#013 - Rapid Trust

Tiffany Lenz 0:05

We've talked loosely about creating something around TQ, the trust quotient score. I heard one today that was called CQ, like the cultural quotient, which I thought was interesting. So there's a session. I don't know anything about it. But there's a session for international women's day that I signed up to listen in on, on maybe the 11th. And one of the topics they're covering is something called the culture quotient,

Robert Greiner 0:33

The culture quotient Did they say what sort of constituent elements makeup culture question?

Tiffany Lenz 0:39

No, it was the ad.

A bit of a teaser.

Robert Greiner 0:41

Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Tiffany Lenz 0:43

I didn't even have a chance to google it today and see if it's a thing that see.

Robert Greiner 0:48

Yeah, I'm looking it up right now. There's a book 10 dimensions of high performance, culture, easy to read approach to culture that guides readers every step of the way, better financial results, as well as increasing engagement, improving talent acquisition and retention. Look

at that.

Tiffany Lenz 1:06

Cultural intelligence has three components, the cognitive, the physical and the emotional or motivational.

Robert Greiner 1:13

Okay. It is cool how it's 10 dimensions of high performance culture and the chain link on the cover is 10 links. So I bet they're gonna say that you can't, you have to have them all. You can't just have eight out of 10.

Tiffany Lenz 1:26

It's funny that they're saying things like cultural intelligence is a it's like an expression that's used in business and education. I've never heard of it before. been in business for a long time and either never heard of cultural intelligence,

Robert Greiner 1:40

Great stories, great science and practical advice about how to build a high performance culture. Interesting. So you're going to a seminar on.

Tiffany Lenz 1:49

Yeah

Robert Greiner 1:49

It's like a primer for this book.

Tiffany Lenz 1:51

I don't know that. It is. It's, it's about it's in honor of International Women's Day. So there will be a variety of topics around inclusivity as a big one, and one, this one around cultural intelligence.

Robert Greiner 2:07

Okay. I'll be interested to see, I guess,

Tiffany Lenz 2:09

I'll bring some stuff back that, yeah, we might work into a talk or something.

Robert Greiner 2:14

Yeah, that sounds good. So looking at today, we have Five Dysfunctions of a team. So going over that, and then trust is a cornerstone. And yeah, I think we're talking about weaving in some ideas around like when you don't have time to build trust.

Tiffany Lenz 2:27

Yep.

Robert Greiner 2:28

And so maybe we could go through because we haven't covered this yet on the podcast. So maybe we could go through and hit each dysfunction and talk about it just a little bit. And then maybe after we cover the five, we can go back over them around our experience with COVID. And things like that. Sound good to you?

Tiffany Lenz 2:45

Yes.

Robert Greiner 2:46

Okay,

cool. Let's add some notes here. All right. So the first dysfunction is absence of trust. And that's like, the whole reason for this podcast really is the most foundational element that if you don't have people around you that trust each other, to do the right thing, you don't have that relationship capital built up to where if you're in an interaction that's a little bit awkward or wonky, you generally get the benefit of the doubt. And you trust that the people around you have your back and generally want what's best for you. If you don't have that, then any kind of conflict or holding accountable to results or trying to do work together or have a conversation, it's all just going to fall apart and slowly but surely breed dysfunction, and bitterness

over time.

Tiffany Lenz 3:31

A couple interesting little nuances here, I think, yeah, obviously, the cornerstone of our podcast, and we chose our words, specifically, the idea of industry being building. And the this whole this Five Dysfunctions coming from Patrick Lencioni work in his company, table group, and the bottom of their five level pyramid being trust. So there, every element from an illustration standpoint is that of building on top of that, so you have to have you have to work at trust, it isn't actually one big slab, like it would look visually, it's brick by brick, piece by piece made up of a number of things, the number of hard work elements of vulnerability and transparency. And we'll talk about what it takes to get there in a little bit. But I love them all the interconnections of the words that we've chosen, and even the visual that table group uses with the Five Dysfunctions pyramid to show that you actually have to do things in a certain order, then you can't cheat either. You can't take one of them out and expect to get to the top of the pyramid because they build on one another in a almost like a force multiplication mode. But certainly starting with trust.

