Remote But Not Distant Transcript

More Elephant Intro

[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: Welcome to the latest edition of the More Elephant podcast, where we look to listen, learn, and live better. I'm excited for today's guest, Melissa Romo.

We're going to talk about her latest book, Your Resource is Human, and how empathetic leadership can help remote teams rise above.

And I think this is particularly important in a series of conversations we're having about the changing nature of work. We've just come through the pandemic. As Melissa reminds me in many conversations, she's been a leader of remote and hybrid teams for many years. We're going to get into a conversation about how Melissa felt it was the right time to write this book and what it can teach us as leaders and employees about the new way of working that is not going away and will continue to evolve post-pandemic.

So Melissa, welcome. Thrilled you're here.

[00:01:36] Melissa Romo: Thank you, Jason, for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

[00:01:39] Jason Rudman: Great. So I like to start before we get into the meat of the book and why you wrote the book and your More Elephant moment, but for those in the audience that may not know you, if you would just give them the synopsis of the incomparable, as I like to say, Melissa Romo.

[00:01:56] Melissa Romo: I'll do my best. I'm Melissa Romo and I am a marketing, advertising, and marketing executive. I've been in the field my whole career for almost 30 years now. I started on the agency side doing fast-moving advertising for Procter and Gamble. And then, I had a little stint in business school and flipped to the client side, where I was at American Express. And after that, I went into software in the SaaS world and that's where I am now.

So, I've always been a marketer. I've always been about communications and about connecting with the audience, empathizing with the audience. In fact, and I've built teams during my whole career and more recently, over the last 10 to 15 years built global teams. So, people are located in different offices all around the world, but still reporting to me.

And it really helped me develop the muscle of how to connect to a person, even though there could be thousands of miles from me. And it turned out that that skill really mattered when remote work became so prevalent.

[00:03:06] Jason Rudman: And again, just to double-click on that - remote work is not a new thing, right? I feel as though in the pandemic, we will kind of woke up and said, “Oh my goodness, we've got to do remote and hybrid work.” It's been around for as long as I think you and I have had a professional career.

And I also think that writing a book is a quintessential More Elephant moment. You're listening, observing, and then have the impetus to put pen to paper and write down your thoughts and create what I think is a wonderful, wonderful guide for this moment that we find ourselves in, for leaders.

Not everybody, I think, wants to, has the impetus to write the book. What was your More Elephant moment that said, “This is the moment I can be helpful, I can be resourceful to others?”

[00:03:55] Melissa Romo: Yeah, well, it's been said that we teach or we write what we most need to read or learn. And that was really the case for me with this book.

There were, and there are, a lot of books about remote work that help you with schedules, and technology, and norms around meetings and managing people remotely.

But those were not the things that were hard for me. Like, I know how to use Slack, right? I know how to use it, so those were not the things that were hard for me. The hard thing for me as a remote leader and a remote worker was feeling connected, feeling like I belong, feeling like I have enough information to do my job and also that people know what I'm doing and, you know, how do I manage my reputation from such a distance.

So all of the things related to, you know, managing one's own brand and building one's own career and feeling part of a system and part of a company. Those things are very hard to do when you're remote, and I was struggling with them, and I couldn't find a book to help me with that. And so I wrote it.

[00:05:07] Jason Rudman: I love, I love that. I love that. I mean, can't find it, figure it out. That's design thinking on steroids: prototype it and then try it out. And I think the response to the book validates, clearly, you've created something that's incredibly useful.

At its core. I think what you're talking about is that emotions have a vital place in the workplace. I think for so long, I remember when I started my career, I felt I couldn't show up as this fully-formed emotional, you know, vulnerable, dare I say, authentic person, let alone as a leader, relate to people in a, in a humanistic kind of way.

Is that, is that fair that, you know, again, you're, you're really preaching that we're emotional creatures and we shouldn't shy away from bringing that to the workplace?

[00:05:57] Melissa Romo: We shouldn't, and I have to say I was, I was highly influenced when it comes to emotions in the workplace, highly influenced by a woman named Sigal Barsade, who was my professor at the Yale School of Management, in 2000-2003.

