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Join Kelly Campbell twice a month as she goes deep into what it means to lead a creative agency, with interviews discussing leadership, culture, mindset, and more.

EP 70: Contracts, Compliance + COVID-19, with Audrey Glover-Dichter

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly chats with Audrey Glover-Dichter, an advertising law attorney, about the importance of agency contracts and compliance during the current pandemic




 EP 70: Contracts, Compliance + COVID-19

Duration: 25:56


Kelly: So welcome to this week's episode of Thrive: Your Agency Resource. Today, I'm here with Advertising, Marketing and Promotions Law Attorney, Audrey Glover-Dichter. Welcome to the show Audrey. It is so good to see you again and I'm so happy you could make it.


Audrey: Thank you so much Kelly for having me on your show today. I really appreciate being here with you and with everybody. Thank you.


Kelly: So today we're talking about influencer contracts and legal review and we sort of have to start by talking about the fact that marketing during a pandemic does not need to stop. I know I'm getting a lot of questions about that. Maybe you are as well. But you say that this is actually the perfect time to be able to pause and review everything that needs, needed or currently needs to be reviewed—whether that applies to our existing content, our planned campaigns, things that we may not have had the “time to review” before. The whole point of marketing is to build trust, right? So now we have this point, this moment in time where we have that ability to pause and take the time that's needed. So, how are you sort of advising your clients from that perspective?


Audrey: Well, I have about eight points more or less. We can combine them real quick, but there’s time and I realized that in this crazy world that we are living in today, there maybe a slow down of business, which to me seems to be a perfect opportunity to do certain things like for example, everything's always due yesterday or last week.


Kelly: Oh you must have experienced with marketing agencies...


Audrey: Well, always watching. So this seems to be the perfect opportunity to take a deep breath and take the time to go back and review your campaigns because at this point there's certain things in campaigns that you're planning or your scheduling that it's not going to be possible to, go public like you can't do billboards right now. Yeah, I don't know about print. I'm assuming print is out of the question for the time-being temporarily, but of course to social media you can. But this is the perfect time to take those campaigns and review them for legal compliance in English and Spanish. I like to review campaigns in the language that they're going to run in, just because you don't want to lose your message and consistency, but also, obviously, the main point being compliance, legally compliant. So, I like the legal compliance review, take the time to do it now. Under FTC law, technically, you're supposed to review your marketing campaigns to be legally compliant before you go public, you launched publicly. I get that not everybody does that because not everybody has the time to take the time to go to legal, but it's absolutely necessary. So take the time. It might be an extra hour, but do it, because it could really save you, the agency to plan. Everybody such a big headache and hefty fines if it's taken a long way.


Kelly: Yeah, that was actually going to be my next question was like, what kind of consequences are there. Because it may be just that some agencies may not know, like what are those consequences? What are those fines? What are the things that could happen if they don't go through these proper channels of review?


Audrey: Well, this is the biggest thing where I tell my clients. If the client, the marketer, the business is being reviewed just now, I mean investigated by, like the FTC, the FDA, the SEC it doesn't matter who, or even the State Attorney General's office, or even the self-regulatory bodies. If anybody's investigating the business for their advertising campaigns, if there's some legal issues, trust me that the agencies are being investigated all along side as well because they want to know what the role of the agency is, in that marketing campaign. So if it's a misleading issue, what will the agency take play in creating a misleading advertising campaign? And the standard is always knew or should have known. So, obviously, there's a lot that goes into the knew or should have known because it goes back to what do you have on the client. What question should you have asked? You can't just stick your head in the sand and say, well, I didn't know. Ignorance is never ever, ever, ever a defense for any field of law. So if you see any red flags, ask the questions, don't ignore it.


Kelly: Right. And one of the other things that you and I have talked about in the past is that from your perspective agencies really need to be reviewing their advertising law contracts. You suggest twice per year, but at minimum annually. And I think a lot of the reason for that is because the laws change so frequently. So can you talk about a little bit like why you really recommend the twice per year?


Audrey: Sure. As an advertising law attorney, I like to review the advertising law of contracts from an advertising law perspective. And what that means is, law is a living thing, believe it or not, and it changes constantly. So it is crucial, it is very, very important that you have your contracts reviewed and that you have the proper clauses written legally correctly with the correct legal legalese to make sure everybody's protected and if you need to get out, you can get out.


But the most important thing is, the last thing you want is to have an on clause in a contract that could potentially null and void the entire thing. I mean, then what do you do? I mean, incredible amount of issues that could potentially come up if that happens. It's like, so, what happens to the scope of work? And how are you going to get paid? Are you going to get paid? You need to sue to get paid. I mean, there's just so much that goes into it. So I prefer to do it on a twice a year basis just to make sure because again the law changes, changes, changes. However, of course, not everybody can or wants to do it that way but at least once a year. And of course when you're dealing with different things like influencers, there are very specific clauses that go into advertising law contracts and depending on what they are.

And for influencers for example, those are whole a lot of things and whole of different clauses that you want to put it in there not just to protect the agency and the brand but also how to deal with this person. This is a person right?


Kelly: Right. And you are essentially like responsible for what an influencer says or does or posts on behalf of your brand, right?


Audrey: And there's a lot of litigation and enforcement going on right now because influencers may not get enough guidance on how to make that disclosure, that material disclosure that they need to make or when to make it or how to make it with the perfect wording. So these are things that I help put in the contract so that everybody's on the same page, everybody understands what needs to be done in plain English.


Kelly: Yeah, and I would imagine, I know that we're kind of only a few weeks into this pandemic, but I would imagine that because everyone is really or the majority of people are working from home, there is so much more online activity now, especially on social media than ever before, right? At one given time or over a pretty prolonged period of time. So I would imagine that those things are even more right at this point because you've got so many people that are following more, engaging more, commenting more, right? So I would imagine that this is kind of, like you said before a really perfect time to really look at those contracts and make sure even if those influencers are active or actively promoting a brand or what have you, making sure that the contracts that you have in place as the agency with that influencer are obviously more important now than ever before and that's sort of a consequence of the reality that we're in right now.


Audrey: And what I like to do is, like I said before, I'm fluent in Spanish. So, not only do I like to review the campaigns in Spanish, if they’re going to be wanting in Spanish. What if you're going to have a Spanish influencer or Latin influencer? Perhaps it's a good idea put a hashtag in Spanish you want to have them use. Given the very specific language, if it’s going to be in Spanish or if it's going to be in English because you don't want any wiggle room. You want to make sure it's tight and that everybody again is using the correct language and the correct hashtags to make that necessary disclosure. So that's what I like to do because If you're going to do it in Spanish, it's just as important to get it all right in Spanish as it is in English. You can just get in trouble for getting it wrong in Spanish as any much. It doesn't matter. The law applies regardless of what language you're writing in it.


Kelly: Right. I think that's a great point. So let's talk a little bit about online privacy policies and how information is collected. So, I know we've got GDPR in Europe, we've got CCPA in California and what a lot of people probably don't know at this point from the agency perspective, just because we are in the realm of COVID-19 right now is that the SHIELD Act of New York you just mentioned before we spoke earlier. The SHIELD Act of New York the second phase of that has actually gone into place as of March 21st. So this is really brand new content, new policies that are in place. So if you could share a little bit about that, I think that would be really helpful, especially to the agencies who operate in New York or have any kind of business dealings in the state.


Audrey: Sure. Well, the biggest thing, pattern that I'm seeing is that it's the who is on the other side of your marketing online especially your website's obviously because this really applies more to the online....


Kelly: Data collection...


Audrey: Right, data collection, and privacy, like how much private data do you collect? Is it identifiable? So the biggest thing is to me is always the who’s on the other side. You don't know who's on the other side looking at your website, right? So it could be a person from the EU sitting in New York. So guess what? Now the GDPR applies to you. Right? Because it doesn't matter where that European person is. The fact that that person is European the GDPR just attached. So the same thing with CCPA, it attaches; if it's a California person sitting in New York looking at your website because that person is a resident of California, then the CCPA attaches.


Kelly: What is the CCPA? Just for the benefit of other people who don't know.


Audrey: The California Consumer Protection Act and it's a GDPR wannabe. I mean, don't get me wrong, a lot of differences. Okay?


Kelly: I like that.


Audrey: Well, you know…


Kelly: It’s a good way to remember it.


Audrey: And then the SHIELD Act is another one and they’re all very different but the interesting pattern is that again now the SHIELD Act applies to New York residents. So, are you collecting data? private data, social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank card numbers, email, addresses like very identifiable data, right? That it could be breached and cause havoc as we all very well know. So, but again, so that New Yorker could be in Paris. Hopefully not now. So then the SHIELD Act applies because it's a New York resident sitting wherever that person may be sitting on earth because that person is a New York resident the SHIELD Act applies.


So I always tell everybody remember that it's the who, not the where or not the what. All of that comes after the who? So because we're so different, I always advise my clients like just play it safe and make sure you’re compliant with all three and sometimes you kind of feel like, huh? How do I do that? So what I like to do is I have GDPR language and you can click on GDPR page, and then maybe CCPA language and click on the CCPA page, and now we're going to have to add the SHIELD Act because that just came into effect and of course because everybody's so busy trying to figure out how to work from home for people who haven't been doing it and this whole pandemic thing is freaking a lot of people out obviously for good reason. It's not easy. So the SHIELD Act kind of fell through wayside where people are not exactly aware that it does exist and it does apply because it is a state act.


Kelly: Right. I actually have a quick question about that though because you just mentioned specifically with websites. If you have a page for each of these acts on your website to show that you're in compliance, to show how you're protecting data that is being collected. Do you have to have an individual page for each of the acts or could you just call it privacy compliance and data collection or something like that? And then have what you're doing for each one of these three on the same page or does it necessitate an individual page per each act?


Audrey: It depends on client and their each act has a very specific base as to when it applies, when it attaches. Of course, it always attaches to the who, like the CCPA and the SHIELD Act also have... for example in CCPA, I’m sorry, if I remember correctly it’s like 5 million dollars of revenue and then in New York it’s 3 million dollars.


Kelly: I see.


Audrey: So those numbers whether or not it attaches but because you never know who's on the other side, I always advise clients why not just play it safe regardless of what your revenue is. And the other important fact that I'm starting to notice is under the GDPR and law changes all the time. In the general GDPR, technically, you're not exactly responsible for third-party software, like if you use PayPal you're not responsible for PayPal, right? Because you’re whole different world and you can't control what they do. But on the CCPA if PayPal has a breach, now you also are connected to PayPal because you're using PayPal. So there's some responsibility there.


Now unfortunately, we don't have final regulations on CCPA and so a lot is constantly changing. We don't have the final regulations for that. I'm not aware that there are final regulations of the SHIELD Act so it just came to an effect. As those regulations become final, we’ll have better understanding at how to work things. So I just want to say it's just kind of muddy right now, very gray. Just that this exists and it may apply and the differences is on how it applies, it may necessitate to have different pages with different language, with differences because like I said one requires no responsibility for third acts where CCPA apparently is going to give you responsibility for the third party. And I'm not sure where the SHIELD Act is going with us. So I can't say right now because it just came into effect but yes. So sometimes it's just easier to have a different page for each one or maybe one long page and say GDPR or CCPA. It depends. And it's not so much about the structure. It's about having the proper language.


Kelly: Okay, so it sounds like you could theoretically have all of the compliance in one single page and just have it all put underneath a privacy policy, but there could be extenuating circumstances where it necessitates multiple pages. So again, just like checking in with your advertising law attorney.


All right, so as we start to wrap up here, obviously we're in the age of entirely remote workforces especially for agencies. We have no control over that and we don't know what the future of that looks like in terms of time frame. So this I think is another opportunity to make sure that we are making sure that our employees are really trained on advertising law. So not in the context of having them act as lawyers, but at least sort of being like a first line of defense in ensuring like checks and balances to protect your agency.


So if you could talk a little bit more about that as we wrap up, I think that would be a great place to land because this is not only from a professional development standpoint, but just from an agency protection standpoint, really getting/taking this opportunity, to get on the same page and be really consistent with how we're understanding where we're getting our content and our images and making sure that the copyright information is in place and all of that. So I'd love to just kind of hear your thoughts on that.


Audrey: Sure. I'm a true proponent of in-house training. The main reason for that is and again like you just said, we don't expect you to be lawyers. But the whole point of the training is everybody should be on the same page with the same basic understanding on how the law attaches and applies to the work that you're doing because, like I said before if the marketer, your client is being investigated, chances are that the agency is being investigated as well.


So this is a great way to be able to have a basic understanding of how the law works and depending on what you do and depending on the product or the service that you're working on. What you should be aware of? Where are the red flags? And then come up and then after that, what I like to do is sit down with the agency and try to come up with some kind of a checkoff list to have some kind of advertising or internal procedural policy. So it's just simple check off. We check for IP clearances. Do we need to do an IP clearance? And this is just an example like you're going to use this photo, just use some photo, right?


Where did you get the photo? Did you just download it from somewhere in the internet? And is it clear to be used? Did you pay for it? Are you allowed to use it? Is it copyrighted? There's so much that goes into that. Did you get the photo from the client? Really? And where did the client get it? And are we allowed to use it? Is there a copyright attached to that? So what protection does the agency have if the client demands to use that photo and whether or not that photo is copyrighted and whether or not the client did do it's due diligence as far as doing the IP clearance, as far as checking whether or not they can use it if they pay for it and all of that. I mean if they’re adamant about using it, and you're not comfortable by using it, what is the agency going to do about that? So what do you have in place to make sure that the agency is protected from using a photo that you may or may not be legally able to use.


Kelly: Right, because if that client has a photo that they've obtained in a way where, let's say that their copyright information is in question, they’re mandating that you as the agency need to use this photo in a campaign yet you technically are going to be liable, right? If something comes up where the client is investigated or whatnot, there's no way that you should go and use that photo without making sure that it's gone through the proper checks.


So I think this is a really big thing because I do see so many agencies and to be honest like we probably did that at my agency. We probably didn't run all of the clearances and all the copyright information and a hundred percent of the protections that we should have. I think this is a really good point and now that we have the time to kind of like pause, I'm really talking about the pause a lot in here. We have the opportunity to create a checklist and to train our people in a way that supports them, a way that supports our agency, a way that supports our clients. And in the end, that's really back to our value proposition. We're going to go through as an agency. We're going to go through and make sure that you're completely compliant with every kind of piece of content, imagery, video etc., if we're going to be using it in the campaign. So that's kind of what I hear you saying.


Audrey: Correct. And really, I'm going to go back to my original point. Under the FTC law, all campaigns need to be legally compliant before launching publicly. So the bottom line is if you don't do that, then you're opening yourself to not just the government issues and investigations and all that but also potential lawsuit.


And trust me, agencies do get sued. As a matter of fact I have a whole presentation on the reasons why agencies get sued. And if you do your due diligence right off the bat, it may slow you down in launching publicly but at least you minimize your legal risk because if you get challenged or sued, you can go in and hopefully nip it by showing all the due diligence that you've done and say look I have help to support my claims. I have the IP clearances, I have this, I have that, and then hopefully if it is a lawsuit it gets thrown out quickly and as you not already know, lawsuits are very costly and time-consuming. So if you can get rid of that lawsuit immediately, think about how much time and money you're saving and the same thing to having to defend at a federal government agency or state attorneys agency or even at one of the self-governing bodies because again, if you have everything done up front, then hopefully you just completely minimized that legal risk and minimize the cost and the time and the aggravation. So it's well worth the time.


Kelly: Absolutely. Well Audrey, thank you so much for joining me today. This conversation has honestly been so packed with just a wealth of information and your knowledge. Really, really appreciate you coming onto the show.


Audrey: Thank you so much for having me and thank you everybody for listening and I really appreciate your time and for inviting me. If anybody has any questions, may I give them my phone number?


Kelly: Absolutely.


Audrey: My phone number is 954-736-9787 and my website is


Kelly: I will. Yeah, Audrey, thank you. And I will put that in the show notes. The website obviously. I don't want to put your phone number in the show notes, but yeah, so thank you so much again. This is really helpful. And please be well during all of this.


Audrey: Thank you. You too. Have a great day and everybody stay safe and healthy.


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EP 69: Planning During a Pandemic, with Drew McLellan

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Drew McLellan talk about the realities that many agency leaders are facing right now, from questioning the sectors we serve and the financial health of our businesses to planning for a viral resurgence later this year.



 EP 69: Planning During a Pandemic

Duration: 13:04


Kelly: Welcome to this week's episode of Thrive, your agency resource. I'm here with Drew McLellan, a marketing agency owner himself and owner of the consultancy Agency Management Institute, which is where all of you probably know him from. He's actually been described as helping clients create authentic love affairs with their customers, which for me, that's one of the best descriptions I've ever come across. So Drew, welcome to the show. I'm really glad that we're finally able to connect.


Drew: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have the conversation.


