Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Why Middle Management Really Matters with Jeff Sigel

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 276

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Jeff Sigel is an author, coach, and consultant who is passionate about creating better work environments and more fulfilling careers for middle managers everywhere. After over 20 years of corporate experience at Nabisco, The Hershey Company, grocery retailer Ahold, and the restaurant company Cracker Barrel, Jeff has shifted his focus to coaching mid-level leaders and supporting companies looking to empower their middle management teams. He is currently a consultant and coach focused on turning strategy into action by developing middle management excellence. His book, "The Middle Matters: A Toolkit for Middle Managers" was published in June 2024.

A Few (Awesome) Quotes From This Episode

  • “I spent a lot of years in middle management doing stuff wrong.”
  • "These are the hardest skills that we actually have to learn to do our jobs—the so-called ‘soft skills.’"
  • "The goal of leadership is to create the conditions where you trust your team to function at a high level even when you are not there.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.


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Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.

Scott Allen  0:00 

Okay, everybody, welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thanks so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have Jeff Sigel. He is an author, coach, and consultant who is passionate about creating work environments and more fulfilling careers for middle managers everywhere. After over 20 years of corporate experience at Nabisco, The Hershey Company, grocery retailer Ahold, and the restaurant company Cracker Barrel, Jeff has shifted his focus to coaching mid-level leaders and supporting companies looking to empower their middle management teams. He is currently a consultant and coach focused on turning strategy into action by developing middle management excellence. His book, "The Middle Matters: A Toolkit for Middle Managers" was published in June 2024. Jeff, thank you so much for being here. I really, really appreciate your time. I'm excited for this conversation. Middle managers, I spend a lot of time with middle managers, and yes, they are in the middle. So, the fact that we have someone who is helping us make sense of this space, I'm so excited for this dialog. Before we jump in, what do people need to know about you? Is there anything not in your bio that listeners might be interested in?

 

Jeff Sigel  1:08 

I feel like the bio captures most of what I've done, but I guess I'll talk a little bit about who I am and how I ended up writing a book about middle management, probably almost anyone. Like, I started out my career as a marketer. And I think I was pretty good at it, and eventually got promoted. And then spent something like 20 years in middle management roles. What I discovered, and I'm sure most people discover, is, you get trained to be a marketer, an accountant, an engineer or whatever. And then suddenly people are like, “Well, you're good at this. You probably can lead people doing this.” And so, they promote you, and you're like, “I don't know how to do some of this stuff, but nobody's telling me so it must be easy.” And so, there's a lot of guesswork and so forth. So, your question was something about me, is I spent a lot of years in middle management doing stuff wrong. I thought I would write a book about the things that I messed up and learned from, that's my story. I was a marketer for many years, but I also was a middle manager for equally long.

 

Scott Allen  2:05 

Yes. Every day. We've got the phlebotomist who takes blood like a champion and is a good person, good human, shows up on time, kind, courteous. And let's make them the leader of the phlebotomists, maybe the nurse manager. Or, in automotives, we have that great tech who can fix a Lamborghini like a champ, is a good soul, good human being. And now, let's make them in charge of the others. And so, we see this across industry; whether it's construction, finance, healthcare, it doesn't matter. It happens. And the tragedy, at times, let's see if I can say this correctly, Jeff, I have a PhD in leadership. I know a lot about leadership and management skills. And I've taught that for 20 years, studied it for 20 years. It's like looking at me and saying, “Hey, Scott, go do phlebotomy now, if you would.” (Laughs)

 