She was a professor of organizational behavior at Yale, then she went to Wharton, and she studied two phenomena around emotions in the workplace that she literally was able to prove the business impact of sharing and showing emotions, which I think is really profound because we tend to think emotions don't matter and emotions don't have a business impact, but she found that they did.

And she studied two concepts very deeply. One was something called emotional contagion, and another is something called companionate love. And, the ‘companionate love’ work that she did was really interesting because she went into even typically male environments like engineering, she went into a firehouse, she went into different places that are even typically very male.

And, what she found is that where there are expressions of companionate love, and companionate love is feeling the companionship of someone; it isn't a sexual love or romantic love, but it's the companionship of being with someone, especially being with someone over a repeated basis, you know, spending a lot of time together. You feel companionate love. You should feel companionate love.

And so she [Sigal] found that where that was expressed and that was allowed to exist between people in these organizations, there were better work outcomes, better business outcomes.

For example, there was higher accountability where people felt a companionate love to each other. Higher accountability of the work if they felt loved and they could love in that way in the office. And then a number of dimensions related to business performance, they're better, when we're in an environment where we can express companionship and companionate love, and it's expressed back to us. So, I was highly influenced by her research, and as her student, especially, she was someone whose teaching just stayed with me after I left Yale.

And I actually looked her up when I started writing this book in 2022, and believe it or not, when I Googled her, she had died a matter of days before my Google search. I was completely stunned. She had a brain tumor and had died, I think she was 56; she was in her mid-fifties.

And I think what's really a shame is that what she was an expert in and what she studied is so needed right now. It is so needed, and her data around the business impact of emotions is so needed right now, and we don't have her anymore.

So, I dedicated the book to her, and I referenced some of her research in the book. And if people don't believe it, I would just encourage them to look at her research, because she proved that not only do we need to accept that emotions are part of the work environment, I mean, she preached that a lot, but she proved that if you did accept them, you're going to get better business outcomes.

Like, why would we not want that, right?

[00:09:15] Jason Rudman: Short answer is…and yet here we are, right?

Saying that we actually need more of that. I think, you know, we'll come back to that a little bit later. You and I talked about this concept of, as we've elevated our professional careers, I think it gets more and more lonely.

The fight or flight muscle comes in. And, I think that that is a symptom of organizations or structures that don't allow for an emotional context in the work or that the emotional context from a performance management perspective can sometimes be misread. And therefore, the cues are say, uh, are suggested that you should not show emotion at work.

I know you've got five blueprints that I think we're going to get into, but if we, if we take a step back, you talk about five emotional pitfalls in the book. We're going to give a little bit of a TLDR moment here: Top line didn't read. Five emotional pitfalls that are particularly prevalent in all of the research and all of the conversations that you have as it relates to managing and or being on a remote team.

[00:10:19] Melissa Romo: Right. So, the book is organized around something that I call ‘The Remote Leadership Wheel.’ And on the outside of the wheel, there are five pitfalls. And those are the first five chapters. And, on the inside of the wheel are five empathy mindsets that make for a positive and powerful remote or distributed team.

And I want to emphasize, by the way, Jason, that this isn't just a book for people working at home. This applies if you are a manager working in office A and you have people reporting to you in offices B, C, D, E, F, all over the world, everyone in an office, so there's no remote work at all; but nevertheless, you're not together, right?

And so it's how do you connect when you're not together? So..

[00:11:06] Jason Rudman: I think that's a key if you can just double-click on that. Your definition of remote, which I think is really, really important, is we're not together. We're not sitting across the table face-to-face, and indeed, we may never have met each other.

[00:11:18] Melissa Romo: Exactly. And, and, you know, more and more, this is how we're interacting with each other. This is how we're working. And the pandemic proved that we could.

I mean, now you can have telehealth. You can, your vet can see your dog on Zoom, right? So we know it's possible to use this technology for all kinds of things. So that's great. But what I want people to understand is that when we're not together and especially when there are long, long blocks of time - like, I've been fully remote for seven years, which is a long block of time to always be, like, in a screen relationship with people. So, there are these pitfalls that I write about.

The five are loneliness, boredom, depression, guilt, and paranoia. And when I explained this to the publisher and I said, these are the first five chapters, I don't think anyone's going to touch this book, because the first five chapters sound pretty horrible.

