In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by author, speaker, and leadership expert Alain Hunkins.

 

Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essentials Series. I’m Mari Ryan. I’m the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Alain Hunkins.

Alain helps high-achieving people become high-achieving leaders. In his over 20-year career he has worked with over 2000 groups of leaders in 25 countries. His clients include Walmart, Pfizer, Citigroup, General Electric, State Farm Insurance. IBM, General Motors, and Microsoft. In addition to being a leadership speaker, consultant, trainer, and coach, he is also the author of Cracking the Leadership Code book. You can see all my little tabs in here for my key places where I am keeping track of important topics. He is also a faculty member at Duke Corporate Education. His writings have been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Chief Executive, Chief Learning Officer, and Business Insider.

Welcome, I’m so excited to have you here today.

Alain Hunkins: Mari, thank you so much for having me. I am really excited for our conversation.

Mari Ryan: Great, let’s dig into this idea about leading and leading well. We hear a lot about leadership topics these days and leadership is just such a ubiquitous topic. You have spent your career helping high-achieving people become stronger leaders. Today we’re going to explore a little bit around this intersection of leadership skills and wellbeing. I couldn’t help but notice while reading your book that there were three key elements that you have described as being core to leadership effectiveness. I’m wondering if we can explore those individually.

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, for sure. Let’s just do level setting too because to some people leadership means different things to different people, and for some people leadership means oh, you have the position, the title, the authority. I have a much broader definition. The fact is I think that any time any of us are trying to get anyone else to get anything done, that takes leadership. So when you define it that way we are all leaders in our lives every day. Leaders at work, leaders at home, leaders with our friends, with family all over the place.

What I found in my work – again this is 20 some-odd years of research and practice – is that time and time again there are patterns. The best leaders have certain things in common. Lousy leaders have certain things in common too. What I found were these three overarching skill sets, which are the three you are referring to, which are around connection, communication, and collaboration. I’m happy to dive in deep with any and all of those as you like.

Mari Ryan: Let’s start with connection. When I think about this, especially from a wellbeing perspective, connection and that sense of belonging is just inmate to us as who we are as human beings. Let’s unpack this idea of connection a little bit and what that means in the context of leadership.

Alain Hunkins: Sure. Everyone listening right now, you work in an industry of some kind, whether it’s high-tech, pharmaceutical, retail. The fact is no matter what industry you are in, you are in the people business. Let’s face it, that’s how everything gets done. There is no organization or company without the people that get things done. I think all of us, if we want to lead people we have to understand how do human beings work. At our core leadership is not this title or position, it is a relationship between someone who chooses to lead and someone who chooses to follow. What we know from the research and the science around this is that when people feel cared for, they are so much more engaged, they are so much more likely to do better work, and they are more likely to tell other people about their positive experience, whether they are customers or employees.

As leaders we have to understand we make a difference. In fact, Gallup did this wonderful study and they found that 70% of the difference between lousy, good, and great team culture is directly attributed to that team’s leader. I grew up thinking that leaders made a difference and what I’ve said now is that leaders don’t make the difference, leaders are the difference. That starts with connection.

Mari Ryan: So, there’s a piece of caring. You’ve wrote about how it’s important that when you connect with people on a personal level they feel cared for. That sense of caring, creating that caring culture in the workplace, why is that so important and how do you think that influences wellbeing of the people in the organization?

Alain Hunkins: First, it’s really important – and I’m sure as people are listening to this, most of us are probably thinking I am a caring person. Here’s the big gap, which is there is a huge gap between your intention of caring and whether or not someone feels cared for. Actually caring for people is a much more proactive and dynamic thing that most leaders do. Most people don’t feel cared for in the workplace.

For me, the root of connection is empathy, which is the active demonstration that you show people that you understand them and that you care how they feel. Now, as you hear that you think that sounds pretty basic, pretty common. There are some interesting studies on this. It turns out that 92% of CEOs say oh, our organizations are empathetic, when in fact only 50% of the employees in those very same organizations say their CEOs are empathetic.

That makes me think why is leading with empathy so hard? If you look at the nature of our general corporate business for profit world, there’s a couple of big reasons. The first is showing people that you care about them and care how they feel, showing empathy, doesn’t happen in a heartbeat. It’s not something that you can just check off your to-do list, like, okay, empathy for Mari – check. Go! Move on!

