The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:09 - 00:00:42:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Communication. Culture. Conversation. These three key words are linked and are at the core of team productivity and success. Whether you know it or not, these those are the three words at the core of today's conversation to the conversation that when you apply these ideas, the ideas that we will discuss could change the trajectory of your team's future. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger difference for their teams organizations in the world.

00:00:42:23 - 00:01:05:05
Kevin Eikenberry
If that's what you're after, you're in the right place. If you're listening to the podcast in the future, you could join us when we are live on your favorite social media channel. Or maybe, maybe not your favorite, but on some social media channels. And, to find out how that's happening, when that's happening and how you can participate live, you can join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups.

00:01:05:05 - 00:01:29:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Two of the platforms that we're at, these are on. you can do that by going to remarkable podcast.com/facebook or a remarkable podcast.com/linked in. Either one of those will get you all that information. Whether you choose to watch on that channel or not. Today's episode is brought to you by my upcoming book, the second edition of The Long Distance Leader Revised Rules for Remarkable Road and Hybrid Leadership.

00:01:29:06 - 00:01:51:19
Kevin Eikenberry
If you lead a team that is distributed in any way, this book will give you new skills, insights, and the confidence to lead more effectively in the new world of work. You can learn more and order your copy now at Remarkable Podcast Dot coms DL. And if you're listening to this podcast on the day it's release. Well, the book came out yesterday.

00:01:51:21 - 00:02:18:10
Kevin Eikenberry
so let me bring in our guest, and, I will introduce him. There he is. His name is Douglas Squirrel, aka squirrel, as you can see, if you're watching. Douglas squirrel is the director of Squirrel Squared Limited. He has been coding for 40 years and has led software teams for 20. His experience includes growing software teams as a CTO and startups from fintech to biotech to music and everything in between.

00:02:18:10 - 00:02:54:11
Kevin Eikenberry
And there's a lot in between. He's consulted on project management and over 200 organizations in the US, UK, Australia, Africa and Europe and is coaching a wide variety of leaders in improving their conversations, aligning their business goals and creating productive conflict. He lives in Frog Holt, England, in a timber frame cottage built in 1450. He is the author of Squirrels Tech Radar Decoding, Tech Talk and his newest book, Agile Conversations Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture, and, coauthored with Geoffrey Frederick.

00:02:54:11 - 00:03:12:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Here's the book. And here is squirrel. And I'm so glad. so since you're in a house that was built in 1450, you said, the walls are thin. We might hear other things. And that's all good. So if anyone hears something extraneous, considering.

00:03:12:05 - 00:03:12:14
Douglas Squirrel
The world of.

00:03:12:14 - 00:03:37:17
Kevin Eikenberry
Podcasting, just consider it a feature, not a bug. How about that? Exactly. That's a that's the closest I can come to talking about software development. squirrel. So let's start here. Let's start with the journey. Like as I was thinking about our conversation, the question that I had was, how does a coder start talking about a conversation?

00:03:37:19 - 00:03:56:00
Douglas Squirrel
Well, it is an amazing journey. So, I certainly didn't start there. I started by, being kind of a radical rabble rouser. And what I would do is, in my technology team, I would get them riled up against the rest of the business. And I would say, I'm ashamed of this. Now, but I'm telling you. So, so you can hear where I started.

00:03:56:02 - 00:04:16:06
Douglas Squirrel
And I would say things like those suits, they just don't understand us. They don't know what we're doing. you know, we have to be even better because we have to impress the suits upstairs. This was totally counterproductive. This was not helpful. And I noticed after a while that this kind of oppositional approach really wasn't working. But I wasn't sure what to do differently because I needed to get it right.

00:04:16:08 - 00:04:34:22
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah. So I have what I had and the engineers responded to, clear direction. And if I gave them a clear direction, like, let's, make sure we impress the students, that's what they would do. We also engineers. We really like things that are black and white, zero and one, you know, on or off and and a set of steps.

00:04:35:00 - 00:04:57:10
Douglas Squirrel
And then I came across the work of an amazing guy named Chris Argus, who most of your listeners have probably never heard of. And our jurists had in the 1970s discovered a whole set of techniques for improving your conversations, building trust, reducing fear, improving commitment. And I said, this is the stuff I want to do. And I've been doing it really in expertly.

00:04:57:12 - 00:05:22:12
Douglas Squirrel
And I got together with several friends who also we're working on this kind of stuff. And, Jeffrey, my coauthor, was one of them. And we practiced every two weeks, improving our conversations. That's one of the key messages your listeners can take away is conversations are a skill. You can think of it like, race walking in the Olympics that we have on as we're recording this, you know, we were all walking all the time, but the race walkers, boy, did they practice.

00:05:22:14 - 00:05:25:12
Douglas Squirrel
They're really good, and they don't walk like the rest of us. And they walk a lot.

00:05:25:12 - 00:05:31:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Not even close. And they go somewhere, both in terms of speed and technique. Right.