Kelly: So let's just put it out on the table. Many agency leaders from your perspective, from my perspective of what we do, these agency leaders are coming from a place and operating from a place of a lot of fear right now—questioning the sectors that they work in, questioning their own business models and even maybe their leadership capacity. So what are you seeing from a granular perspective with your agency clients?


Drew: Yeah. People are freaking out. I mean, I think that's the way I can see it.


Kelly: The only way to put it.


Drew: Yeah. And, here's sort of the start of every conversation I've been having with agency owners and like you had been having them pretty much from 7 AM till midnight in the last couple of weeks. We have to remember that we've done this before. It looks different because there's the health element to it and there's the working from home element to it. So that makes it weirder and it feels more intense. And we're also trying to work around our children and our pets and all the other stuff, which also adds to the stress of all these, right?


Kelly: Absolutely.


Drew: But the reality is, if you've got an agency owner for any length of time, you and your agency survived 9/11, you survived 07-08 recession. And so, the truth of the matter is we have to expect as business owners that every 8 to 10 years, whether it's just a financial crisis like a recession or it is some sort of external crisis like 9/11 or the virus, that we have to be ready to weather this and we have been ready to weather this in the past. And our job as leaders, our number one job as leaders, we have to think of ourselves as sort of the captains of a ship.


Kelly: Yeah.


Drew: And right now our ship is in the middle of a huge storm. Our job is to get the ship back to calm waters. There is an end in sight to this. This is not going to last a year. It’s not going to last two years. And then I was staying here before we hit the record button, I've been chatting with agency owners in Asia, and they're already back to work. They’re already back in restaurants. They're already back meeting clients face-to-face and they’re about two and a half months ahead of us in this experience. And so, part of this is we have to as hard as it is, remain calm, we have to be confident, and we need to be compassionate. That's what's being asked of us right now by our employees and by our clients. And so, that's where we have to come from but I get that we’re all afraid and for some agency owners they're actually busier than they were before because of the sectors they serve or like my PR agencies are crazy busy right now with crisis communications.


Kelly: Yeah. Same.


Drew: But I've also had agencies that have had 50% of their AGI walk out the door. And so, you also understand that you are probably if you're listening in the middle, you're probably not on either extreme, but you need to plan like you may get to either extreme.


Kelly: And, the other thing that you bring up is that you're pretty confident that there's gonna be a resurgence of the pandemic just based on what you're seeing with some of the clients and agency owners in Asia. So if we know that we need to plan for this, from a financial perspective, from a positioning perspective, what are those best practices that we should have really all been following all along?


Drew: Yes, so I think one of the truths that this crisis has revealed is which agencies have already been running a pretty solid ship. And so what that means is, depending on your client mix, so if you have a gorilla clients that’s worth more than 25% of your total AGI, then you need to have 4 months of operating expenses in the bank. So operating expenses of all your all-year salaries and all your overhead costs. If you are an agency where your clients are more scattered evenly and you don't have anybody that's more than 20% of your business, then you can get by with two or three months.


So now, it's probably not the time for most agencies to be stockpiling money away but when we come out of this, one of the first things they should all be doing is starting to—your mark money to have as a safety net. Many agency owners rely on a line of credit as a safety net and are now feeling like that's inadequate and that's because you need to have both. So I think some of the other things that we need to be doing are: a) If you do have a gorilla, the reality is for many agencies right now what they're going through is no different than if their biggest client fired them today. Right? It's just we have the health stuff and the other things that make it scarier but financially from our agency management point of view, it's exactly the same as if you lost your biggest client for a lot of those.


So part of it is having a plan, a regular active biz dev plan that allows you to—if you have a gorilla, offset that gorilla as quickly as possible. Right now, it's about having lots of conversations with clients. I have a lot of agencies who have said to me, “You know what? We haven’t been able to get the attention of the CEO for the last two years. And now all of a sudden, they want to talk to us.” And so, we should be making the most of those conversations. I think it's really easy to be a great partner when money is flowing and everything’s awesome. I think it is really telling if we can be a good partner in this moment in time.


And so that may mean telling your client to stop doing something that they're paying you to do because it's really not in their best interest. It is about helping them figure out how are they messaging this to their internal audiences, at their clients. So helping them pivot what they're doing and the resurgence, just for clarity, not a scientist. But what I'm hearing from Asia is that they are all back. They were all back at it and then they started letting people come back into the country and outsiders were bringing the virus back in so they had a slight resurgence of active cases, which they were confident they’ll be able to tamp down in a week or two but all of a sudden they're back working from home for a week. And so, we have to be ready for that too. This may not be a one-and-done for us.


Kelly: Right, for sure. And there's also kind of this thing that you talk about a lot which is there is this reality of something like this, some anomaly that happens, pretty much every 10 years.


Drew: Yeah.


Kelly: You can almost bet on it.


Drew: Right.


Kelly: And we can't really plan our businesses around that or change them from that perspective. First of all, we don't know what those 10-year glitches are going to be. But it's not something where you like necessarily need to completely pivot or completely rethink everything every 10 years. So from your perspective, it's more about staying the course?


Drew: Yeah. That's the equivalent of saying, the grocery stores closed on Christmas Day so I need to find another place to get groceries all year long because they're closing.


Kelly: Right. That's a good analogy.


Drew: For agencies that have positioned themselves or niched themselves in a certain way that maybe now is being adversely affected by this, that doesn't mean it's not the right thing for your business to do. For 9 and a half years, it's been a very lucrative smart thing to do. And, if you had built the safety net, you would have been able to weather this. Let's call it six month decline, right? Or recession, whatever we're heading into. And then you come back out and you keep doing what you're really good at. So I am a firm believer in we should still be selling from a position of expertise and authority and for many of us, that's around a niche or an audience or some sort of solution that we provide for our clients and this shouldn't stray you away from it.


Kelly: Yeah. No, we're definitely aligned in that thinking as well. And again, a lot of this is coming up because there are so many agency owners who are again going back to how I started the conversation, they're just so fearful and starting to question like if nonprofit or education or all of these other sectors are the area of my specialization, for all the reasons that positioning should be in place. I'm questioning whether that's even the place that I should be in, because what's going to happen to those sectors as, yes kids come back to school, maybe they're not doing online learning as much in the future, nonprofits, they're looking at marketing as like an expense versus something that's really critical to their mission. So there's this mindset that really I think what you're saying is we do have to be really clear that if we positioned ourselves the right way, there was a reason for that and we do need to put those other best practices in place from a financial standpoint so that we can weather things.


Drew: And the reality is the generalists are having as much trouble as the specialists right now. There is no industry that is safe from a pandemic.


Kelly: Right.


Drew: Though there are some industries that are perhaps more recession proof than others, but there is no island where you can stand and know that no storm will ever get to that island. That's just not realistic.


Kelly: Right.


Drew: But the reality is the specialist agencies, the niche agencies, the agencies that are known as an expert in something, when we come out of this, they're going to be the ones who clients are seeking because clients are gonna be hungry to make up what they've lost. Everybody is going to be champing at the bit and again they're already seeing this in Asia, that people are saying yes I paused for 3 months but now we got to go, go, go.


Kelly: Right.


Drew: And so if somebody doesn't already have an agency relationship and they're looking to really boost and come out of the gate strong, they’re not gonna pick a generalist. They're gonna pick somebody who understands their industry or their audience or whatever it is your specialty is.


Kelly: Yeah.


Drew: So just be bold and proud about who you are and what you are and know that this is just the reality, this is the lousy side of owning a business. Right?


Kelly: Yeah.


Drew: But the good news is we enjoy 9 and a half or more years of the good side of it. So in my opinion, it's still a whole lot better than being an employee.


Kelly: Yeah, well absolutely.


Drew: Yeah, right.


Kelly: And I know that you actually pretty generously put together some resources for agencies particularly around COVID and just let us know a little bit about how we can access those and what we can expect from those resources.


Drew: Yeah, so I have been sending out like emails constantly to our own members and things like that and finally I thought this is: a) I'm killing them with email but b) I need to have a resource. So we’ve put together a page on our website, And it's organized by week so I'm putting all the stuff we're creating but I'm also curating what other people are sharing specifically stuff that’s agency specific. But right now, this week there's some information we're recording this in late March. There's some information on what will hopefully pass the Care Act. So also there is some generalist option. There's no firewall. There's no email asked for. I'm not going to know that you're there or not there. We're not going to try and sell you anything. I just want agency owners to have vetted resources and help them survive this storm like I said at the beginning, get the ship through the storm and to calm waters.


Kelly: Right. Well again, that's incredibly generous. I'm definitely gonna put a link to that in the show notes. And Drew I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk with me today and really convey a lot of this advice to other agency leaders. I know there are a lot of people really hungry for this content. So thank you.


Drew: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me.


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EP 68:Integrating Agency Leadership + Humanness, with Leslie Peters

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Leslie Peters, author of Finding Time to Lead, discuss the importance of being human at inflection points where ambiguity and fear arise. 




 EP 68: Integrating Agency Leadership + Humanness

Duration: 20:41


Kelly: So welcome to this week's episode of Thrive, your agency resource. I am really, really excited to have Leslie Peters on the show today—speaker, author, guide, all in the context of leadership development. We actually met at Owner Summit from Bureau of Digital just a few weeks ago in New Orleans. So that was super fun and I loved her talk and we chatted afterwards and I was like, you’ve got to come on the show. So Leslie here you are. Thank you so much for joining me today.


Leslie: Thanks! I'm really excited to be here.


Kelly: So you talked about this a little bit in your keynote but something that really resonated with me was that leadership isn't something you do, it's something you are, right? So you talked about how you show up and really why is that so much do you think on the minds of the agency leaders?


Leslie: Yes. So part of it is on the minds of agency leaders because they are the leaders. They are the bosses. And so, I think that sometimes particularly when maybe you didn't set out to be the boss, some people go into it the gamut and be the boss. If you’re founder-owner, you’re like, I started doing my thing and now there are all these people and I could be the boss of all these people. Like I really didn’t sign on for that.


Kelly: Accidental management.


Leslie: Exactly. And so then, I think you get in this mindset of I have to do leadership today, like I have to do the boss thing. What does that mean to do the boss thing? And we’re make a list. We’re gonna do the boss things. And it's actually in a way simpler and more complex than that, which is as the agency owner and leader at the top of the org chart like you have a lot of influence all the time. So every time you walk into a room, every time you’re in a meeting, every time you make a comment, people are like, whoa, paying really close attention.


Kelly: Yeah.


Leslie: And so, you’re leading all the time so it's really someone you are. It's about how you show up and not something you do because everything you do is leading and that is just about you personally.


Kelly: Yeah, totally. And what I also hear you saying like as the undercurrent of that is it's actually a lot about self-awareness because if every comment, everything that's coming out of your mouth, how you show up, when you show up, when you leave, like all of these things from all these different perspectives are essentially communicating something to that team, right? So like what are you communicating? It's really being super self-aware of that.


Leslie: Exactly. And exactly to your point, you're always communicating and so you can be intentional or unintentional about that. The self-awareness is about being intentional about that. What does the fact that I say to this person. If you always are, for example, reinforcing how quickly people get things done. Thank you for getting that done so quickly. People are just going to just try to move fast. That's what they're going to do because that's what you reinforce. If you are also reinforcing I really appreciate you took some time with that and we're very thorough about it, then people have freedom to do both of those things. But if all you reinforce is how fast people get things done, people will just keep speeding up. And maybe that's what you want. That's fine. Again, there's an intentionality around it.


Kelly: Absolutely. And that's sort of like what you're talking about with that the feeding into or rewarding or praising that quickness. Right?


Leslie: Uh-huh.


Kelly: It's also like unintentional culture development at the same time, right?


Leslie: Yes. It totally creates the narrative. I will often ask people sort of what's the narrative, what do people talk about a lot, and if people are comparing the number of emails they have, right? Like I got 32 emails while we are sitting in this meeting. Well, I got 54 email.


Kelly: It’s like a competition.


Leslie: Exactly. You’ve now created this competitive around how busy everyone is.


Kelly: Right.


Leslie: And that is actually not helpful because then the winning, being successful is about how busy you are and how many emails you got as opposed to the thing you might really care about, the quality of the work or how many times you have a client into your capacity to sort of go deep on a project. And so, again one of the ways to think about this is to look for whatever the narratives, what do you hear people are saying very frequently.


Kelly: Yeah, that's a great point. And I guess sort of ancillary to that, a lot of the work that I do is around scaling or it's a component of what I do, where a lot of people who do leadership development or agency growth, do that. So scaling as you put it, it entails a lot of ambiguity and that ambiguity then leads to the creation of a lot of fear—fear among the team, fear among the leaders as well. So why is it so important to be human at those inflection points?


Leslie: Nice. Thanks for the question. Yes, so what happens when we scale and grow is a lot of change. We don't know what things are gonna look like in the future. Sort of like we used to be 6 people and now we’re gonna be 15 people. And that's really different and as things change and the ambiguity increases, our level of personal risk increases as well. Like I used to know the answer or I used to have this role. I knew the answer. I could get VA. I knew exactly what to do when I would do exactly that and feel really good about myself. And now, I have to do something really different and there’s a different scale and a different level of accountability. And so now, I’m really personally at risk. That’s scary. I don’t want to put myself out there because I might do something wrong. And so people starts to then like our limbic brains kick in, and we start to either fight or flight or freeze. We're just like people get really stuck. I had an agency owner say to me, “Why does everybody keep asking me for my permission? Why don’t they just get their stuff done?” And it's because they were scared.


Kelly: They’re scared.


Leslie: It’s that I want you to tell me that this is okay, that’s the time I can do it. And that's by responding with that sense of humanness and really integrating that into the way that you are. So say to people, “It’s gonna be okay. You can do this. You can take this risk. Nothing terrible is gonna happen.” And then they start to build that muscle and they start to see, how they can start to really, I call it brave participation. Like actually step in and participate in what's happening with a sense of courage, that you don't get if you're leader isn’t gonna take care of you at that level.


Kelly: Yeah, I love that. I'm definitely using that hashtag brave participation.


Leslie: Great.


Kelly: One of the things also that's kind of coming up for me as you're talking about it, is I see such a parallel between how you're describing what the team is needing and raising a child. So in a lot of ways, the team members if they're asking like, is this okay, am I doing it the right way, they're looking at you, almost to like parent them in a way. So if you are the type of leader who is encouraging and empowering of their bravery as you put it, like that's incredibly important for the success of the company and the scalability of it as well.


Leslie: Absolutely. Because what happens is as the ambiguity increases, there's this inflection point that happens when we start moving into things that are unfamiliar. And so, we make a choice at that moment, each of us. Am I just gonna continue to do what I've always done and like secure myself in sort of familiar territory or am I going to really grow and expand and think differently about what's coming. And the choice that we make right there is really important because what happens is if we're in that new space, I now, I'm not as competent or confident as I was in the work that I was doing. So that's gone and I'm feeling very exposed. The first thing I will do is I will disconnect. I will disconnect from the leader. I will disconnect from others. You can see in a culture in individuals when they're feeling that, because they will do one of a couple of thing—they will either start to hoard the information coz they don’t want everyone to know that they don't know what's happening.


Kelly: Right.


Leslie: Right?


Kelly: Yeah.


Leslie: So they’ll do that. Or they'll just to advocate. They’ll just start saying, I don't know, ask someone to. And all the memos start to have like big CYA on them, got 15 people on this email because I am totally covering my you know what, because I don't know if this is okay. And so, people start to disconnect and then you move into what I call “the pit of despair.” Everyone just starts complaining and being mad and feeling exposed and they fight each other and pretty soon you've sort of got this whole mass of people who are just whining and complaining and feeling bad and that's a lot to clean up.

Kelly: Yes, it is.


Leslie: You can be human with people and help them feel okay in that ambiguity and start to show up, you don't have to clean up all of that other stuff like that.


Kelly: Yet this is what you're saying, sort of preventative medicine from needing to hire somebody like your eye.


Leslie: Exactly.


Kelly: So we actually want you guys to do this.


Leslie: Right. Exactly. Or yes, like think about it now. Get ready to do this so that we can come in and help you be even more successful as opposed to try to like clean everything up.


Kelly: Untangle.


Leslie: Yes.


Kelly: Yeah, untangle the bird's nest, as I like to think about it.


Leslie: Oh I like that. Yeah.


Kelly: So we're talking all about what actually happens in these situations but what are their perspectives or the skillsets that leaders really need in order to integrate this humanist that we're calling it.


Leslie: Yeah, so I think that your point about self-awareness is one of the most important first steps like just to know sort of a little bit about who you are, when you can show up in ways that when your natural default mode is a helpful thing, and when it's not. So that you can have some time to rethink if showing up as you would naturally show up maybe isn't the most helpful thing right now. So self-awareness is the first thing. Also being aware of your own values, which I define as your decision about what's important to you in life. You can be clear about that. You can start to see how those are showing up in your culture, either in a positive way or negative way. So that's a really good piece of this self-awareness. The actual skillset, one of the things that I teach that is most valuable to people is just the idea of listening, sort of really deep listening to understand instead of listening to respond.


