Transcript, E170: Carole Robin

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Network ID: LinkedIn News

Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel. And this is Hello Monday, our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us. Today, mark's the start of our summer series that we're calling, navigating the new office. To help host it I'm bringing on our producer Sarah Storm. Hey, Sarah.

Sarah:

Hey, Jessi. This is going to be fun.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah, totally fun. You and I, we've been working on the show together for a really long time at this point. Since before the lockdowns, they feel now like a distant memory, like 2020 was a distant memory.

Sarah:

And the return of 2021 along with the great reshuffle and talent that followed is also in the rear view mirror. At Hello Monday, we expected this upset would change everything and it has.

Jessi Hempel:

Work is different in 2022, those black swan events that once felt unimaginable like once in a lifetime, pandemics, political upheaval, environmental disasters. Now, they're just regular occurrences.

Sarah:

And this has led to immense shifts in the culture and the nature of work. Our interpersonal relationships matter, more. Many of us are choosing to work less and as we attempt to build ever more equitable workplaces, we're talking more than we ever have about things we haven't usually, talked about at all like what we get paid for a start.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. So here's how this series is going to work, for the next six weeks we'll explore six big shifts happening right now then stick around because after the interview, Sarah and I are going to break down what we learn.

Sarah:

What's our first topic?

Jessi Hempel:

Well, I want to start with something that I think is really the most important thing about how we work. And this is our interpersonal relationships. Getting along well with others especially, when there's conflict it's the key to getting things done and feeling fulfilled, full stop.

Sarah:

But it can be so hard so today I have Carole Robin, she's the co-author along with David Bradford of Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues. This book was born from a class she taught at Stanford Business School that students called the touchy feely class.

Jessi Hempel:

Amazing.

Sarah:

Now, these days, Carole consults with tech leaders on how to improve relationships. Here's Carole.

Carole Robin:

Most people just aren't armed with the tools and the skills and the competencies frankly, that they need to build really strong, robust relationships. Some of them just happen organically and aren't we lucky when that happens. And by the way, it's easier to connect with people that think just like us, see the world just like us, have had the same experience we've had. It's much harder to do that with people, to connect across differences and that turns out in this day and age to be even more important.

Jessi Hempel:

Well, Carole, and I've heard you make this point before. It's not like there's anybody out there teaching us about how to do this. Maybe we learn from our parents who have modeled for us how relationships work and-

Carole Robin:

Or not or how they don't.

Jessi Hempel:

... exactly. We watch TV and that's where we learn how interpersonal relationships are supposed to work. And then we try to put that into practice and it doesn't work very well for us. And now, we've got this other vector which is that we're doing a lot more, not in physical presence with each other.

Carole Robin:

Exactly. It makes it even more complicated. And A, it's even more important we acquire the skills and competencies and we have to double down on using them even more.

Jessi Hempel:

Okay. So let's talk about those skills and competencies. I want to know where most people go wrong.

Carole Robin:

I'm going to talk about a few ways in which they go wrong. The first is they don't realize that at one end of a continuum of relationships is contact and no connection. And at the other end of the continuum is something that in our book we call exceptional. Now, we're not advocating you try to turn every relationship in your life into exceptional. It's impractical and it's not necessary but you should at least know how to move to robust and functional, from contact and no connection and dysfunctional. And what most people don't realize is that's even a continuum and it's not a switch. It's not an on, off.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Carole Robin:

Okay.

Jessi Hempel:

It's not like your relationships works or it doesn't exactly.

Carole Robin:

That which relates to the second thing since every one of us is always a work in progress then our relationship is always a work in progress. So assuming that what works for you today is the same as what worked for you 20 years ago when we first met probably, doesn't serve you probably, an assumption worth examining. And the third one related to that is that what works for me in really connecting with you, Jessi is not necessarily what's going to work for me connecting with Jane sitting right next to you. So assuming that one size fits all, that what I do with you is automatically going to work with somebody else, another bad assumption. Here's the challenge in the dilemma, there aren't five easy steps on how to connect with somebody.