Robert Greiner 4:46

Yeah, so we have absence of trust at the bottom. And then I'll just read the other four, so that we can go that bottom to top and yeah, you can't skip. So absence of trust, and then fear of conflict, lack of commitment. We see that a lot. Avoidance of accountability, which is interesting, because a lot of times that fear of conflict either breeds this lack of commitment or avoidance of accountability. So you can even see those two that come after it is based in fear maybe, or a lot of times, and then inattention to results. So lots of tie backs to our Seven Deadly leadership's sins.

Tiffany Lenz 5:20

yeah, many too many.

Robert Greiner 5:21

It's almost if that was intential.

Tiffany Lenz 5:24

Yeah, these are great, simple, I really, I like them a lot. There's almost everything I've read by Patrick Lencioni. And his team I appreciate this one resonates deeply with me, it just always has, in terms of what people want is they want results. And they focus on results, and sometimes on accountability. But rarely do they focus on or hone in and fix a lack of commitment, fear of conflict, which is incredibly hard, probably, in my opinion, the hardest one in the pyramid. And then really knowing that all that if you try it, if you look at them from the top down and do them effectively you are you're almost like building trust as you go. And it's feeding off of itself. An increase in trust, will reduce conflict, increase commitment, increase accountability and increase results, if that makes sense.

Robert Greiner 6:20

Yeah, it's almost like whatever symptoms or pain or tension you're feeling, you need to like recurse, back down the pyramid. That's your sort of topping point, and then you go down. And it just occurs to me. Now, I wish I would have known this earlier, we've given people feedback in our careers a lot where we're in a meeting, important decisions are being made, directions are set is like a deep conversation, it's an hour of everyone's time or more, these things are expensive to have. And someone comes up to me after the meeting, it says, you know, what James said over here, isn't going to work because of these three things. And the first thought is, why didn't you say that in the meeting? Like why didn't you bring that up? And that, to me screams fear of conflict. But my initial approach, originally, and probably default approach would be today is, let's address you feedback to you coaching to you for your fear of conflict. I don't know that I've ever taken a step back, though, and said, I wonder if there's like a trust issue on the team? Is this an early warning sign of a trust issue, like different behavioral types that they could be like the canary in the coal mine for some of this stuff, if you have someone that's maybe a little bit more predisposed to avoid conflict, and has to really feel like they're in a good place to do it, or it's unnatural to engage in conflict normally, especially around people they don't trust, like maybe that's a, you could look to that person and say, Hey, this could be an indication of a deeper systemic issue on the team.

Tiffany Lenz 7:48

It's a really good example, one similar to that, that I've heard often is in different kinds of meetings, like an unwillingness by some people to want to take accountability, to want to sign up for something, or to want to, let's just say, want to sign up for a specific outcome or initiative. And I don't always have the mental discipline to follow that logical trail in my mind of pull on the thread and see why and, but when I think about, think back to different kinds of examples, it does seem like there was an avoidance of, or a lack of desire to take accountability, because very seldom are initiatives in silos, they are often deeply connected and dependent on one another. And if you if one doesn't sense commitment from others, or trust that the like other parties, whether it be teammates, or people in a slightly extended team, are going to be able to execute or willing to even take accountability themselves, then you get this sense of why would I bet my career on that? Why would I sign up to get that done? When I'm not able to do it myself? And I don't trust that other parties will come to the table with the same amount of effort.

Robert Greiner 9:11

Yeah, I think I'm seeing this with a little bit of new eyes now. So on the avoidance of accountability, I view that as taking ownership for outcomes that don't go well, like in general. And so that stems from this whole recursive nature, I don't know why it's like maybe clicking for me a little bit more now. But that is because of a lack of commitment. And if you didn't commit to something in the first place, if you didn't buy in, or say yes, we're gonna go take this hill, I'm all in on it. If you're reserved or or avoid taking that commitment, then when something goes wrong, probably is as a self fulfilling prophecy because you had people not putting their time and energy into this work, then the avoidance of accountability side is really around, not taking ownership for that bad outcome. And then ultimately, changing directions so that you can or putting actions in place changing direction so that you can have a better outcome later. Is that how you view it too?