[00:12:15] Jason Rudman: You’re a psychologist's dream, right?

[00:12:17] Melissa Romo: It's a psychologist's dream. Yeah. But It was amazing how, when I was developing the concept for the book, I actually, I went through a workshop with the publisher to develop the concept of the book.

There was this one exercise we had in this workshop where she said, okay, I want you to list the chapters, and it took me twelve (12) seconds to list those first five chapters because those were the five experiences I was having that I did not like and I did not know why I was having them so much, and I thought that there was something wrong with me, right?

I was paranoid; I was sometimes low and blue, so I was depressed, and I was, I felt guilty if I took a walk. Right? I was bored. There'd be days where I just couldn't engage, and I thought, God, what's wrong with me? Am I just, like, a poor performer? So there were these things happening to me that I thought were my fault, because of flaws in me.

And I thought, wait a minute! I need to understand what relationship remote work has to these five things. And understand how much of it is me and how much of it is the context in which I'm working.

And what was really profound was when I started researching this, these five pitfalls, I found a ton of data about all five that I have never seen in any book. I've never seen it all together in any book. If there's, you know, they're in academic articles, and it's sprinkled all over the place.

And especially things like, like loneliness is something we commonly know it is an issue with remote work, but I never saw it written down anywhere in this way and brought together in this picture. And so I really felt like I was breaking new ground in understanding remote work.

And, you know, people often look at remote work and, and people would say to me, “Oh, you're so lucky you can work from home”. Like it's, you have it made! And then they would say this to me and I'm thinking, I don't feel lucky. Like, I spend half the day bored. I get blue. I, you know, I don't feel like I belong and all these other issues that I was just constantly struggling through. And, I thought, okay, I need, I need to understand these better because the rest of the world seems to think I have it made, but I don't feel that way.

[00:14:24] Jason Rudman: Again, I read the book a couple of times, and I find something new every time. But I think what you've given voice to is the things that we dare not talk about. It's not, and if I extrapolate that to a corporate environment and both you and I have worked in a corporate environment - talking about boredom of the job that I do is a no no, right?

Because people are going to be like, Oh, but you're lazy. If you identified boredom, even to the most, well, I, I found it with, with few, with a few exceptions, but I, I mean, there've been times in my career, but I've been completely…it's like lather, rinse, repeat, done it before, my goodness. It's like, yeah, I'm ready.

But to give voice to boredom in a corporate setting, I think it's really, really hard. To talk about loneliness. You're around people all the time in a corporate environment, how can you possibly be lonely? I think each of the five pitfalls, think it's incredibly difficult, in a performance management and in a corporate setting that is face to face, to even give voice to that, because I don't think, again, by and large, that we've allowed emotions into the physical workspace.

And then your experience that you just talked about is, well, now “I'm on my Tod”, to quote the British. I'm in these four walls.. It's pretty much the same four walls. If I'm completely remote and I have to deal with me. I have to deal with me. So I'm forced to actually think about those pitfalls. And to your point, is it me? Am I the flawed character? Or is it the very nature of the setup that we have?

You decided, let me go explore that and I'm going to write a book about it. And lo and behold, there's research out there that says, I'm not a body of one. Right? I'm like many other people that have been doing this work forever and we just don't talk about it.

[00:16:15] Melissa Romo: We don't talk about it. I mean, like I'll give you an example, Boredom.

So there are these two consultants, Swiss business consultants, who I think it was around 2007 or 2008. They coined a term which is called “boreout”, and boreout is kind of a different flavor of burnout, right?

Bore out is when your work has lost, completely lost meaning. And it, you're not burned out, but you're bored out, right? You just don't care about it anymore. And they studied this and they wrote about how this, this phenomenon surfaces when we have lost a sense of meaning.

And, I really think that's important in remote work because when, or distributed work, because when we're not together, it's harder to see why what we do matters. Then we lose touch with the meaning of what we're doing. And when we, according to these consultants who studied this, when we lose touch with the meaning of what we're doing., we lose touch with caring about it, right? We become bored by it.

[00:17:18] Jason Rudman: I've been, I mean, look, I've been there in the recent past!