00:05:31:09 - 00:05:51:00
Douglas Squirrel
Exactly. And that's the point, is that, you can improve your conversations as I did on this journey by practicing them. And we can talk a lot more about how to do that. And the result I got was incredible that suddenly I wasn't opposed to the suits anymore. The suits were actually talking to me about business issues and business challenges and business problems.

00:05:51:03 - 00:06:15:23
Douglas Squirrel
And as I moved into consulting and I began coaching people in the executive suite, including salespeople and customer service and people and operations and all over, I discovered that all these techniques work just as well for them. You have to adjust them, of course, because they're not quite as rigid and nerdy as US engineers. But the same methods, if you give people start by step instructions for improving their conversations, you suddenly get much better performance out of your team.

00:06:15:23 - 00:06:18:02
Douglas Squirrel
So that's the journey.

00:06:18:04 - 00:06:32:03
Kevin Eikenberry
So Chris's work is is famous to some and those who know it. I would say almost Revere it. So if you if you were to recommend one of Chris's books, which one would you recommend?

00:06:32:05 - 00:06:39:02
Douglas Squirrel
None of them. Don't read any of them. The problem with Chris is books is they're incredible, but also incredibly dense. And so they are are.

00:06:39:04 - 00:06:41:14
Kevin Eikenberry
I was wondering if you had what you wanted to know.

00:06:41:15 - 00:06:47:16
Douglas Squirrel
Because I can't I can't say that any of them are, are legible to normal humans.

00:06:47:18 - 00:06:50:20
Kevin Eikenberry
How much is why you need to read this book.

00:06:50:22 - 00:07:10:03
Douglas Squirrel
That would be helpful. So agile conversations would be good. But there are others, such as Peter Singh Zenger. never know. Say his name. The, Yeah, yeah. Thank you. the fifth discipline. I'm. I'm you're catching me out here. and there's another one that.

00:07:10:05 - 00:07:12:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Is easiest to read ever either.

00:07:12:12 - 00:07:34:00
Douglas Squirrel
Actually, no, I agree, but but a little easier. And then if you want really, Digestible. Easy, easy, easy going stuff. there's a good one called, difficult conversations, which is, by, I think, the Harvard Negotiation Project. So several Harvard ites who got together and, wrote a really accessible book. So there's your full range.

00:07:34:00 - 00:07:39:03
Douglas Squirrel
You can read the tough stuff for the graduate level, or you can get started at, high school.

00:07:39:05 - 00:07:58:00
Kevin Eikenberry
well, I love that. And getting started is where we really need to do so. You obviously you come from the software world and, the first chapter, the book, you actually talk about sort of the the background and the history of coding as it relates to things that eventually led to agile. So the title of the book is Agile Conversations.

00:07:58:01 - 00:08:12:06
Kevin Eikenberry
it's not a book just for software folks, though. So why the word agile in it? I'm curious, like because there's a reason. But so talk to us about why is it an agile conversation that you want us to think about?

00:08:12:06 - 00:08:39:05
Douglas Squirrel
Got it. So now some of your listeners might not know this concept of agile. It's kind of like, lean in manufacturing or, quality circles and so on. This one of these things that people latch on to and kind of add their own, ideas onto, and it's a word that doesn't mean so much anymore. but there's an underlying principle behind, this idea that software could come out more quickly and be more what people actually need.

00:08:39:06 - 00:08:54:18
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah. And that's really the fundamental core of it, is that I could show you over and over again a piece of software and say, hey, Kevin, did you like that? And comes as no, I hate it. And then I show you another version. You say, I hate that slightly less. And we keep doing that until we make something that's good.

00:08:54:19 - 00:09:14:07
Douglas Squirrel
That's the whole idea. There's not really much more to it, but the challenge is that, everybody forgot that the whole point of that is the part where you say, do you like this? And you have a conversation about whether it works for you, and that applies in customer service and operations in every part of any business, not just the tech side, but in particular in tech.

00:09:14:07 - 00:09:32:08
Douglas Squirrel
We kind of got ourselves stuck and we got ourselves behind this agile, logo, this agile, moniker. And so we wound up saying, oh, yes, we have to be agile. We have to follow the rules. We have to do it this way. We have to, follow this, predilection this, this direction to go.

00:09:32:10 - 00:09:39:12
Douglas Squirrel
And the problem is that, that's not actually very agile, that's kind of rigid and.

00:09:39:14 - 00:09:41:18
Kevin Eikenberry
And it's kind of the essence of the idea.

00:09:41:23 - 00:09:56:05
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah, exactly. And so what you'll see, and probably your listeners have seen us engineers do this. It's one of the classic things I have to root out when I go into a new client is, this idea that, oh, we have to do it this way. Oh, we have to have this meeting at this time. Oh, we can't give you this piece of software.

00:09:56:05 - 00:10:13:09
Douglas Squirrel
We can't do it that way. Because the rules say you can't. And that's not the idea of an agile software development team or a good team anywhere. What you do is you say, here are some techniques which would help me to get the outcomes I'd like. Well, let's have a conversation about that. And we kind of left that behind.