Jessi Hempel:

Oh, come on.

Carole Robin:

I'm sorry. I wish there were. And in fact, people don't realize that first of all, when we talk about interpersonal dynamics, we're talking about two different people and it might be really easy with one person and harder with another. Now, let's go back to some of the actual skills and competencies. The first one is allowing myself to be a little more known for its self disclosure but it's not like that. Let tell you everything, it's just allowing myself to be just a little bit more vulnerable in helping you get to know me.

Jessi Hempel:

I want to explore this one a second, Carole, because I feel like the period we've just gone through has led to us simultaneously knowing more about each other's personal lives. So we have COVID this week, my three year old's running behind me. I'm tired.

Carole Robin:

My cat just ran across my computer and you didn't even know I had one.

Jessi Hempel:

Right. But at some point it's almost like that becomes too much, at some point I don't have the capacity to navigate the many hardships of my many colleagues and I just need to get my job done. And I think that we're wrestling, I'll at least speak for our own culture. We're wrestling with how to draw healthy boundaries again, where we have necessarily had to have no boundaries for a while.

Carole Robin:

I love roofing with you about this because it's about selective disclosure. It's about appropriate authenticity. It's about what do you need to know about me in order for us to feel more connected? This idea of selective disclosure is what is going to serve our connection best including what not to say because our connection is not served by overwhelming you with all my 1700 problems. Feelings, at the heart of disclosure that actually, builds connection, our feelings not facts, not stories in the moment here and now, feelings.

Jessi Hempel:

What you're asking for, let's talk about it in the micro. Tell me if I'm distilling it to really a form that is too simple. But you're asking for us to pay more attention to how we feel in a particular moment and to be willing to make ourselves just 15% more uncomfortable-

Carole Robin:

Yes.

Jessi Hempel:

... in acting on those feelings.

Carole Robin:

Absolutely. And that would be the disclosure piece of the skills and competencies, there are others. It's certainly, that's the place to start.

Jessi Hempel:

Right. We have a certain stereotype of people in business and were you to teach this course where my wife got her master's degree at this NYU school's social work, you might work with a very different population of students. Do you think that there is something specific in particular to the population of students you are working with, who are going into business and at Stanford, not just business but a specific sort of entrepreneurial form of business offering?

Carole Robin:

Right. And now, at Leaders in Tech, they're all in tech, they're all CEOs and founders in tech.

Jessi Hempel:

Exactly.

Carole Robin:

So I think it is more foreign to them to even consider this as an important aspect of building relationships. Now, interesting if we were teaching this at the school of Social Work where your wife is then what would be more foreign to them is another piece of this skills and competencies which is the belief that honesty and dealing with conflict productively and giving each other direct feedback builds relationships, strengthens and makes relationships even more robust. That a different population might have a more difficult time with.

Jessi Hempel:

Oh, that's a wonderful point. So talk to me about honesty in relationships. What do we get wrong about honesty in relationships?

Carole Robin:

Well, most of the time we confuse indirectness by thinking that the opposite of indirectness is brutal honesty and nobody wants to be brutally honest so we get very indirect. By the way, brutal honesty is more brutal than honest most of the time.

Jessi Hempel:

That's true.

Carole Robin:

The opposite of indirect is direct and what we mostly get wrong is we're not direct.

Jessi Hempel:

Give me an example.

Carole Robin:

Let's say that we work together, I've sent you various things to look at, I haven't heard back from you and when I do hear back from you, it's not as full a response as I had hoped. And I'm a little bit irritated or annoyed because I'm always Johnny on the spot anytime you send me something. So the indirect version of that is, "Gee, I wish you were more sensitive to my needs." What the hell does that even mean? And that's why we have this whole model of the net that people have to go either read the book or go listen to a talk or something like that unless we get into it. But the idea is if I'm going to be direct then I have to be both behaviorally specific, "Hey, that's the third time in a row that I've sent you something. When I finally heard back from you, it wasn't everything I had hoped to hear back from you and asked for. I feel disappointed. I feel disappointed." Notice a feeling not, "I feel that you don't care," that's not a feeling. There's not a feeling we're [inaudible 00:11:39].

