TLDR;
As leaders, we often find ourselves navigating a landscape of constant change. Unexpected challenges.
And the constant pressure of having all the answers.
So, if you’re feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, or simply know there’s a deeper, more authentic way to lead—you are in the right place.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Leadership podcast. Today, I’m honored to sit down with Eric Charran, an author and thought leader, who has spearheaded innovative data strategies and AI/ML solutions at giants like Microsoft and Capital One.
Eric is known for bridging the gap between complex technology and tangible business results across diverse industries. In our conversation, Eric and I dive into the profound insights from his book, “Have You Ever Had a Boss That…”, and explore what it truly means to lead with resilience, adaptability, and ease.
Here are some critical insights unpacked in this episode:
- How vulnerability, seeking diverse perspectives, and acknowledging your blind spots pave the way for innovation and holistic problem-solving within your team
- How to identify the subtle signals of rising emotions in high-pressure situations
- How to process, and not just bury, feelings like frustration or injustice, enabling professional growth for both yourself and your team
- Understand the profound business value of shifting from rewarding “busyness” to truly empowering your team
- Diplomatic yet potent approaches to address recurring, unhelpful patterns.
If you’re ready to embrace change like an old friend and build a legacy where your team truly brings their best, you won’t want to miss this.
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About the Speakers
Eric Charran
For more than 25 years now, Eric Charran has helped organizations scale in an increasingly digital economy through innovative data strategies, AI/ML solutions, and scalable enterprise platforms. Charran is recognized for building next-generation data ecosystems and AI/ML solutions that drive measurable business impact, operational excellence, and a culture of innovation. Eric’s work focuses on future-proofing enterprises through strategic data and AI adoption.
Get in touch with Eric Charran ↓
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericcharran/
Michael Hunter
Michael Hunter is the founder of Uncommon Teams and host of the Uncommon Leadership podcast series. With 35+ years guiding leaders worldwide, Michael empowers teams to beat burnout and thrive for the long run—helping them move beyond overwhelm to create meaningful impact.
Michael’s mission is to help leaders, CEOs, and founding teams create and inhabit their legacy, elevating themselves in a way that is safe and sustainable.
Want to build an uncommon, unstoppable team? Get in touch with Michael Hunter ↓
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/
Website:
https://uncommonteams.com/
Newsletter:
https://uncommonteams.com/newsletter-archive/
Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/@UncommonLeadershipPodcast
Presented By: Uncommon Change
Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every single stinking day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams, and cultivating the resilience necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving. I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams, and today we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead with resilience, adaptability, and ease. Joining me today is Eric Charran. Eric is a visionary technology executive, author, and thought leader with over 25 years of experience in transforming global enterprises through digital innovation, data-driven strategy, and AI-driven solutions. Known for his ability to bridge the gap between business objectives and complex technology, Eric has spearheaded transformative initiatives at major organisations such as Microsoft and Capital One, where he served as chief architect, bringing substantial advances in cloud resilience, digital transformation, and data infrastructure and efficiency. His strategic insights and leadership have driven high-impact changes across sectors, optimizing performance and fostering resilience, and industries from finance to healthcare, and ‘Have you ever had a boss that dot dot dot’. Charran draws on his extensive leadership experience and his understanding of corporate dynamics to offer readers a guide to navigating workplace challenges, enhancing personal effectiveness, and fostering a balanced, fulfilling career. With insights that resonate across industries, he empowers readers to become more effective leaders and team players. With a career shaped by a commitment to measurable impact in a player-coach leadership style, Charran is a sought-after speaker and advisor on topics of leadership, digital innovation, and organizational change. His work continues to influence leaders and organizations seeking sustainable, innovative solutions in a rapidly evolving world.
Welcome, Eric.
Eric Charran
Michael, so great to be here with you today. Thanks for having me on.
Michael
I am happy to be in conversation with you today. When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self, bringing that into everything that you do, might be a valuable approach?