00:10:13:13 - 00:10:28:16
Douglas Squirrel
One of my favorite, agile quotes from one of the people who got started with this principle. This idea in software development is when you create a ticket and you might know that in it. We tend to create these tickets and we keep track of them, we do them and so on. When you create one, don't do it.

00:10:28:18 - 00:10:49:04
Douglas Squirrel
It's an invitation to a conversation. So by you saying, hey squirrel, I would like my computer to, dance and sing and tap dance on my on my desk. I might say, Kevin, that's challenging. I don't think I can do that. That's not starting a conversation. If I say, Kevin, why do you want entertainment from your computer? Then I might be able to introduce him to YouTube.

00:10:49:04 - 00:11:17:13
Douglas Squirrel
And, hey, he finds something that's entertaining. That is a little microcosm of getting from what somebody asks for and what they demand, which doesn't lead to a conversation and what they actually need, which does lead to a conversation. That's the shift that agile people were trying to make, but it kind of got lost. So that's why we called it, Agile Conversations, trying to drag it back to, creating those conversations, creating that, fulfilling those needs for customers.

00:11:17:15 - 00:11:44:02
Kevin Eikenberry
So the subtitle of the book says Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture, and it promise in the it's a big promise. And in the book, you say that conversations the glue of culture. talk about that a little bit because I think it's a, it's a great way to think about it. And I, and I think culture is and by the way, I don't want to go on my own little rant here, but culture is another one of those words that's been overused to the point that it's problematic.

00:11:44:02 - 00:11:54:19
Kevin Eikenberry
Right? My definition is the way we do things around here, right? not a bad definition. So why, why or how is conversation to glue?

00:11:54:21 - 00:12:13:07
Douglas Squirrel
That's because stories are the unit of idea transmission. And somebody was, you know, was talking to a client yesterday and trying to explain an idea to them. And I stopped after a couple of sentences of explanation and, and blank looks around the table and I said, can I tell you a story? And they all immediately lit up and they said, oh, great, we'd like a story, tell us a story.

00:12:13:07 - 00:12:30:13
Douglas Squirrel
And I told him a story about a client who had a terrible situation. They had a wall full of all their problems. It was 50ft long. It was describing all the things that they were trying to do. And I came in and we eventually tore down the wall. We took down all the stuff that was on the wall, and they had the wall space for like some nice pictures instead of all their problems and challenges.

00:12:30:13 - 00:12:46:17
Douglas Squirrel
And I told them the story in a little more detail, and suddenly the room was animated. We had ideas coming in. We were able to pick out some, tasks that we could take on to change the culture. And that's because we started with a story. And the story could have been one that people disagree with. No, I don't want that.

00:12:46:17 - 00:12:52:09
Douglas Squirrel
I want something that's great. You create now in the conversation by having the story.

00:12:52:11 - 00:12:53:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Right.

00:12:53:03 - 00:13:09:01
Douglas Squirrel
And that's why it is so powerful for change in culture, because people can see themselves in this story. They can identify with the story and they can understand the language of the story. And once they get that, they're having a conversation and that's where the real change happens. That's where the trust is built, is where the fears reduce.

00:13:09:01 - 00:13:11:07
Douglas Squirrel
That's where the commitment happens.

00:13:11:09 - 00:13:15:19
Kevin Eikenberry
You said stories are the unit of idea transmission.

00:13:15:19 - 00:13:22:04
Douglas Squirrel
I'm quoting someone, but I don't know who, so I'll try to look it up for your show notes. Sorry, I can't remember it so well.

00:13:22:04 - 00:13:26:08
Kevin Eikenberry
I had it, but I did it again because I thought it was really, really profound. Right?

00:13:26:09 - 00:13:27:02
Douglas Squirrel
It really is.

00:13:27:02 - 00:13:47:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, it really is. So, there's another line, and I told you in before we went live that I wasn't going to I wasn't going to there wasn't a test here. But there is something you said in the book that I thought was really useful. and you said there's a core challenge for us to improve our conversation.

00:13:47:04 - 00:13:50:07
Kevin Eikenberry
So it's that core challenge.

00:13:50:09 - 00:13:55:15
Douglas Squirrel
well, I might say one thing today, and I said something else in the book, so give me give me an out if in case.

00:13:55:17 - 00:14:01:16
Kevin Eikenberry
See, that's what I didn't want to do. and now I'm going to see if I can find it because I thought it was brilliant.

00:14:01:18 - 00:14:08:11
Douglas Squirrel
Oh, great. I'm glad I was brilliant, but I'll try to be brilliant again. Maybe I'll be brilliant in a different way. Kevin, while you're looking up, let's.

00:14:08:13 - 00:14:21:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Here we go for page 23. this will describe the core challenge to improving our conversations, which is that our behavior doesn't match our beliefs. Oh, you're unaware of the gap?