Mari Ryan: Or, I did my empathy today.

Alain Hunkins: Exactly. How are you today? Good, let’s move on. We’ve all seen that. It’s the fake listening thing. It’s the willingness to take some time. So, showing people that you care takes time and patience. Part of leadership wisdom is knowing there is a time and a place to go fast, and a time and a place to go slow. Unfortunately, the culture in many of our organizations, it’s actually been codified, and I’m sure you seen this it’s actually lit up on big picture frames in the lobbies. Our core competencies, our core values. “Buy is for action.” “Drive for results.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against driving for results. I understand that you want to get things done. You are in business. However, driving for results should not come at the expense of the people who are working to deliver those results for you.

As leaders we have to know there is a time and a place to go slow, to care for, to connect, and for us to put people before the task. This is getting out of the old industrial age mindset as seeing people as human resources, literal things, that are spare parts that can be interchanged, and getting into understanding we are leading human beings. That starts with empathy and when people feel cared for in that way, their performance is going to accelerate and it’s going to be more sustainable both for you and for them and for the long-term viability of the organization.

Mari Ryan: When you talk about it that way, it sounds like that is something that has to be done very intentionally. I wonder if … I recall reading a recent article in the Harvard Business Review about taking time in meetings to do the warm-up, chatty time kind of thing, which I will honestly say I often have a little patience for because I am one of those get to work, let’s do it kind of people. Yet, after I read that article it was like, I get it. We’ve got to slow down and we’ve got to stop and check in with people and see how they are doing. So talk about the intentionality aspect of empathy.

Alain Hunkins: Oh, it’s huge! So in all that we are talking about today there is this intentionality component, which is basically doing something for a reason. The fact is that all of us as leaders are designing an environment for the people that we lead. Great leaders are designing those environments with intentional design, whereas other people are designing them by default. They are just like, I dunno, this is what I’ve learned and I’m not even thinking about it. It’s unconscious incompetence. I don’t know what I’m doing, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, and if the company is profitable you are leading in spite of your flaws. You are successful in spite of that, not because of that.

So intentionality is key. When you talked about this HBR article, for me one of the places – and I wrote an article for Forbes a few months ago around three questions that make a huge difference in terms of that upfront time. This can take two, three, four minutes, very quick, whereas question number one, how are you feeling today, and to move beyond “I’m fine, how are you, Mari?” That was the old-school model of this is work, we check our feelings at the door, which is a funny thing to say because you can’t check your feelings at the door. What you do is you suppress your feelings at the door, which is exactly what is happening and much of the North American workplace.

So, step one: how are you feeling, really? And listening to it. And I would say [asterisk] and shut up and listen. Listen to the response. So, how are you feeling, and then the second question would be, what’s on your mind? Or, what’s distracting you? To give people a chance to just get here, to get to present. You know, we live in this world of information overload. In the 1970s the average leader dealt with 1000 communications a year. That works out to four a day. This is a Baines study, where I found all of this research, this is great. Today, it’s well over 30,000 a year. Everyone knows that intuitively we are all like whoo whoo, inboxes up to here. We’re drowning in information.

Giving people a chance just to center and be like, what’s on your mind, what’s distracting you? That way just by naming it, what it does … And by the way the science behind this, when you name what is on your mind, how you are feeling, you are linking the language centers of your brain in the prefrontal cortex to all of the emotional centers, which are in that midbrain or limbic system. You are actually coming that older part of your brain that is in that flight or fight mode to actually settling down so that you can focus and do your most creative work So, that’s the science behind it.

That’s question number two. Question number three, how can I support you? Again, how are you feeling, what’s on your mind, how can I support you. All of that will take maybe three minutes per person in a meeting. People think like you are saying, “gotta get to it, gotta get to the work.” One of the challenges for us as leaders in today’s world and beyond is that we have to learn to value effectiveness over efficiency. Yes, it seems more efficient just to get to the work, but long-term it’s not nearly as effective. Leaders need to know when there is time to slow down and be effective instead of just getting into it.