Eric
It’s an interesting question, and I guess I’d have to look back to the first real management position that I actually had, to kind of think about the whole self component of it, the leadership, my leadership journey was one in which I was a reluctant leader. So I had been, I had a leadership experience early on in my career, and I wasn’t really taken away with it.
But as I matured in my profession, one of my managers at Microsoft sat me down and said, Hey, that old saying, if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together. And he goes, you’ve done a great job going fast, and now I need you to go far. I said, alright, I’ll lead a small team.
But the team size grew and grew. And I think during that process I realized that it’s not only important to bring your whole self, and I think the term whole self mean, can mean many things to different people. For me, it means that I need to bring not this perception of being the smartest or being the most infallible, or always knowing what to do.
But it’s being comfortable enough and secure enough as a manager to realize that my job is to surround myself with people that are experts in areas that I am not. My first go with this is I selected people that thought like I did, talked like I did, had the same career that I did, which meant that we all had the same strengths, but unfortunately, we all had the same vulnerabilities.
So we didn’t really ensconce ourselves in the detailed minutia of how to get from A to B. We just thought about great, awesome ways in order to do things, and then we just like, lemme know how that turns out. So, bringing your whole self in this aspect for me means that I could actually seek out different and diverse perspectives.
To be vulnerable enough to say, I don’t know. I need experts to help me with this. Instead of always having to be, like I said earlier, the smartest in the room or the most talented or the person that comes up with the right answer the fastest.
Michael
Yeah. Thank you, Eric, for that perfect demonstration of how diversity in all the forms is so important on a team.
It’s the best way I found to come up with creative, holistic, probably going to hit all the important points, solutions to problems. When all the team or clones of you, you can get to those same solutions, it tends to be way more hard ’cause you have to explicitly go through and discover, work out, all the blind spots that you have, which they’re blind, so it’s hard for you to find them.
You can’t necessarily, there’s parts of your back you can’t reach with your hands. You can’t just do it yourself. And if you’re all doing the same thing, it’s really hard to catch all of those. So much easier.
Eric
It’s such a great observation because first, what I didn’t realize is that we had blind spots. When you’re working with clones of yourself and, that may be too reductive of a term, but when you’re all so similar and you all have the same talents, when you’re jamming and you’re coming up with these ideas, you’re like, yes and yes, and this is gonna be awesome.
And then you all get blindsided in the exact same way. And then you kind of have to roll with the punches, and then you realize, oh goodness, there, I need diverse perspectives here. I need people that can imagine all the ways in which we’re going to get hit. Or criticized, or just gaps that you don’t know that you have.
So it took me a while to figure out that there were blind spots because the act of creation and collaboration was so fluid and so amazing.
Michael
What helped you recognize that you had blind spots?
Eric
It wasn’t until I realized that we all were failing in the same ways and failing is not bad. For me, I was around during the transition from the Ballmer to the Nadella era. He had us all, you know, culturally, he did a great job of culturally transforming Microsoft. He had us read that book, by Carol Dweck, called Growth Mindset. Mine sat on the desk for maybe about six months.
I said, Of course I have a growth mindset. Look at my, look at how far I’ve gotten so far. No way. You know, I don’t need to read that. And then when I picked it up and I realized we were gonna be meeting with him, I said, well, maybe I should just thumb through this thing. And the first 20 pages changed my life.
So, you know, I think at Microsoft we get really good at that, up until that point in time, around 2014, at hiding our failures, making our failures seem like successes, but it wasn’t until I realized that we’re failing the same way multiple times, that I’m like, there’s a pattern here. I must have a blind spot that I need to accommodate for.
Or we all have the same blind spot that we need to accommodate for, because learning the same lesson twice is kind of expensive. So, when that started happening, I realized that we needed to do something different.
Michael
What was it that helped you recognize you were always failing in the same ways?
Eric
It’s kind of the same thing that led to what I wrote this book about, which was, you know, at some points, unhelpful behaviors or failing the same way multiple times.