00:14:21:03 - 00:14:38:21
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah. And this is Archer's classic Arcturus. that what you espouse and what you say you're trying to do. For instance, you're trying to be customer centric, you know, go to any company and look at their mission statement. It doesn't say anything. We're customer centric. We, help the world be a better place. We fulfill our employees dreams, you know, something like that.

00:14:38:23 - 00:14:57:01
Douglas Squirrel
And you look at what they actually do and what they do is, you know, beat their, employees up until they, are, unable to think for themselves and then give them a set of instructions and they follow those. And what they're actually doing is very, very different from what they espouse. And the problem is people don't know it.

00:14:57:01 - 00:15:28:15
Douglas Squirrel
If it were just obvious to people, they said, yeah, you know, what I'm doing is, trying to exploit my workers as best I can, then at least we would know. And there are a few people I've worked with who actually do that. At least they're honest. You know, I can deal with them, but it's much, much more difficult when you have a negative situation where people are not being treated well, where the, environment where you're not making the progress that you want, where, the, the software is full of bugs, the product doesn't work, the customers are unhappy and you don't know it, and you think everything's fine.

00:15:28:17 - 00:15:47:06
Douglas Squirrel
And over and over and over again, I encounter teams in which people think everything's okay. And then you peel back the layers and you find so many challenges underneath the trick of having really, really valuable conversations, they're super value you get from it, is that you very rapidly discover all the things that you thought were true that aren't.

00:15:47:08 - 00:16:04:16
Douglas Squirrel
And once you get those, your behavior changes because suddenly you're aware of all kinds of problems. You didn't build up. And you can take actions. You're freer to take actions than you were before. And you have allies because other people say, finally, well, you know, Kevin, he finally understands why we're having a terrible time over here in, in the South.

00:16:04:16 - 00:16:24:06
Douglas Squirrel
You know, you northerners, you don't ever listen to us. So, you know, here in the South, then, you know, we're the second class citizens here in this company. You know, Kevin understands that, and suddenly you're able you have a lever there. You have something you can push on to change the culture, to change that opposition, to change whatever it is that's not working in the company.

00:16:24:08 - 00:16:44:16
Kevin Eikenberry
So, the book is about five conversations and, and and first of all, we're talking with, Douglas Squirrel, the coauthor of the book Agile Conversations Transform your conversations, transform your culture, and we won't have time. Nor is it my goal for us to to unpack all five of those conversations. we'll we'll introduce them. We'll talk about it briefly before we're done.

00:16:44:16 - 00:17:13:10
Kevin Eikenberry
But there's a couple of things that, that you talk about that I think are really, really useful. And it goes back to what you said earlier that you and your coauthor and so others got together regularly to practice having these conversations and in the book you talk about what you call the four hours. And it's interesting because just this morning I wrote, an article about the importance of reflection, which is one of the four hours.

00:17:13:15 - 00:17:25:15
Kevin Eikenberry
So can you talk about what those four hours are and how we can apply them in, in our in our conversations, but really in anything as well? Let's unpack that few would.

00:17:25:17 - 00:17:36:18
Douglas Squirrel
I be happy to. So the key thing and we'll go back to our race walkers. You could imagine if, you, Kevin, if you were going to join the Olympic team and you were going to be in the 2028 race walking Olympics, you might need to.

00:17:36:18 - 00:17:38:19
Kevin Eikenberry
Practice my best shot. Just say.

00:17:39:01 - 00:17:57:02
Douglas Squirrel
Hey, you know, it's worth trying. And and if you needed to do that, you would need to practice and and change how you walk. You would need to change your stride and your gait and your shoes and a bunch of other stuff. And in order to do that, you would need information about what you're currently doing. So that's the first are is to record your conversations.

00:17:57:05 - 00:18:17:19
Douglas Squirrel
Now this doesn't have to be on a tape recorder or your phone or something like that. It doesn't have to be, written down, exact words of what you said, but you do need some record of a conversation that probably didn't go so well. You know, you had a battle with your boss and you wanted budget and you weren't going to get it, or you had an employee that you wanted to move in a certain direction or develop a skill.

00:18:17:19 - 00:18:33:06
Douglas Squirrel
And they said, no, I ain't going to do it, and dug in their heels. When you have a conversation like that, you write down what you actually wrote, what you actually said, and what the other person actually said, what a video camera would record. And that's just like taking a video camera and shooting at you, doing the race, walking.

00:18:33:09 - 00:18:52:15
Douglas Squirrel
Right. Because then we could see, oh, wait a minute, your feet need to be farther apart and you need to do this different. And you can analyze that, like, and go in more depth about exactly what you write down and how it works. But I'll give you just the kind of guts of it. What you do is you take what you've written down and because it's on paper or it's a little further away, you get a thing called self distancing.

00:18:52:17 - 00:19:08:07
Douglas Squirrel
It's not like social distancing, we all know that. But self distancing, where it's that other swirl, it's that guy who's who was having the conversation on the page, not this person. And when you can do that, you can say, you know, it really wasn't so helpful for me to to, tell Kevin that, he never listens to me.