Tiffany Lenz: 10:07

I think so i think so. Yeah, these are deeply interdependent. And you can see if you pull on different examples, you can see a an erosion at different levels of this pyramid. And when I think about like, how solid the structure would be, it would fall, it would be like it would be like playing giant Jenga, you start pulling out little bits and pieces here and there and not addressing the root cause, essentially, you would have a structure that would be completely unsound. And that's the whole point of giant Jenga, think about this alternative example of, we all know people who, when we sit, let's think about attention to result in attention to results. We all know people who flip that on its head, and give all attention to the results and not what it takes to get there. Or even worse yet, take credit for a positive outcome without looking at what it took to get to that outcome and the hard work that it took. And that is that right there drives a knife through the heart of this pyramid, it would drive the whole it would just rip shred rip rip trust to shred, you've seen this, if one were to take that kind of credit.

Robert Greiner: 11:18

Yeah, someone attends a kickoff meeting. And then they're at the project success party. And they really played virtually no roll the hole in the middle, but they were in one meeting. And then all sudden, the successes there's what you see this a lot too. And we're both football fans, when you have the player on the team loses the game. But the running back sets the record for most yards in a game, or the special teams return yards is better than average. And I played sports a lot growing up and you'd see this a lot on the team too. It's Hey, I scored three goals. What's your problem?

Tiffany Lenz: 11:52

Where were you

Robert Greiner: 11:53

because I mean, I did

my job. And so this inattention to results is also to your point, it's this weird, it can get perverted and a focus towards the good things that you did. And it's Hey, this is not my fault, going back down to accountability. And so that you can hit it both ways that the thing on the book, though, is it's a leadership fable, which I think is great. It builds the case, bottom to top. And I think what we've said before is it's harder to take what you read, distill the wisdom, and then apply it to your situation when you're in the middle of a pandemic, or your company's going bankrupt or you have to go through layoffs, or even you're in the middle of a large initiative and things are going pretty well things can go poorly, really quickly if you don't pay attention to the right things. And so I think that's where the sort of nuance that the leader that reads these books and distills this wisdom has to go and put some science behind the art or some art behind the science, some of us to make it there. Yeah,

Tiffany Lenz: 12:47

yeah. I also think that the pandemic is a great example leading in a pandemic, this book wasn't written for that it was written for more at both there. I remember from what I recall, there's micro examples and macro examples and human interaction examples. It's a really great read and very clever actually the way it's written. But it doesn't really take time into account. And at least in both of our experiences, whether it's the pandemic responses or a project that's on fire, we hurry. And it's not that speed is not important. And time is not of the essence, as one would say. But there, the steps here matter, because they actually do allow you to speed up quickly. So in, in my experience, if you skip them even when the house is on fire, if you skip a step between accountability and conflict, or accountability and commitment, but you don't address conflict between two people or two teams that is likely to unravel all of your results, you really, you've almost taken yourself on a fool's errand, because it would be sheer luck, if you were to have a good result and then sustain that result. So there is a such a link between speed and these outcomes.

Robert Greiner: 14:09

Man, that's such an insightful point. So

the our world works that way. If you're flying a plane, and you have some event low on fuel, bird strike ice on the wings, there's a very clear and straightforward checklist to go and look through annotate descend this many this level of altitude, go do these four or five things, put your landing gear down, whatever it is. And if you do those out of order, even if you do all the constituent elements correctly, you're going to be in trouble. Like these things have to come in order. And so what you're saying also, it's it's an element of energy and focus where you can't skip you can't go from trust to commitment, but if you're at this con fear of conflict layer, but double all your effort on trust until that's solid and then you can move to the next one. And so you can really focus your energy and go fast within One of the dimensions of the pyramid and then over time when you get to next one, put that same level of energy. So it's like a single piece of myopic perspective that will ultimately let you move faster over time.

Tiffany Lenz: 15:10

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. But it takes so much discipline. And they certainly do not underplay that in the book, that it takes a high degree of discipline. And I, from what I read, either both, I don't want to over over extrapolate in my experience. And I've used this pyramid a number of times the the fear of conflict, peace is the single hardest, to continually address most just mostly because we don't like it. I had a coach super blessed to have this guy as a as an executive coach for so many years. He was the former CIO of Time Warner, and also of McDonald's. And he used this tool all the time, and would always hone in on trust. This is he just took it as an absence of the team is broken and absence of trust is just reality. It wasn't even up for debate with him. And he honed in on conflict as the hardest one. And if you could address conflict, you would immediately fix the things above. And the one below that was the most important would would almost fix itself interested in your perspective on that based on your experiences?