I, I call it, I call it MQ5 - mentally quit, level five. Because the reason for doing the work on behalf of who you serve is not enough. We're transparent and direct on the More Elephant podcast. You know, for me, it was also tied to a lack of gratefulness for the sheer number of hours and dare I say, while in a position of privilege to have a role, just the sacrifice as a leader that there was so much coming at me and there was a general lack of gratefulness.

And it was very hard for me to see that my leaders cared and there was no outlet for that. I actually didn't feel that I could express those feelings in a way that was safe, right, that I felt psychologically safe in the workplace, and that's in the recent past.

There's a couple of points in the book I'm going to, you know, one of them I don't have to read because I can memorize it, the gray matter is still working, you write, it's just such a pithy sentence. Are you trying to control the work or the humans doing the work?

Could you expand on that a little? I just, that struck me, especially in a corporate environment. There's just, there's power in that question. And as a leader asking myself, what did you, what were you trying to get at with that sentence?

[00:18:41] Melissa Romo: Well, I was trying to give leaders a side door to say, look, you, you can still get the results that you're looking for by controlling the work, right? Making that what you measure, making that what the output is.

And it's, it's interesting that when I talk to other people leaders, for example, I get anxious about so and so has so many dentist appointments, or they take these really long dog walks, or, you know, where are they? They've been offline for 45 minutes. And they get really anxious about where the person is.

And I always say to them, What is this person supposed to deliver for you? Do you know what that is? It's amazing how often they don't know what that is. They say well, “they're supposed to strategize.” But what are they supposed to deliver like this week? What are they supposed to deliver? Are you that specific with them? And if you're not, then what you're going to care about is the 45-minute dog walk, right? Because you're not specific about what they're supposed to be delivering.

So my advice to leaders is control the work, have a very specific, detailed plan like an inventory of deliverables that have to come every week, you know, of KPIs that they have to hit every month. Have quarterly business reviews. Have performance reviews; know if they're delivering what they're supposed to deliver, make it measurable, right?

Doing all of that, if you have that discipline, who cares if they take a 45-minute dog walk, right? If they're delivering it, who bloody cares, right? So, we are wasting so much energy caring about where people are, and honestly, it's just laziness. It's because we're too lazy as managers to actually measure what needs to get done and keep track of that, right? It takes work as a manager to do that. And it's when people complain about the 45-minute dog walk is because they're too lazy as a manager to be measuring anything.

[00:20:36] Jason Rudman: You know, you and I are aware of organizations that are checking people in and checking people out, right?

It's policing the person and I think to your point, we're then focused on the wrong things. And naturally, I think that creates an us versus them. An even bigger wall between the corporate regime that's trying to build a culture or keeps arguing, especially in a post-pandemic world, that we care about culture, culture is important. And yet, they put up these barriers from a humanistic perspective such that you're being tracked for your every move and not about the quality of the work you deliver.

[00:21:12] Melissa Romo: Yeah, everything I just said aside. I don't think the return to work thing is about wanting to control people or a lack of trust. And there's definitely part of the mix. It's just real estate. Basically, it's real estate.

I mean, on real estate, I mean, you just read all of the analysis and especially a city like San Francisco, where it has less than 50% of the people come back in the offices and there's a homeless problem and there's a crime problem. And the city, the city is really in trouble because people don't want to go back in.

Well, guess what? It's really expensive to live in San Francisco. And during COVID and I know people, they moved, they moved away. But not just to like the suburbs and Napa Valley, they went to like Montana, right? They left, they fully left.

So the struggle on the real estate side is, as municipalities have lost tax revenue, all of the street-level retail is, has gone out of business. And the companies have these huge office buildings, the cost of fortune that nobody is in. So that is a legitimate real estate problem. And I, I mean, I acknowledge it. And I, I agree that it is a problem. So that is a motivation that companies have to get people to just get in their cars and drive to a city to be back in a building.

But that's really very short-term thinking. It's like, why, why do we have to fill up buildings? Like, could these buildings be repurposed and something else be done with them? Can we create clusters and hubs where people work and they work in different ways and they don't have to drive as far? Because we've all learned what a big time waster commute is, right?

We knew this, but we sort of thought, well, there's, you have to commute, right? If you have a job, you have to commute. Then COVID happened and we stopped commuting and we could still work. And we thought, wow, how about this? I get two or three hours back every day.