It’s important to be self-aware enough to say, Oh, wait a second. I’m not just reacting to this situation that I found myself in. I can actually be introspective and say, I’ve seen this before. I’ve been here before and I’m now here again. What should I have done to prevent against me from being in this exact same spot again or subject to these unhelpful behaviors again. First time I saw some of these unhelpful behaviors from some of the leaders I’ve had, I was shocked and horrified.
Then I was shocked again, a little less so, and then I was like, wait a second. I’ve seen this story before. I know how this is gonna end. What can I do now to prevent against this? To thrive, to not only just cope with it, but thrive in that situation.
Michael
What helps you recognize those patterns, especially in the heat of the moment when it’s so easy to react and to forget to take that pause, to reflect and look for what might be a larger pattern hanging out there?
Eric
I think it’s the, what helped me was, when I was early in career, I was just shocked and then I just felt this surge of injustice, like, I can’t believe this person is doing this to me.
One of my first meetings in which this happened, I remember is, we had been working on a project for so long and we, it was funded. We had people that were hired to, to work on this particular project. It was a cloud analytics reshaping for a client of ours. And the manager I had at the time was just field in so many things.
They had too many direct reports, responsible for too many divisions and business units, and so they were in their own way in survival mode. They couldn’t persist information from ROM to RAM. They couldn’t formulate long-term memories in which they knew about the project I was working on. So they all oftentimes asked the question like, Eric, what are you telling me?
How long has this been going on? How is this the first time I’m hearing about this? And that actually carried over into leadership meetings where I would be presenting. And they would just, be there, they’d wake up, and they’d put their phone down and be like, who green-lit this project? And how many resources do we have?
Do we think this is the right way to go? Is this valuable? And I am just shocked and horrified, like, how can you not know this? And I thought it was due to just professional ineptitude, maybe a subversive way to say that, Hey, I’m just gonna assassinate Eric in front of these entire, this entire group of C-level executives for whatever reason. And, when I realized it wasn’t adversarial. It was just a pattern of behavior. So the next time it happened, I’m like, I felt less of the emotion, and I’m like, oh, it’s happening again. This happened last time, and then the third time it happened, I’m like, I’m not gonna get caught by this again.
It was less, more of, it was more of a, less of an emotional reaction, and more of a, I have to figure out how to anticipate this and give them mnemonic hits. Help them form long-term memories around why, what we’re doing, what we’re doing, so that they don’t question the existence of what we’re doing here.
Michael
What gave you the wherewithal that first time, especially to realize that, oh, I’m having an emotional reaction, and what I am starting out thinking is going on might not be what’s actually going on?
Eric
It’s interesting because, you know, I guess even in my personal life, I’m not very emotionally expressive or explosive person.
And so like, when I’m in a, and, I think we have this fallacy that in, in, in a professional setting, there is no room for emotion. Like it’s all business. It’s all business. And so you kind of have to. I mean, I’m a Gen Xer, I’ve been around for a while, and so there was no such concepts of belongingness, bringing your whole self to work, psychological safety. When I was coming up, it was like, you just stuff that down and you be a professional. And which I don’t recommend for anybody by the way. You know, bringing your whole self to work makes you help you realize that there are emotions involved and that you need to process those things and not bury them.
So for me it was like just feeling tingling in my hands and just like a rising heat in my body starting to sweat and, you know, just the sense of injustice and disbelief was kind of what really what sticks with me as I look back on those memories and when I write about this in the book, I call this archetype of behavior.
’cause this repeats across multiple managers. I call it the amnesiac. And the number one thing that you’ll hear, multiple managers that fall into this behavior ask, is like, how is this the first time I’m hearing of this? So those, that really helped me understand that, hey, this isn’t, this isn’t, personal.
They’re not doing this to me. This is just how they exist based on all of the strain that they have to manage and all of the inputs that they have to manage. So when I first encountered it, I kind of said, Wow, this is really making me angry. I need to probably just get out of this meeting without reacting.
That was my, first element of survival on my own, which is, just let this meeting end and I just need to kind of get out of here and then just think about what happened and why it happened.