00:19:08:09 - 00:19:12:15
Douglas Squirrel
Probably saying you never listen to me is not going to help him to listen to me. So. Okay.

00:19:12:17 - 00:19:14:18
Kevin Eikenberry
I like actually.

00:19:14:20 - 00:19:30:10
Douglas Squirrel
And it might be helpful, but I might want to revise it out of my conversation. So this is where I can adjust it to the to match what I want to do. And if I say look that kind of thing is not so helpful, but I want to share the information. How can I take what I'm thinking, which is I don't feel listened to and share that with Kevin.

00:19:30:14 - 00:19:44:15
Douglas Squirrel
And what I might then do is cross out. So this is the revision step. I take a red pen or something, I cross it out and I say, okay, what I'm going to say instead is I'm going to share the information, but I'm going to say, you know, I just don't feel like you're listening. I can't see that you're listening.

00:19:44:15 - 00:19:58:08
Douglas Squirrel
When I look at you, I think you're just bored and you want to get out of here. And if I share that kind of information instead of you, never listen to me. Which is a judgment and sort of puts you in a box. Kevin. Then you can say other things. You can say like, I'm so actually I actually so interesting.

00:19:58:08 - 00:20:16:15
Douglas Squirrel
And I'm thinking of canceling my next meeting and then suddenly you learn something new. So by replacing certain things in your conversation, you can change how the conversation goes. But we're not done because we've revised it. We've discovered something we want to change. But now what we want to do is practice that. so, and I can't remember the R for it.

00:20:16:15 - 00:20:22:00
Douglas Squirrel
Sorry. I can't always remember. Oh, play. Role play. Thank you. So you get someone and it could be, it works.

00:20:22:02 - 00:20:23:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Better than three hours in a P.

00:20:24:01 - 00:20:44:00
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah, exactly. So, then, you, role play it to actually try it out with somebody else. And ideally, it's a human being, but you can do it with the mirror entertainingly. You can do it with ChatGPT. You can say, hey, ChatGPT, I want you to be my tough boss, Kevin, who never listens to me. And I want you to respond to me like he does.

00:20:44:02 - 00:21:02:16
Douglas Squirrel
And then you can practice over and over again because ChatGPT never gets bored. you can keep practicing new ways of speaking and new ways of sharing what you're thinking. And then, of course, you want to loop. You want to repeat. And, as you repeat it and then you have the conversation, it doesn't it goes slightly less bad, and then it goes a little bit less badly.

00:21:02:16 - 00:21:09:20
Douglas Squirrel
And then it's actually not so bad. And, you know, you really had a good, productive conversation. That's when you know you're on track.

00:21:09:22 - 00:21:36:02
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, I really like that. And of course it's a it's a core piece. And you hinted at this. it's a core piece of your process to do this, writing it down. But you said what they said, and, and I want to comment on that because so so first of all, having done in not so much anymore, but in my past, I'm done having done lots of, training of trainers and lots of training of, presenters.

00:21:36:02 - 00:21:54:21
Kevin Eikenberry
We, we know in those cases that everyone realizes in those cases that video is incredibly valuable. we could use it in lots more cases that we never think about. But the thing I want to comment on is the writing it part. It is the self distancing, but there's something else going on there. I don't want you to add to this comment on this if you want.

00:21:55:02 - 00:22:01:10
Kevin Eikenberry
The other thing that's going on is we're taking thoughts which are fuzzy and making them clear. Yeah. And it's that.

00:22:01:11 - 00:22:01:19
Douglas Squirrel
Word for.

00:22:01:19 - 00:22:05:12
Kevin Eikenberry
That transformation is a huge piece of it is.

00:22:05:12 - 00:22:26:14
Douglas Squirrel
The fancy word for that if you want a $10 word is reification. You're taking a fuzzy concept and you're making it real. And that's what happens, of course, when you write down a to do list, it comes from, you know, I'd really like to, you know, be a champion race walker. And you're like, okay, but won by race walking shoes to get coach, you know, and you move through all your steps and you do the same thing with your conversations.

00:22:26:14 - 00:22:41:18
Douglas Squirrel
When you say to yourself, you know, I'm tired of battling, banging my head against Kevin. You know, we're arguing all the time. It's never productive. How could we move forward? Well, number one, I'm going to have a bad conversation with them. Number two, I'm going to revise it and figure out what I could do better. Number three, I'm going to ask him more questions.

00:22:41:20 - 00:22:57:11
Douglas Squirrel
When you get to that, you have a much clearer direction for yourself, and you're much more likely to make progress. And you really can. That's the the, the magic is. Most people think you can't practice conversations like most people probably don't think of practicing walking.

00:22:57:13 - 00:23:22:00
Kevin Eikenberry
There you have it. so you just mentioned questions like five times. And, and I think any, any of us would say, well, a good conversation has questions in it. If you talk about something called genuine questions, as a part of the question fraction. Oh, yeah. so let's talk about first, what do you mean by genuine questions.

00:23:22:02 - 00:23:24:06
Kevin Eikenberry
And then the fraction.