Jessi Hempel:

Feelings are trickier than you would think to be able to identify.

Carole Robin:

Way trickier which is why a vocabulary of feelings is part of the syllabus in the course, it's in the appendix of the book. Most people have been socialized to leave feelings out of it and not just in business but think about like, a kid falls down in the playground and he's crying and the mom runs over and says, "You're okay. No. It's okay to say, "Oh, I bet that hurts." It's okay for the kid to say I'm hurting but you know what? We deny people's feelings because they make us uncomfortable, because we don't want them to have it. Well, how does that build a relationship?

Jessi Hempel:

Humanness is messy, Carole, by design.

Carole Robin:

And that's why business hates it. It's not predictable, it's not packageable, it's not-

Jessi Hempel:

But you know what? I would like to think that's why old business hated it and that we're actually, moving into a new realm where we're learning. And I would say we are learning, we have not learned but we are learning that embracing it not only is it a more successful environment for the people in it but it actually, leads to better business success over time.

Carole Robin:

... absolutely. I believe that unequivocally and I don't think we could have gotten away with teaching this course for decades at the Stanford Graduate School of Business if there wasn't some evidence of that.

Jessi Hempel:

We're going to take a quick break, when we come back more on interpersonal relationships with Carole Robin. And we're back. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed a conversation about getting along with others so much or learned so much about something I thought I understood as this conversation with Carole. When I look at the frayed places in society now and we are not a political show, people have lots of ideas of their own where those frays are. Often, the perpetrators are people without social connections for whatever reason, people who have somehow been let loose from the binds that tie us all together and so tackling those interpersonal relationships that's where all healing begins.

Carole Robin:

I think that's so well said. So let's come back to feelings for a moment, regardless of what our ideology is we both know fear. We both have felt afraid so whether I agree with you or not, I can empathize with you being afraid. And if I can empathize with you being afraid whether I would not be afraid in that circumstance or not, doesn't matter. You will feel more known in knowing that I have felt fear and I understand your feeling regardless of your reason.

Jessi Hempel:

Right. So how do we actually build those personal relationships? I've been thinking a lot about this generally on the show.

Carole Robin:

It depends on the setting. I can give you some interesting examples of, or at least one example of something that a lot of the CEO and founders that I'm working with at Leaders in Tech have brought into their daily way of working which is when they have a small meeting, they spend the first 10 minutes with, if you really knew me right now. And they all have vocabularies of feelings and they all have to have three feeling words in their check-in instead of the check-in being, "Oh, my son's baseball team won on Sunday." The check-in is a minute and it's, "If you really knew me right now, you would know that I am feeling," and then it would sound a little bit like what I said to you earlier, "Thrilled to be here, hopeful that enough people will listen to this to start to move the needle, disappointed in what's happened so far," that's it.

And by the way, if we had another meeting in a month, I might be feeling in a different place. The point is that we stay in touch in the here and now. And by the way, disclosure tends to be reciprocal, vulnerability is reciprocal so if I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's going on for me to your earlier point 15%, you might be willing to tell me a little bit about what's going on for you, 15%. And so now we've already created something that continues to deepen then add to that we are committed to each other's learning and growth that in our relationship we tell each other the truth and are honest with each other and that we don't run away from conflict and hide it under the rug. But rather lean into it and learn how to do it productively and now that's how we move relationships.

Jessi Hempel:

We are doing a lot more of this over screens, you teased at the beginning of our conversation that you had some ideas for how to make the most out of this digital box. What are those ideas?

Carole Robin:

So the bottom line is double down on a lot of what we've been talking about. When I was telling you earlier about my CEO founders that do the, if you really knew me as the check-in, some of them have never met in person and the CEOs and founders keep writing to me and saying, "Oh my God, I've never had a team that felt this close even though some of us have never met in person."