Michael
Is that awareness of the emotions that were going on and ability to separate yourself from that enough to not let, to reason about them in that way so that you didn’t react explosively and you were able to at least survive long enough to get out of the meeting and then reflect on that. Is that something that you’ve always been able to do? What let you do that there in that moment?
Eric
I think, at that point in my career, I was, because there’s multiple things.
I think early in career, you’re always looking after what’s going to get me to that next level? What’s going to help me mature, and what’s going to help me attain the next big responsibility, big project to get me noticed that’s going to get me promoted, essentially. How am I gonna climb this ladder? And so for folks that are very interested in career philosophy, like I’ve always been, you know that there are unhelpful things that you could do to yourself.
Self harm, erupting the meaning of really senior people, and challenging your boss and asking what you really want to say. Just what are you doing right now? Like, do you realize that your lack of preparedness and your inability to remember, disfunded project that I’ve been working on for weeks and months, and I have an entire team working on this?
How could you forget this? How could you not know this? How could you have this happen within your division, within your organization, and not understand that this is one of those strategic things that you know, your team has been signed up to provide? And, you, in the moment you begin to realize that’s probably not gonna be helpful if I start asking those questions.
So your ability, and this right or wrong, and I don’t know if this is healthy or not, but at the time, this is the way I thought about it, that I need to swallow this and get out of this meeting. So that I don’t hurt myself and I don’t hurt my chances. And I don’t know that’s necessarily healthy looking back on it, but I do think that pro conducting yourself professionally, realizing that you have, that you’re having an emotion and then navigating the best way to portray that emotion, or not, but deal with it and process it rather than bury it is the way to a productive engagement and a coping strategy that you can use to kind of help grow your manager.
Michael
Thank you for this example. It’s especially when we are not used to handling emotions in a productive way, simply keeping hold of them enough to not get yourself fired in a meeting, not alienate everyone else to get out of the meeting in a way that we survive, our job survives, our team survives, and then we can deal with ramifications of what might be going on later is, can be so hard just on its own.
Then to try to, on top of that, be in real time analyzing all the dynamics going on and searching for the optimum way to help these people who may be having all sorts of their own emotions coming up. They probably aren’t so excited about discovering that they’re being blindsided by something that they know they, or they’re telling themselves they should have known about.
Whether that’s true or not. Handling all that in a way that helps everyone move forward in a smooth and easy way is a high level stunt, and even when we’ve been on our journey to being able to do this for a long time and we’re really good at this, there’s still times that pop up where we’re right back at the beginning and we don’t know how to do anything other than just barely hang on and get out of there with our skin intact.
Eric
So insightful, Michael. That’s such an awesome point about how no matter where you are in your career, and we, I think, there’s this perception that as you get older and you’re more advanced in your career, that you know how to deal with some of these things, and that emotional reactions just don’t happen any longer.
’cause you’ve seen it all. You’ve heard it all. Not true, as just alluded to. There are instances in which, you know, you’re dealing with one of these archetypes that I write about in the book, and even though you’ve encountered them before, you know exactly what to do. It doesn’t necessarily make the frustration go away or the sense of injustice go away.
And in some instances, it might surprise you that you’re feeling such a visceral reaction when you’ve got such experience working with people that have exhibited these behaviors before. But one thing you can’t do is underestimate how visceral those reactions can be. And you still have to have that, all right, I need to process, I need to separate this. I need to not bury it, but I need to work through these emotions and then get to a place where I can be productive, that I’m not reacting, I’m not responding. And it’s surprising sometimes when that happens, especially where you are, you know, where we are in our careers.
It’s a novel phenomenon that it can still happen, but it does.
Michael
It definitely does. Doing this for ourselves is one thing, helping others do this for themselves and building these cultures where they feel safe enough, empowered enough to go on this journey for themselves to bring their unique talents to everything they do, can be a whole another ball game.
How do you help people? How do you build those cultures?
Eric
That’s a really great question. I guess it’s, in some instances, it’s like, how do you paint the Mona Lisa? But I’ll do my best to try to answer. So the way that I do it, and have done it, and it’s arguable whether or not you can quantify that you’ve done it.