And now the commute itself is so painful and people know they're wasting their time. They're wasting the company's time, right? So that's the frustration by the company has a real estate problem. So they want everybody back in. That's the first thing.

The second is culture, and what you see companies say, it's in all the Forbes, Fortune, you know, Bloomberg, it's in all the interviews, what all the leaders are saying is, our culture is going to go down the drain as a company if we don't have people all within the same four walls.

Well, I also think that's sort of running scared from the changes that have happened in work, in work modalities, right? Because we can have a culture. We don't have to be sitting next to each other. I interviewed people in the book who talk about culture and never are in the same four walls with the people that they work with, that are in their company. But they still have a strong culture and their ways they do it. And it isn't about everyone being in the same four walls five days a week, every single week. You know, all year long.

So I think with both problems, we want to go backwards to fix these two problems instead of thinking in an innovative way about how work has changed and how our relationship with work and the places we work has changed.

If we were thinking more innovatively, there are lots of ways we could both solve our real estate problems and solve our culture risks and protect ourselves from our cultural risks, iIf we really thought more innovatively about how to solve both. I just don't see companies doing that. I just see them wanting to go backwards. Let's get everybody back in.

[00:24:31] Jason Rudman: I love the concept of going backwards because this is where I wanted to go next.

I feel like we're receding back further than pre-pandemic. We're not even reverting back to how we used to operate before the pandemic. I feel like we've taken, you know, we've gone back to the 1970s, 1980s kind of style of working.

Where work is not set up, you mentioned that we've proven that the commute is arduous. You can build on that and just say, look, balance is an accordion and what the pandemic showed us is families need flexibility.

So that, that 2-to-3 hour commute that we have, that we no longer have, accords a level of flexibility that has now been taken away. So do you agree that you feel like we're receding back further than even we were kind of pre-pandemic?

[00:25:20] Melissa Romo: I think we are. I mean, one thing I'd say is that the percentage of people who were fully remote five days a week before the pandemic was really small. It was less than 5% of the global workforce. I was one of I was part of that 5%. And I didn't know what a really small population of people I was part of. Really small, so it wasn't, wasn't a common thing.

Did you have people, you know, once in a while work from home because they had some sofa being delivered or something? Yes, you had lots of that going on. But fully remote was still pretty rare.

I think what's where we've gone further back is like the sofa delivery, right? Now it's a big deal to ask to be at home because your sofa is being delivered, right? Like, are you really going to be working?

I know lots of people who wouldn't, wouldn't have thought twice about, for example, in the summertime on a Friday, you know, in New York City, you go to the Hamptons or you go to the Jersey Shore or whatever, and you work from there in your house or with your friends or whatever. And that was really common in the summers before the pandemic and I know lots of people who are afraid to do that.

Now they're just, it's a Friday in the summer and people feel like if I don't show up, I'm, you know, I'm going to get it. And I do know companies who are saying, I don't know of an instance where it specifically happened, but I do know of companies who are saying that people will face disciplinary action if they don't come in five days a week or X days a week, whatever it is. Performance ratings will be impacted, things like that.

So I actually think that's good because companies need to draw a line in the sand and not be wishy-washy. If the requirements of the job are to be in the office five days a week, well then say so. And if you're not there five days a week, what are the consequences? And companies need to actually, it's like raising a toddler, right? If you say you're going to take the lollipop away, take the bloody lollipop away, right? Stop making threats that you don't carry through.

I mean, this is what drives me crazy is I see these companies like, well, we're encouraging people to come back and we're, you know, we think this is the best thing for the company and people need to get on board, and support the culture and model the behavior and blah, blah, blah. But they don't do anything. There's no consequence.

So, I think what companies need to do is decide what they need. Every company should decide what they need. It's their decision, right? You know, this is, we don't have to all do the same thing. So they decide what they need, explain that to the employee, explain the consequences - these are the requirements of the job - and if you don't meet them, you don't have the job. Right. That's it.

[00:27:54] Jason Rudman: Yeah. I mean, it's your choice. Yeah. Your point. Right.

[00:27:58] Melissa Romo: And so if it's that black and white, then I feel like what I really want is this whole debate to end. Right. I just want companies to pick a lane, decide what they need, and then employees can decide if I'm going to stay or I'm going to find something else.