Kelly: My favorite phrase.


Leslie: Yes, exactly.


Kelly: My favorite, yeah.


Leslie: It's so important and again simple but not easy. And so I teach a coaching class and one of my friends in the class said, “Oh, I really have to tame the fixer.” I said, yes. That's a really good way to think about it, like not always fixing and solving but actually just listening.


Kelly: Yeah, it's interesting because so many agency owners like start out as practitioners. So whether that's design, creative, strategy, what have you. We're sort of hardwired especially for founders/owners. We're hardwired to be that practitioner, to be that problem-solver, to come up with the solutions to fix the problems. So it is really hard to sort of like unwire that or maybe it's not so much on unwiring of it, like we don't want you to change who you are because that's a great skill set to how to be able to problem solve. Really, think quickly on your feet. However, there is that pause, that pause of like, wait a minute, if I'm listening to someone as they're talking, a team member, a client, colleague, whoever it is, my business partner—if I'm listening and I catch myself already formulating what I'm going to say, cut it off, just pause.


Leslie: Exactly.


Kelly: Put that over there. You can always come back to it, still in your head, but like being really present with that conversation so that you take the time to understand not only what they're saying but also more of what is not being said.


Leslie: Exactly. My example of this is I taught this, and then I had another class with the same group a couple of weeks later and this one came back and I call it epic listening. She came back and she said, “I got it! Epic listening. I got it, I got it!” I said, “Tell me what happened.” She said, “Well, I was in my office and one of my direct reports came in and he was just, flailing, he was like, they're not getting their stuff done and they're not getting their stuff done and we can't get our stuff done and the school is ridiculous, and all of these things. And she said, “What I would have done before is as he was talking I would have said, okay I'll talk to them. I know it's hard. And I would have just been like solving all through the conversation.” And she said, “Instead, I just listened. I was just really present with him and I listened to what he said and it got done, and I said, it sounds to me like you're really overwhelmed and he sat down in the chair and he said I am so overwhelmed.” And she said, “Okay, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. Let's figure out what we can do. Then they were actually getting at the real problem. He was participating in the solution in a way than he wasn't when he was ranting and she was fixing and they were able to make some plans and he left feeling better and more empowered and not so freaked out and all the things we talked about with that ambiguity and change and challenge, like she really got into a place where he can engage and bravely participate in what was happening.


Kelly: Yeah. That is such a perfect example because it's not just about him feeling empowered but she was holding space for him. And so look at all the positive things that you just mentioned like he felt, seen, heard, understood, he participated in the solution process. If there are some of you listening wonder like why can't my team just like do this themselves, why can't they just take the initiative? It could be because they're fearful, that they're not doing something right. It could be because their roles are maybe not defined really well or what's expected of them isn't really defined very well. But if you want them to take an active role in the problem-solving, sometimes it is just about empowering them. So that was a great example because I'm sure that a lot of people have team members who come into their office like that all the time.


Leslie: Absolutely.


Kelly: I know.


Leslie: And I think the other thing is people are like, “I don’t have time for all of that. They just have to solve it.” And I would say that that took less time than it took for her to be interrupting him the whole time he was talking and then just her running off to solve things that weren't actually the problem.


Kelly: Right.


Leslie: So I would also challenge people to think about time. And the things that you think I don't have time for that, and just challenge yourself to think about how much time does it really take in comparison to the time it might take to clean something up or to rework something after the fact. Because often it is much more effective to listen and to pay attention and to coach and bring people to their own solutions. It may be more efficient to just give somebody the answer, but I think we really have to pay attention to that sense of effective versus efficient.


Kelly: Yeah, and again the thing that comes up for me with that is it's not just the time that it takes to have that conversation and whether you're solving a particular problem if that person comes in with. But ultimately what we want to do is we want to teach our people to fish. So like for me, it's look at the lifetime value of the time, like if you can help them to figure out, okay well once I recognize like yeah I'm feeling really overwhelmed, let me try to figure this out on my own, what are the core issues. Now I don't necessarily have to come back into my boss's office for that solution.


Leslie: Exactly.


Kelly: So like lifetime value of the time that you're saving is a huge one.


Leslie: Absolutely. And then they will also be able to do that for others. So everybody's leading all the time. So they then have experienced that with you in such a way that they can offer that to another colleague. Somebody comes to them and they're all worked up, they can actually think, oh what was helpful to me was sort of allowing that space and understand what's really happening. And so, now you've also expanded, you’ve extended yourself with these other people who know how to do this and that also is about your culture.


Kelly: Yeah. So that's actually a great segue. I know that you authored a book a few years ago called Finding Time to Lead. So tell me a little bit about that and then also where people can find that.


Leslie: Sure. So here I have one. It’s called Finding Time to Lead. And I named it that because of this idea of sort of who you are is more important than what you do. So if you're like I don't have time to do all that leadership stuff, actually you just need to do your own work and think about how you show up and that is the leadership stuff. And so finding time just becomes what you do. And so there are really specific practices in there. I talk about the listening in there. I talk about some of the values, deciding who you want to be and how you want to show up and then some really specific ways of doing that. To. It's really written for CEOs. It's applicable to everyone but it's pretty specific to CEOs. So I think for owners, there might be a lot of really good information. And also I wrote it specifically to be a pretty quick rea and to be very practical. A lot of business books I think are really long and I feel like I could have read the most important parts in an article. And I tried not to do that so this really has like here's three tips at the end of each little chapter about things you can do and why that might be helpful.


Kelly: That's actually really funny because sometimes I read books like that as well and I'm like I definitely could have, like if this was consolidated down to about 15 pages as opposed to like 150, I would have been pretty happy about that.


Leslie: Exactly.


Kelly: So Finding Time to Lead and you're letting them find time to read so I love it.


Leslie: Exactly. That's what I always get. If I could just find time to read and it's on Amazon, you can get it there.


Kelly: Perfect. And how can people find out about you other than for your leadership development training.


Leslie: Oh there's also a website that goes with the book called And you can actually download a little workbook that goes with the book there so you can get some sheets and things that go with the tools in the book. And then I am at


Kelly: Perfect. I will put both of those in the show notes for today's episode and thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This is a great conversation.


Leslie: It's been great fun. Thanks Kelly.


Kelly: Take care.


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EP 67:Designing Conversation, with Daniel Stillman

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Daniel Stillman, author of Good Talk, discuss maximizing human connection in our intentional design of conversation




 EP 67:  Designing Conversation

Duration: 26:50


Kelly: So welcome to this week's episode of Thrive. Today’s conversation is about designing conversation. And I'm here with Daniel Stillman, who is a coach, a consultant, a keynote speaker, and author of the new book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter. We were actually introduced by a friend of ours and mutual colleague, Jay Malone of New Haircut, and I'm super excited that he felt compelled enough to connect the two of us. So Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.


Daniel: Thanks for having me. I expect an excellent conversation since we've already had a good conversation before we even hit record.


Kelly: Well, maybe we can start with sort of the backstory of how did good talk come to be, how did it come to fruition? And just would love to hear a little bit more about what either the pain points or the gaps in the market or whatever that story was for you.


Daniel: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's layers with everything but for me I used to work in industrial design and UX design. And I worked with my clients to try and discover what they needed, what they wanted, what their customers needed and wanted. And we did that thing where you go out, you do the research, you do the insights, and you design workshops to bring them together, you design presentations. And no one really taught me how to do that in design school.


And it wasn't until many, many years later that I was working as a facilitator teaching facilitation and design thinking with a group in Australia. They call their facilitation practice, conversation design, and I initially thought that that was a super douchey way to describe what I did. I was like, you're not designers. What does that even mean? But it really put a little bug in my brain because as a designer moving from industrial design to UX design, then I became aware of experience design and service design.


And when you have those new words, you start seeing the world in different way. When you start to see the world as services, you're like, well, this product is just connected to this big intangible surface service. And so, I was just like, what does it mean to design a conversation? I knew how to design an experience. I knew how to design a service. And so I actually sat down, I did four interviews with four people I knew and respected; Dave Gray, who wrote a book called Gamestorming my friend; Abby Covert, who wrote a book called How to Make Sense of Any Mess, a wonderful book about information architecture. My friend, Leland Maschmeyer, who is now the Chief Creative Officer at Chobani. And my friend, Philip McKenzie, who has a podcast now as well.


And I said to them, I was like, “What does conversation design actually mean to you? Like, what those two words mean?” And they were like, “It’s weird. It's interesting. It's intriguing. It means this. It  doesn't mean that.” It was a provocation. And honestly, I thought, this is weird. And, it took me a year to finally get around to starting a podcast about it. And in a way, like, that's the origin story for me. And so I started this podcast in 2017 to say like, okay, well, if we can, in fact, design conversations, and it seems that you are like, what are we designing? Like, literally, what's the material of design? And I don't know, like two years in, I got tricked into writing a book.


Kelly: That’s a good way to put it.


Daniel: Right, exactly. And so that to me, is the origin stories like one is, the pain point of working in a creative agency and being like, how do I guide this conversation? Like, when you learn about design thinking, like, wow, there's a structured approach to having this dialogue with my clients. And then when I saw someone else run a workshop, where they physicalized what we thought our ideal experience for this product was using collage, I was like, I can do this. I'm going to tell my boss like for this workshop we have coming up with our clients, like, I'm going to do this word and photo collage thing. And he's like, what is this? Is it? Is this gonna? That sounds weird? Is it gonna be? And I’m like, it's gonna be okay. I saw someone else do this. And I could totally get away with this. And it was amazing.


Kelly: Yeah. Sometimes you just have to trust.


Daniel: Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what he had to do.


Kelly: Right.


Daniel: I had seen it for myself. And we had this conversation where one client was like, “No, I don't want this product to be magical.” And the other guy, the client, he was like, “This thing should be magical. And so we could have this conversation about, well, what does magical mean?” And that's to understand what your client means by magical and why one half of the team doesn't want it and the other half of the team does, like that was a gift — to be able to facilitate that conversation. And so, to me, I don't think in my bio now I say like Daniel Stillman designs conversations for a living and insists that you do too. And, I think we are all designing conversations as well as we can with whatever tools we've been given or stolen or absorbed. It's like, we remember maybe being taught how to play chess, but very few of us remember being taught how to talk. Right? And so, I think it's really important.


Kelly: Yeah, that's a good point.


Daniel: That's a long origin story. But that's how I feel about it.


Kelly: No, it's great. I mean, it gives a lot of context. And I love your mantra, which is like we live our lives one conversation at a time. And what you talk about a lot in the book is the fact that we need this range, right? Like conversations have structures, you just mentioned, and give a good example. But we're not great at sort of the dichotomy of the structure of those conversations, right? So we can be, as you say, in the book, like forward-thinking or forward and fast or we can be slow and methodical and thoughtful. Why is that so challenging for people?


Daniel: It's interesting. Maybe it's a false dichotomy. There's definitely attention. You know the Rudyard Kipling poem If—? There's one phrase where he says, if you can talk to crowds and not lose your virtue and talk to Kings and not lose the common touch. There's this idea of like, can you, in fact, wow a crowd? Can you talk to some to power? Clearly, like, that's range. I think a lot of people are scraped like you do, you’re a keynote speaker. It's scary to go up on stage. And it's a different type of conversation because you can't see the audience. You don't get the same…


Kelly: Sometimes those lights are a little blinding.


Daniel: Yeah, those lights are a little blinding. If you've ever done a webinar, right? Like you're talking to the air. And so you don't get that feedback that you get in a normal dialogue. And I think team dialogues they need to be designed and are usually poorly designed like half of what I think or designers do, that I've seen as they just give people better team patterns, team dialogue patterns, making sure that everyone speaks the same amount.

But this thing that you and I were talking about, which is how hard it is to introspect, and to have time with ourselves. I don't think that's a modern malady. I think it's very easy to say, oh, it's because of phones. But it's slowing down is hard. And doing inner work is hard. Because we are human doings, not human beings. What we do is we output and there's this classic Zen concept of the ball being, being but the space in the bowl is nonbeing. And what you actually need is the space in the ball. And so we see what we do, but the nonbeing emptiness silence looks like nothingness. And isn't valued in the same way because you buy the ball, coz there's no way to buy space.


Kelly: Right. You buy the container.


Daniel: You buy the container.


Kelly: But by buying it, you're buying it to fill it up or to do something with it.


Daniel: Yeah. And so like, this is something I talked about with, I think clients are actually buying their time from me. Right?


Kelly: That's interesting.


Daniel: Like when I am on site, or when they are on a call with us, they are required to set aside their regular everyday lives and to be present, and to put away their phones. They're like, oh, Kelly's gonna be here tomorrow. We have to actually get our s*** together, and focus and do real work. And so, I think time is obviously the most precious thing we have and time with yourself is the hardest thing to get.


Kelly: Yeah, yeah. There's this concept that you also talk about, like the fact that we are constantly designing conversations whether we know it or not.


Daniel: Yeah, yeah.


Kelly: We are clearly not conscious of it. I mean, hopefully this episode will bring consciousness to it. But we're not conscious of it. But we do it all the time. So you're asking the question, what would happen if we design these conversations from a holistic perspective, to maximize meaning and connection? So what do you actually mean by that? 


Daniel: Well, so the first thing is, you have a good step back. I'll break it down for you like a math problem. Maybe, it's just because I come from a combination of like, I have a degree in physics, and I studied industrial design. And so there's this idea that if we're designing, we're designing something. Like if I want to make a curve more interesting, we spent an entire semester thinking about fast versus slow curves. I'm looking at the painting behind you. And I'm like, looking at those curves and like, oh, I see it, how it speeds up and slows down. And if I wanted to change or critique the physicality of something, I know what to critique. But with conversations, we don't even know what we're looking at, because we don't see the structure. And it's like trying to play chess without understanding moves. Right? And, modularity of moves.

And so, for me, one of the things I started to realize was that, I wanted to try and give people the smallest number of things to look at when they're designing a conversation. And one of the most interesting ones is space, and interface, the fact that our conversation happens in a place. Like right now, Zoom is the interface between our conversation, but our conversation is also happening. You've got a piece of paper nearby you with a series of questions that you want to try and address. And so, you're having a constant conversation between your plan and what's happening. Right? There's a narrative structure that you have. That's another thing that conversations are made out of stories. And it's being held in the space.

And so, one of the stories that I thought was interesting enough to put in the book was the story of this woman who, on NPR, she talked about leaving voice messages to herself. She'd walk her dog, and she would call herself and talk through her problems. And so just literally taking that time is one thing, but then you can listen to them afterwards. And we all know how much it is. We are so much better at solving other people's problems than our own. Right? And so, what she did was she put her problems on an interface outside of herself, and she could listen to her problems as if it was someone else's problem.

So she literally like peeled the conversation, her inner conversation out from inside her head, where we think at 4000 words a minute, right? Speech is, I wish I could remember the statistic right now. We can talk much, much more slowly than we can think. Our thoughts are so fast, and so peeling it out, bringing it outside, changing the interface of the conversation immediately makes it easier to address and to process. It slows things down immediately. And so, I think one of the challenges that people don't even know what they're designing. And so you can steal patterns, you're like, okay, let me start leaving voice messages to myself. But to me, I think, understanding the why is more interesting, because there's another story of like Amanda Palmer, deciding… Do you know Amanda Palmer? She's super famous TED Talk on the art of asking?


Kelly: I don't. I'm gonna put that in the show notes though and listen to it afterwards.


Daniel: She's married to Neil Gaiman, who's also a badass, and there's a story of them having a dinner conversation and she's like, hey, what if we didn't talk but we just passed notes to each other? And they asked the waiter for a pen and paper, and it was basically texting. But with time to think because writing as an interface for a conversation, it slows things down, and so they would doodle something, she’d write something and slide it across the table. And while he was writing, she got to like enjoy her dinner and just be in her thoughts. And maybe think about what she was saying while he was writing something back. And so this is what I mean by designing conversations. There are ways to slow it down, to speed it up, to physicalize it, to internalize it, to switch it up, and to be playful with the way that we interact. And that will radically change the way that we're communicating.


Kelly: Yeah, it's really interesting. As soon as you were telling that story, it made me think of a story. Just recently, I went up to a Buddhist monastery in Pine Bush, New York. And I went with a friend of mine, and in the middle of the day, there was a lunch with the monks that live on, the residents of the campus there. And so the entire time it was a silent lunch, right? So we're all eating the only thing that you could hear were like the clanking of the utensils and chopsticks and whatnot. And it made me have a conversation with myself while I was eating and I was so purposeful and so intentional. And also really excited that once that silence was broken, I was so clear about some of the questions that I wanted to ask my friend about her experience or ask one of the monks sitting next to me. And it was the slowing down on the silence that allowed me to do that. Really, really interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way until you just told that story.


Daniel: So good. Great music is not just constant noise at like one volume. There's musicality to great conversations. And that is what I would call cadence. When does a groove become a rut? You listen to a baseline where it's like, oh, you know when it's like it. It pulls you forward and there's interest. There's a variety and I think that's something that we're missing too. And so just having a pattern of silence and not silence, is essential and loudness and softness and high and low. People don't know how to vary their voices and speak with a musicality. But we don't do that for ourselves at all.