But the way that I try to manage and lead teams is by making sure that I get everyone’s buy-in, that I am not, you know, leading from the rear and telling people what to do. It’s more of a how can I combine skill and will, how do I know that? Even if somebody’s really good at a position or a job or an assignment, do they love it?
Are they going to believe in it? Are they going to own it, and is it gonna bring them energy? Now obviously, you know, we all can’t just sign up for the assignments that we want, that’s why they call it work and not fun. But at the same time, you wanna make sure that if you’re asking somebody to do something, that they know the reasons why.
Now, there are certain personality types where that is a prerequisite. There are certain personality types I found where they’re just like, okay, this is what I’m gonna do now, and I’m happy just being busy. But for the large part, I like to make sure that the person on the team feels respected enough that I care about their opinion, that I care about their willingness to do the work, that I care about their energy givers and energy takers.
And my goal is to have the good outweigh the bad. I wanna give you more energy working on my teams than I do have to, you know, give you something that takes away your energy. Energy drainers, once they that becomes imbalanced, means that person, is in jeopardy of not being a team player, not performing their best, and potentially leaving the team.
And so my goal is to say, listen, I know you’ve been doing an energy drainer for a long time. I want to make sure that we provide you with the right opportunities. Let’s work together to figure this out. And I think that they really value that. And the question is like, well, how can you tell if you’re doing a great job?
Certainly, there’s the day-to-day interactions with the team. There’s the staff meetings. You can get a sense from that. The other way is, many organizations have these pulse surveys, which are anonymous to you as the manager, and you basically get a report card from what you’re doing, and that factors into your performance appraisal and many organizations as a manager.
And how, you know, how you’ve attained your goals and your achievements. And so that’s a really great way to calibrate. Whether you fit the job that you’re doing is a good job in building an inclusive team.
Michael
What are your techniques or strategies for learning what lights people up and what turns their lights off?
Eric
It begins for me with just getting to know the person professionally and hopefully, personally, and asking. I think that a lot of people don’t get asked what brings them energy and what takes away their energy.
I think they’re just given assignments or they’re given projects, and the question is, can you handle this? Rather than, is this something that you really want to do? Now, as a manager, you’re obviously, again, it’s work, not fun, and so you wanna make sure you balance the energy givers and the energy takers.
But just asking, I found is a really great way to figure out whether or not people love what they’re doing or want to be doing something different. And then making sure that you look after that, that you try as a manager. And I’d like, I like, servant leadership to say that it’s my goal to give you things that are going to bring you energy, make you successful, make the team successful, so that I can amplify your successes and have you stand on my shoulders and say, this is what we’re able to do.
This is how I was able to do it, and so forth. Like that to me is the core of how I think about managing teams.
Michael
Yeah, and oftentimes I find there are simple ways to transform, at least in part, if not in whole, and oftentimes pretty close to all the way, a task or project from an energy taker to an energy giver by helping the person understand how what does get them energy is present in that project.
Eric
That is a great perspective. Because even though it might sound on the surface like it’s a boring project, it’s non-strategic and sometimes you have to do those things, the ability to kind of help them through, like, if you’re able to do this, you know, or if we gave you carte blanche to figure it out, what would you do?
Sometimes just talking them through it, like imagined really finds new ways to breathe new life into a situation or to an assignment, or responsibility, in which they’re like, yeah, I really get a chance to put my stamp on this. Oftentimes, I challenge people just to think about how, just because I did something one way, and now you’re being asked to do it, you don’t have to do it the way I did it.
You can have full freedom to engage creativity, to engage novel ways to do it, make it better, make it more efficient, make it your own. And in revealing that sometimes to your point, is really a great way for you to kind of just reinvigorate somebody on how to be engaged on a team.
Michael
And if we do this across the entire team, if the team, whole team, has conversations about this, then the team becomes able to divvy up work themselves.