00:23:24:08 - 00:23:41:04
Douglas Squirrel
Oh happy to do both. And the fractions related to the exercise before hours. We were just talking about the extent you do a genuine question first by asking you a non genuine question, Kevin. And I want you to imagine we're in a court of law and we've all been following. I forget who it is. There's some famous person who's been in a court recently, and we were all paying attention to what was going on there.

00:23:41:06 - 00:23:59:14
Douglas Squirrel
So imagine you're there or somewhere else. And I ask you, Kevin, weren't you outside the bank? And weren't you gunning the engine of your car? And weren't you looking nervously down the street? And didn't you dash off quickly with all the robbers in your car? As soon as the, the alarms went off? Didn't that happen? Kevin, that's not a genuine question.

00:23:59:14 - 00:24:14:05
Douglas Squirrel
There's only one answer for Kevin, which is. Well, yeah, I guess I did, but it was okay for some reason. You know, you've got some answer, but you're boxed in, and that's what lawyers want to do. They don't want you to say, well, actually, I was waiting for my grandmother. And, you know, I've never met those robbers. They just jumped in like, they don't want to hear that.

00:24:14:07 - 00:24:31:11
Douglas Squirrel
They want to hear only their answer. And you want the exact opposite of that. You want to be the anti lawyer, because what you want from your conversation is to be surprised. And so you could imagine a situation where, for example, I go to Kevin and I say, Kevin, why weren't you on time for this podcast? Kevin was right on time so there's no problem.

00:24:31:11 - 00:24:33:00
Douglas Squirrel
But I'm just going to use you because you're here.

00:24:33:00 - 00:24:34:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Thank you for clarifying that.

00:24:34:09 - 00:24:53:03
Douglas Squirrel
I don't want you to get in trouble with your listeners, but, so, Kevin, why weren't you, on time? You know, I really needed you. It's really important. You should be on time. I'm not giving any room for Kevin to say. Well, wait a minute. There's something else going on here. And if I were to ask him something like what happened with the start of the podcast, I noticed it wasn't smooth.

00:24:53:05 - 00:25:08:22
Douglas Squirrel
Yeah. Was that right? Did you see it that way? Kevin might say it went perfectly smoothly. You know, in this country, we're always five minutes late for everything. And I have some clients in countries where that's the case. or Kevin might say, well, actually, I was held up by you, squirrel. You gave me the wrong link so I couldn't actually join.

00:25:09:00 - 00:25:30:16
Douglas Squirrel
And, you know, it was a screw up by you or we might find out, you know, aliens landed on my lawn that morning, and, you know, it's a bit of a distraction. Any of those would be surprising and interesting and much more valuable than the answer. What I was like, because, you know, I'm not very good at it or whatever, you know, I'll try better next time, which is what you're likely to get from the closed question from the non genuine question.

00:25:30:18 - 00:25:50:03
Douglas Squirrel
So the the trick is to look through the, the conversation that you've written down. And first, you know, you said that people would say this is back to a spouse behavior. People would say, I bet all your listeners would say, yeah I asked questions. I'm always curious. I'm a really curious person. I'm sure that they are, except when it matters and when it really matters.

00:25:50:05 - 00:26:08:20
Douglas Squirrel
And you got one of those tough conversations. You say, well, I don't have time for those questions. What I gotta do is get Kevin on board. I got to change the culture here. Kevin's doing the wrong thing. I'm going to tell him, and that's where you get in trouble. Whereas if you write down the difficult conversation and you circle the question marks, you will first of all find probably you might not circle any.

00:26:08:22 - 00:26:25:23
Douglas Squirrel
And that's telling you that you're not asking enough questions even though you think you are. Or you might circle questions and you say, you know what? This isn't really very genuine. My question is, you know, Kevin, why are you such an idiot? And why don't you, get your stuff together and start performing better? That's not a very genuine question.

00:26:25:23 - 00:26:40:04
Douglas Squirrel
That's not going to help anybody, right? We're not producing productive conflict. Whereas if I ask Kevin, is there some challenge that's keeping you from performing? Because there's something I could help with? Then I open myself to many different types of answers, and I can see all that in my record of my conversation.

00:26:40:05 - 00:27:03:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Exactly. Taking us up the ladder of inference. Oh, by the way, which we don't have time to unpack. so, I said we'd get to it briefly. There are five conversations, and I'm just going to say this in each of the of these five conversations, Squirrel and Geoffrey walk us through the process he's just described, including the way to have their way to think through these conversations.

00:27:03:07 - 00:27:23:17
Kevin Eikenberry
and we don't have time to really unpack any. That's why you need to go get a copy of this book. But I do want you to at least be able to tell people what the five are before we finish. so they have a context of what you believe. Are the two of you believe are the are the are the critical conversations that become the glue, to our culture.

00:27:23:17 - 00:27:41:11
Kevin Eikenberry
So even if we can't go into depth on them or really even talk about it very much, I think it's a great value to those of you listening to say, okay, these these are the these are, these are core and you've you said several of them several times, but you've not said all of them yet. I don't think.