Kelly: Well, that was going to be sort of along the lines like my next question was about like, the inner voice work that you do. I think, for me, that's super fascinating and love to hear a little bit more about that.


Daniel: Well, step 1, if you've never listened to Julia Cameron. She wrote The Artists Way and The Artists’ Way at Work. I did a writing workshop with her. I took my mom. It was super fun and when anybody would step up to the microphone with a problem, the first thing Julia Cameron would say is, are you doing your morning pages? And the morning pages are these three pages of free hand, free thinking, just like scraping off the first layer of your brain first thing in the morning? And that is like her base level of like, you must be doing your morning pages. Like that is the fundamental first conversation that happen.


Kelly: Is that like the same thing as journaling or just calling it something different?


Daniel: It might just be fancy journaling. But Julia believes…


Kelly: Fancy journaling.


Daniel: It’s just fancy journaling. The morning pages is not like, oh, this happened. And this happened. It's literally like, you write it as quickly as possible. It's free association. It might be a list of song lyrics. It's sometimes I've written a half a page of, I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be doing this. Whatever it is. So I think journaling is like, oh, so last night, last week, Tom did this and I don't feel good about that versus like morning pages. It's just like, I don't care what's in it. It doesn't matter at all.


Kelly: And it doesn't have to be a narrative. It doesn't have to be sentences. It's yeah, okay. Got it. It’s like a brain dump.


Daniel: Brain dump. Exactly. Don't like barely pick up your pen. Don't think, just get it out.


Kelly: But handwritten, not typed.


Daniel: Handwritten. It's absolutely essential. I just got back to my morning pages like a week ago. Because I like to have space. I don't want to just be, I want to have a flow between doing it, not doing it, but the inner voice stuff, it's fascinating. There's a whole school of therapy called Inner Family Systems. There are some Inner Family Systems cards where you look at a grumpy, sullen teen being yelled at by like a mother and there's a mess everywhere. And there's a beautiful happy family picture in the back. And it's like, okay, well, what is the family dynamic in here? And then where's that dynamic exist in me? But the way that I've done inner voice work with my therapist is, whenever I have an internal conflict, it's actually naming the parts and sometimes physicalizing the parts so that if I have an inner critic, maybe you have an inner critic, too.


Kelly: We all do.


Daniel: Really? It's not just me? I'm normal? So when I struggle with my inner critic, we name it, we give it a name. And we actually localize it in a room. We put it in a space.


Kelly: Like give it a name, like calling it what it is, or giving it a name like David?


Daniel: Like, yeah, whatever. It could be David or it could be like the taskmaster.


Kelly: So like an archetype. 


Daniel: Well, yeah, well, I mean, I name it for myself and I drew it. I have drawing somewhere where I drew all of the different parts where it's like, he's like at a millstone. Like you put an ox around like a millstone, just like push around and grind out that. That's what I feel sometimes. I find out more stuff. And so you're like, okay, well, let's put the taskmaster over there. And what do you want to say to him? What does he want to say to you? What do you need from him? What does he need from you? And that is actually having a conversation with yourself.

And it is much easier when you have somebody coaching you through it. You can also do it for yourself. So when I teach my facilitation masterclass, I do an exercise called the facilitators hats. And people draw the roles that they think they take on as a facilitator, ones that are hard for them to take on, which ones are easier and joyful for them, which ones are sort of like outside of their reach. And then we do some physical sorting where they start to think about like, what's in the core? What's in the shadows? What do they want to bring into the center? What's the pyramid of facilitation for them, and getting introspective about what is the role that I really need to be focusing on right now.

And it's been really interesting because I made this deck of cards and it was internally very struggling for me because I enjoy people drawing their own. But I decided to just take. I've been doing this for like 5 years now. So I went through 5 years of people's facilitators’ hats, drawings, and just made a deck of like 40 some odd ones that I liked. And the other day, I had them in my pocket because I was going to show somebody a prototype and I was going to this event. And like many people suffer from mild social anxiety.

And I thought to myself, how do I need to show up at this thing? Like, what do I want to be? What's my goal? Like, what am I going to do here? And I literally pulled out 3 facilitators hats at random, and one was the nourisher. It's this big top hat where like, the brim of the top hat is filled with food. So that's something we have to do. When we gather people we have to nourish them. And the other one was the fun hat. Like it's got a big propeller on it, because sometimes we just need to have fun.

And the other one was a detective hat. And I was like, whoa, I'm going to be the fun nourishing detective tonight. Like I don't even know what that means. But it was just wonderful provocation for me to think about how to show up playfully and be like, yeah, I know how to pull those parts out of myself. If I'm thinking to myself, Daniel, let's be nourishing today, I know how to pull out the nourisher in me. And I know how to be a detective, to ask really deep questions.


Kelly: And that's really interesting because we all have all of these different parts, archetypes, aspects, whatever you want to call them. We can pull from all of these different things. And I like the fact that you pause and you had that moment of reflection of like, what is my intention? Who do I want to show up as in this particular event? And let somebody else decide that, which in this case was the card? Right? Or the set of cards?


Daniel: Right.


Kelly: That's pretty cool. I think that's a really, really cool thing that the cards themselves remind me a little bit of… are you familiar with Q&E cards, questions and empathy cards from Michael Ventura that go along with his book Applied Empathy?


Daniel: No, I don't, but I do know, Michael. 


Kelly: Okay. So he's been on the podcast, and yeah, so I have actually right behind me a set of those cards. And funny enough, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine over text message this morning. And she was talking about convening and I like pulled the cards out and I was like, oh my God, these questions are great. That's exactly so applicable. So yeah, it's really interesting how you can use different cards like that to either ask questions or to sort of, not dictate, but give you some inspiration as to how you want to show up or who you want to be in each given day. Right? And that goes back to your whole thing about like, we are really living our lives and designing these conversations one at a time.


Daniel: They have a choice. It’s to illustrate that we even have choices, is huge. Because most of the time I think we just… respond reflexively, right? So if I'm thinking about how I'm going to show up at this party, I'll just be like, I'll just pull it for myself or I'll make a choice or I'll be anxious about it. And so giving ourselves the recognition that I've got a whole deck of cards of how to be empathetic to somebody. Right? I have an infinity of choices. I don't think it is scary. I think of it as liberating. Oh, I could show up. And I could be a dick. Like, that's choice. Right?


Kelly: That is a choice.


Daniel: But some people make that choice without even realizing there are other choices, right?


Kelly: True. It’s just lack of awareness.


Daniel: It's lack of hard-nosed on purpose. It's a lack of introspection and time and being like, what do I want? What do I need? Just taking a moment saying like, well, what are my ways? What are my options on the table of showing up and which is the best to actually get me what I want? My fiancée and I talk about this all the time, because we don't really fight much. Because there's this idea of like, well, why would I yell at you about the ironing board being out for 3 days? Like that's not actually going to get me what I want. And honestly, I don't really care. But the other day, I was like, hey honey, I noticed you took out the ironing board, which we never, it's not ever really used. I was like, what's the ironing board doing? And she's like, oh, like, there's this thing I pulled out of the back of my closet. I want to iron it. So I thought if I took out the ironing board, it would have encourage me to do it. And I was like, cool. And then like another 3 days later, I was like, hey, so what's going on with the ironing projects? And she's like…


Kelly: How’s the ironing project going, honey?

Daniel: Yeah. I know. And she's like, well, I'm beginning to get started on thinking about doing it. I was like, oh, let's dig into the process of beginning to get started on doing this. Tell me more about this. And we just laughed hysterically about it.


Kelly: Oh my God.


Daniel: And so then she's like, the next day she irons the thing and put it away. Because like, that is just such a different way. Now I was able to do that because I love her tremendously. And I find her hilarious and amusing in everything she does. So to me, like I could be like, what's the goddamn ironing board doing out? And in fact, we sometimes pull up voice out, the old Jewish married couple for fun, and just like we pretend. And I was like, you take out the ironing board and what is it furniture now? It's gonna be there for how many years? Should I put some flowers on it? What do you think? Right? Because that's even more ridiculous like yes, let’s just play that role.


Kelly: Oh my God. That is designing a conversation. That's just designing an amusing fun, amazing conversation.


Daniel: I’m letting out my aggression in a hilarious way, potentially at least to, Janet. And so, that to me is like being thoughtful and playful with how we express ourselves.


Kelly: Oh I love that.


Daniel: Try that on. It's always fun to be a crotchety old couple. 


Kelly: Okay, I got to practice my Jewish accent though.


Daniel: Yeah, yeah. Just watch The Princess Bride. It always helps. Miracle Max and, and his wife whose name… “I'm not a witch. I'm your wife.”


Kelly: All right. Well, I am going to put links to the book and some of your social channels in the show notes. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me on the show. This has been such a great conversation. I don't know if I've laughed so much on the show before, so I appreciate that.


Daniel: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's been really fun.


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EP 66: Navigating Agency Life Transitions, with Annie Scranton

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly talks to Annie Scranton of Pace PR about the many transitions she’s had to move through within the context of integrating agency leadership into her personal life. 



 EP 66: Navigating Agency Life Transitions

Duration: 27:15


Kelly: So welcome to this week's episode of Thrive. I'm here actually today with Annie Scranton, who’s the CEO of Pace PR in New York. We're chatting about the many transitions that agency owners face on a continuous basis whether that's personal, professional, and she's going to share her story about how she's actually been able to navigate them. These are some of my favorite conversations, real agency owners, real challenges and just being really transparent about what those things are that people are facing and then how we kind of come to resolve those and solve them. So Annie, it's great to see you again. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.


Annie: Thank you for having me.


Kelly: So first of all congratulations on hitting your 10-year mark with the PR firm. That's amazing.


Annie: Thank you, thank you.


Kelly: So let's talk about this first, will call it the first transition of many with the agency where you actually went on maternity leave, how you kind of navigated that because that in and of itself is pretty challenging or could be and then we'll maybe dive into some of the issues about growing and scaling the team as a new mom with a brand new baby at home.


Annie: Yeah. So I would say that definitely having a baby was obviously like the biggest life change I've ever had but it certainly in the context of my business, it was absolutely the biggest moment where I just kind of felt like even though I did tons of crap beforehand I had just no idea like what it was going to be like and how things were gonna kind of shake out.


Kelly: How do you prepare for something like that, right?


Annie: Well, a client gave me a good advice. He said write down every single thing you do every single day for like a week or two straight and so I tried to do that so that way my two VPs would have a little, a look, a glimpse, into like sort of what my day to day was like. And before going on maternity leave, I really was acting like the CEO, the president, the founder, the CFO, I was doing like all of those roles, but I was very entrenched in like the day to day with the clients stuff. And so what I figured and what became true was that once I came back I was not gonna be able to be as entrenched in the day to day client work. So that was something I had to kind of relinquish in terms of like control which isn't easy, I don't think if you're an owner of an agency or a company.


Kelly: We tend to all be a little type A.


Annie: Exactly. But really what really was like so surprising and like the best way is that when I, I had so much anxiety about telling my clients I was pregnant and I would be out on maternity leave and they all surprised me, every single one of them was so happy for me, was like don't worry it'll be fine we'll figure it out or work with the others on your team and they truly meant it actually. And so I think that was something that I had underestimated because being in the service industry you're there to serve and so you're not really there to take time off and not to be working but I think for my clients particularly those who are parents themselves I think they understood it and I guess believed in me and believed in the foundation of what we were doing and I should say I only I only took like two months where I was fully off. So it was not a long maternity leave and then I came back slowly like sort of couple of days a week until I hit five months and that was when I came back from maternity leave sort of right after the holidays.


My experience was that the first few months after maternity leave or after I had my daughter actually went really, really well because I was still working right up until the day I gave birth. I had lots of planning meetings with my senior staff about how they were going to fill in the gaps and what was most important etcetera. And I really was able to just enjoy my daughter and not worry about work for two months which was awesome and everybody should do that a hundred percent because you never get that time again. And it was really wonderful and then dipping my toe back in like a couple days a week was good. It was definitely like one of the benefits of being a founder and owning an agency. It is just sort of write your own path back in after. So that was really good.


But then going back full time was really hard and it was hard I think because I felt really lost like in terms of what my role was now at the company. It’s been running really smoothly while I was gone and so I came back and I was like, alright, what am I doing here, like what’s my purpose. And then I realized what it was, was that, the one component that I hadn't been doing that nobody else was really doing was keeping up the new business relationships like getting new business is not really a skill you can teach somebody. It's just sort of I think innate and probably something that all owners or agency founders are good at. That's why we started our own agencies because we had a pipeline into potential clients. And so I realized that when I was sort of reviewing the Q1 numbers after I had just come back and they were not as strong as the previous year and that was the first year in nine years in business at that point that that had ever happened to me.


Kelly: That was just last year?


Annie: That was just last year. Yeah. Almost exactly a year ago and that really freaks me out because I had always been on this slow trajectory up and now we were like looking to maybe just break even with the year before. And so that was a big realization for me. Running the day to day and keeping the current clients happy and sort of keeping up with that work, my team totally expertly handled but having sort of foresight to keep the company growing was something that I wasn't in the headspace to do while I was enjoying my new baby and that was sort of the first big challenge of 2019, figuring out okay what are we going to do here to keep growing.


Kelly: Yeah, so it's interesting one of the things that you said early on was that you had all of this anxiety about telling the clients, right?


Annie: Yes.


Kelly: So that anxiety I'm imagining was coming from a place of like are they going to think that I'm incompetent, are they going to look at our agency as less valuable, would there potentially be some attrition because of this, was that all of the underlying feeling of that anxiety?


Annie: All of it. Yes, a hundred percent. And also being the one who primarily signs the bulk of a new business, the bulk of the clients, many of our clients want me. They want me involved. They want to talk to me. They wanna make sure I'm working on their accounts. And my staff is tremendous but there’s still that connection and so yes I was very worried about, would they feel like they weren’t getting their money's worth if they couldn't get me on the phone. Would they feel like their account wasn't going as strong if I wasn't actively pitching them to producers and different media?


And then just from my own perspective before I started my agency ten years ago, I always worked in a corporate culture. I was at various TV networks, like Fox, CNN, MSNBC and I remember being younger like in my twenties and seeing people take their maternity leave and then realizing okay now the bulk of the work they were doing is going to fall onto me and feeling like I mean I was so naive at the time but feeling sort of like well this isn't fair. Now I have all this extra work to do so I was worried about my staff too like feeling like they weren't feeling supported because I was out. So yeah, it was a lot of anxiety but one of my clients actually who I had a conversation with about it really like put my fears at ease and he said, Annie, people are going to be happy for you, you work really hard like you have the right connections, you're doing things the right way like people will support you. And I did find that to be true.


Kelly: Yes, so all of the potential like that story or that narrative that you created that this was going to be devastating for the clients and it was going to impact the employees like none of that was actually true. It was all just coming up out of the sphere of like if I'm not involved like everything's gonna go and fall by the wayside.


Annie: Totally. And like my ego was a little bruise because I was like oh, like okay everything's going fine. I wasn't even needed here for the past few months.


Kelly: Right.


Annie: I say that jokingly but there was a little bit of that, real feeling in there, and it was an adjustment like for sure but my mom always says to me, she's like, whatever you're worried about it's not going to be that thing that happens to you; it's gonna be something else.


Kelly: Or nothing.


Annie: Or nothing. Exactly. But I'm a worrier and so I always think something's gonna happen. But for me, it was not the operational side or the client side or even the staff side, it was really just continuing the growth of the business. I mean I didn't have the foresight. I don't know if I even could have for that being the one thing that I needed to pay attention to.


Kelly: Yeah, but that's also really self-aware that you said yeah my ego was a little bruised like I used to have sort of control over almost every nuance of this business, right?


Annie: Yes.

Kelly: Hand in clients, leading the team, developing culture, new business, like all of these things and so when you step back in and everything sort of running aside from new business, but everything else is sort of running smoothly without you, you're like wait now you said I felt lost. There's also like for me what natural extensions of that is, there's a little bit of loneliness and there's a little bit of question about purpose which you mentioned so it's like how did you get over that, how did you transition back in and sort of redefined what your purpose was and then get over that challenge of not necessarily prior to that only focusing on new business and now you're in this place where that's what the agency needs and that's what your primary focus, like how did you manage that transition.


Annie: I mean, to be honest with you I'm still managing it. I honestly, sometimes I do, I'll have conversation my husband something like I don't know what I'm doing, like what is it am I supposed to be doing right now. But when I came back from maternity leave, it was even harder because I was getting used to not seeing my daughter from nine to five every day. I was nursing. At the times I was pumping in the office. Forget it, like that was a whole other life challenges. It was hard because I was feeling sort of like I was feeling at home, feeling in the office and it wasn't easy. What did I do to get over it? I think somebody just told me another piece of good advice was to spend your time doing what only you can do and not what others on your team can do.