Almost always, whatever you don’t wanna do, there’s someone else on the team that would love to do that for you. And even in situations where outside the team protocol or rules, or something else defines that who has to do a thing, what that really means is, in almost every case, the person who delivers that work product has to be a certain person. It has to be the manager who sends the status email for a really common example. But within the team, you have total freedom to assign work however you like. So manager doesn’t have to be the one to put the status mail together. It could be someone else who loves telling stories and would really get a huge amount of joy from each week putting together the story of the work, how the, of how the team has enabled their customers, their peer teams, their manager, management chain to do their work.
Eric
Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great perception, and I completely subscribe to it. I’ve often thought, and I read about this in the book, even as you’re dealing with unhelpful behaviors from managers, you have to realize that, the management and the team member relationship should be, if it’s working well, a partnership rather than, you know, a team member taking orders and asking if you want fries with that.
Like it should be, Hey, you know what, I don’t think that I’m right for this. Or maybe, you can help me see how I’m right for this, or who can I actually leverage to learn this? And it becomes much more of a partnership rather than a hierarchical Jack Welch style, organization. And it should be, I, mean, the way that, I don’t know if it should be, but the way that I’ve always thought about it is that, you know, it’s a coaching role, to lead.
And it’s less of a command control process these days that I found, and there’s a certain amount as an earlier career person or as a team member, we always, no matter where we are in our careers, we’re always going to have leader and managers. No matter how high you rise from a career velocity standpoint.
And so being able to recognize that yes, this person is at the next level above me, they’ve achieved that level, and I someday want to get there myself. You don’t necessarily have to have the reverence associated with that position. I mean, or balance that reverence with saying that, hey, they don’t know everything.
And in many instances, I’m a subject matter expert that I can actually utilize some of my, these tools and techniques that I, hopefully, that you find are useful in the book to partner with the manager and to potentially even grow the manager out of some unhelpful behaviors so that the team could achieve more.
So that you can actually, you know, be happier in your role and you have more energy takers than drainers.
Michael
More energy takers than drainers sounds like a wonderful thing.
Eric
Sorry, it’s the person. Yeah, it’s more energy givers than takers.
Michael
Yes. Takers and drainers is the same thing, isn’t it? Yes.
Eric
Synonyms, Yep.
Michael
Getting more energy than putting out is a great thing for leaders and their teams. How does this add value to the company? What’s the business value of creating these cultures?
Eric
It’s a great question. I find that in my career, just looking back, a lot of organizations and a lot of managers and a lot of leaders reward busyness more so than they do results.
And those organizations that have shifted from rewarding business or busyness to results have also shifted again to say, well, how did you achieve those results? Did you leave a trail of bodies behind you in achieving this particular result? And a bunch of people quit, but you delivered the result?
Or did you bring people along? Did you get in the same boat with people? Did your, you know, rising tide lift all boats? And the reason why I think many organizations are pivoting in that direction or have pivoted is because they realize that getting results in a collaborative way. Leads people to be more invested in their work to deliver higher quality results, to facilitate a place where talent is retained and not churned or turned over, and that overall, a happier and more engaged worker is gonna deliver better and more tangible results than somebody that’s just punching the clock, running down the clock.
Really unhappy. Kind of upside down in their employment experience.
Michael
How much do you help people understand that this is the business value for doing things, and how much do you encourage them to do this and let them discover for themselves what the business value is?
Eric
This is a tough one that I am still, I’m still wrestling with today. In specific, your question, the part of your question in which you asked, how do you let them discover for themselves the right path to achieve results versus give your own advice and guidance and almost tell them how to do it or say things like, this is, if I were you, this is what I would do. I think new leaders tend to do that a lot, and experienced leaders will ask questions and by asking questions, you’re not necessarily, you’re leading through question asking. You’re not necessarily saying, this is what I think you should do, or, here’s what I know works, or here’s what I’ve seen works.
Because I think that leaders today have a greater appreciation that a lot of these innovative ways to deliver results to take a 2X result and make it a 10X result, however you choose to measure it, comes from allowing people to be creative and take ownership of the subject matter or this space.