[00:28:12] Jason Rudman: People can find the work arrangement that works for them. I think that's why you're seeing such an uptick in people electing with their feet to say, there's a different outcome for me because I want to design a different work experience than the one that I was doing for ABC corporation.

And I shared this with you. I read your book as Human-centered Design for the workplace. Employees are the customers, right? You're not going to serve every customer. And leaders from, you know, the C-suite down, have to design an experience, that to your point, is right for their brand, but that I think it needs to undergo a serious evaluation. And I think that's what the second part of your book gets into, right?

Which is you've got five emotional pitfalls. That's the outer wheel of the remote leadership wheel and then on the inside, you've got five blueprints for success.

How do you deal with the five emotional pitfalls?

[00:29:14] Melissa Romo: Well, each emotional pitfall, the way I designed the wheel, is that each emotional pitfall has an empathy mindset that if you, that you should focus on and be intentional about as a leader.

So for example, loneliness, what do you want to focus on with loneliness?

And I explain in the book how to sort of spot it. If you spot someone exhibiting - some people may just come out and say, “Hey, I'm lonely. You know, I haven't seen my boss in four months or whatever, and I'm lonely for my team.” They may just come around and say, but sometimes you have to sort of scan for it. So I explain how to scan for it and some things to ask.

But if you sort of identify that's a problem, what you need to focus on is creating belonging. So that's the kind of antidote to loneliness is belonging.

And then if you take something like boredom, the antidote to boredom is meaning. Going back to what I said about bore out, right, is that the leader needs to bring meaning is to say, you know, this is why we're doing this. This is why the report you just created is going to help the customer. This is why, this is why, this is why, right? The leader needs to bring meaning and be really intentional about explaining meaning to the employee.

The antidote to depression and depression is kind of a hard word, but it's just sometimes the blues of being at home. It's joy, right? Joy. Like there are definitely days when I log in and they're just people that I'm really happy to see online.

And I'll send them a note and say, you know, it's great to see you online. How was your weekend? Whatever. They're just great people. So we need to surface these moments of joy. These sparks of joy as an antidote to just sort of feeling down when you're by yourself.

The antidote to guilt is faith. And I specifically use the word faith because it's a deeper form of trust than even trust is because faith is believing in something you can't see. When someone works for you, you don't eyeball them every day, but you express your faith in their ability to do their work.

There's a phenomenon called the Pygmalion effect that Marie Kondo writes about really in a really interesting way. But the Pygmalion effect, it basically says that we will rise to the expectations that are put on us. So if you tell your child, If you say to your five-year-old, you can tie your shoe, I have faith you can tie your shoe, you know, you'll know how to do it. If they hear that enough, they will just buckle down to figure out how to tie their shoe because they're like, Mom really believes I can tie my shoe, then it must be true, right, that I can tie my shoe.

So the Pygmalion effect is about. It's about putting in front of people that faith, I know you can do it, and putting that out there so that a person wants to rise to that, right? So faith.

And then the last one is clarity. And when we're, you know, everyone's experienced this idea of out of sight, out of mind when they work in a distributed way. No one sees me. Do people know what I do? Do I, how is my reputation? And you do start feeling paranoid, wondering about these things.

Now, the reason you feel that way is because you don't have enough information. Information flows when we work in a distributed way are hampered by distance. And so as a leader, what you want to do is create clarity and create information flows and focus on that because that helps bring down these feelings of out of sight, out of mind.

[00:32:41] Jason Rudman: I love it. I love it. I shared with you one of the areas of the book that I spent a lot of time on was blueprint number three, which was building trust.

And I actually wanted to read a paragraph, and let me take a step back, the reason that was this was such a timely chapter for me is again, in the recent past, day three in a particular role and I've learned to go in full trust because I had no other information that was suggested that I shouldn't and for the first time in my career, like in 20+ years, I was, I was on the receiving end of a level of vitriol. I mean, that's the other way I could describe it, right? When a person actually said, you've given me no reason to trust you. So I actually distrust you until you prove otherwise, show otherwise, and this was somebody that I was supposed to work with.