And so on that is where I tried to really dive then in terms of new business of course, just like oversight generally speaking of how the company was working and flowing, hiring, like that was something where my resume senior team was knee deep in, in the day to day work. I was like okay I'll take on the responsibility of actively hiring and doing these interviews. And now I think, my role it's harder to define because there's not like I'm always thinking about how to keep growing and scaling my company and what are more services that we can offer to clients and how can we implement that without burdening the staff that we currently have and it's hard because I before I had Rose, my daughter, every day I feel like I could do like a checklist of like every single thing I needed to do and I got it done and here's how I made the clients happy.


Like now when you say okay I'm working on how to scale the business like I don't know it's more like nebulous. It's more like I need to just spend time thinking and talking to people and whatever and it kind of comes in more of like an abstract way. And it's still really hard because I'm very type A and so my brain doesn't work like that. So I don't know I'm just trying to like lean into it as much as possible like if my email isn't crazy busy then I'll go on like Fast Company or Inc. or  Entrepreneur, and like read an article that I think I could benefit from, whereas before I feel like I literally didn't have like five minutes in my day to do that.


Kelly: Right. I recently heard somebody say if you replace your task-list with a to-solve list and take let's say you had ten things each day on your task list and now you're to-solve list becomes like much more strategic, becomes much more high level. That to-solve list maybe should have like four things on it for the entire week. I thought that was a really interesting way to sort of reframe exactly what you're talking about.


Annie: I am going to try that because that is a good way. Sometimes that's all it takes, just like witching the way you think about it.


Kelly: Yeah. So just kind of moving into the next big challenge that you faced. At some point between what we're talking about with the maternity leave and coming back, you had four employees actually quit and give notice, some leave within like just a couple of months of each other and you were pretty clear when we talked last time that you knew that the issue wasn't systemic. They were all for different reasons but that it actually did impact morale. And so I'm curious to know how as the visionary, as the founder, as the leader how did you sort of help that transition as well.


Annie: Well, I just try to be as honest and forthcoming with my staff as I could about each specific situation and I try to also very quickly hire freelancers or finding new people to fill in the gaps so that way at the very least the current staff wouldn't feel overloaded by having to pick up the work. So I think those are just very easy tactical things that I could do but it was really hard like super hard because most of my staff has been with me for years and years and years and so it was just like it was a shock for sure. Each situation was really different and I think in each situation I just was as honest as I could be with the team about why that person had left but we try to just to keep the morale like up, like we just try to do more like have more moments where we were sort of trying out all feel good about something that we did or like a big accomplishment we do every week.


On Thursday afternoons, we do weekly wins so it's like what was your big win for the week. So we try to just do that. I tried to highlight when a staff member had a great booking or had a great client, initiative that went well. I tried to make that feel more like a moment within the team so people would feel good about their work. And I think that's all good and I think people do appreciate that but at the end of the day, what people care the most about is either, are they getting more money or are their perks that are going to benefit them, so we try to just be even more flexible than we could about like time off, for people needing to work remotely sometimes. It kind of sucked. It was like I'm not gonna lie, it was very hard for sure.


Kelly: Yeah. So I'm curious to know like through the spectrum of a lot of these experiences that you're talking about which are so common in agency life, so many agency leaders can absolutely resonate with one or all of these things. I'm curious to know like how would you describe your own mindset as you were going through those, like were you really freaking out, were you able to compartmentalize, were you able to just kind of be authentic like what was your mindset, what was going through your mind to kind of help you get through it all.


Annie: I feel like I went through different phases and like different phases almost within each day. At home with my husband or talking to my mom on the phone. I'd be like freaking out, crying. I mean not like I was doing this all the time but I definitely have my moments. Having trouble sleeping, you wake up and you're like oh god how am I gonna fix this or what are we gonna do. I don't know if that ever goes away as long as you're still like involved in running the company because like I have twelve people that are on payroll like that's a big responsibility that you have to worry about. But in the office and from my staff I definitely tried to be reassuring as possible about everything because I mean losing some of the staff members was hard but we were fortunate in that the business was never at a point where we have to be worried about loss or anything like that.


So that was good but I think we all have some level of imposter syndrome and I definitely felt like I knew it was a learning experience for me but it was hard to feel confident that I was gonna see myself to the other side of it. So I just, I don't know, what did I do. I worked really hard. I tried to just like put myself out there to get more biz and to meet new people we can hire but then I also just tried to take advantage of like where I was at in my own life and my own career. This summer I realized in New York it feels like nobody even works in the summer but especially in August and so my daughter was turning one and then I had a lot of clients who are away and it was just sort of slow. And I just took a lot of time off like in that month just to be with her. I mean I'm always on my phone, accessible or whatever for work but I tried to just not freak out that like things were slow and I tried to just be like okay let me enjoy this time and I'm so glad I did that because literally the day after Labor Day, I feel like oh my god everybody just woke up, everybody's back like it’s crazy and things started to really pick up.


Kelly: Right. So it sounds like you're saying like with the team, you were really transparent. You were very reassuring to them. But did you also feel like you had this innate sense of like I don't know maybe from an intuitive standpoint or just like a deep knowing that everything was going to be fine. You just couldn't necessarily see how in that moment. Would you say that you had that or not necessarily?


Annie: Yes, I think I did because I was already nine years in business and so I'm like okay what are the chances that then after nine very successful years all of a sudden, it's all gonna come crumbling down. So I was like okay that's probably not going to happen and I try to remember pieces of advice that people gave me like an executive once told me like you can't expect every single year to grow, and grow, and grow. You have to have some flat years, you have to have some time that you are down, there's no business that just goes completely up every single year forever. And so I feel like I did have that knowing but if I also didn't have the anxiety and the nerves and the drive within me that like wanna make sure a hundred percent that that was going to be the case then I think that's how I balanced it.


Kelly: No, that’s great. So it was definitely like an intuitive or deep innate knowing that everything was going to be fine but also an action like action steps or actionable things that you did to realize like I can't just sit back and be like yeah, everything's gonna be fine. I know it'll be fine without me having to do something. It's like a little bit of both in terms of that dichotomy.


Annie: One hundred percent. Like somebody said to me like after I had a baby like are you even going to go back to work? You should just like relax and let Ross and Megan run the company and whatever. And I was like no, I mean like I could but again like I think as a founder, if you want to keep it moving and keep going to the next level only you until you're ready to completely check out. Like there was no like half in or out for me.


Kelly: You weren't ready at that point to make yourself optional in the business?




Kelly: You wanted to remain as whether it was from an oversight perspective in addition to doing business development, whatever it was, but that was what you wanted, like that's what was fulfilling to you in that moment, that that may change in five years but in that moment and right now that's where you're at.

Annie: Yeah, I think I think too like for people who are moms or dads like continuing to have that other purpose is so important at least for me, like just because Rose gives me so much purpose, but if I didn't have something that I was day in and day out working for myself, I do not think I would be as good of a parent or as patient or as just happy. So yes I think absolutely and also just tactically for the business, yeah, I think we still needed to have someone like myself sort of driving things from a higher perspective.


Kelly: Right. It is such a great conversation and I really appreciate your complete transparency and honesty and like sharing this story because a lot of people aren't really willing to be that vulnerable I guess we could call it to say yeah these are the things that I've gone through and this is how I am either I've come out of it or solved it or I'm like literally in the process of solving it. So I do appreciate that really. I guess my last question is really for some of the agency owners who are dealing with one or more of these things literally right now, as they're watching or listening to this. What's the best piece of advice? It sounds like you often like will ask other people for help and assistance and advice, which is amazing. Because we don't know everything ourselves that's why we surround ourselves with amazing people but what's the thing that you would actually advise other people who are going through this. What would be your number one like best piece of advice?


Annie: Therapy or a business coach, like for sure. I have a great therapist who has a lot of business experience too so we talk a lot in there about all the stuff we just talked about so I think having an outlet of some kind and for your business staff is so important and whether that's a mentor or a therapist or a business coach or whatever. I would say definitely that. I think I did for a long time just keep a list not everyday but as much as I could of things that made me feel happy about the business and about the job like to kind of keep practicing that gratitude part of it because it's so easy, especially as an owner but especially you’re the founder but especially when you're going through one of these issues or another big issue to like just y’all totally like burdened and just overwhelmed and my mom would always say like, you love this.


Kelly: I don’t love every part of it.


Annie: But it's like remembering why you're doing it and trying to just not feel like in every single moment I'm rushing to do the next thing or whatever and to like enjoy it a little bit would definitely be part of it and then I think to just like being as kind and easy on yourself as you can because if you're running a successful agency, you have for years and then you have a blip in the road like chances are high you're going to be able to get through it. And just remember to be good to yourself through that process. It is not easy but that probably would be helpful.


Kelly: Yeah, that's amazing. I literally couldn't have scripted a better answer to that question. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining me on the show today. Best of luck and all the success in the world.


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EP 65: Workplace Transformation, with Lauren Bachynski

  On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Lauren Bachynski of Steelcase discuss workplace experience design and how agencies can begin to think differently about the impact on productivity and culture, as it relates to creating intentional physical spaces for their teams




 EP 65: Workplace Transformation

Duration: 21:53


Kelly: So welcome back to Thrive, your agency resource. Today, we're going to be talking about Workplace Transformation primarily in a physical sense, maybe a little bit of the research behind it and how it all leads to larger benefits for our agencies.


So my guest today is Lauren Bachynski. She is one of the applied research consultants with Steelcase and I'm sure many of us are familiar when we look around our creative agency offices with all of the furniture and everything there, probably coming from Steelcase in many cases. So welcome Lauren. It is such a pleasure to have you on the show today.


Lauren: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.


Kelly: So a mutual friend of ours introduced us, someone also that works at Steelcase and was sort of teasing this idea to her talking about the fact that this isn't really a conversation that a lot of people think about. They don't think about how the design, just how are our physical office environments really affect our culture. They affect the depth or the breadth of communication that we have, the quality of the communication that we have with one another. The physical comfort that we experience throughout the day. Right?


So there's so many things that go into this and I think some people in the industry sort of refer to it more as like workplace experience design, but it's really about transforming the organization. Right? I think it extends so much further beyond just like the physical environment. So what do we mean by organizational transformation with respect to these physical spaces?


Lauren: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and it's definitely one that a lot of organizations are grappling with today. And I would say that there's two primary aspects here. The first one is that, the physical work environment is really like an artifact of that organization's culture, whether intentionally designed or not. It sends a lot of messages about who the organization is and what it values.


And the second thing that I would say is that it not only plays a role in who the organization is today, but also what it will become in the future. So we always say that space shapes behavior and behavior over time becomes culture. And so the work environment can play a really important role in sort of fostering and enabling some of the behaviors that are going to enable that transformation.


Kelly:  Yeah. Can you repeat that? That was a great soundbite. About the transformation.


Lauren: Yeah. It's space, shapes, behavior and behavior over time becomes culture.


Kelly: Yeah. I love that. I love that. I think that's so true. And I think starting with the physical space is certainly like a good foundation, a good starting point. That's great. So I guess talking about maybe some of the statistics or maybe some of the research done around productivity, maybe employee attrition, or retention, hopefully and even profitability. Where can we sort of find some quantitative measurement here?


Lauren: Yeah. Well, what I would say is we get that question a lot and how we generally answer it is that, those things really depends. We want to understand like the metrics that are important to that organization in how they measure productivity is going to be very different than how another organization would. So I wouldn't say that there really is any standard measures or predefined solutions, that it's really on a case by case basis.


And that the approach we take is that we really want to listen to understand. And that we're able to combine both, that understanding with a lot of experience in years of research, working with other organizations to develop a set of measures, a set of variables, a set of metrics that create a really representative of like what is the ideal state or like the best, sort of like the best case for that organization.


Thinking about not just sort of comparing yourself to a norm, which may in fact include an average that is based on a lot of organizations who may not be well leveraging, who may not have a good work experience, who may not be leveraging their space well, but instead of really determining what is ideal for that organization and then using that as sort of the bar going forward.


Kelly:   Yeah, no, that's a great point. Sort of like creating your own metrics based on what's important to you.


Lauren: Absolutely.


Kelly:  Yeah. So I guess my next question would be like, I'm just curious, what process do you sort of implore in Steelcase? Like when an organization comes to you, they're looking to improve their workplace from the initial outreach to the actual installation. I don't know if you call it installation, but to that end product or that end environmental designer transformation. Like what does that process look like?


Lauren: Yeah, no, it's a great question. Again, I mean, we really begin this process with trying to understand what the organization's needs and goals are. And then we want to develop a tailored strategy around that. So at a high level, we have a user centered process that is very sort of like holistic in nature. No two projects look the same. 


Kelly:  I could imagine.


Lauren: Yeah. We're always adapting and customizing that to the specific needs of that organization. But that being said, in terms of sort of that higher level process that we follow, the first step is really diagnosis, which is really trying to understand through a number of different research activities, how people are working in the organization today and how they need to be working in the future. What is that desired future state? And then understanding the scope and the scale of the gap between the two.


We then move into a phase which is all about working with leadership and sort of defining what their critical success factors are and what their goals and objectives are both for the project, but for the organization more broadly as well. It's really important to have sort of those two levels, so that the goals of that project are very much aligned with where the organization is going more broadly.


We then go into what we call like an engage stage which is with employees. So it's very much like a top down, bottom up approach. And we typically engage users for like a cross section of the organization, across roles, positions different work groups to make sure that we're getting all perspectives at the table. And that's where we really start to gain a really in-depth understanding of the organizational culture, how people are working, what are the unmet needs.


And then from there, we go through a deep sort of analysis and synthesis of all our findings and inputs. And with that, we develop a set of key insights and those key insights inform the recommendation, the workplace strategy going forward, but also the change management effort that's going to be required. That's usually a really important part of the process.


From there, we deliver those recommendations to the key stakeholders involved. And then we go into a guide base, which is essentially the change management phase and looking at how we can really address the different considerations to make sure that the solution is successfully adopted and implemented.


And then we'll finish with a measurement phase where we're going back and we're measuring how that solution is performing and what improvements we're seeing and what are we learning and where can we continue to make refinements to ensure that we're really ending up in the best place possible.


Kelly:  Yeah. And that last phase, the measurement phase, is that a combination of qualitative and quantitative?


Lauren:  Yeah, absolutely. So it's often a mirroring of sort of what we do in the diagnose phase. So the diagnose will often do to your point. But we’ll do the more qualitative, which is typically interviews. We'll do them like workshops with the more quantitative, which is typically like surveys, utilization studies. So we'll typically go back and then we sort of have to have the pre to have the post. You know what I mean? So you can sort of compare the findings of both.


Kelly: Right, right. I just think it's so interesting because I could imagine a lot of the agency owners and leaders who are listening or watching this and sort of, I'm thinking like, wow, I thought Steelcase just kind of made office furniture, you know? And it's, I could imagine in their minds like, wow, I didn't realize that all of this went into it. And if I actually want to affect change in my organization on pretty much every level, including my own leadership and change management, then this is a really, really viable option.


And I don't think a lot of people think of it like that. It's like they think of it potentially as like another vendor or looking at just like the design of, or the aesthetic of what the options are, right? Color and form and things like that as opposed to, okay, this is really strategic in the same way that a creative agency is strategic with their clients, right? With their deliverables. So yeah, I think that that's going to be a pretty big takeaway from this. I mean, that's awesome.

Lauren:  I mean, that’s often something we hear again and again, which is that, people, it's sort of like build it and they will come, but in our experience, we know that that isn't that, that it doesn't really work that way, but you need to really have a broad and holistic approach. I mean, we generally think about we don't think about workspace. We think about work experience and we think about sort of different elements that are incorporated into that.


So you certainly have the space, but you also have the culture and the behaviors of the organization. You have the work process, you have the tools, and technology and all four of these things are like deeply connected and interrelated. And it's really hard to affect meaningful change in one of those areas without touching the other ones. So we really make sure that we're through all the phases that I just mentioned. That's always sort of like the lenses that we're looking through from the research activities themselves to the synthesis, the frameworks that we use to synthesize that material to our final recommendations.


Kelly:  Do you have an example that you could share of like specifically at like a creative organization or agency that has gone through the process that you just talked about and really saw some kind of significant improvement? Whether it was quantitative or both? 


Lauren:  That's a great question. What I would say is that I'll use the example of actually maybe a more traditional organization, but that organization was really trying to implement sort of a more creative approach within the organization. So I've been working more recently with a large airline company who has a number of, they're implementing a process called Agile within their technology department.


And we've been working with them to study how these teams are working within these spaces and just start to develop the space that would best support not only that process but also like the ceremonies and the rituals and the interactions that are inherent in it. And in tandem with that, it's been interesting because Steelcase has been going through a very similar change with our technology teams. And an interesting thing about Steelcase is we really like to experiment on ourselves.