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Carole Robin:

So double down on the creating opportunities for people to actually, know each other more at a level that feels a little more meaningful than what did you do last weekend. It may be harder but it's even more necessary to be honest with each other and believe that in giving each other feedback, all feedback is data and we are always better off with data than no data. But if we double down on using our feelings when we convey specific behavior, instead of saying, "Good job, thanks," saying, "Wow, I can't believe how quickly you turned that report around and I cannot tell you how grateful I am. And by the way, if you're looking for more responsibility and I'm your boss, I'd love to talk more about that. I can do that online." And it's a hell a lot more powerful than, "Thanks. Nice job."

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Carole Robin:

Feeling, back to use some feeling words.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. There's feeling words, man. But here's one for you. There's a lot of crap going on in the world, people have experienced a lot of death in the last couple of years. Often a lot of death in their personal lives and a lot of loss so much loss related to the pandemic or related to their sense of safety or their sense of environment. How do you make room for feeling words when there are legitimately people in your direct vicinity who may have had profound, let's call them black swan events except they're not black swan events anymore?

Carole Robin:

Right. Well, let me start by saying, if they are feeling all that whether you give them an opportunity to say it or not, they're still going to feel it. And you may be better off giving them a chance to at least say it so they can be more present. Just because you give somebody an opportunity to talk about feeling overwhelmed and somewhat hopeless in the moment doesn't mean that then the entire meeting turns into talking about what to do about it. We hold all these mental models, all these beliefs and assumptions, "Oh, my God. If I go there then we're going to end up there," not necessarily.

Jessi Hempel:

Yes, entirely.

Carole Robin:

"Oh, my God. If I make space for that then this is going to happen," not necessarily. So I think we're all equipped with two antenna. And this comes back to an early question you asked me about boundary management. One antenna picks up signals on what's going on for us internally, how am I feeling right now? The other antenna tries to pick up on signals on what might be going on for you. The more we work on honing those antenna so they pick up more and more subtle signals, the more interpersonally effective we're going to be, we need both. So if I am in touch with the fact that I am really overwhelmed and I can say, "I'm feeling really overwhelmed," then you can be in touch with what does that do for you? And then you can maybe go to the, "Wow. I've certainly, felt that way too or am feeling that way too. And I have some fear about what happens if that's what we spend the next hour on and I wonder if doing something that feels productive might help us both feel better."

Jessi Hempel:

I so appreciate that and in that I often think about feelings as weather patterns that move across the sky. We're often terrified of there's thunderstorm but in reality thunderstorms rarely last longer than 15 minutes.

Carole Robin:

Exactly.

Jessi Hempel:

And the sky becomes blue again over time.

Carole Robin:

Exactly. And the reason I'm a big advocate of meditation is that it helps us hone both those antenna to pick up even more subtle signals.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. And we'll put-

Carole Robin:

And meditation teaches us nothing is permanent, everything passes. And so when we remember that the depths of our sorrow in the moment will not last and sometimes even just remembering that helps. And when we're feeling really great and high about something then that's also going to pass. So let's notice it and relish it and be in it because that too is not going to last forever.

Jessi Hempel:

... that was Carole Robin. You should check out her book, Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues. And now, I'm bringing back Sarah for a segment. We're calling office hours. Hey, Sarah.

Sarah:

Are we calling it office hours?

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. Let's call it office hours.

Sarah:

That won't confuse people since we have Office Hours on Wednesday.

Jessi Hempel:

Hey, guys. We have office hours on Wednesday. We hope you come to talk with me and Sarah about this episode but here we are right now. And I'm just curious, Sarah, what did you think about what Carole had to say?

Sarah:

I loved it so much that I brought it up with my manager this very morning to be like, "Oh, hey. This is what I was working on last night and we should implement the, if you really knew me exercise in our departmental meetings." Literally, that's what I did on my one on one today.