And the best way to do that is to ask them how they think it should be done and then offer gentle suggestions and advice that they’re gonna try to, you know, if you see them driving off a cliff. Like, don’t let them, don’t ask questions, and then have them give all the terrible answers, and just let them go.
But it’s definitely a balance. And I struggle with that today because, in instance, many instances, I think I know the answers because I’ve been there before. So it’s a balance between giving the depth and breadth of your experience, but also mining for new ways that you might not even thought about, in your career, that they might have, being earlier in career, different perspectives. And I think that. Managers, especially experienced ones, surround themselves with people that are much smarter that than they are, in certain areas, and have, you know, or certain experiences. And really great leaders know that they’ve done that and ask questions and guide through question asking.
Michael
And yeah, I had some thought that totally disappeared. Putting guardrails up for the teams is, can be super challenging to do that, in a way that feels uplifting rather than restraining. When it’s done right, it gives so much freedom because both you a leader and your team knows that your team can go hog, wild, crazy, experimenting on all sorts of seemingly insane things, and it’s all gonna be fine because they’re not gonna go off the cliffs, as you said.
And if things start going off the rails, you’re all gonna get signals early enough to redirect that before things become dramatic.
Eric
Ideally, you’re a hundred percent right, engaged managers that have the right management tools in their management toolbox, whether by accident, by natural talent, by training.
Absolutely. There are guardrails. They’re looking after their team’s energy. They’re amplifying results. They’re measuring success in terms of what was delivered and how it was delivered. The challenge that I’ve noticed and I write about in the book is. ,A lot of leaders don’t have that luxury, that experience, that level of self-awareness, that introspection, and in many instances, these leaders are under pressure. They are being asked to deliver intensive results across a broad spectrum of subject areas and divisions, and departments. They don’t have the time to read email. There’s thousands of unread email messages in their inbox, each demanding their attention, their guidance, their input, their awareness.
And so many of these leaders are in what I call survival mode. They’re just constantly reacting and providing advice, and they’re just, it’s just like playing pickleball or tennis. And as a result, memories, of what’s strategic and what’s important and what your teams are working on, never filter through to the long-term memory.
I call it in the book, I say it’s RAM versus ROM, right? Things are high-performance in RAM, but if they never, once you shut the PC down, it wipes it out. And if it’s not persisted to disc, which is ROM then you forget about it. And that leads to challenging situations like managers deconstructing their, or being an adversary to their own teams’ projects in meetings like the, and I write how this happened to me once where I’m in a meeting and this project had been funded and we had people working on it. We were hiring, we were delivering great results. And in this executive meeting, the manager I had at the time goes, who green lit this project? How long has it been going on? Do we think that this is the best use of resources?
I’m not sure that this is the right way to go. And this emotional reaction I had at the time was. How can, I’ve sent you emails, I’ve sent you slacks, I’ve sent you teams, messages I’ve sent you, I’ve talked to you about this in the hallway. I spoke to you about this yesterday. How can you not know that this is the right thing that to do?
How can you be asking these existential questions? That’s just gonna just unravel everything that we’re working on in front of the leadership who were trying to convince to do the right thing. And again, you know, recognizing those patterns reoccurring. You slowly begin to develop, oh, I’m not gonna get caught by this again.
Let me start utilizing the same terms. Let me refer you back to the same slide deck. Let me figure out my plan of attack, my talk track in case you do actually bring this up. Let me make sure that I don’t accuse you of being ill-prepared, or, you know, forgetting things. Let me try to just absorb that feedback and then redirect that energy into, you know, my agenda.
It takes a long time to come up with those techniques. My hope is, in this book that I write about them well enough and I demonstrate how you could utilize them, that you can easily adopt them. But it took me a while to figure these things out.
Michael
It can take a while, and it can also, we can do great right from the start if it’s taking five minutes before a meeting of what do I know about the people that are gonna be there? What are they likely to be concerned about? What are three points they’re gonna have ready to answer the questions they’re probably gonna have? Just doing that, even just one meeting a week, can make a huge difference in how everything else flows.
