They may be design procedures, but not follow them. And somebody who prefers procedures, just tell me how to do it, and I'll do it. Get out of the way, and I'll get it done. So right is depending on the job. And that's one of the things I want to help people do is figure out what are the right people for the fit. Yeah. Shelle, this has been amazing. This discussion has been great. I could carry on with this discussion for hours. And I suspect next time I see you, we are going to carry on this discussion. As we're wrapping up here, have you got any current projects that you're excited about, something that you're working on right now that you want to share with the listeners? Actually, it is an example of this. That's probably why I brought up these examples. There's an educational technology company in Texas, and they call this "Shelle-fying" as in making it sound, you work like Shelle, is we're going to, we've started already and we're working on their customer service systems because they don't want customer service, because they're helping school systems and teachers and students get better at learning. They don't want their customer service people to just be transactional. They had trouble doing this. I helped them do that. We want them to be able to zoom out and actually facilitate the clients using the technology better so that they have a wonderful experience of working with the company through the customer service people and using their technology. to listen to my language, move away from the transactional, move towards a more relationship. And what I'm helping them do is design the process. and train the people on what to listen for and how to respond, how to create rapport and credibility, how to generate enthusiasm in your users. I mean, one of the things with end users, you probably know this as being in the technology business, is they get overwhelmed very easily. And if you use too much options language for a typical end user, just, know, deer in headlights. They want standard operating procedures. And then they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. But if you give them, you could do it this way, or you could do it that way, they're like, It's like, get away from me, you know? no. what I'm working on. As you can see, it's kind of exciting. That's so cool. Shelle, this has been amazing to our listeners. If you want to find out more about "Shelle-fying" something, we'll have Shelle's details in the show notes, as well as what she's busy with and links to her site. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for this. This has been wonderful. Shelle, thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely great listening to it. I love your ideas. I love the way you've spoken through this. Thank you so much. thank you, Ross. Thank you for this opportunity. And anybody can contact me with any questions they have, put my website and email information. if they want, Words That Changed Minds is available in an audiobook, an ebook, and regular book. And that's a place to get started if the topic is interesting. Wonderful. Thank you so much. And thank you to our listeners. Till next time, keep swimming. Cheerio.