Mari Ryan: I totally agree. I love it. Well, there’s a few lessons for me to be a better leader by slowing down a little and asking some of those great questions. Let’s go on to your second key concept, which is around the idea of communication. When we think about communication in the workplace and there’s this whole idea that has become so important of late is the idea of transparency and honesty, which helps build trust in the organization. Why from your perspective is communication such a key element for this and how it is that link to the culture in the workplace?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, it’s huge. If you think about the nature of communication is if it is done well, it creates clarity. If it is done poorly it creates confusion. Think about the last time you felt confused, like literally, viscerally, what was going on in your body? How well were you able to think straight? When you are confused, your shackles go up. Literally you feel like what am I supposed to … and you expend a lot of energy trying to sort stuff out. In fact, HR Magazine in the UK did a study of 4000 employees, and they said 46% report regularly receiving confusing and unclear instructions so much to the point, they waste an average of 40 minutes a day trying to figure out what they are supposed to do. If that wasn’t bad enough, other studies have shown that when we get interrupted, someone says “oh, do you have a second?” It turns out that to get back to where you were when you’ve been interrupted takes an average of more than 23 minutes in terms of your cognitive focus, getting back to that deep level of thinking.

So, communication and the goal of creating clarity and understanding is critical to leadership and wellbeing because basically confidence comes out of clarity. When I am clear and I know I have understanding I can move forward with boldness, whereas a I have confusion and uncertainty I’m doubting my decisions. I’m really wondering is this okay, is this the right thing to be doing? When we have clarity it provides shared understanding. Here’s what I think a lot of leaders don’t recognize overtly, which is the point of communication is not to communicate. The point of communication is to create a shared understanding.

The reason that is so important is because shared understanding creates the platform on which we take all future action. So if we have a solid foundation built on comment and shared understanding we can make great decisions to create great results. And if our platform is wobbly, I don’t know. I’m sure you’ve had this experience, Mari, where for example you finish up a meeting and we haven’t really totally nailed the points and we are out of time and we all sort of assume that everyone is on the same page. Then you go out in the hallway and you have those meetings after the meetings. So Mari, what did we just commit to? So there are eight different versions of “the truth” and eight different versions going off in eight different directions and we wonder why we are misaligned and we wonder why it takes so long and we wonder why we have all this duplication and rework and confusion.

One of the things that leaders should recognize is that misunderstanding is the default setting for human communication. The reason for that is really simple; it’s because I don’t live in your brain. You don’t live in mine. What is super clear to me is clear to me because I live in here and you don’t. So I have to do — to use a Star Trek reference — like a Vulcan mind meld, that sense of how do I get what is in my head into yours, and how do I build all sorts of scaffolding to make sure that is happening.

As a simple example of a scaffold is when you finish a meeting, do an understanding check. Which is just to take that moment and say, okay, I know that we are all on top of this but just to be clear can we go around the table and what is everyone committing to? Just to make sure that we hear it and say to close that loop. I call it asking for a receipt, it’s getting confirmation that your information hasn’t just been received, but it has also been understood. That’s why communication is critical to all of this and that obviously impacts wellbeing as well.

Mari Ryan: it is so interesting when you think about the aspects of communication because in the absence of it, employees are just going to make up their own stories. They are going to use that wild imagination and make up a story and my story could be different from your story. It’s interesting, I watched this take place after the pandemic started with a particular client and they started communicating on a daily basis. So senior leadership communication to employees on a daily basis. Things were changing so fast that they really needed to do things. This is a great example on how to take action in a solid way that was going to reassure the workplace. They literally carried that on from March through August. At the end of August they moved to weekly communications. It was so reassuring and part way through the year they surveyed the employees to ask, how are we doing kind of survey. People were just so reassured as a result of that communication.

Alain Hunkins: It is so true. You bring up such an interesting point which is in the absence of communication, people will fill in the vacuums with their own stories and the nature of the human brain is such that when people fill in their own stories, they tend to go negative. Isn’t this where we go? In fact, I was just telling someone this morning one of my mantras is “no news means no news.”