So we've been testing the same thing in our Grand Rapids headquarters where we've been prototyping and studying different spaces to look at how these teams work and how to really support that. So we've kind of taken the research that we've done with this organization and we've taken some of the research that we've done on ourselves and kind of merge that and to develop sort of some recommendations about what this space might look like.


And what's been really interesting about the entire process is we've been doing this closely in alignment with their teams kind of working as a partnership and we've applied the Agile process actually to even how we're approaching doing that. So we're taking the solution and we're prototyping it through like multiple different cycles of learning and measurement and iteration.


And what's interesting about it is the intention is that there's never a final or a fixed solution, that there are always constantly an iteration. And so, it's really interesting to kind of work with them on this and to kind of see how they're taking. They’re not only trying to find the right environments to support these teams, but the kind of creative approach that they're taking to finding them. It's been really fun.


Kelly:  Yeah. It's such a great example because so many of the agencies that are active listeners or viewers of the show definitely employ some kind of Agile methodology, whether it's from a development sense, which is pretty traditional or in other senses in the work that they do. So it's a great example and what I love about it is that you are actually taking layers of Agile methodology, right?


And then on top of that, creating sort of like an agility to the way that you're putting this together with the client. I think that's great and I'm sure that what that means at the end of the day is that even though it is constantly iterative, the outcomes of what the client ends up with is going to be that much more effective because of the way that you've applied this research and are constantly working with them in partnership. So yeah, really, really interesting case study.


Lauren:   Yeah. It's been great to be a part of it.


Kelly:  Yeah. So as we start to wrap up, what would you say is the best piece of advice for creative leaders who are currently sort of considering the impact of workplace transformation for 2020 and beyond?


Lauren:  Yeah, so I would say understanding and internalizing how the workforce is changing. I think the younger workforce is really representing a significant shift in terms of like the values and expectations that they're bringing to the workplace. And I think, some of the things that we're seeing is definitely a greater desire for purpose-driven work. Greater sense of community, more flexibility, greater autonomy in how they're working, but also, the area of supporting greater wellbeing and work life balance has really seemed to like very top of mind.


Kelly:  Yeah. I was just going to say I love to use work life integration instead of balance. Just because I feel like it's really hard to kind of visualize, especially for creatives. It's almost like, it's difficult to visualize these two things being on like opposing ends of the spectrum, but trying to be like balanced as if we think about like the scales of justice for example. So like more of like a meshing or an integration. And every time someone says in the show, I always say it, so I didn't mean to cut you off. Go ahead.


Lauren: No, no, no, no. That's a great point. I'm going to use that. But no, so I mean, I think what's interesting about it is this is kind of all happening at the same time that like creative firms, organizations more broadly are having to think hard about how they're differentiating themselves in a marketplace in which unemployment's at an all-time low. And in which talent scarcity is kind of increasing.


And I think something that a lot of creative organizations have been thinking about for a long time, that like other organizations are really just kind of coming to is that as work becomes increasingly automized through technology and digital transformation, the value that humanized work brings is really the hunch. Creativity and innovation and engagement.


And so, starting to think about how this very high order level of thinking needs to be supported differently. There's really sort of like a renewed emphasis on wellbeing, but not physical wellbeing. I mean that's obviously important, in terms of the ergonomics and the physicality of where you work, but also like the emotional and the cognitive aspects of wellbeing. And how do you really support engagement? How do you create psychological safety within a work environment?


What is the right degree of stimulation so that people can really focus and concentrate deeply for sustained periods of time? So I think the workplace has a real role to play. I mean, it is the context that enables those in which those behaviors and processes happen and has a really important role to play in fostering that. And I think it's kind of brought a renewed emphasis to our role in that and also like the importance of thinking about some of those things moving forward.


Kelly:  That's great. That's great. I think that that's really helpful. And again, back to what I said earlier, I don't think, or again, it would be my assumption that a lot of creative leaders, creative agency owners and I would put myself when I owned an agency, I'd put myself in that same sort of head space. I don't think that I would have ever thought about all of those things from that perspective. For me, it was just, hey, we need office furniture. Where do we buy office furniture? Right?


Where’s that commercial furniture vendor, what does that look like? And we're basically looking at price. You're not thinking necessarily, and almost, I would say even more than that, you're looking at the physical space of your building that you own or lease, whatever your space is that you rent. And then looking at, well, what are the dimensions that I need that I can fit into this space?


So that yes, it's comfortable for the employees, but more so like how many can I fit in without it feeling like, there is a small level of or decent level of consciousness about the environment, but it's certainly nothing to the extent that you're talking about. That was just my experience. So this keeping in mind or starting to bear in mind all of the things that you're describing, I think that is, to me, the definition of transformation for sure.


Lauren:  Yeah. Well, you're definitely not alone in that. And I think it's only now that I think workplace is starting to be recognized for the design of their work environment, is starting to be recognized as the strategic tool that it is and then it can play, like culture, it exists. Sort of getting back to this idea of it being like a physical artifact of the organization. You can do that intentionally or unintentionally, but either way you're saying…


Kelly:  You're doing it.


Lauren:  Exactly. So it's like, how can we really leverage that to its fullest extent.


Kelly:  Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really, really appreciate your time.

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EP 64:  Do You Know + Communicate Your Value, Paul Boag

  On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Paul Boag discuss how to identify your agency’s value by focusing on the knowledge and experience that influences the services you provide.




 EP 64:  Do You Know + Communicate Your Value

Duration: 23:03


Kelly: So welcome to another episode of Thrive. Today, my guest is Paul Boag, a user-experience consultant, author, speaker, and coach. He’s based in Dorset, England. He helps nonprofits and enterprises to really refocused the user experience and engagement for their digitally savvy audiences. Today, we're actually gonna get into identifying and communicating your value to others and we'll do that in the context of agencies but I think that that can also really be applied to then our clients and honestly sometimes in our personal lives as well. So Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited for the conversation.


Paul: It’s a pleasure to be here. I always like catching up with other people that work in a similar failed and facing similar challenges.


Kelly: Yeah. So I think you and I agree for sure that, well, let me give a little context first , the reason how we got connected was I have a coaching client who had received an email from you, that was I think it might have even been titled, do you know and communicate your value, or something along those lines and he forwarded it to me and said it seems like you wrote this and Paul just put it out. So I was like well then, I have to meet Paul obviously. So I can say that I know that you and I agree that most agencies have a lot of difficulty being able to identify what their actual value is, let alone communicate it because you've got to have one before the other. So what are the inherent issues from a business standpoint in letting this issue just completely linger unresolved.


Paul: I think a lot of it is built out of where people started in their careers that if you're running any kind of creative agency, you began by producing assets so that might be a website, it might be brochure, it might be whatever. You produce something, something tangible. Okay. So we see our value inherently as being in the deliverable, in what it is that we deliver. But in truth that is not the whole or even the main part of what value we provide. So yeah I don't know the kind of agencies that you deal with, with all the agents but typically the kind of agencies that I'm working with are web design agencies. And these people think that they produce websites but he is the thing producing websites is a commodity. It's easy. Anyone can do it. That's the whole point of HTML, is that it's easy to write and it's even easier today than it was ten years ago because now there are these amazing themes.


Kelly: You don't even need to know HTML anymore.


Paul: No. Absolutely. So you can just use your Squarespace or Webflow, whatever tool to build these things. So as a result, that's not where the skill is. That's not where the expertise is. The expertise, the value is what's in our heads. It's all knowledge in our understanding of what makes a design compelling, what makes a piece of copy persuasive, what makes performance particularly important on a website or security, or whatever else. So it's understanding that the value is in our knowledge not in our deliverables.


Kelly: And you argued that we should not only not feel guilty about following the so-called best practices but we should value our role. We should value all role more because we're providing what we're providing is so much more valuable. It's in the knowledge. It’s in the experience behind influencing, these other services. And all of that really if you boil it down, it comes down to empathy. The experience, the understanding of other people's perspective, wrapping all of that together, it's really a solid understanding and utilization of empathy. So I think that's really important because I don't think a lot of agencies really focus on that understanding, that part of their value is derived in their practice of empathy.


Paul: Yeah, but here’s the ironic thing, a lot of those agencies will understand themselves that they empathize and aren't being able to get into the minds of users is the key to that success. They understand that for themselves and they want to do that all the time with their own users but they never apply that same methodology to their clients. They never say what is it that the client values for me, as I tend to empathize with the client, what's the value that I’m providing at the end of the day for the client. Is it just the website or is it the reassurance, the reassurance that they’re heading in the right direction. Is it the reassurance or what’s their motivation, maybe they want to get their next pay raise at the end of the year and so you need to deliver by the end of the year. So understanding how our clients think is just as important as understanding our end-users. I don’t think a lot of agencies put the same effort into understanding their clients as they do their users, at least it’s not in my experience.


Kelly: Right. Absolutely. So can you give actually a couple of examples of what that effective value communication looks like, and maybe some of the in-house teams or other clients that you've worked with like where did they start and then what is that effective value communication look like.


Paul: For me, one of the best ways of communicating your value is to educate, is to share and to educate. So one of the things that I encounter a lot because I work with in house teams as well as working with agencies and what I encounter a lot with in house teams is they’re effectively are seen as a support service because they’re often borne out of IT, for example. And so, the result of all of that is that people come to them with an idea, they’re expected to go away and implement that idea. They’re not there to have ideas of their own. And the same is true with agencies actually. You go to an agency, you expect them to deliver on your brief but actually in order to shift that relationship to one where people come to you with a problem rather than a solution and they look to you to help solve that solution, that is really about education and communication. It’s about starting that kind of dialogue and conversation with clients. So what I often do within organizations is I get those internal teams to share better their best practice so get back to explaining, look this is my process, this is how we do things to get to a final solution because having a process in a framework makes it sound like you’re not just making up stuff as you go along.


Kelly: Isn't that the thing that most people think when they hire an agency, right? We're working and they’re like, oh, these people don't know what they're doing, they're just making it up as they go along.


Paul: And that’s especially true with creative stuff. Oh yes they go and have artistic muse in the corner and spell out a lot of artistic stuff. So it’s our job to educate them that there is a process, there is a methodology behind what we do. Unless they see that methodology and as they come to understand that methodology, they understand the depth and complexity behind what we do. The problem is a lot of us within the creative industry don't fully understand why we do what we do. So a great example of that is white space in design. Every designer knows that white space is a really important part of creating a design because clients come along and they want to fill that white space.


Kelly: Make my logo bigger. Why you need so much room?


Paul: Yeah, and we will go, no, you can't do that. I'm the designer. Well, that's not a good reason. That's not educating their client. So first of all, we need to understand why white space is important and that means maybe understand a little bit of that cognitive load and the psychology behind these kinds of things then we can communicate better to the client so it's a combination of having a methodology, better communication, understanding what we do, and why we do it and why that leads to success. No, I was going to say, a lot of the times, a lot of the problems we have with clients comes down to their lack of confidence in us and that lack of confidence ultimately comes because we are very poor at explaining what we do and why we do it.


Kelly: Right. So it's almost like in order to communicate our value, the very first step is actually not communicating the value but actually understanding and turning that lens on ourselves and understanding what we do, documenting that, and then diving a little bit deeper to understand why we do it, then producing some content about why we do it, sharing that with the client, then we can speak to our values. So you're sort of making the case for what you do just through this conversation helping them with that framework and all of that. So yeah absolutely there's so much to this and this is the big component. Let’s call this 4 or 5 step process. There's so much meat to this and this is literally the 4 or 5 steps that very few agencies whether they’re external independent or in house, they just gloss over this and I think for 2020, this is our year of vision, we have to stop glossing them with this.


Paul: Absolutely. And I think you said something really interesting there. So we've got to document this stuff and we've got to have it written down and I find that that is extremely important for setting expectations with clients so as you go into a new client engagement, if you can provide them a set of documentation that says this is what is going to happen, this is the order that things are gonna happen in, and this is why things are gonna happen. That is so reassuring for the client and they also establishes you as the expert in the partnership. But also there's another thing which relates to that is, let’s say we went into a meeting and I presented a design to you and you turned around and you said, make my logo bigger.


Kelly: I will never do that to you Paul.


Paul: No, I know you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t, but it happens. You're being a hypothetical client in this occasion.


Kelly: I know.


Paul: Now, I might now come back with a good reason as to why you shouldn't make the logo bigger, but there’s two other things that are happening there. One, first of all, I sound like I'm just messing you at this point, that I'm just making up reasons. Two, you have already put your stake in the ground as the client and said this is what I want. So it's hard for you to back them now. However, if before, you ever said that, I’ve given you a nice little cheat sheet in why white space is important and negative space is important within the design. And I’ve preempted that issue. A, it doesn't sound like I’m making up things as I go along and B, you have an opportunity to back down before you actually say anything and lose space.


Kelly: Yeah, no, I'm all in favor of education, client education and setting those expectations upfront, whether it's a cheat sheet, whether it's a blog post, whether it's a video, whether it's a podcast, I think creating this content in ways in which the client can feel like they're a part of the conversation as opposed to being spoken to. Part of them wants the education but part of them wants to also feel a little bit like the equal so in those meetings like you're discussing, there's a little bit of a power struggle that happens especially if it's early on in the relationship. I'm trying to assess the agency. I'm trying to establish my expertise, my value, all of that and as the client I want to remind you that I'm paying the bill and you're pretty much I have the last say. So there's that weird balance that we have to achieve and get to a place where ultimately, this comes down to trust.


And this is a good segue sort of for my next question, which is that we need to understand that value is a two-way street and this was a huge takeaway from the article, that Lou had passed over to me. For me, this comes down to two things, which might sound really strange in the context of business but I think that the two things that it comes down to for me are love and respect. So respect is easy like I respect that as the client, I respect that you’re the agency with the expertise that's why I'm hiring you and as the agency and I hope everybody's really paying attention to this, as the agency, I have to respect the client. I have to respect that they know their industry, their organization, and the nuances of all of that, so well they know it much better than I do because they do it every single day whatever the service or product is and having that level of respect gives them the opportunity to communicate that to me as the agency so that I can do a better job.


So I think that's point number one. And then I think also, it just comes down to having a little bit more love for each other. I think that we don't like to talk about sort of squishy things in business but at the end of the day we're just humans interacting with one another. We're just humans communicating with one another and we all are sort of built from sort of the same mold for the most part. We all come to the table with different baggage and triggers and all these things. But at the end of the day, if I feel respected and appreciated and we come to the table trusting one another or at least willing to trust one another, we're gonna get a lot further.


Paul: But you see that's the problem I often see with agencies.


Kelly: And that was going to be my question, is what is that, what are those barriers to those things?


Paul: Yeah. So many agencies don't trust clients. They don't they don't trust the clients to be involved in the design process. So for example they’re constantly limiting the client's involvement. We're not gonna show you anything until this point and then you’re gonna get a controlled choice and then after that you'll get X number of iterations and that’s all, and then you have to sign in blood that you're happy with the design. Now all that does is, undermine the relationship and it builds up each of those decision points to this phenomenal level where oh, I've got signed in blood that means I have to be happy. I have to think this thing is perfect and so it becomes this power struggle. Instead and also, you're completely excluding all that expertise that the client brings to the table. 


So instead if you actively involve them, I involve my clients to every stage. We agree on keywords together or the brand needs to communicate where we do collaborative mood boarding. We do collaborative web production. They're involved absolutely every step of it. And when it comes to presenting them the final design, there's no surprises because they were involved in creating it. It's not just the natural evolution. So I almost never have to do each iteration of designs and I certainly don't have to do multiple versions of the design because I created that design in tandem with them.


And best of all, they then feel a sense of ownership over the design so they’re certainly not going to reject and they’re going to defend it internally. And also I never asked clients to sign off on the design either. I simply just keep of evolving, keep producing it as I build the website, accepting that there will be changes and tweaks. It's better than getting stuck in the endless cycle of iterations, which goes nowhere. So the more you control the client into the process, the more it establishes the relationship as peers working together which is what you are ultimately trying to achieve.


Kelly: Yeah, what's interesting that comes up for me and even though this conversation is just between the two of us, I can already hear agency leader in and saying, that sounds great in theory, how would I build for that because if I'm expected to iterate with the client and have this collaborative relationship and it takes double, triple the amount of time that I was hoping for, how would I make any money of that.


Paul: This is the most common question I get asked whenever I talk like this, you know what, it won't take any longer. The reason it won't take any longer is yes the actual production will be longer of the initial design but you won't have any of that endless situation and it's the iteration that kills you, that's where you lose money, on the iteration. And that is completely unpredictable. You have no idea how many times you might have to iterate and tweak and change the design before the client is going to be happy. While you know you're gonna do a mood boarding exercise, you’re going to do a wireframing excise, whatever else, I’ve talked about this on my blog, if people are interested but that is predictable. I know that that's going to take a certain amount of time. Well, if you can be stuck in iteration for weeks, if you're not careful. So it’s the predictability that makes it work because what we do is we submit proposals on the best case scenario. Oh yes, this is probably gonna be one round of iteration. Rubbish. That never happens. So actually, it works out more economical to do it that way.