Jeff Sigel  2:55 

Exactly. You can't know how to do something without being trained. And I often tell people I hate the term soft skills, although I use it all the time because it's the term that people know what it is. These are the hardest skills that we actually have to learn to do our jobs are those quote-unquote “soft skills.” Like, how do I manage up? And it's interesting, by the way, it's not only that we call them soft skills, but we almost act like there's something wrong with these skills. Like, how do I manage up? How do I manage politics? How do I lead my team? Are all important things, and yet, at least two of those three people are like, “Man, politics are bad.” Okay. I always tell people, I'm like, “I think we've had politics in business since the days of trying to figure out who gets the choicest parts of the wooly mammoth in the cave.” There's always been politics. And to pretend they don't exist, you're just flying in the face of reality. Those things exist, we need to learn how to manage them. The same thing like managing up. Oh, that sounds like a terrible thing to do. It's not that managing how you come across to your leader, how you support your leader, is a bad thing, it's just we've sort of turned it into this kind of negative thing. And I'm guessing you're familiar with Brown's work, but she talks about this idea of shame. This feeling of, “I can't say anything about something because, if I do, I'm going to look weak, or wrong, or not... And I actually think that, because we often put people into these manager role after being really good at doing something, accounting or whatever it is, then we put them in a leader role, a manager role, we don't tell them how to do the managing up, the leading the team, the influencing others. We don't tell them how to do any of that, and their assumption is, therefore, it must be easy. And the fact that I am struggling with it means that there is something wrong with me, which is exactly what Brene Brown would talk about as shame. In fact, I think that there's, at least, a portion of what we call imposter syndrome that is due to the fact that we don't train people how to do their jobs or these other parts of their jobs. So, I don't know what your take is on that, but that's how I think about this challenge of being in the middle, is we don't train people because we act like it's easy and it's not.

 

Scott Allen  5:07 

Okay. So, yes, we are singing from the same hymnal. I was with an architecture firm, it may have been about six months ago. And I was trying to make a point, but these are individuals who are leading studios, and essentially, I said, “Okay, so you were trained as an architect, great, awesome. Or as a designer, awesome, cool. You have all that expertise. Let's now list what you're required to do as a leader.” And whether that was difficult conversations, influencing clients, influencing team members, managing up, as you said. Difficult conversations, performance management, hiring, firing. We just go down the list, and we came up with this page-long list of all of these things that they have never been trained on. And so, I have great respect for that organization because they're at least trying to prepare… But in some of these spaces, also, Jeff, what's fascinating is, by God, we're going to make sure that tech, or that automotive tech is certified in that space. That master carpenter is, in fact, a master carpenter. And boy, that phlebotomist, they're going to be certified and trained. And then we put them in this position of authority, and we wonder why two thirds of human beings are going to work and not engaged, according to Gallup. And we wonder why some of our cultures are not where we want them to be. We have individuals, and, to your point, which I love, yeah, they have imposter syndrome because we've set them up to have imposter syndrome. They're afraid to say, “I don't know.” And, oh, man.

 

Jeff Sigel  6:41 

Isn't it interesting, by the way, that the narrative that you often hear about imposter syndrome is literally to sort of blame the victim. And basically say, “The problem is you lack confidence.” It's like, “No, they don't lack confidence. They lack training.” “I don't know how to do this stuff because nobody has taught me.” And it's just fascinating how much we focus on the technical skills. I keep coming across this idea -- and we could have a whole episode about this, I won't go down this rabbit hole too far -- but I keep coming across this idea of the fact that everything in business fundamentally boils down to trust. It literally says, “Trust on our money.” Everything boils down to trust. “Does my boss trust me to get the work done? Does my boss trust that…” I was having a conversation with somebody about this, “Does my boss trust that I'm not going to quit if I don't do something?” All those kinds of things about trust. “Doesn't my boss trust me?” And if they don't, we tend to go, “Oh.”We get mad. My boss is annoying, I hate my boss. No, actually, what you should do is say, “What do I need to do to create the conditions where my boss trusts me?” It works in the other way as well. “Does my team trust me?” “Does my team trust that I am in this for them, not in it for me?” Of course, I'm in it for me. I want to get results, but does my team feel like I'm not just asking them to do stuff and getting them to… Do they trust me? And fundamentally, that's true when you're dealing with your peers as well. “Do my peers trust?” “Do they trust that I'm going to help them with their projects, and therefore they're going to help me with my projects?” I think training people on how to create the conditions for trust is really important, and we often skip that step. I really believe that trust is incredibly central to all of the relationships that we have, whether it's the relationship with your manager, the relationship with your team, relationship with your peers. And that, fundamentally, we don't spend enough time training people how to create the conditions for trust.