But you write in the book on page 105, and it's Sabby Gill, CEO of Thomas International. And, and you write this - “Sabby reminded me that we don't train leaders on how to trust. We just expect them to know how to do it. Trust is hard because it requires giving up control and being honest with ourselves and with the other person. It requires taking risks that the other person deserves our trust and won't take advantage of us. And building trust is anything but formulaic. Sometimes we have nothing to go on but our instincts to tell us if trust is warranted.”

That then leads to a wonderful anecdote about your late father that you describe. And what I love about your the anecdote about your Dad is I mean, he hit it straight on with the, you know, for those of you folks that read the book on page 105 and 106, your Dad hit it straight on and that so spoke to me because I walk in saying, we don't have history, I have no reason to distrust you. The chapter for me was particularly potent at this moment, because the experience “knocked me for six” because again, what I've learned is that you go in and yes, you have to earn trust, but you don't go in saying, Hey, I'm going to distrust you until you show me enough. Do I have that wrong?

[00:34:55] Melissa Romo: When you express to a person that you don't even know at all, that you don't trust them, you've ended the relationship on day one.

And I've had an experience working for someone who, I was like day one, where she, she basically said to me, I don't trust you. And I quit. I, I actually couldn't even stomach working for somebody who would say to me on day one, with no information, I don't trust you. I thought, well, there's nothing here for me then if you don't trust me, right? What can I do to possibly perform well if you don't even trust me?

So it's very uncomfortable to trust because we risk being made a fool of, right? If you trust someone and you find out later that they're just taking you for a ride. Then you feel stupid, right? So this is why we don't trust off the bat and why we feel like trust needs to be earned and built. And often leaders will talk about this - needing - you need to earn the trust of the leader.

But I really love this idea of the Pygmalion effect. And so, I start with trust and I say, you know what? I trust you 1000%!! I tell them that. What I want them to do is rise to that and say “she trusts me. I don't want to let her down because she trusts me.”

Probably one out of every 20 or 30 people will let me down; 29 are great, you know, I trust them. I continue to trust them. They continue to perform because they don't want to let me down. And the relationship has started on a high note. And it stays on a high note.

[[00:36:23] Jason Rudman: Well, and I think again, that is an example of empathetic leadership. I think again, like, and again, I Situationally, the struggle that I had was that the leader was holding themselves up to be this paragon of, you know, empathetic leadership. I thought it was sabotage and I brought it up in this conversation because I spent a lot of time in the chapter wondering if, for many years, I kind of got it wrong and I should go in there with a, you know, doubt and it just doesn't feel right to me.

So, you know, reaffirming, in our shared experience, that trust first and yeah, people, people have to earn it. It's like trust and verify, right? But to start a relationship off from a position of distrust, I think is, I think it's impossible.

[00:37:07] Melissa Romo: Relationships kind of over from that point.

[00:37:09] Jason Rudman: I do feel as well, love your thought on this, that again, some of the challenges that you, that you brought out in the book are tied to what I call corporate trauma. If emotions have no place in work, you don't bring your whole self to work. And, yet I do think that your corporate trauma is connected to personal trauma.

Like things that you've not dealt with, that then as a leader, you bring whatever version of yourself that's not fully formed, and then you're trying to manage these teams where there's every degree of variability. And you go to a team of 12, no 12 people are alike.

I feel as though what your book is setting us up to talk more about is the connection between personal and professional and our own trauma and our need to understand what that is in order to be the best leader we can be in the workforce. I think there's that connection and we're not talking enough about that. And I do think that your book is starting to lay the groundwork for having an even more, maybe it's your second book. I don't know. It's a more deliberate conversation about this connection between corporate trauma, performance management, and what we've not solved for our own personal lives.

[00:38:23] Melissa Romo: Yeah., I mean, I've been reflecting a lot recently about dignity and a relationship between work and our own dignity.

And, you know, like I've had, I've had a few friends get, be laid off, you know, this year and you read about it and it's happening in a lot of places. It's always like explained away as well, it's a business decision and blah blah, but people derive their dignity from work. It's really hard to disassociate what you do every day with your own self-worth. So, work can heal trauma. And cause trauma.