Kelly: Yeah, so as we start to wrap up here, what would you say is the top piece of advice that you’d give to agency leaders who are trying to figure out how to identify their value and then communicate it.


Paul: Talk about outcomes and not just deliverables. So what I mean by that is talk about the business benefit, what you do provides not just what you’re delivering. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about deliverables, of course. They want to know what they’re going to get. But when I produce a proposal for my clients, sure I outline what I'm gonna deliver but I also outline what that deliverable, anticipate that deliverable maybe able to provide for them as an organization in terms of well, let's take a take a standard website, increases in conversion, reduction in marketing spend, more repeat business and etc. So focus on the business benefits because that is where your values lies, not in pushing some pixels around.


Kelly: Because then you get out of that commodity loop and there's less client attrition because they see the value. It’s definitely I always say the same thing, it's always more so about benefits over features, benefits being what our expertise is, features being the thing that comes out of the relationship, which is the deliverable.


Paul: The only thing, again now, I've got the people's voices right in my head. The only thing that I think people worry about is well how do I know what the benefits are going to be and you've done it.


Kelly: Historical data or historical experience or anecdotes give you a sense of hey for a project similar to this, with my client similar in your industry, this is what they achieved so you can draw on that for sure.


Paul: Yes absolutely. And there are all variables involved, which is why, so for example, I always soften it a little bit in my proposals by saying things like together we can deliver rather than I'm going to deliver these business benefits. I talk about both of us because if they don't play their part, then it's gonna be rubbish. You’re not gonna exceed those benefits. So you could do things to soften it, if you need to, a little bit for your own state of mind.


Kelly: Yeah. Paul, this is a great discussion. I've had so much fun. We are so aligned in the way that we're thinking and talking about this. So I really, really appreciate you coming on the show today and hope to talk to you soon.




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EP 63: Why Exploration Matters for Your Employees, with Erica Shieh

  On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Erica Shieh of Movement Strategy talk about the importance of cultural exploration and travel for agency employees. The multitude of benefits to your team, your agency, and your clients may surprise y





 EP 63: Why Exploration Matters for Your Employees

Duration: 13:52


Kelly: So welcome back to Thrive, your agency resource. Pardon my voice, I'm just getting over laryngitis after the holiday season. But last year, I actually work with this agency called Movement Strategy. They've got offices and a bunch of places across the US. We worked on some positioning things together a little bit of SEOs, some conversion rate optimization, and as part of that work together, they initiated this employee contributed blog.

And one of their first post was by Senior Manager of Data + Insights, Erica Shieh who is actually my guest today. Her post was called How Traveling the World Made Me A Better Researcher. And honestly, I was kind of really blown away by the post. I’ll put that in the show notes today but I thought we could have a really great discussion about why exploration matters for agency employees. So Erica, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to have you on today and just thrilled to have this conversation. I think it's one that I haven't heard before so I'm really excited to jump into it with you.


Erica: Thanks for having me Kelly. I'm so excited to talk about it. I could talk about travel all day.


Kelly: So you actually started off this post by identifying a critical issue for strategists and creatives alike, which is that they're sort of like this idea that there's an unconscious bias and like a cultural blindness that we have and kind of unintentionally creep into our work because at the end of the day like we're just making assumptions. So how does that impact the work that we deliver to our clients is really the question.


Erica: Yeah, I think sometimes we don't even realize it. Because a lot of my teammates and a lot of advertising agency, a lot of us are from similar areas. We have similar backgrounds. Most of us have lived in big cities and when we get together and put together a creative brief or a strategy, I think we're sometimes not aware of the fact that we kind of live in a bubble and how it is an agency life, like the timelines are really short and sometimes we don't have a budget to do proper research.

And so, we kind of sift together what we know from our own personal experiences and hope that that's enough to put together a really broad reaching insightful campaign. And sometimes it works and sometimes we hit the mark or we miss the mark just because we don't fully understand a subculture or a group of people. And unfortunately that's kind of pervasive in the industry right now. One thing that's really helpful to deter that is just doing research and talking to people and experiencing things and getting a larger perspective from travel or research.


Kelly: Yeah, and the reason why I think this is such an important conversation is because I think you hit the nail on the head that this is very pervasive in agency world because of all of the reasons why, you just mentioned. And so, if part of our charge is to deliver good work and effective work on behalf of our clients yet we're lacking perspective, we’re lacking empathy. We’re sort of using our own assumptions and our own experiences, which could be really limiting or limited.

That obviously has to impact the work and not make it as effective as possible. So yeah that's the reason why sometimes we do miss the mark and then the client questions our value and then there's client attrition and so really it cascades down into a lot of different things. And again this conversation is not one that I've heard before so I want to know a little bit more about the journey, the physical journey, the travel journey, that you went on. You bought a one way ticket to Asia and actually you were sort of on sabbatical for about seven months and I want to hear more about that. 


Erica: Yes, so I had worked in advertising for probably six years and it's the story of burnout, working long hours and I kind of was looking for a reset moment and part of my job is to do consumer insights and to study human behavior and to study psychology and discover truths about people and I realize that I don't really know my own personal truths. I had never really felt connected to my Asian heritage growing up. Essentially my sister announced that she was gonna have her engagement party in Taiwan. And then I had a friend who had a wedding in India and I thought oh my god, like this is the perfect moment for me to just go to Asia, take some long time off. In my head, I was thinking around like six months and take the opportunity to just explore other countries and be in different cultures that I'd never really known before.

So I started off in China, which was crazy and I did the typical touristy things, did Great Wall of China, and went around, Terracotta Army. Went to the meeting place called [5:47]. But I think one of my intentions with traveling was to travel slowly and to think slowly and have it be less about me but more about observing what's around me. And you have all the stereotypes about Chinese people. Growing up in America you're told certain things and then you realize when you get there that it's not everything that you were taught necessarily and being able to travel slowly and not really know where you're going and just figuring out it along the way and just being spontaneous and letting people that you meet tell you where to go.

It was invaluable and I had the best time. I think I met a lot of people in China that kind of reframed how I felt about the Chinese government and just having that insider perspective, I never could have gotten that if I hadn’t been there. So China was crazy and then I went to Nepal where I did a lot of hiking there. It was a very spiritual experience because a lot of folks are religious and they believe that the mountains are sacred and time spent there is very simple and slow. And I think along the way, being able to observe people and meet other travelers that perhaps were from German or Sweden like they have different perspectives as well. So just meeting strangers, meeting other expats, meeting other travelers, it was really, really awesome and just getting to talk to people and learning about what are my own biases, what did I not realize that I held on to. And just kind of being exposed to their thoughts and perspectives, is really awesome.


Kelly: Yeah. As an employee obviously you're with movement strategy but like as an employee, what advice would you give to the owners or leaders of other agencies that might be considering the pros and cons of sort of allowing employees to take these extended periods of time for travel  and vacation and exploration and things like that.


Erica: Yeah I'd say it’s so, so incredible in making employees not only feel like they’re growing personally but also professionally. I honestly went into my trip thinking this was a personal journey of mine. But I came out of it realizing that I grew so much as a researcher and someone who became more empathetic and more aware of my own biases and as a strategist, being aware of those things helps a lot in crafting our briefs. I would tell agency leaders that while you do miss this person for a couple of months, they will come back as more confident, bold, empathetic, open-minded, and really I would say, audacious. I think any time that people are exposed to different cultures you come back so humbled and so empowered. And like people are the best versions of themselves when they travel and then when you come back, you're not only reset from a mental perspective but you have all these experiences that make you a better strategist or creative.


Kelly: Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more just from my personal travel experiences and all the upcoming travel I have planned because of that. I do want to read the last paragraph of your post because I think first of all there's just so much sort of poetry and beauty in it. But also because I think it's really good for these agency leaders to understand why they should really encourage this exploration in their employees. So if you don't mind I'd love to read this last paragraph. It's a little long but I think it's important. 

You said, “I've taken what I learned during my travels and have since re-entered the agency world with a new perspective on research and strategy. I take the time to recognize my own implicit biases and ask questions that don't make assumptions. I actively listen to consumers with an open-heart and without judgment. I am more compassionate towards societies and cultures that I'm not familiar with and I share this mindset with my fellow teammates reminding them of our audiences complexities and nuances. I left America to connect with myself and I came back not only more in tune with myself but even better as a researcher.”

That to me, that was like, amazing. That was honestly, that was the paragraph that made me even want to record the show with you. Because I thought it was really moving, it was really inspiring and I think again it's a conversation that we need to have because we do get so sort of tunnel vision. Agency life is hard. Agency life is just what we talked about a little while ago. It's fast paced. Sometimes there isn't budget for all the things that we need to really get done but who are we doing the disservice to at the end of the day. So I do want to thank you for your writing that and for encapsulating it in such a way that I think it's really compelling.


Erica: Thanks. Yeah, I think again like it was an opportunity to slow down and be patient and be open-minded and be present. Those are all things and experiences that will go a long way especially in the agency world.


Kelly: Yeah, so as we wrap up, is there anything else that you would love to leave the audience with? A take away or just something that you think that they should consider?


Erica: That's a great question. I think that, I envision this future in which maybe once every six years, it became normal to take a sabbatical for six months like the 6/6 rule, like 6 years and then you learn in 6 months. If that could be implemented as normal and standard across not only agency world, but in the professional life, I could see a world in which employees are so much more productive, happy, inquisitive, curious, brave and I think Americans especially can benefit so much from that because we don't travel much. I feel like we’re afraid to travel sometimes. And so if we made it a norm to say hey you're with us for six years where every six years you do this, I think it would be really incredible.


Kelly: Yeah, that's awesome and if you put a petition together or something, like I would sign that in a heartbeat. I love it. I love it. Well, Erica, thank you so much again for joining me today on Thrive and I wish you the best in your future travels.

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EP 62: Mind Training for Agency Leaders, with Anahita Moghaddam

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Anahita Moghaddam, Founder of Neural Beings, discuss consciousness and contemplative science for creative leaders. Learn how to tap into the power of your own mind and how that can lead to taking the right actions in your life and business. The guided meditation at the end is great for beginners as well.




 EP 62: Mind Training for Agency Leaders

Duration: 21:27


Kelly:  So happy new year everyone! Welcome back to Thrive. I literally could not think of a better way to start 2020 and a new decade than to talk about consciousness and mind training for agency leaders. So I'm really happy to have everyone with me today. My guest is this beautiful being, Anahita Moghaddam. She's the founder of Neural Beings. She's a consultant to organizations and individuals who are really purpose-driven, mission driven and she's also an international speaker, which is actually how we met. We met last year at the World Happiness Summit in Miami and instantly I knew that we had to work together. I was in the audience, she didn't know this on stage, but I knew and so she's been working with me as my mind training and Buddhist psychology coach for the last eight months and she's also one of the people that I've interviewed for the book that I'm writing. So excited to have you on the show with me today. I'm so grateful for you to be here. Thank you so much. Welcome.


Anahita:  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Such a warm welcome, Kelly. And it's an honor to be here and to be able to say some things that may add some value.


Kelly:  Yeah, absolutely. So let's start out with sort of setting some context. What do we mean by consciousness and how does mind training actually help us to live happier, healthier lives?


Anahita:  Well, I think when it comes to the question of consciousness, I'm probably not qualified to really explain what it is. I don't even know if there is any clear understanding of what really consciousness is.


Kelly:  Fair enough. Fair enough.


Anahita:  Pretty hard problem out there, but let's just call it awareness. Let's call it maybe even like deeper mind, right? So let's like borrow back with the term deep mind from the world of AI and robotics and computing and so forth, and just refer to that deeper mind, which is synonymous for awareness, for knowing that a lot of the contemplative traditions are pointing us towards, right? So with the practice of introspection and gradually sort of calming the mind, we may start to access states of awareness or states of mind perhaps that have the potential of revealing, let's say the true nature of reality, right?

So once you achieve that deep level of consciousness or awareness, you start to see things in a more, let's say clear manner, less distorted by your own filters and perhaps more congruent with the way that things really are. And coming back to your question about how does my training actually create a better life? Well, I think it's pretty simple. So let's just go back up to a more surface level understanding of the mind, which is what our current under scientific definition is of mind. So mind being sort of the cognitive processes that in let's say, reduction of scientific terms is considered a byproduct of the electric chemical processes that happen in the brain. Right? Let's just say mind is like all the thinking and that is produced by the brain, which I don't agree with that definition, but let's just hold that for a moment.

If that's the case, most of us are subject to a lot of negativity, a lot of habitual thinking. That actually doesn't make us really happy. In fact, it keeps us in these kind of ongoing inner dialogues that just make us more and more connected loops, disconnected from ourselves and let alone from other people. And so I think that the more we can have an understanding of the mechanics of mind and how mind works and mind is not separate from feelings and emotion. So the whole thing, the whole system, the more we can have an understanding of how it all works for oneself or ourselves individually, the more we can perhaps began to change it. And when we can change it, we can change it into something that is a bit more conducive to our wellbeing and our happiness, maybe even to our professional lives. Right?


Kelly:  Yeah, absolutely. And I know that as I said at the beginning of the show, you work with leaders of organizations, you work with individual leaders. We all know the responsibilities that come with leadership, right? But what does the responsibility to lead oneself really entail?


Anahita:  I would say it begins with humility. I work with leaders and I think that you know with all love and respect to become a leader, a lot of the time, a pretty well-defined ego is required. A lot of people become leaders because of motivations that they may not even be conscious of or aware of. So when you're working with a leader, the first thing to do is to just really make them aware of their ego.

And by ego, I'm referring to their sense of self and maybe in some cases when you're dealing with people in leadership positions, the sense of self is really calcified because it's constantly been reified by their environment, by the people that work for them, by themselves, by how they see themselves in their positions. So to start to slowly decalcify the sense of self or this ego is a whole art form in and of itself, which really requires willingness on the part of the leader, humility to be able to actually say, maybe there is more to me or less to me than what I think there is.

And then of course the massive discipline, resolve and resilience that is required to actually change, to really change.


Kelly:  Yeah, I was just going to say, and all of that obviously resonates with me. That's a great encapsulation because that's really, I think a boiled down version of the work that we've been doing together for the last eight months. It does require all of those things coming to the table to say, I had this, this sort of CEO egoic thing, this ego that I came with and now help me strip it down and unravel it. And I want to be willing to do that. I want to get down to the simplicity. Get down to that humility, be in service of others. And then, go through the disciplines, whether it's changing mind, changing action, all of those things. So that resonates really, really deeply.


Anahita:  Exactly as you say. And I think that the more you are able to do that, the more, let's say the weight, the baggage, the armor, the identification is removed. So what happens naturally is there's a sense of lightness and a sense of ease and flexibility that comes sort of as a byproduct of this work. With that, inevitably you're going to be more pleasant to be around when you're more committed.


Kelly:  I hope so.


Anahita:  Yes, of course. There's Apple research that's been done on how happy individuals are more likely to have better relationships when a leader is more, let's say, calm and kind and generous and friendly, they're going to invoke a deeper sense of trust and reliability and loyalty from their employees. They're going to be much more motivated to work for a leader that's kind, versus perhaps a leader who is perhaps not as, is a bit more rigid and little bit more unnecessarily firm or closed off or lacking empathy. So you're just going to benefit from it in every way.


Kelly:  Yeah. And I think also I would add to that or build on that with the aspect of vulnerability. I know we've talked to her, I've talked about Brené Brown on the show before, but I think that aspect of vulnerability sort of builds nicely on everything that you just said because the more vulnerable we are, the less rigid, the less closed off, the more I can say, you know what, I need help from my team to help lead this organization. Or hey, this is something that I'm struggling with. Like, remember, I'm human, not just the leader, right. And I don't have all of the answers and I have to rely on you as my team. That's why I built this team of people who are really talented and some of them smarter than me and you have to just let that go. And really, again, that goes into the trust that you're talking about. So I think vulnerability is definitely something I would add to that.


Anahita:  Absolutely. And that's really what my understanding is of a leader, someone who helps other people be their best rather than they are doing all the work and others are following. They actually are creating and inspiring others to become leaders.


Kelly:  Yeah. It's all about empowering other people. Absolutely. So in your own coaching and consulting practice, how do you actually help leaders to gain this clear understanding of how their minds work and then how that leads to taking the right actions in their lives? Like give me like a little bit more about the nuts and bolts so I can share that with everyone.


Anahita:  Okay. Well, I guess when they sign up with me, my role is to be that really uncomfortable instance in their life and they first show who they are and how they are. Right? So maybe, just acting as a mirror of sorts. And for that, going, referencing the Buddhist teachings, we have to become really comfortable with the reality of our suffering, with the reality of our dysfunction. So in order for us to actually go from being perhaps unhappy to happy, we have to first really look at what is making us unhappy. We have to understand the causes for that unhappiness or that dysfunction or that suffering, whatever you want to call it.