 

Scott Allen  8:49 

Exactly. And I think, for me also, just even the acknowledgement. Let's say I've been promoted to a nurse manager because I was an incredible phlebotomist, does my VP look at me and say, “There's no way you can possibly understand everything. Never hesitate to reach out to me, ask questions if you need training on finances, if you need training on difficult conversations. We understand that we are now asking of you this long list of things you've never been exposed to, and we need you to be skilled. So we're here to support you. Don't hesitate to ask.” So, trust is built in that way, in a really, really nice way. But, yes, if that person now pretends that they get it, that they understand, that they know how to motivate and inspire a group of people, or lead a meeting, or whatever, we could just go down the list, again, we're setting them up to fail, especially if they feel like they have to be skilled in all of these new things. And I think, in any human relationship, trust is foundational. If I don't trust you, Jeff, I keep you at arm's length, and I don't give of myself wholly because I don't trust you. So, I think, yes, that is baseline needed, a necessity. And as soon as I don't have that with my team, or my supervisor, we're only going to get so far. You've seen that in corporate life. You've seen it all over the place.

 

Jeff Sigel  10:09 

Yeah. Absolutely. And I'll take it a step further, which is to say, I know when I do workshops, I have this definition that I give them. I say, “The goal of leadership is to create the conditions where you trust your team to function at a high level even when you are not there.” That is not, by the way, saying, “Hey, they have to work at a high level when I'm not there in order for me to trust them.” It is putting the burden on the leader to say, “You have to create the conditions where you trust them.” And what does that mean? That means if they don't know how to do something, you train them. If they're confused about something, you help them understand. If they don't agree with something, you listen to them and try and understand why they're not agreeing, and give them at least as much information as you can to try and help them understand why. And those are the conditions for trust. I was talking recently with somebody, and they asked me a question about someone on their team who had been put on a performance improvement plan. And I think you know as well as I do, is that by the time somebody's on a performance improvement plan, you're toast. This is just checking the boxes, and whatever. And, by the way, often people do sort of survive these performance plans because they check a bunch of boxes, and then they go straight back to the same problem that existed before. Because, fundamentally, at some point, to get to a PIP, trust was so eroded the manager didn't trust the person was doing their job, but didn't say anything about it. They didn't tell them. They just let it, “Oh, this person's terrible. This person doesn't do their job. They don't know how to do anything.” And so, they lose all trust in that person, which is why, by the time you get to a PIP, it's like, “This person probably just needs to go.” Not because they are not capable of improving, but because the manager has lost trust. “I don't believe that this person can do this.” And I put it back on the person I was talking to, it was like, “We look at a PIP typically as a problem with the employee, but it is really a problem with the leader. They did not create the conditions where they could trust their team member, and now they're sort of reaping the benefits. And unfortunately for the person who is about to lose their job is they're the one that suffer from this.” In fact, what I said to this person is, “I think you would be better off in this PIP saying to this person…” It'll be fascinating to hear your take on this because I think sometimes I get gas when I say this is, “I would have said to that person, ‘hey, I'm going to put you on this 90 day performance plan. I cannot guarantee you that at the end of this performance plan you will have improved enough to stay in this job. What I can guarantee you is that you will be better off and better equipped to be great at whatever your next job is, whether it's this one or the next one.’” And some people are like, “What? That's like a terrible thing to say.” I'm like, “No, but at least now I've made this PIP not so transactional.” I'm like, “How are we going to make this about you and what you can get out of it?” So, I’d be fascinated about your reaction to that approach.

 

Scott Allen  13:08 

Time and time again, I'm really amazed at a couple of things in organizational life. Number one, I don't know that at times, as a manager or a leader is bringing someone into a new position of authority where they're leading a team, they have a clear sense of the 17 or 20 things that this person's going to have to do as a leader that's different from what we asked them before. They don't have that list. Of course, there's a bunch of things bumbling around in their head, but there's a lot of assumptions that's not transparent. It's not clear. It's not on a piece of paper. It's like this hidden to-do list. “Oh, you need to make sure that Jimmy is skilled at building high-functioning teams.” Not on the list. And so, as a result, there's these 20 or 30 things that, again, in any other job, are just left to chance. And hopefully, and I imagine, Jimmy's good at, maybe, let's go, 17 or 18 of them. Fair at maybe 6 of them. Avoids conflict like the plague and struggles to hold people accountable because they don't like having difficult conversations. So, that's Jimmy's kryptonite. And again, it takes us six or eight months to figure that out, and we haven’t proactively... So, even the fact that we're not clear on the front end, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Because if it was phlebotomy or sales or carpentry or automotive, we have the checklist. We know exactly what we need. Otherwise, I will kill people. They will drive their car away from my dealership and they'll die because we haven't been explicit about my skill and that checklist of what I need to be able to do. So, I'm just amazed that we continue to do it and put people in these positions. I thought your phrasing was just fine, for sure. I want to go back six steps and say, “Why are we even in this position?” Wow.

