In this eye-opening episode of the “Transform Your Workplace” podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Brett Cooper and Evans Kerrigan, authors of Solving the People Problem, about how to build workplace relationships that lead to better morale and higher productivity. From determining strengths and habits to increasing emotional intelligence, Brett and Evan tackle the topics that all organizations grapple with daily. They also provide valuable insight and resources for the listener who seeks better self- and team-awareness.
Takeaways:
- The “people problem” is our struggle to work effectively with others in the workplace.
- We must first become self-aware, and then we can seek to understand our colleagues’ perspectives, approaches, strengths, and habits.
- Soft skills like empathy, resilience, and the ability to work with a team are critical in today’s changing workforce.
- Specific language is needed to effectively talk about emotional intelligence — with common terminology, we can understand each other.
- When feedback becomes an expectation, real growth can begin.
GUESTS AT A GLANCE
Brett Cooper and Evans Kerrigan are the best-selling authors of Solving the People Problem and co-founders of Integris Performance Advisors, a firm specializing in employee engagement and efficiency. They are passionate about facilitating genuine workplace relationships — relationships “that really work” — among the teams they help each and every day.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
TOP TIP FROM THIS EPISODE
Setting your people up for success is the key. According to Brett, “it’s the magic in everything that we do.” The first step in doing that, as you might expect, is to work on yourself. Brett and Evans spend a lot of time “helping people understand their own style, their own personality, their own communication patterns, what they do well, as well as some things they don’t do well.”
The second piece, outlined in their book Solving the People Problem, is to learn and understand the styles and the patterns of the people with whom you’re working. So, when Brett and Evans are “doing our work with clients and we’re working on leadership and teamwork, we spend a lot of time helping those leaders and those team members really pay attention.”
They look at style, communication methods or habits, strengths, and areas of improvement. By teaching teams how to focus on themselves and others, Brett and Evans see marked improvement in employee interaction which, in turn, results in increased productivity and effectiveness.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
A hindrance to working well with others
Brett: “I think when organizations have a lot of team members who have a lot of experience in their contributor-level roles, but […] put them together in a team — whether it’s a leadership team and they’re promoted to that leadership level, or they’re just in a cross-functional team — sometimes they can’t quite function together.”
Evans: “At the beginning of the career, we tend to start as an individual contributor. We’re just doing our work. As we get further in our careers, we need to interface with more and more people. And [this is] what we call ‘the people problem.’ It’s not that people are a problem. It’s our inability to communicate clearly and concisely, work with one another, and understand the differences to make those situations work.”
Soft skills: the most important skills of tomorrow
Evans: “It’s really more about those softer skills — the more human skills. It’s about empathy and resilience and teamwork. What we’ve heard from all of these employers was that they’ll train the technical skills. ‘If people can’t come in and work with a team, if they can’t do those things, that’s really difficult for us to overcome.’ So more and more businesses are really recognizing the hard value that you get from the softer skills that sometimes we haven’t built up over time.”
The value in teaching soft skills
Evans: “I think we’re starting to see some schools adding some of these things to the curriculum, and I can honestly share with you that we have a few clients who are actually universities. We have schools who have actually realized that this is a gap. They’ve said, ‘You guys have been doing this for a while. Help us learn this, help us bring this, and help us start to use this for our people so that our students will be much more successful as they head into the work world, because this stuff is just getting more important.’’’
The language of emotional intelligence
Brett: “Something that we brought — that I believe is new to the conversation about emotional intelligence — is a language. In the traditional sense of emotional intelligence, sure, you need to know yourself, and you need to know others. But what’s the language for that? So what we’ve done is we’ve taken the personality styles instrument called DISC, and we’ve combined that with the traditional view of emotional intelligence. We help organizations then create in this language around style, [so that] you have this basic language that everybody can use, which gets everybody on the same page.”
A caveat to using DISC
Brett: “The way that we use DISC is that we say these are patterns that we all have.
There are natural tendencies, ways that we are naturally wired. Every one of those DISC styles has its own value. We use it as a guide, as an insight into your own personality preferences and the communication styles of other people. But we stay far, far away from using it as a label for what people can and cannot do.”
How to apply our knowledge in the workplace
Evans: “Learning helps us grow. Learning helps us be more than we are currently. We actually created a field guide, which has exercises around six applications. Everything from how I make my own decisions, how we communicate, conflict, teamwork. We put [in] five exercises that you can do either individually or with a team to help continue your ability to apply this language and to apply your emotional intelligence.”
“It’s not enough to read about it. It’s actually the doing that helps us get there. So if we can create that opportunity and we have with our team and we have with a lot of our clients where providing feedback becomes kind of an expectation, something that we should be doing, something we should all be listening to, to remove some of the tension that comes up when people bring up the word feedback, that’s what enables us to actually start to grow.”
LEARN MORE
If you’re interested in hearing more from Brett Cooper and Evans Kerrigan, go to their website and download their field guide (free for a limited time) or take their free survey here. Also, be sure to check out their book, Solving the People Problem: Essential Skills You Need to Lead and Succeed in Today’s Workplace.