00:27:41:16 - 00:27:54:19
Douglas Squirrel
I can put them together. It's not a problem. But let me point out that they're in an order and they're in an order for a special reason, for particular reason. And that is, if you were not to build the foundation first, then you're not going to get very far up the mountain. You're not going to get a very tall building.

00:27:54:21 - 00:28:14:04
Douglas Squirrel
So, what's very important is that your listeners pay attention to the order in which these conversations come. And by the way, if they sound familiar, that's because, Jeffrey and I stole them from a guy called, Lindsey. Yoni, who wrote a book called The Five Dysfunctions of a team. And the thing we we got really upset about, the really motivated to write that.

00:28:14:05 - 00:28:30:22
Douglas Squirrel
To write the book is once he only tells you about all these problems and doesn't give you a thing to do about them. He just says, you know, diagnosis. You have a problem with fear? Well, yeah. Thanks, but could you tell me what to do? And that's our difference is we say, write down the conversation, circle the question marks, do these other things change your conversations?

00:28:30:22 - 00:28:49:08
Douglas Squirrel
And guess what? You will change that characteristic. Great. So with that preamble, here are the five conversations. The first one is trust. Because if you don't have a shared story, if you don't have common language, if you aren't able to talk to each other and make sense to each other. And that's what trust is for me and for Jeffrey, then you're not going to make any progress with the others.

00:28:49:10 - 00:29:05:15
Douglas Squirrel
So build trust first. Second one, you need to reduce fear because you could trust the other person all you want. But if they're terrified, if they're thinking, oh my God, I'm going to get fired for this. Oh my, heavens, you know, this is going to be massively consequential for me and my community, my family. They're not going to be able to think clearly.

00:29:05:18 - 00:29:28:20
Douglas Squirrel
So we need to remove the fear. We need to mitigate the fear. The third one is, the quality conversation. And unlike a famous guy on YouTube, we say don't start with why? Because although understanding what is really great, you need people to be part of the conversation of defining what Y is. And once we're kind of able to talk to each other, we have to trust in the fear sorted.

00:29:28:22 - 00:29:48:10
Douglas Squirrel
The next thing we have to do is understand why we're doing what we're doing, and that involves other people. And that's a process called joint design. And that's a great process for figuring out with the people in your organization without being dictated to by them what the direction is and how, how important it is in which to prioritize.

00:29:48:12 - 00:30:01:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Before you get to the last you. Yeah, yeah, that that idea of the word with its really important. Right. Because to me that underlines so much of this whole our whole conversation in the whole book is conversation is something you're doing with someone. Exactly.

00:30:01:18 - 00:30:16:09
Douglas Squirrel
So, for example, disagreeing and commit, which people often talk about in this area and they'll say, oh, yes, well, now you understand why and you don't agree, but I want you to disagree and commit. Stop doing that because that is not helpful. You may wind up with the person disagreeing and committing, but you need to make that decision with them.

00:30:16:15 - 00:30:35:20
Douglas Squirrel
And that's more painful. But it can be very efficient. And so that's what the joint design process is all about. And I mentioned commitment. So once you actually understand while you're doing something then you're ready to commit to it. And one of the key things there is going back to trust, making sure you have ubiquitous language that actually, you know, what the heck's the words mean?

00:30:35:22 - 00:30:49:21
Douglas Squirrel
I had a wonderful, I'll tell you, just 110 second story. I had a client in which there was a massive debate for months, and I came in on it and I said, guys, what are you debating about? They said, we we want to expand and they don't want to expand. No, no, no we do. We just don't want to expand your way.

00:30:49:23 - 00:31:09:16
Douglas Squirrel
I got them to sit down and figure out what expansion meant. They meant the same thing. So they were having a vigorous debate over a word that they both agreed on, and they were arguing back and forth on it for months. So this kind of, clarity on language is super important for getting the right commitment. Otherwise people commit to stuff that they think they understand and they don't.

00:31:09:18 - 00:31:30:15
Douglas Squirrel
And then the final one is accountability. And this is what I'm working on right now. So ripped from the headlines. I've got a huge client in Africa, where that it's really hard to tell what all these developers are doing. They've got these wonderful developers building wonderful stuff and nobody knows about it. So the accountability there is from the person, from the engineer to the rest of the organization.

00:31:30:15 - 00:31:45:06
Douglas Squirrel
And I'm putting in place a simple framework for them to do that. But the key thing is to be accountable means to give an account, to say, this is what's happening, this is how I see it. And then you can have a productive dialog with the other person, the part where you hold somebody accountable. You say, Kevin, it's all your fault.

00:31:45:06 - 00:31:51:19
Douglas Squirrel
You're doing a terrible job that does not produce productive conflict, that does not produce high accountability. So you need.

00:31:51:19 - 00:31:56:06
Kevin Eikenberry
That's what I call when accountable accountability becomes the longest four letter word in the.