 

Jeff Sigel  15:02 

It's really interesting. I was talking with somebody. I've been doing a workshop for a company, and was talking to this person and they were saying there was sort of some issues with one of their people. And I basically said, “Have you thought about what is it the person's manager's gaps are that led to this?” As opposed to saying, “How dare this person do this thing?” It was like, “How do you look at the manager's role and say, ‘What are they missing?’ or ‘What are they not understanding?’” And I'd like to build on what you were talking about, this list of things that people need to know how to do. I will say just taking one step back before the list was, and this is how my book is structured, is this idea that people don't understand what their role is. They don't even have a mental framework for it. They believe, “I was a good doer, and now I've been promoted to do things through others,” which is not leadership. That is just… I don't know, there's lots of names for it. I don't know if you're a Liz Wiseman fan, she calls it one brain with many hands, whatever it is. I call it marionetting, whatever. Doing through others is not how you lead. So, in the book, I talk about this idea of the framework for a middle manager has to recognize that the middle manager has three roles. You are a doer, a leader, and an influencer, Doer being your relationship with your boss; leader being the relationship with your team; and influencer being your relationship, essentially, with everyone else. And so, part of the reason that I liked this framework and built the book around this framework is because I absolutely agree with you. There's probably 20,30, skills, whatever, that people need, but I'm going to hang these tools off of this framework and say, “Here are the doer skills that you need.” “Here are the leader skills that you need.” “Here are the influencer skills that you need.” So that you understand, as a middle manager, that this isn't just, “Hey, here's 100 different things that you now need to know how to do,” it's like, “No, you need to learn how to be a good doer, you need to learn how to be a good leader, and you need to learn how to be a good influencer. And here's some tools that you can use.” And I often think about it as a toolkit, in part, because I'm not telling you that you have to do all of these things all the time, I'm just equipping you with the ability to be able to react to different situations in different ways, which, by the way, is the purpose of training people. There's this great quote, I think it's a Navy SEAL quote about people do not rise to the occasion, they sink to the level of their training. Of course, I’ve never been in the military, but I can imagine, if you are in the kind of situation that a Navy SEAL would be in, are going to do what you've been trained to do because the adrenaline and the craziness and the chaos. You don't have time to be all contemplative and whatever, but the same thing in a maybe a less intense way, is true of managers. There's constantly fire-fighting situations going on, whatever. And if you haven't been trained to do… Or you haven’t been trained in lots of different techniques, what you're going to do is essentially sync to whatever comes naturally to you. And this is why you end up with… You hear about people who are micromanagers, or who are, whatever, dominant style leaders or whatever. And yet, I often talk to HR folks, and they say the best leadership tool that we have out there is situational leadership, which, when you think about it is sort of obvious. Different leadership styles are needed for different situations. But if you only know one leadership style, “I tell people what to do,” then you will always use that. Back to the toolkit, it's basically, you're sort of proverbial, when you're a hammer, everything's in [Inaudible 18:45] And that's how a lot of folks end up leading, is they're like, “Well, this worked one time, so I'm going to just keep doing it.”

 

Scott Allen  18:53 

Yes. Let's go a little bit deeper on each one of these areas. So, we've got doer, leader, influencer. In the time that we have left, I want you to give listeners a little bit of a taste of each one of these areas. So, what's something you'd like to elevate under doer? What's something you'd like to elevate under leader? And, of course, for listeners, there's going to be links in the show notes, and we are not going through the whole book, but I just want people to have a sense of how you're thinking about these three. I love the framing, it's awesome. Anything we can do to better prepare people to serve in these really challenging roles, I'm in, because I think it's not easy, and they've entered the arena, and how do we arm them with some of these skills to, ultimately, create a better environment for the team and get to what you said, build a level of trust. And if we can achieve that, we're winning. So, give us a little bit on each one of these. 