Robert Greiner: 16:22

Oh,

that's smart. As I'm looking at the pyramid, and you said that story, that's a great way to not skip a step. So you anchor to conflict and your boundaries for all that you can hope to control. While you're so laser focused on conflict is absence of trust at the bottom, lack of commitment right above it. lack of commitment is the right at the middle of the pyramid. So actually, if you're doing those three things, like you're on a well above average team, right, you're probably in the top 70% of teams, or I guess, top 30%. And so if you come in, right at conflict, it's the hardest. So why not focus on that first, because if you can nail that everything else will seem easy. And in your openness, about engaging in healthy conflict, having interesting lively meetings, solving problems together, addressing politics head on, that will build trust, because you're being open about what everyone's working on. And the few in on the team that are bought in from the beginning, they'll start to commit, okay, I'm going to speak up. And even though it's uncomfortable for me, I'm going to speak up, I'm going to be clear about my direction, I'm going to tell everyone when I made a mistake and and really show what I did to learn from it. And so I think that's really smart. And then in the book, too, though, you saw the I think was the marketing person who just wasn't buying in at all, and the one sort of negative, and we talked about this before, right? If you have a toxic person on your team, you're not going to get up this pyramid at all, you're going to be stuck in absence of trust

Tiffany Lenz: 17:55

that I think that comes to a head and becomes really transparent. If you do focus on what you want is trust. And you also want results. But if your anchor, if you're willing to anchor on conflict and and fight through that, I do think you'll get the results that you want. And just thinking about in my own example where I used building trust first as a kind of a basis for designing some less than likely team norms. If we talked about this on one of our previous sessions that I developed these three rules of engagement around human interaction,

Robert Greiner: 18:31

we're gonna have a whole episode on it.

Tiffany Lenz: 18:34

Okay, good.

Robert Greiner: 18:34

Yeah, it's coming up.

Tiffany Lenz: 18:35

They came from focusing on the conflicts that already existed, simple conflicts, sometimes, oh, wow, there's time zones that stretch almost around the entire globe. Or I really need my team to have a mix of cultures and genders. And even first languages that are not English, because of the clients we're serving. Those are conflicts that they didn't, they don't fit anywhere out anywhere else. They're not results. They're not accountability. But they were eroding. They were set to erode trust. So I was labeling them as conflicts that needed to be addressed.

Robert Greiner: 19:09

Yeah, that's good. I got some, I've gotten feedback. my whole career, this won't surprise you that I'm not very detail oriented. And the time that I got some feedback, where I was thinking, Oh, this is on a review, like I need to do something about this was, hey, you can get by just fine on your own at a lower attention to detail. Sometimes the people around you and the relationships around you dictate a higher level of detail that makes the group around you feel more comfortable and feel like they can trust you. Because you're signaling to them. You're speaking their professional love language, right? You're like you're signaling to them that you have everything under control, and they judge that your level of caring this and attention it based on attention to detail. And that was the time where it clicked for me and now I'll go in and see what Excel files my colleagues are updating and I'll go update cells. If I can and stuff like that, and I'll come with things a little bit more formal than I'm used to specifically to address the trust of the people around me. And then I've also found it helps on the conflict side, because if you put something like the Five Dysfunctions of a team pyramid in front of a team, if you put something a little bit more formal and concrete, you can attack that thing. You can say, Hey, we're focusing on conflict, because that's the second tier of the pyramid. And I found in my experience, that it makes a lot of sense to start here, I had these five other things went really well for me. So this is where we're gonna start. And it's hard to argue, because it's like, hey, it's part of this sort of formal thing. And so I think that those are some ways that definitely can increase trust for people that even if they're not wired towards formality or analysis, when you're in a space of not trusting you want more information. And so I think this could be a way to unlock that, I like that your coach is really smart, that's such a brilliant thing to do.

Tiffany Lenz: 20:58

He's a really smart guy, I've learned quite a lot from him, there's something else you just hit on that I think is really important, though to in the example you just gave, there's a slightly different analogy that I think supports the pyramid really well of when you're thinking about, see, I'm not a detailed person. But I will do it to build trust via often the analogy of slipping around who my customer is, helps me with things like that, when I have to act out of character, if that makes sense. Or I certainly index as a, an informal communicator, that's me. And when I have to index formally and communicate much more formally, for the good of the audience, it does tie right in here to conflict and commitment, my commitment to them and conflict that they feel. But an analogy that has helped me make that mental shift is to think of that group of people as my most important customer, they might actually just be my teammates, or my peers. But Customer service is something that for whatever lots of reasons resonates with me. And so it does help me know exactly where to laser focus in on like, the framework of this pyramid, or what what Related Actions I should take, that's it helps me to think of them as my customers for whatever it's worth,

Robert Greiner: 22:21

your definition of who your customer is, can change. It's just instantly based on. Yeah, based on your situation. And that for you is triggers a line of thinking around, hey, how can I delight my customers? And so you use that term as broadly as possible in order to help shape your thinking of your approach?