00:31:56:06 - 00:32:05:16
Douglas Squirrel
In the OS. And it can in some organizations. It's really it a no no go area. You can't talk about accountability. And if you use a different word.

00:32:05:18 - 00:32:26:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah, exactly. So, hopefully everyone you've got a tremendous sense that this is a book worth you, reading and perhaps even listening to this episode again. but before we give you a chance to learn more about where you can get that information and all the sorts of things, I have two other questions. Squirrel, that I like to ask people.

00:32:26:09 - 00:32:30:05
Kevin Eikenberry
And one is this what do you do for fun?

00:32:30:07 - 00:32:50:18
Douglas Squirrel
Excellent. so the main thing I do is, I play games with my wife, and that might seem kind of boring and normal and so on until you realize that my wife is blind. And so actually finding things that we can do together and ways that we can collaborate is, is one of the fun challenges. And, you know, if I could cure her tomorrow, of course I would.

00:32:50:18 - 00:33:02:04
Douglas Squirrel
But, given that we have that restriction, finding ways, for example, for her to play Minecraft is, quite an exciting and fun, sort of thing. The challenge to figure out.

00:33:02:06 - 00:33:07:23
Kevin Eikenberry
All right. And the other one, the only thing you knew I was going to ask is, what are you reading? You said you had it right in front of you.

00:33:07:23 - 00:33:26:04
Douglas Squirrel
I do reading. It's a nice, obscure book called Ridley Walker. And, the, reason I'm reading this book is because it's about my village and my village or. Well, it features my village, and my village appears in it. There's a map that has my village on it, and my village has not appeared in anything for its entire 700 year history.

00:33:26:06 - 00:33:45:20
Douglas Squirrel
my village has eight houses. one of our main neighbors are 2000 sheep who live over there. And the Channel Tunnel. That's about 500m that way. So, the fact that, this science fiction book about the future, has references to, to my village just makes me entertain. So I've been enjoying finding them. Kind of encoded in the book.

00:33:45:22 - 00:34:09:15
Kevin Eikenberry
Shocking Squirrel that after 448 episodes, you're the first person to say, that's the book that you were reading, right? So there you go. We've got several other books. Tell everybody that we've mentioned throughout this episode. We'll have those all in the show notes for you. Not only that, we want to have in the show notes, obviously, your book Squirrel Agile Conversations, how can people find you, connect with you, get the book.

00:34:09:15 - 00:34:11:07
Kevin Eikenberry
Like how do you what do you want to point people?

00:34:11:09 - 00:34:28:22
Douglas Squirrel
Well, the best place to go is Douglas squirrel.com and so therefore you just have to remember how to spell Douglas and how to spell squirrel. And it's here on the screen. So that's great. but then I also have a community. And in this community I have conversations. Guess what. And there are thousands of people these days has been growing for years.

00:34:29:00 - 00:34:51:19
Douglas Squirrel
thousands of tech and non-tech executives in what I call the squirrel squadron. And our job there is to, figure out how to use tech insanely profitably. And that means that we need salespeople talking to operations, people talking to engineers about how to sell something that people actually want. And that's the kind of debate and discussion we have on the squadron all the time.

00:34:51:21 - 00:34:52:22
Kevin Eikenberry
Squirrel Squadron dot.

00:34:52:22 - 00:34:56:00
Douglas Squirrel
Com. Oh, yes. Sorry. Yes, exactly. Right there on the screen I forgot.

00:34:56:01 - 00:35:28:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Okay, so before we wrap up, everyone, I'm going to ask you a question. I can't have a true conversation with you because we're not in the same place and not having and you're not hearing these words at the same time. I'm saying them, obviously. but it's the question I ask you all every week. And now what? So for the last 35 minutes or so, you listen to squirrel and I have a conversation about conversations, and there's been all sorts of things that we've talked about in terms of how to, use stories.

00:35:28:11 - 00:35:51:22
Kevin Eikenberry
We've talked about, we've talked about the four hours, we've talked about the idea of writing down and sort of distancing ourselves from what we actually said. We talked about practicing a role playing conversations. We've talked about conversation being a skill. Those are just a few of the things that I wrote down. But even those things aren't what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about, what are you going to do with what you got?

00:35:51:23 - 00:36:09:12
Kevin Eikenberry
So because it's the action that you take as a result, it will make all the difference. in your conversations, in your culture, in your communication and in your life. So that's the question that I leave you with is now what? And a long with that question, I leave you with the challenge, to come back again next week.

00:36:09:14 - 00:36:11:22
Kevin Eikenberry
Squirrel, thank you so much for being here. It is a pleasure to have you.

00:36:12:00 - 00:36:15:17
Douglas Squirrel
Absolutely fun conversation. Thanks, Kevin and everybody.

00:36:15:19 - 00:36:29:18
Kevin Eikenberry
if you enjoyed this, make sure you come back, make sure that you are subscribed. Wherever you listen to your podcast. Make sure you tell somebody else as well, because we'll be back next week with another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Thanks everybody.