 

Jeff Sigel  19:46 

First thing I'll say is I often tell people, “You have to understand what kind of problem you have when you're thinking about doer, leader, and influencer.” And so, I often ask people, if you have a micromanaging boss, what kind of problem do you have? And they say, “I have a leader problem.” And I'm like, “No, your leader has a leader problem. You have a doer problem.” Because you're the doer, you can't change the way your boss leads, you can only change the way you show up and work for your boss. To me, the real key to the doer role is this idea that the entire purpose of your role as a doer is to create credibility with your boss. That they believe that you are going to get your job done and you're going to do it well. And the more you create that credibility, the more independence you get. And, for example, if you have a micromanaging boss, I often tell people like, “How do you deal with a micromanaging boss?” And I said, “The problem is they don't trust you to do it at the same level that they would do it.” And I always tell people, “That doesn't mean you're not trustworthy, it just means your boss doesn't trust you. So your job is to figure out how do I create trust with my boss?” So that's why I say that the doer role is all about credibility. The leader role, I sort of mentioned that idea before. This idea that I am trying to create the conditions where I can trust my team to get the work done at a high level, even when I'm not there. And so, what I always talk about in the book about the leader role is that the leader role is about creating capacity with your team. And I actually tell a story in the book about a woman that worked for me who went on this very long vacation and her team functioned perfectly when she wasn't there, even in the middle of a crisis. And when she came back, she's like, “How did it go?” And I'm like, “Listen, there were lots of challenges but your team was on top of it.” And I said, “That is the sign of a good leader. They are able to function at a high level even when you're not there.”

 

Scott Allen  21:36 

Love it. Yes. I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs and individuals who, literally, if I say to them, “Can you be gone for a week and this thing still hums?” They say, “No, I can't.” “Can you be gone for two weeks?” “No, I can't.” So, I always just say, I make the comment… And I want to write a book called The Three Month Rule. Maybe we write this together. And it's based on no research or data whatsoever, but I think you've done a good job of leading if you can leave for a week, if you can leave for two weeks, if you can leave for a month, and the place hums along with people who are not simply complying, but truly committed. Could you leave for a month and a half and this place hums along? That means that you have then built the bench. You've actually elevated the capacity of the system. So, we are on the same page, for sure, on that.

 

Jeff Sigel  22:23 

Absolutely. And it was interesting because, for obvious reasons, again, I keep talking about military examples with no experience about it, but one of the things that's really interesting about leadership in the military is you have to train people to function if the boss isn't there for obvious reasons. So, I just think some really interesting sort of lessons to learn there for the business world, but creating those conditions. Why do you create those conditions? Because that then allows you as the leader to level up and spend more time creating better conditions so that you can do more. Otherwise, what happens is everybody is basically micromanaging everything, and you get a lot less done. So, the influencer role, the way I talk about the influencer role is that it is all about getting commitment from the people around you. And the thing that I often point to, if I sort of distill it down, is this fundamental idea that everyone you interact with, everyone you talk to, everyone you work with is the hero of their own story. And so that you as an influencer have to recognize that you can only take one of two possible roles in their movie, you can either be a supporting character or you can be a villain. And if you are dealing with somebody who is difficult to deal with, for example, that doesn't work for you, whatever, you have to get into their head and say, “What can I do that's going to help them be the hero here?” And that's, I believe, foundational to this idea of influence. And so, I talk about that, and all the sort of things that kind of go with that idea throughout the book. And then, ultimately, it's sort of that idea of, if you create this idea of doer and credibility, leader and capacity, and influencer and commitment, sort of if you can do all of those things really well, that's when you're functioning at a really high level of leadership in a middle management role that is not just about how you manage the people that work for you, but how you, essentially, manage your role in the organization.

 

Scott Allen  24:22 

Mmm. Well, I love the framing. I really, really do. I think it's helping people make sense of what's swirling on around them. It's definitely one perspective that's really important. What else do listeners need to know about the book? Is there anything else that you want to highlight that you feel is just a nice contribution to the conversation?

 