And it sort of goes back to this point that it's emotional, right? And I've been in a situation where I've, I've had to let people go and it's very emotional. I'm not supposed to show that. I'm not supposed to communicate that. I'm not supposed to make any apology, right? There is a legal script I have to follow. I am basically turned into a robot. It's horrible, right? It's horrible for the person doing it, it's horrible for the person hearing the message because we insist on excavating all the emotions from the whole experience. , right? Work can be about trauma, both fixing it, healing it, and creating it, I think.

[00:39:37] Jason Rudman: Right, right. Or exacerbating it, right? Because again, we, you and I talked about this in your, you know, in your most recent experience. To me, the mark of an empathetic leader is the moment you stop feeling anything other than dread and you want to take a long bath and drink a whole bottle of wine after, I don't know, maybe two bottles of wine or whatever it is, right?

I think the moment that you stop feeling and caring to me, is the moment that you get out of the leadership business. Because if it doesn't make you feel like that, then I don't think you've got your empathy antenna on, by any stretch of the imagination, right? And you're not, and you're not leading with trust. And with patience and with optimism.

The moment you're soul stops feeling in that type of environment is, you know, you're, I think that's your escape clause because you should be doing something else.

[00:40:28] Melissa Romo: Yeah. I would tell people though that if they're feeling unempathetic to look at the leadership above them.

It's very difficult. It's kind of like abuse in, you know, in a relationship, right? If you have leaders who are not empathetic with you, it's really hard to turn around and be this empathetic leader because no one's giving it to you from above you. Feeling unempathetic may really have nothing to do with you, but just be, you're in a place where it's not, your tank is empty, right? Like it's not being given, just, you can't draw from it anywhere. It isn't your fault. Basically, it's just look around.

[00:41:04] Jason Rudman: That's really good, thanks for cleaning me up a little on that. Because I think the emotional connection to that moment, there needs to be a kernel of it somewhere, I think.

[00:41:13] Melissa Romo: It has to be around you for you to express it.

[00:41:16] Jason Rudman: That's fair. I like that. It has to be around. I'm going to use the word feel.

We're almost at the end of our time. We've talked about a lot. What would be the one, if there was one thing that you'd want people to really take away from our time together discussing your book and empathetic leadership?

[00:41:29] Melissa Romo: Yeah, what I would tell people is that, you know, work flexibility is a is a great thing. I'm the sister of a handicapped man who would not be able to work without work flexibility. And so there's lots of reasons why I support it. Lots of personal reasons why I support it.

I also think it can help us with with climate change and helping businesses get to net zero by significantly reducing things like commutes and business travel. So, I am all about remote work and flexibility because of all of its benefits.

That said, what I learned writing this book is that we are not all cut out to do it. We really are not. And companies do not evaluate people's readiness to be a remote worker or work in a team where they're distributed from other people. It's just sort of handed out as a sort of like a party favor, at least, you know, as a benefit. But we don't really evaluate a person's readiness.

What I want people to do is, if they pick up my book, is use it as a way to reflect on what they need. And is flexibility, a la remote work, right for them? Is it going to actually help them or is it going to create more, more pitfalls that are harder for them to navigate through?

So I think I would just really want people to reflect on what they need. And if remote work and working at a distance from your team is something that works for you and the book will help you figure that out. If it works for you, the book will help you figure out what you need from your leader and from your organization. And so I hope people will use the book as a, as a reflection tool.

[00:43:04] Jason Rudman: I love that. And so those of you listening, you can find a link on moreelephant.com to go purchase Melissa's book.

And final question. How do people connect with Melissa Romo? Find out more about what you're doing, whether that be in a professional setting or I, again, I think I gave you your second book to write about, but you know, that's okay..

[00:43:25] Melissa Romo: Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Melissa T Romo. You'll be able to find me. I'm, you know, love people to follow me on LinkedIn. I do talk about this topic on LinkedIn. Also, do book giveaways and share things. Sometimes they're a little bit more personal about my life on Instagram @romowriter. And so those are probably the two best places to find me.

I'm on Twitter, or what used to be called Twitter.

[00:43:48] Jason Rudman: What are we, X these days? I don't know.

[00:43:50] Melissa Romo: I don't know how much longer I'll be there.

[00:43:53] Jason Rudman: Well, Melissa, I've known you for 20 years. This is an hour well spent, so thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Talk soon.

More Elephant Outro