For example, I reached out to a client a few weeks ago because I had sent a proposal and they didn’t get back to me, and so I followed up with another email. Didn’t get back to me. Another week goes by and at this point, of course, in my mind I’m thinking oh, they are not interested. I created this entire story in my head, and then just yesterday I get this email, thanks for the nudge, I’m meeting with my colleague tomorrow. We’ll get back to you next week. I have to remind myself that no news is no news. However, as leaders we have to realize that if we don’t fill in the vacuums for people, they are going to fill them in for themselves and they will go negative. So there is an opportunity for you to step in and do something about it.

Mari Ryan: Absolutely, I totally agree. So let’s go to your third pillar and that is collaboration. I’m curious from your perspective how does a leader create an environment of collaboration? I would think that this is so totally tied to innovation, creativity, so let’s talk about collaboration. 

Alain Hunkins: It’s interesting. Collaboration is multi-faceted, and Innovation and creatively are a big part of that. Every organization that I’ve worked with says we want to be more innovative and they might even post it on their annual report. However, what are you doing to create a climate that supports that? The climate is a result of specific behaviors that you do as a leader every day. In my work and in my research what I have found is that there are four fundamental human needs that employees need to have satisfied in order to perform at their best and to create a climate or a collaborative culture that is high performing.

The four needs are this: the first is we all have a need for safety. That need for safety is physical safety, which is why many of us are working from home right now because it is literally not safe for us to go into an office, but beyond that there is also psychological safety. All the work of Amy Edmondson at Harvard is great about this. For example, is there equal airtime among team members or do just one or two people dominate the conversations so that other people feel unsafe speaking up? So you want to have physical and psychological safety. So safety is the first need.

The next need is that we have a need for energy. You know this from your work in wellbeing is that people need to be energized to perform at their best. In fact, the key to high performance is managing your energy, not managing time. How do you do that? For example, do you schedule breaks through the day? When you sent me this meeting invite for example, Mari, it’s a 45 minute meeting. It’s supposed to be an hour meeting. If you book 60 minutes on top of 60 minutes that all works on paper but it doesn’t work for human beings. We need breaks. We need revitalization. We need energy. So the second big need is energy.

We’ve got safety, we’ve got energy. Number three is we have a need for purpose. People need to feel What they are doing is contributing to something greater than themselves because when they do that what really matters is that they bring more energy to it. We all know that. There are people who have massive hobbies and they spend all this time and energy unpaid because it means something to them. So how as a leader are you tapping into the difference that you and your organization are making in the world? And to say all we do is increase shareholder value – and I’ve talked with executive teams about this – they said well, we’re here to increase shareholder value. I said, great, why don’t you just start dealing cocaine? The profit margins are much higher. Because realizing what is your purpose and everything has a purpose and if we don’t connect to it we are not going to be able to perform at our best.

So that’s the third one, purpose. And the last one is about ownership. No one wants to work for a micromanager and the fact is all of us want to … We talked about creative and innovation, this is where our autonomy and our freedom, our desire to solve problems in new and different ways comes out. So how do you create a framework or a sandbox in which people can play and go to town. So this is a huge need as well.

So we have are for human needs. Safety, energy, ownership, and purpose. When people have those needs met. You are going to have a much more robust high-performing collaborative culture.

Mari Ryan: I love it. Those are all fabulous and I really like this idea of energy because energy is, and what you’ve written in your book is, energy is really the fuel of high- performance and you’ve given us some suggestions there. But from a leadership perspective what are some of the ways in which leaders can build and energized work culture?

Alain Hunkins: Number one is lead by example. Albert Schweitzer, who won the Nobel prize twice, my favorite quote from him is, “example is not the main thing when influencing others, it’s the only thing.” If you want to engage other people, you need to be engaged. If you want them to be energized, you need to be energized. So that’s one key thing.

On top of that we talked around this idea of life is rushing at us so much. What are you doing as a leader to create boundaries between work and recovery? For example, what are your policies around emailing people 24 hours a day or on the weekends? Because people need some time off. What are you doing to support people’s wellbeing in their downtime? If you are familiar with any race car like the Indianapolis 500, Daytona, the key to winning that race is not just to go around the track it’s that you have to have a great pit crew who knows how to refuel to renew those high performance vehicles as quickly and as effectively as possible. People are no different. We want to find those renewal techniques. So what are things that you can do? This is why so many companies like Google are famous for their cafeterias and try to take care of people’s physical needs. They realize that when people are happy, satisfied, performing at their best, they do well.