Jeff Sigel  24:42 

I guess what I'll say is it's been really interesting that, as I've talked to a lot of people who have now read the book and shared their thoughts and so forth, and I would say I get two very consistent pieces of feedback from people. The first one is from people who have been in their careers a little bit longer, like myself, I get, “This is the book I wish I had 20 years ago.” So, there's this view of, “Hey, there's a lot of stuff…” And what they often tell me is… Because the book is all stories, it's mostly stories of me messing up and figuring out, learning something. But it's all stories, so it's very relatable. And a lot of people tell me they're reading the book, like, “Oh yeah, that's what I should have done differently in that situation.” And what I will tell you is funny is that many, many times, because I read this book probably a million times while I was editing it, and whatever, is many times I would read my own book and have that same reaction. I would suddenly have this realization of, “Oh, that's what I did wrong there.” And a totally different story than what I was telling it and I'm thinking, “Huh, I still have a lot.” It's sort of a constant learning effort that we are never perfect leaders. We will always be able to become better at leading. The other reaction I get is from more junior folks who are in these roles, they've just been promoted, or they've been doing this for a couple of years. They feel completely lost. Nobody's supporting them. They feel very squeezed in the middle because their boss tell them what to do, and their team kind of ready to revolt, and whatever it is. And what they've said to me is, “When I read your book, I felt like I wasn't alone.” And this idea that we talked about earlier in our discussion about imposter syndrome, and whatever, they don't call it that, but that feeling of, “I'm alone in this. Nobody else is having these problems. Everyone else is good at this, I am not good at this.” I think there was a lot of value in giving people the sense of, “Hey, everybody struggles with this stuff, and even more so because they don't actually train you how to do it. So, don't feel bad about yourself as you are learning these things, just continually look to become better, seek education, or whatever.” And so, I think those two things. This sense of, “Hey, these are the things that I learned along the way, and you are not alone because you will also probably have to learn them the painful way even though I wrote… Here's my book. At least we can try to give you some stuff to work with.” But I think those are the things that I would add to the discussion, is seek out. I read leadership books all the time, and I learn something from every single one of them because everybody has an interesting perspective. Everybody has something to add to this conversation. So, anyway,I think that's what I would add.

 

Scott Allen  27:36 

I think that the lifelong learning is so incredibly critical. And I loved your phrasing of, “Look, I'm constantly reading.” Whether it's Brene Brown. You were giving some military examples. I recently finished ‘Dichotomy of Leadership,’ Jocko Willink. And again, that's an interesting perspective. And so, there's so much to consume, so much we can take in; whether it's a podcast, a short podcast, a newsletter, an audio book, whatever it is, is a way of being. Are you in a continuous state of learning? Because there just is. You're going to bump into situations, whether it's leading through a pandemic, generational differences, work from home, you're going to bump into things that no one's ever experienced, that's living, at least, and you're going to have to navigate that. And it's not easy work. It's incredibly difficult work.

 

Jeff Sigel  28:31 

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's interesting; that whole point about learning. One of the things that I've come to after I wrote the book was this real appreciation of what I call the learner mindset, as opposed to the achiever mindset. Many of us, myself included, have grown up having this view of I am the sum of my achievements. And now, what I often tell people is, when you believe that your degrees, your job titles, and whatever, you're essentially focusing on the punctuation and missing the whole sentence. You are missing the fact that you got where you were, not because you got a degree, but because you are capable of learning tremendous things. So, how do you stop focusing on that next title, or whatever? I was talking to this former director [Inaudible 29:19] of mine a couple months ago, and he said to me… I was congratulating him because he had just gotten promoted to director, and he said, “Yeah, I told my wife, ‘Hey, I just got promoted today,’ and she's like, ‘That's awesome. How long before you start stressing about getting to VP?’” I was like, “Exactly.” Actually, we should stop worrying about how do we get that next punctuation -- because it's very unsatisfying, the moment you get it, you are on to the next thing -- and really focus on, “What am I learning, and how do I learn?” And interestingly, I've come up with these three questions that I'll share with you that I think could change an entire culture. Questions are related to that doer, leader, influencer framework. The first question is, if you're talking with your team, talking to people, ask them, “What did you learn?” The second one is to ask them, assuming they have people that report to them as well, is, “How did you grow your team?” And the third one is to ask, “Who did you help?” And my view is, if you ask those questions every week in a one-on-one, or the CEO asked their executive team those questions every week in an executive team meeting, that you can be sure that people will show up with an example of something they learned this week, or how they helped their team grow this week, or somebody else they helped somewhere else in the organization. Because you're asking them, they know they're going to get asked the question so they better not show up with nothing. And that's why I say, “I actually think you could actually really change a culture by getting them into that mindset of ‘I'm always learning and I am expected to learn.’”