Jessi Hempel:

And did you get a positive response?

Sarah:

Very, I explained how it worked and yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

I thought Carole had so much to offer on some things that I took to be very basic. I mean, let's dial way back. Just the idea of being able to identify your feeling and express it in the moment that's the simple building block of her philosophy and yet even I who feel that I'm conversant in feelings, I don't know that I can do it well. I don't know that I do, do it well.

Sarah:

You see, that's interesting. She's really speaking to two kinds of people, I think. Because I think I'm the opposite spectrum where I feel very conversant in my feelings. Thank you, grad school. I'm too in tune with my feelings and I talk about them too much. And so Carole also talked about selective disclosure and it was eye opening. People need to know a bit about what you're dealing with. They don't need the whole magilla.

Jessi Hempel:

I so appreciated that and I should say, sorry, you and I work together all the time and I really enjoy knowing a lot about how you're feeling so don't dial it back too much. But I will say that one of the challenges of right now, why this episode belongs in this summer of 2022 is because through the worst days of the pandemic when often our personal lives invaded our professional lives because people were sick or children needed care or you were working from a, I don't know, closet in a back bedroom trying to drown out the sounds of your three year old playing with this magnet tiles. It was almost like the personal life crowded out so much and now we're reestablishing exactly where it belongs. And yes, we want to know a lot about each other and ourselves but we also want to get work done and finding the new balance in a changed culture, it's tricky.

Sarah:

It's so tricky. And it's funny because you've mentioned here on the show before, we can't even really call this post pandemic because whether we want to admit it or not, we're still mid pandemic but work has come back and the workplace has come back. And so now we're holding all of the stress but rewritten and we're coming back to work. And just finding that balance is really tricky because at any moment, one of our colleagues could very much be reliving an early 2020 kind of time, like might be under their own quarantine or might be in isolation for a while.

Jessi Hempel:

And at the same time, we have more and more people choosing to work virtually. I actually, had an interview this morning with a potential candidate who would come here. I really hope it works out, they're a great candidate but they would be based in a city where we don't even have an office and it would be for a very relational job. And before two years ago, they would be off the table as a candidate because of that and today they're our first choice candidate. If you're going to work virtually you have to have a bigger vocabulary around interpersonal skills and how you nurture them.

Sarah:

That was one of the things that I really loved about your conversation with Carole, that she clearly doesn't feel like the Zoom screen or whatever digital interface you're using is any kind of impediment. She talked about people using the, if you knew me, the feelings exercise to gain more closeness with their virtual colleagues, at least from what I gathered from your conversation, you've got to work for it but it's totally doable. And that's really exciting about the nature of work because how many times, like what you were just saying, candidates who are nowhere near as geographically, who might be the best fit. Right now, none of that is impossible but we do have to be really conscious about how we bring it together.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us for this episode.

Sarah:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to use some of the knowledge that Carole dropped.

Jessi Hempel:

I know, me too to put it into practice. And I hope you'll come back next week because we've got another great episode. You know what? Let's leave the reveal for folks who join us next week.

Sarah:

All right. Well, you guys, you know what that means? You have to come back.

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah.

Sarah:

Next week.

Jessi Hempel:

It is true. And also, will I have you if you liked this episode, you Sarah, and also everybody listening, let me put you on the spot. Have you rated it and reviewed it?

Sarah:

I think I have a multitude of times. Every time I'm on a new device, I'm like five stars. But you know what? Friends out there virtual and in real life, if you have yet to rate and or, but preferably and review us on your favorite podcast app, this is a magic moment. Please open that app and give us some feedback. You can also shoot us an email at Hello Monday at linkedin.com because we love to hear from you.

Jessi Hempel:

It is true. And now, it is time to tell you that Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. Our producer is Sarah Storm. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. Dave Pond is head of news production. Michaela Greer and Victoria Taylor have terrific interpersonal relationships. Our music was composed just for us by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. And friends, today's episode is in memory of our colleague Markus Templer. I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

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