So that’s one of the areas as well. Another key area is gratitude and appreciation. When people feel cared for it releases this huge amount of energy. Gallup did this great study that said that the highest performing employees have received recognition at least once in the last seven days. That someone has specifically commented and appreciated their work. Now I’ve worked with employees use that said “seven days? I go for seven months!” Think about that. What are you doing to appreciate and create a culture of gratitude? Something else around that, and this is all based on positive psychology, is what you doing to create milestones, small milestones, and for people to see the progress of their making towards the milestones, as opposed to saying, “here is our annual sales target and December 31 – yay!” And then on January 1 we’re back to work. What we want to do is celebrate wins all along the way. If you know the work of BJ Fogg, he’s a professor at Stanford, and talks about tiny habits, the key to embedding any kind of good habit is we need to celebrate that because that’s what starts to anchor and rewire the brain so that we actually want to keep repeating those behaviors again and again. Again, we can talk on and on about this. Those just a few good examples of energy.

Mari Ryan: Great examples. You’ve worked with literally thousands of leaders, and I’m curious as to what extent do you see self-care practices that the individual uses for themselves to be a core leadership skill?

Alain Hunkins: I see it all the time. In fact, I was just coaching with someone earlier today who was sharing with me the idea that they took some time before a busy day. They said before I started I had some “me time” to ground, be present and set intention. One of my other mantras around this is “first being and then doing.” The thing about it is the being looks different to different people. Maybe your thing is meditation. Maybe your thing is not meditation. Maybe your thing is yoga. Maybe it’s hard-core exercise – who knows? Maybe it’s listening to music. Maybe it’s writing a letter. Maybe it’s journaling.

There is no one right way to do it, but I would say with all these thousands of leaders what I see in common is they all have some sort of practice, some dedicated practice of self-care. Some might not even call it that, but they say oh yeah, actually I spend some time writing in my journal in the evening. They don’t call it self-care. Or I reflect on the day and I think about what my wins were. There are so many different ways to do it, but being an intentional, conscious leader, usually there are two key components here. There is a sense of forward-thinking, what’s my plan for the day, and that takes wellbeing to calm and center ourselves so we could have that focused, dedicated plan of intention for the day. That’s forward-thinking. Then on the tail-end, the back end of the day, there’s the reflection, looking back on your day. What did I do well? What were some wins? What were some connections? What did I learn? What am I grateful for? I find that the best leaders that I work with tend to have some kind of intention and reflection practice in some way.

Mari Ryan: Sounds like they also build rituals around that. For myself I have this block of time at the beginning of every day where I have my morning rituals. For me it’s meditation, exercise, a healthy breakfast, and at the end of the day that’s where my gratitude time comes in, my evening gratitude journal. It sounds like rituals are an important part of this.

Alain Hunkins: Absolutely. I had a mentor once who said, a ritual is anything that worked once and got repeated. The reason we have rituals like this, Mari, is because when you have it as a ritual it becomes on autopilot. It becomes this positive … I like to think of habits and rituals as slightly different. Habits might be unintended habits, like I bite my nails or smoke cigarettes, whereas rituals are thoughtful and intentional and what rituals provide for us is a transition. If you think about some major life events, like births, marriages, these are rituals. Even like New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve, birthday cake, candles – these are all rituals that move us, transition us into milestones and we also get so much more meaning out of life because of that. So, why not create some rituals that work for you as opposed to living a more ordinary life? You get much more meaning out of it.

Mari Ryan: I love it, that’s great. If our audience wants to learn more about you and the work that you are doing, where can they find you?

Alain Hunkins: Probably the easier place to go is, the book has its own webpage, www.crackingtheleadershipcode.com and if you go there you can download the first chapter right there and that will link you right to the alainhunkins.com website as well where you can learn all about the different work that I am doing. I do speaking, coaching, training, consulting with individuals, groups and organizations. I have these various 30-day leadership challenges that I run at times. All the information is there. You can sign up for my newsletter and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

Mari Ryan: Fabulous. As always, it’s wonderful to spend time with you. Thanks so much for being here today.

Alain Hunkins: You as well, Mari. Thanks so much for having me.

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