By understanding the causes we can then slowly begin to tweak them and change them, right? Because everything is subject to change. So that's beautiful. Nothing is fixed in any sense, right? We can begin to work at it. So it begins the process. The work that I do begins with really kind of shutting a realistic light on the condition and the circumstances and the inner reality of a person. And not everybody wants to do that. Not everyone wants to be…


Kelly:  Why not? That sounds like so much fun.


Anahita:  Yeah, exactly. Not everyone wants to do that. It's an uncomfortable process. Not many people want to look at themselves in that light, in that unfavorable light perhaps. But once we begin to do that, we start to then create sort of a map of where we want to go. Most of us want to be happy. I think if probably all of us want to be happy, nobody wants to be unhappy, nobody wants to suffer. So we all agree that we want to be happy, but then we can get further into the definition of what happiness is for each person. Happiness would be achieving a certain level of success work-wise, achieving a certain reality in regards to interpersonal relationships, romantic or love relationships, whatever, health. So we define what that sort of goal is and then we go back to our present moment, right?

So again, referencing the Buddhist teachings, everything happens in this moment, so, right? So it's in this present moment that we can't even look like there's no, we can't even hold onto the present cause it's constantly fleeting, right? We can attempt to work with this present moment and it's our actions, right? Our actions, which actually then become our future experience.

It's the ways that I think, the ways that I speak, the ways in which I act or for a time, this will weave my reality. So we have to become clear on where we want to go and make sure that our actions in the present are congruent with the results that we want. Most of us want a certain reality in the future, but our actions are so incongruent with that reality that we're striving towards and we keep falling into this hole of dissatisfaction and unhappiness and we're able to, whether it's to conjure forth the discipline or the awareness or the resilience, whatever resources are needed to actually make sure that our actions are congruent with the results we want.


Kelly:  Right. So in Buddhism, it is called pervasive dissatisfaction, right? That recurring loop. I've been doing my homework by the way. So like that recurring loop of like, this is how I want to act in integrity or how I want to feel or how I want to live, but then my actions are not in alignment with that. And so that's really, that's where the work is.


Anahita:  Absolutely. But the sad thing is that my actions are not in alignment with that and I'm not even aware of it. So what happens is I'm constantly feeling this like underlying nagging feeling of things being off. It's almost like no matter what, there's always something that's not right. Whether it's my own experience of myself subjectively or my world, or my work or my relationships, something always needs to change in some future instance for me to finally arrive at that moment of happiness. The reality is it's like the carrot that's standing in front of the horse. You are never going to reach it unless you do what? Testing.


Kelly:  What's that?


Anahita:  I was just testing you.


Kelly:  Oh I didn’t hear.


Anahita:  Do you think Kelly? In the future. Okay. No, sorry. I put you on the spot on your own podcast.


Kelly:  That's okay. Hey, it's all about vulnerability, right?


Anahita:  Okay, fine. Yeah.


Kelly:  It's okay. It's okay. This is the e beauty of an organic conversation. Right?


Anahita:  Right. No, I was going to say, unless we really, we become really aware, whatever, forget about it. But anyway, moving on. 


Kelly:  Yeah. So as we start to sort of like wrap up the conversation a little bit, I think it would be really helpful for agency leaders who I don't, I don't know exactly how many of the people who watch or listen are into meditation or have a meditation practice, but I know that that is certainly part of the work that you do. Part of the work that we do together. So I think it might be helpful if you're open to it to do some kind of guided meditation that we can invite everyone to kind of do this together with us. I think that would be a beautiful way to start the year.


Anahita:  Yeah, sure. Yeah. Gladly. So I would say let's find a comfortable seat. And by comfort I'm referring to a sense of stability in the body, but also a sense of ease. So make sure that you can relax your body, but your body is also sort of upright and stable. And if you're comfortable, you can close your eyes. If you prefer, you can leave them open. Try to not fix your gaze upon anything if your eyes are open, and let's just take three deep breaths. Inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth.

This way we begin to sort of down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system, activating the parasympathetic nervous system and inviting the body into state of relaxing. So inhaling deeply through the nose, exhaling through the mouth, and as you exhale the air out, allow the weight of your body to drop and allow the weight of your body to be supported by whatever you're sitting on. Inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth.

And one more time. I know you may have done more than three rounds. That's okay. Make sure the exhalations are long and as you exhale, the abdomen is pulled in words and then just closing the mouth, breathing naturally through the nose and begin to lose interest in the world of the external and begin to become curious about the world of the internal. Curious to know what is happening in this inner realm that a lot of these contemplative traditions are inviting us to explore.

What is my feeling in this moment? How am I feeling? And see if you can refrain from grabbing onto language and labels and just allow yourself to feel what you're feeling and trying to refrain from judging the feelings as good or bad or wrong or right. It's just feeling.

Notice if there's any change in the quality of your mind as you keep going inwards and inquiring, inquiring into the nature of your subjective experience. Let's go a little further and ask ourselves, what is the quality of my mind in this moment and listening for the answer. So in order for the answer to become audible in a non-audible sense, you got to become quiet.

What is the quality of my mind? And allowing all sounds and activity in your external environment to be there without losing any attention on it. What does the quality of my mind, and it's almost like a tuning in or a sensing or listening quality that is required. And just mere active listening or tuning or sensing into is enough to calm the mind as an entry point into meditation.

And just take a moment to let that go and just rest. Allow your mind to rest and in that sort of state if it wants to run around, if it wants to go into the future, into the past, just let it, but see if you're going to watch how your mind behaves right now when you let it go. It's like a wild horse that you just let go and it starts doing what it does and you just observe it.

Without any judgment, of course, just taking note. And then letting that go and slowly having the intention to come out. Take a moment to acknowledge the fact that you did a meditation for a few minutes. So give yourself that credit. I just meditated. Maybe you allow yourself to feel a little sense of joy or happiness or contentment. And then slowly beginning to bring a little bit of movement into the body. And whenever you're ready, you can open your eyes.


Kelly:   That was beautiful. Thank you.


Anahita:  You're welcome.


Kelly:  Well, I feel a lot calmer now. Good thing we didn't do this at the beginning of the show. I would have been like monotone the whole time. And it is amazing when you do come out of meditation, your whole affect really does change. So if you don't think it's “working” it's always working.


Anahita:  Exactly.


Kelly:  It’s always working.


Anahita:  Yeah. I heard that Sharon Salzberg say that the other day actually.


Kelly:   Yeah?


Anahita:  Yeah. Is it a quote by her?


Kelly:  No, I just said it.


Anahita:  Oh, it's fantastic. Yes. When you think it’s not working, it's actually working.


Kelly:  Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Maybe I'm channeling my inner Sharon.


Anahita:  You are.


Kelly:  Well, Anahita thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for guiding us through that meditation. Thank you for everything that you're doing in the world and really, really grateful for you to be here.


Anahita:  Thank you so much for having me, Kelly, and thank you to everyone that's been listening and I hope you are happier, tiny bits maybe.


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EP 61:Overcoming the Overwhelm Loop, with Heather Yandow

On this episode of THRIVE—sponsored by Workamajig—Kelly and Heather Yandow discuss the physiological symptoms of burnout. They provide suggestions on how leaders can get overwhelm under control, as well as the difference between self-care and self-soothing.   


 EP 61: Overcoming the Overwhelm Loop

Duration: 14:55


Kelly: So welcome back to Thrive, your agency resource. Today, we're talking about the recurring feeling of overwhelm that a lot of leaders can relate to, and then actually how to overcome it. So super exciting discussion. And I'm sure it'll resonate with everyone. My guest is Heather Yandow, a nonprofit consultant with Third Space Studio in Raleigh, North Carolina. And what Heather does is she essentially helps nonprofit leaders to really understand how they can create impact and then generate more of it. So Heather, thank you so much for being here. Really, really excited to have you join me today.


Heather: Great. I'm really glad to be here. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. So I'm glad to be able to talk about a little bit with you today.


Kelly: So we are actually connected after you published a blog post. And I think the blog post was essentially based on an article that you came across in the Harvard Business Review. So I want to hear a little bit about the main theme of that, and then we'll kind of dive into getting some kind of relief or remedy for these people.


Heather: Yeah. So the article that I saw in the Harvard Business Review is how to deal with feeling constantly overwhelmed. And so certainly, I see that all the time with nonprofit leaders that I work with, but I also see it in consultants, and in folks running small businesses that I work with. And so that article really, really just spoke to me and so it talked about how being overwhelmed shows up, feeling confused, unable to make decisions, irritable. And then also what are some of the strategies that you can use to address that? And what are some of their top tips for thinking about how to deal with overcome.


Kelly: Right. So if we start to dive into it, I think a good place to start is talking maybe about the physiological symptoms of overwhelm and burnout, right? Every single person listening or watching this can really relate to that. I know you can. I know I can. I think starting there, but then also, what does it feel like? And how do you recognize it? I think that's a really great place to start.


Heather: Yeah. So I think a lot of the leaders I talked to recognize burnout in their rearview mirrors. They can look back and say, oh, yeah, last summer, I was really burnt out. But a lot of us it's hard to recognize in the moment.


Kelly: Yes.


Heather: It might be, yeah, we're just really high functioning, right? And so we are used to having a million things going on and answering emails at all hours of the day. And so we don't realize the toll it's taking. Some of the signs that the article explains and that I really feel as well are feeling of just being foggy, inability to make simple decisions. So I don't know about you, but I get to the end of the day and I'm negotiating with my partner where to go for dinner and just cannot go.


Kelly: You’re just like pick a place. I don't care if it's Greek or Thai or whatever.


Heather: I’m just like I can't make another decision. So that to me is one of the signs. Certainly kind of stress but stress manifested all kinds of ways. For me, it manifests in irritability. And so I know when I start getting snippy with my dog, that there's something going on, when I'm angry at this adorable little thing, who does nothing but love me that there's something else happening. And then of course, you've got kind of this the sleeping, eating, exercise problems that come up with when you're overworked and overwhelmed.


Kelly: Yeah. I think for me, it's when I look back at when I was running my agency, it was especially in that, the last few years of it, it was just a loss of passion, just a lower vibration in my own mood, maybe a little bit of being feeling lethargic. Those were the things that I could, reflect back on and say, yeah, that if I look at that, those were definitely my physiological symptoms.


Heather: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it definitely gets to the end of the day, sometime, and all I want to do is go to bed, it's 8 o'clock, and I'm just spent, and so that for me is some of that lethargy as well.


Kelly: And that's also your body communicating to you like you need to shut down, or if you don't consciously shut down, like we're going to shut you down, we're going to make you feel that exhausted where it's like, the only thing you want to do is crawl under the covers and just like shut it down for the night. So as you were, sort of you read this article, you subsequently wrote about it, what were your top three takeaways, whether those were for the executive directors and leaders of nonprofits that you work with, or whether those are for creative and technology agency leaders who we’re talking to you today.


Heather: Yeah. So I think three things that I really got out of it that reinforced some of what we hear all the time, but just particularly in this context. So the first was really thinking about what's your main source of stress right now. How can you identify what's happening? What are the projects, what are the tasks, whatever it is, that's really, you are struggling with the most, that you're thinking about the most, that you're stressing about the most? Identifying those and the steps you can take to actually address whatever is happening there. Sometimes I find that I'm stressed about something because I'm letting it hang out in the back of my head, and I'm not bringing it to the front and saying, okay, I actually need to think about how I'm going to get work in the second quarter of next year. Right? What's the plan for that? So that's number one. It's kind of being really clear with yourself about what is contributing to what's going on in your brain. The second that I really like is really carving out more boundaries around your work. So that can be time boundaries and that I'm only going to work between x and y. It can be time blocking. So really thinking about if you've got a project that's on your mind, you haven't been able to find the time for it, can you just start with an hour next Tuesday morning, and just think about that project? And then along with that is just saying no, right? Really being clear. I can't do that then or I need to push this off. It's not a good time. And then the third piece that I think is probably true for you. It's certainly true for me is to let go of the idea of perfect.


Kelly: Oh, do you know me?


Heather: So just thinking about what needs to be A plus work? And what can be B plus work? And where do we really need to spend our time and energy making it perfect? And where can we say, this is great. This is good enough. This is ready to go. Let's get it out into the world. So those are the three big ones.


Kelly: Yeah, and those are big ones. I mean, all three of those resonate really deeply with me. And within the work that I do with agency leaders, similar to how you're working with nonprofit leaders. Listen, at the end of the day, the titles don't matter. What we do for a living doesn't matter. We are all human. And so of course, those things are going to be really resonant. And like you said before, stress and anxiety and overwhelm, presents differently for each of us. And that's based on maybe our past experiences, how we grew up, what organizations we've been a part of, all of those things. So there's a lot to that, but I think those in particular are really, really strong takeaways. So I definitely appreciate those. There's also something that we talked about the last time that we were together, this concept of, part of the resolution or part of the overcoming overwhelm, has to do with self-care. And there's a big difference between self-care and self-soothing. I think that's a really interesting place to kind of take the conversation because I'm really curious to hear your thoughts about that.


Heather: Yeah. So, the rise of self-care is something that I think more and more people are paying attention to. And so more and more companies and organizations are paying attention to. And there's been something that's floating around in the past couple of weeks or past couple of months on the internet that talks about self-care versus self-soothing. And so a lot of the things that we have in the past I think articulated as self-care are actually just band aids on the problem. So, the wine and bubble bath self-care is really kind of a temporary solution. The practicing mindfulness every day is more of a self-care; it's more long term, helps to get to this overwhelm issue and others. So the big difference was kind of what's happening, at one point in time, what's a quick fix, in some ways that actually doesn't fix anything versus what's taking care of yourself. So the real self-care in that are things like managing your finances, cooking a delicious meal, signing up for exercise classes, there are those things that are not going to instantly fix some of the stress or anxiety you're feeling but overtime are really taking care of yourself, rather than…


Kelly: Yeah, I was just gonna say so that for me what the differences I think underlyingly is it's really the discipline and the commitment after you recognize what that underlying issue is, like where those feelings of the overwhelm, the stress, the anxiety, where are those coming from? And then what can I do on a day to day basis to start to regulate those emotions and make that sort of a lifestyle change as opposed to let me go get a massage because I'm super, my shoulders and neck are super tight because I've been on the computer all week, or the wine and bubble bath or those things are great and I don't discount them. But I agree with you that they are sort of a band aid and they're just to fix what happened today versus like, do you want to actually make this a lifestyle choice?


Heather: Yeah. My favorite kind of self-care that I never thought of self-care is going to the grocery store.


Kelly: Oh my God. I love you. I love grocery shopping. Most people hate it.


Heather: Yeah, I don't love going to the grocery store. But when I started to reframe it as this is an opportunity for me to buy food that will nourish my body. It's a way to get me out of the kind of cycle of buying the takeout food that I know isn't good for me. But that's the only way, I don't have anything in my house. When I reframed it that way, I could see like, yes, actually, as much as I dislike the act of being in the grocery store with all these other people, it is actually self-care.


Kelly: So my trick for that is and why I love it so much is I actually bring my phone. I have my shopping list on my phone, so I have to bring my phone anyway. I plug in my headphones, and I listen to my favorite music as I'm food shopping.


Heather: Oh I love it.


Kelly: And so, this way it doesn't, I'm still in my own world, but I have the same mindset that you have, like I get to choose the things that I'm going to put in my body. And so I think part of that is definitely mindfulness and bringing awareness to every single thing and it could be food shopping. It could be whatever. There's so many different examples of how you can reframe and reset the way that you approach something. First of all, what is your intention in this? How are you feeling when you go into this situation? And you can make things that other people would actually dislike or find mundane. You can make them really meaningful. So I love that example. Yeah. So as we start to wrap up, I want to touch upon something that's going on with you, with this national directory of nonprofit consultants. And just hear a little bit more about that, because that could also be really valuable to the audience. I know it's a separate topic, but I thought that was really interesting.


Heather: Yeah, thanks. So I have launched which is, the National Directory and Network of Nonprofit Consultants, coaches, accountants, lawyers, so all of the folks who are serving nonprofits as experts. And it's not only a chance for nonprofit leaders to find new people that they can partner with. But it really is an opportunity for us, as a lot of us are small business owners or work just one or two people in a company. It's a chance for us to meet and learn from each other across the network and to share resources and best practices. So if folks want to check it out, it's


Kelly: That’s amazing. I will definitely check that out. I'd be interested in that. And I know a lot of the creative and technology agency leaders who are listening or watching that serve nonprofits, that could be an incredible resource for them also. And just to loop it all around, if those resources are in need, and part of overwhelm is, not having the right talent or resources or people in your network. Maybe that could provide some relief as well.


Heather: Absolutely.


Kelly: Thank you for that. Well, this has been a great discussion. Is there anything else that you want to leave the audience with before we wrap up?


Heather: The last thing is just pay attention to your body, pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you about overwhelm. One of my favorite teachers here in North Carolina. So the question to ask yourself is what do I need right now? And I think just pausing and asking yourself that over the course of the day, can really help you address some of this overwhelm and over time build to going grocery shopping, taking care of your finances. Really being intentional about that.


Kelly: Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today, Heather. This is great.


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