Tiffany Lenz: 22:44

Yes, I do. Yeah, all the time.

Robert Greiner: 22:46

Because and you find, oh, sorry, I just want to pull on this more. So you find that the act of delighting customers is the same, it's the same criteria, regardless of who your customer base is. So you start with a common framework or approach. But then your implementation is just different depending on if it's a team over here of the actually customers that are paying us or whatever it is, it's the customer satisfaction idea. is the thing that stays consistent across time and space. Is that right?

Tiffany Lenz: 23:16

Yeah,

I do. I know, it seems a little bit foreign at first. But if you think about something as general as the golden rule, like treat other people the way you would want to be treated, then it doesn't matter. If someone is defined in the classic definition of customer, meaning they hired me, they pay me they can fire me, in fact, that seems almost like it lacks human intelligence and emotion and feels a bit more transactional. Where if trust is actually relational, conflict is relational. The there's nothing on this pyramid that is transactional, or as simple as one plus one equals two except results, which is the whole, you don't get there through until you've gotten through many other steps. So when I think when I like bare bones, the elements of a relational connection, it would be how do I treat somebody the way I would want to be treated? How do I delight them? How do I Garner their commitment, their even their interest or their belief? Those are all just different words for commitment and trust. So it for me it if I peel it back, the only way I know how to apply a principle as simple as customer service or the golden rule, which exists somewhere in almost every culture is to think about some different group of people, or as you rightly said, think about a customer's as being a fluid definition.

Robert Greiner: 24:48

So in episode nine of our podcast, Seven Deadly leadership sins, the one where we talked about envy, you gave six, a list of six customer satisfaction questions that you've honed and built over time, and the act of these, asking these open ended questions engaging in this discussion helps unlock? how good of a provider of a product, whatever you are to your customer? And are we making you successful? Do you view us as a strategic partner? Do you believe you have access to the best talent to meet your needs? are we helping your boss look good? You feel like we are invested in you? And then what's our pain to value ratio? Right? Like, how difficult are we to work with based on the value we provide? Those are the core ongoing questions you're asking your quote unquote, customer. And the fact that you're calling them a customer implies a level of commitment that's needed to continually earn their business, whether that's their best effort, or the check every month, or whatever.

Tiffany Lenz: 25:48

Yeah,

Robert Greiner: 25:48

Okay, I like that.

Tiffany Lenz: 25:49

Now, obviously, those were written specifically for a more traditional definition of customer. But I would say, at least four out of six, if not five, out of six, or six out of six actually could even they might need to be reframed a little bit, but you put yourself in the position of even being a project team lead for an account team lead. And leading a group of your technical project team could very easily reframe each one of those questions to prove to them that you were committed, that you felt accountable for their success, that you were looking to resolve conflict, like that's paying to value ratio. And all of these are with the goal of building trust. And it's wrapped in rather than me looking at them as I am manager, and they are team. I am servant leader and they are my customer. They're out there successful outcomes, define my success.

Robert Greiner: 26:49

Yeah, this whole pain to value ratio thing is sticking with me. I really feel like I make the people around me successful, but report to me. And that's something that I've really felt like, has gone well, in my career. I don't really assess though, like, what price Do I have to pay to work with me to get that career success? Am I sufficiently difficult to work with? And what are some like going down that line of questioning over time, could bring out some interesting growth areas, and behavior adaptations that you normally wouldn't get just focusing on? Oh, everyone around me their careers growing, they feel relatively well taken care of those kinds of things. Hey how hard Am I to work with,

Tiffany Lenz: 27:34

and even when, obviously, when you're going through difficult things together, that might be fine, it might be necessary, but the value of being transparent about it returns itself 10 fold, when you flip back to this idea of building trust together through transparency through vulnerability, like even the willingness to talk about how hard a situation is to go through versus someone assuming that they are going through a difficult time or you are hard to work with. And you're you either are not aware of it or you don't care.