 

Scott Allen  30:53 

Really enjoyed those three questions. And I think I have another book in mind, The Three Month Rule, but then the other book is just called The Hidden Task List. There's so many things that are on that hidden task list, like building relationships in the team, accentuating the good in the team, that easily, A) Never get onto the task list because it's not the stuff. If we miss opportunities to highlight the good, if we miss opportunities to help people reflect and help make sense, then I think we're missing those opportunities. And we're missing, in that case, with these three questions, opportunities to grow, opportunities to make connections that maybe we wouldn't have in just a massive flow of the day of organizational life. Doesn't need to take long. Literally, that question takes three seconds to say, and ask people to check in. You don't even have to have a conversation, “I want you to think about this, how did you help people grow this week?” And asking that question can fundamentally transform. I think, sometimes, in this time-starved environment, people think, “Oh, we don't have time to slow down and reflect.” No, make it a micro. 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds, “These are what I want you to check in with,” and we can chip away at some of that. So, Jeff, thank you so much. As we begin to wind down our time, everybody, ‘The Middle Matters.’ And just love Jeff's framing of this ‘A Toolkit for Middle Managers.’ Links are in the show notes so that you can click there and go ahead and purchase this book. Definitely worth a read. Again, how do we better prepare people to serve in these really challenging roles? As you were speaking, I had an image of me walking into a Starbucks and them just saying, “You're a good guy. You know a lot about leadership. Why don't you go be a barista?”

 

Jeff Sigel  32:39 

Well, and it's funny too because I often say to people, like, “I could not have written the book that I wrote if I had not actually been put into a role where I had to lead people that did things that I did not know how to do. Actually turning that whole idea on its head. Like, we put people in leadership roles because they know how to do the thing that they know how to do; accounting, whatever. But I would argue that it wasn't really until I was running… I had all kinds of crazy stuff reporting to me, like marketing, home office, facilities, data, analytics, whatever. Marketing, I know how to do. The rest, I don't know anything about HVAC systems, but I know how to coach somebody who is leading a team that deals with that stuff. And because I didn't know how to do her job, I basically stopped trying to help her do her job which is where you start to move into leadership. And so, people often say, “Oh, I don't think I could lead this function because I don't know what these people do.” And I'm like, “Actually, you will become a better leader if you stop trying to understand exactly what they do and start helping them learn, grow, and collaborate.”

 

Scott Allen  33:44 

Okay. So, I always close out the conversation by asking what you've been listening to, streaming, reading. What's caught your attention? It may have something to do with what we've just discussed, it may have nothing to do with what we've just discussed. What's caught your attention recently, Jeff?

 

Jeff Sigel  33:59 

So, I'm going to actually plug a book that I just recently read by another new author. Her name is Elizabeth Letardo, and she wrote a book called ‘Leading Yourself’ that was absolutely terrific. Really loved it. And, in particular, I loved this concept that she talks about. She talks about confirmation bias, recency bias, frequency bias. This idea that when you see a red car, or when you buy a red car, you suddenly see red cars everywhere. And she sort of talks about that in the sense of, like, when you are in the work world, if you are sort of attuned to seeing everything through a negative lens because, I don't know, your parents hated their work, or you've been told work is terrible, whatever, you will start seeing negative stuff everywhere. And it's only when you sort of take the mindset of, “Wait a second, this isn't terrible,” that you actually start to see there's a lot of positive going on. And then you start to sort of say, “Okay, what can I do to change and move things in the direction that make this even better?” And so, that idea of personal leadership, obviously, is really valuable. But I found her book terrific, so I will plug that as a fellow recent author.

 

Scott Allen  35:11 

Awesome. Jeff, I will put that in the show notes. And, yes, leading self, another critical dimension to this conversation. And that self-awareness, that personal growth domain, that learning as a way of being to continually stay in a place of curiosity and growth. Wow. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for putting this book out into the world. Listeners, there's a whole bunch of links in the show notes. Check those out. And sir, happy adventures. Thanks for doing what you're doing. 

 

Jeff Sigel  35:45 

Thank you, and thanks for having me alone. This has been great. 

 

Scott Allen  35:46 

Okay. Loved that conversation. Loved the work that Jeff is doing, helping people in the middle be more successful. Middle managers, what are we doing to prepare them to be successful in their new role that has a lot of new aspects to that role? Negotiation, conflict, inspiration, problem solving, leadership styles, followership styles, building teams, designing culture, recognizing others. Just a couple of those new parts of their role. So, Jeff, thank you so much. The practical wisdom for me is, are you a lifelong learner? Because that's a lot of new stuff to learn. So, have a great day, everyone. Take care. Be well.

 

 

[End Of Recording]