Robert Greiner: 28:10

Yeah, that's good. Okay, so we're starting with conflict. And on the teams, we think that's probably the best place to start. If you're not sure where to start. If you're seeing things on the team in your organization, like lack of commitment, you have a conflict or trust issue. So figure out what symptoms you're seeing and go down the pyramid from there. If you're not sure where to start, always start with conflict, and use the hierarchy pyramid, the Five Dysfunctions model, just inform one how you communicate the approach and how you're aiming to make things better, and then to how to create an established baseline focus, great hyper focus on that one level of the pyramid and then try to go up from there. I think we've double clicked a little bit on what the Five Dysfunctions model brings in a in an everyday kind of job. We haven't really talked too much about and this is something you pointed out earlier is what if you don't have time, right? What if you're in the middle of a crisis? How do you grow trust, build trust, when you don't have enough time to do it?

Tiffany Lenz: 29:18

For me, I've faced this in pandemic times, but also in just mission critical businesses on fire or delivery is on fire situations. And for me, it is quick wins that actually slice through this pyramid. So what I mean is focusing on commitment, accountability results, and then with each quick win driving down to is that is there a conflict and then using transparency to almost Institute trust. So if I as a leader, help us as a team, produce x result in pretty short order, I am able to rally Here's the transparency around that, do you trust me, and then doing it again. So it's almost like small kind of cycles for me, because sometimes time just is the definer, of how much you can focus on these elements. Or you're maybe thrown in as a brand new leader, because something is on fire, and the previous leader wasn't delivering. So you don't have time to build trust, you're almost asking people to suspend disbelief for a little while until you can show them something. But you can't really show trust and you can't show conflict, what you can show are the the, the other three. So that's why it's not that I forget about them. I am hyper focused on conflict and trust. But what I'm showing to my team is this cycle between commitment accountability results, and then very transparently saying this has addressed x. And it, and I hope it's building some trust in us as a team in that, I'll do what I say I'm going to do type of relationship.

Does that help at all?

Robert Greiner: 31:06

Oh, my gosh, you just, you broke my brain on that one. Okay, in a good way. Alright. So

Tiffany Lenz: 31:12

I figured

Robert Greiner: 31:14

what we're saying, this is a completely different approach, then, when you have time to settle in, we just talked about taking each layer as they come focusing on conflict, you're looking for symptoms, and working down from there, those kinds of thoughts and ideas, what you're saying those if there's no time, then it's an iteration. It's a vertical slice, and narrow vertical slice through the pyramid, instead of building up each foundational layer for structure over time. And the top three, results, accountability, commitment, those are easily more clearly demonstrable. And so you can, as a leader, you can take these quick wins and hit each one of the layers of the pyramid. And you move everything forward a little bit, and you just want rinse and repeat that until you're in a position where you can think a little bit more long term.

Tiffany Lenz: 32:04

That's how I approach it. But I do again, I am hyper as a leader, I might be the only one doing this. But in my own head, I'm hyper focused on conflict and trust. What I'm doing is through my actions, I'm trying to I'm trying to build up the currency to purchase those, essentially, to purchase the right to maybe confront an issue and build trust. But if I'm a new leader, or we are in an extenuating circumstance, where a time crunch, I can't, I can't manifest the bottom too fast enough, you might need to address a large conflict. Okay, so I guess examples are helpful in cases like this, because we're talking about responses to the pandemic. The the conflict itself is the pandemic, that caused a complete a complete chaos between what our plans and commitments were and what we were actually able to do in every way, shape and form. So as a lead, so immediately, there's an erosion of trust. So as a leader, I am going to have to look at the three that are visible and tangible, to start to just to start to rebuild trust with a team or with a group. Now, if we're talking about a project, say delivery, that's on fire that went awry, the system crashed, the clients angry, missed deliverable dates or missed large pieces of function or there was a secure a massive security breach, I would say the macro conflict is understood, the micro conflicts are not. And you can deal with them piece by piece. Trust is certainly broken. But again, time is of the essence. And what you can show is the visibility between commitment, accountability, results, commitment, accountability, results, commitment to kind of ability results in a way that allows you then to go back to this group of people and open a conversation around the rest of the slice. Let's talk about a conflict that we need to resolve. And let's talk about how these actions allowed me to deliver what I committed to allowed me to help you in the way that I said I would help you. So you don't I think sometimes you have to bring people to that conclusion, in times of crisis to show them that you are trustworthy. Transparency is everything. Think Think back to last year, when there was just general fear of business, all economics, fear for health for life and safety. And we're like we're, we're scaling Maslow's Hierarchy up and down constantly all day long. And it was actually the both the leaders and the points in time that leaders were willing to be most transparent, that built trust. If even if you're wrong, just tell me what you're doing. How many times did you hear people asking? Or like asking of the government? Tell me what's going on, just tell me what's going on. I, there's I wish I could remember the clever quote, but there is a quote around when people are left in a vacuum of information, just radio silence, they always assume the worst, they never assume the best. So there. That's right. And those that are, most people are unless you have inherent trust in someone, like maybe your best friend, your wife, right, you might assume that something bad happened, but you don't doubt that person. You see what I'm saying that the in for the most part, we do not trust when we're experiencing silence. And so I think anything at when, when time is of the essence, anything that allows for visibility, transparency, and bits and pieces of communication is always the way to go.

Robert Greiner: 35:52

Yeah, and that is much more under your control. As a leader, as you're talking through this accountability, you can take accountability for a bad outcome. And you can commit to the team to do a certain set of actions in pursuit of avoiding that bad outcome. Again, and you can define success results, collectively, in a team oriented way that shows Hey, this is what I'm going to be pushing towards. And so that, yeah, I see now how focusing on the top three as things to be specific around, and then use that to slice through. The thing, though, and I think the nuance here, which, if you're listening is really important is you have to be intentional about each layer. If you're going to take that approach. You have to show and vocalize that accountability, right? If you gloss over it, it's the equivalent of you ask your customers for feedback, they give you feedback, you don't do anything about it. And then that just hurts you more than not having asked anything in the first place like you have to make send those signals and make this visible in a way that makes sense. Otherwise, you're not going to get credit for it.

Tiffany Lenz: 37:00

Right? You might be worse off, you're hitting I will be as if we did nothing really critical things they're never once in the examples that I'm giving, the leader has to reinforce by example, always, never once in that scenario, am I allowed to take my eye off of the bottom two layers, conflict and trust, like those are my goals, even in a time of crisis, because crisis will happen again, we both know that whether it's hopefully not something as bad as the pandemic, but we will have crises at work, we will have crises in projects, we will have security breaches, we will have all sorts of other issues. So my goal is to keep building trust, even if I'm only showing for a period of time, the top three layers, I have to keep focused on the bottom two. So every single piece is intentional by me as the leader, there's another thing you mentioned there that I thought was really good around. It's the equivalent of receiving customer feedback and doing nothing with it. The one of the biggest things I heard when I was starting to conduct research and form the customer experience those six questions that you alluded to before was when I was talking to people about and these are high paying customers when I was talking to them about whether or not they felt that I was invested in them almost 100% of the time, the answer I heard when it was a lower score. The answer was your company sent me a survey and I filled it out. But no one followed up with me like something so simple as hearing what people are saying with their teammates, or more traditional client or customer and processing it yourself and taking action. But again, not being transparent, not being overly communicative about your intentionality just erodes trust, people do not gravitate toward the positive in silence.

Robert Greiner: 38:54

Yeah, we

have this gate framework we've used for essentially voice of customer type stuff with our clients. It's something we've developed internally. And it's gather it's a loop, right gather feedback, or gather information, analyze, take action, evangelize, GATE, and the we recommend you start at actually tea. Like you don't spend a lot of time gathering because the appetite for getting that's a really big effort, right? What are all of our customers care about, like all the analysis that goes into it? So we just say, Hey, take some action, and then evangelize that action. And you're going to get credit for doing that, whether it was the exact right thing or not. And that quick win will give some appetite to go and maybe do a more comprehensive gather exercise. And so it's one of those things where if you're not sending the signal, just like if you complete work, and you don't report on that work being completed, it's as if it didn't happen. And so that's one of those things like you really have to make sure that you're getting credit at each step of the way, being very intentional, or it's going to work against you. Yeah, I agree. Any other question? thoughts. I have a random question for you. I'm gonna derail everything. Oh, you good. Alright, so we missed national pizza day.

Tiffany Lenz: 40:06

Oh my gosh,

Robert Greiner: 40:07

I'm

looking it up right now. National pizza day was February 9. So last month, and I was gonna ask you what your favorite one say Happy National Pizza Day? Yeah, pizza is amazing. So a month late,

Tiffany Lenz: 40:19

what's your favorite favorite pizza place?

Robert Greiner: 40:22

I'm sorry. Yeah, favorite pizza at your favorite pizza place.

Tiffany Lenz: 40:26

Then, there's this family owned pizza place in my hometown called Bob's pizza. And it's at least 80 years old. Because my parents were going there when they were teenagers. And, and, like, every piece of pizza is square, you buy it by the slice. And there is only one topping it is either with or without pepperoni. That's all. And it is so good. I can't even explain to you. I can't even explain to you. Yeah, the best.

Robert Greiner: 40:54

So what kind of kind of pizza is it like deep dish?

Tiffany Lenz: 40:58

It's like not New York pizza. It's also not deep dish. It's maybe a little bit thicker than pan, but it's essentially pan pizza square. The cheese is perfect. The sauce is perfect. And then they bake it in big giant sheets, like big giant sheets, cut it all in squares. And then at the very end, like before they bag it for you. They either throw on two pieces of pepperoni per piece or not, depending on how many you've ordered with and without,

Robert Greiner: 41:26

oh my god, you've probably offended some people though, with that, like square and big sheet.

Tiffany Lenz: 41:31

I mean, it's an art. And if I could help you franchise it and move one of those to the other side of PA I would do it in a heartbeat. But they are not swinging that way.

Robert Greiner: 41:43

Nice.

When's the last time you had it?

Tiffany Lenz: 41:45

September when I went home back home to help my parents move due to COVID. They moved over. They moved across the state of Pennsylvania. So when will I have it again? Probably never.

Robert Greiner: 41:56

Yeah, who knows? Yeah, there's this Mexican place. frankies, which we love. The enchiladas are amazing. And we haven't been there in over a year. That's very sad. We would go multiple times a month and still cut off completely go. Places. Oh, God. Yeah. Connie Rosa. Have you ever been there? Have you heard of it? I don't know if it's just the Dallas thing or what but it's like Neapolitan type pizza. so thin crust, really hot oven. The center is like a little bit under done, I think is how it's supposed to work. It's a chart on the bottom. It's not in the oven that long at all. And my favorite pizza there is called the Ella. It's a take on, let's call it like a pepperoni pizza. So it uses they use sopressa instead of pepperoni. And tomatoes and basil. And so it's a pretty plain pizza, but it's really good. And so we have that multiple times a month now cuz we didn't try to do like pizza parties on Friday for the kids like well ordered them Domino's or something. And I'll go pick up Connie Rosso. Yeah, apparently during National pizza day, though, is like a two hour wait, and a lot of people sit outside and never got their pizza or anything. So I go in more chill day.

Tiffany Lenz: 43:01

Hey, good question, though. That's so good. If I have to have more of a chain pizza, no, I'm gonna go with toppings. My favorites are ham and pineapple.

Robert Greiner: 43:11

Oh, wow. That's a very new

Tiffany Lenz: 43:15

super,

Robert Greiner: 43:16

super fun thing is like, yeah,

Tiffany Lenz: 43:18

What did you say your yours is?

Robert Greiner: 43:20

So we have one. So my, if I was gonna go more like traditional toppings, it would be something like pepperoni bacon. jalapenos. Yeah, there's one person in my family. So my wife's mom likes Hawaiian. That's what it's called Hawaiian pizza. Yeah, yeah. It's offensive to me.

Tiffany Lenz: 43:38

that's my brother.

Robert Greiner: 43:42

Yeah, there you go. Awesome. Okay, Bob's pizza fans. You probably already know.

Tiffany Lenz: 43:46

It's

amazing.

Robert Greiner: 43:47

Yeah. All right. Hey, thanks for chatting today.

Tiffany Lenz: 43:49

This

was great. Thank

Robert Greiner: 43:50

you right up on time. So yeah, went into direction I wasn't expecting. So

I think the timing thing was really interesting thing.

Tiffany Lenz: 43:56

Thanks. I hadn't really articulated it like that until now. So yeah, thank you.

I like it.

Robert Greiner: 44:03

Awesome. But hey, so next episode is creating rules of engagement to maximize trust, so we're gonna get right into those.

Tiffany Lenz: 44:11

Sounds good news. Sounds good.

Take care.

Robert Greiner: 44:14

Alright. Have a great week. Bye.