Eric
Yeah, and I often, I write about like. Emotional intelligence and understanding motivations as key. The moment you start thinking that these behaviors are directed to you and they’re being done to you, and it certainly feels like that in the moment. You have to then try to put yourself in your manager’s shoes, but you can only really do that after you’ve processed the justice of the emotion.
But once you’ve done that, you have to then say, it’s gotta be frustrating not to just be able to think strategically or to remember things, or to just be surprised by everything. And then you start to say, well, what can I do? What can I, what? How can I take this and partner with my manager and say, listen, it must be tough to be constantly reacting to a million different things.
What can I do to help you remember so that when we go into the next session, we’re going in unified? You’ve got all the information that you need. How can I help you essentially transition from RAM to ROM? Is it email, is it IMs? Is it me just touching base with you once a week? Is it just setting this up before we go in and saying that, remember last week, or remember this time, and there’s not one answer that fits everybody, but you have to walk that road with your manager rather than just think that it’s being done to you and that you just have to survive it.
Michael
Yes, this is a critical point that you are offering your help to them, asking them how they would like assistance, not inflicting your help and assuming you know, and giving them things that may be totally opposite from what they want.
Eric
Exactly. And one of the other points that I like to bring up about this is that these behaviors, these unhelpful behaviors, survive in silence.
So when you’re putting your nose to the grindstone and you’re just dealing with it and you’re swallowing it, it’s just not going to change. And so while you can present yourself as a helpful ally, you know, saying things like, my job is to make your job easier in this area, my job is to provide you with as much context and as much, you know, being your memory so that you don’t have to, and you can actually amplify in this session versus deconstruct.
At the same time, while you’re offering to help, you are saying in a diplomatic way that we don’t want a repeat of what happened last time. We don’t want you to have to deconstruct accidentally and damage the initiative. I don’t think that you want that, and I know that I certainly don’t want that.
So I think by doing these things, we can together achieve the goal.
Michael
Yeah. And is that one way, perhaps, that you help people find their way through all the change, uncertainty, and overwhelm that seems to put everyone who’s dealing with these days?
Eric
Yeah, I often tell my teams, you know, I think, you know, working at Microsoft has kind of taught me this, the only constant is change.
In the universe, right? Like, scientifically, entropy wins out over order every time. So if we realize that, we have to lean into change, and you can either be a part of the change and help shape it and embrace it, or you can resist it and become subject to it. And so as things are changing, you know, the way that I lead through change is I lead into it.
I say, you know what? The manager I had for like the last two years is changing now. This new manager doesn’t know me, and so my job is to, you know, be a servant leader, be of service to that particular manager, understand that they’re just going to be overwhelmed and drinking from the fire hose. How can I make that easier, that transition easier?
And by modeling that behavior for my team, it also helps my team understand how to deal with change. It also helps me realize that they probably are going to have a little bit of this amnesiac archetype, and I have to figure out how I can help them persist memory and to work as a team with them, and to partner with that leader just as the same way my team hopefully is partnering with me. And so that’s, those are all of, I don’t call them coping strategies because I do go over a few of those in the book, but the hope is that you pivot to growth strategies in which you’re walking a road together with your manager.
Michael
For people who would like more of those growth strategies and learn more about the archetypes in your book, what’s the best way for them to get in contact with you?
Eric
You can contact me at LinkedIn. It’s Eric Charran, with a C. My social handles on Instagram and TikTok are author Eric Charran. So happy to chat with folks on that, those channels as well and if you’re interested in, you know, pre-ordering the book, or ordering it, it’ll be on, it’s on Amazon, today, so you should be able to just search, have you ever had a boss that, and it should pop right up.
Michael
Sounds great, and I’ll have all those links in the show notes. What Eric, would you like to leave our audience with today?
Eric
That’s a great question. I just would love for everybody to know that they’re not alone, that these behaviors do reoccur. It’s not due to malice, mainly, or the majority of times, I’d say it’s not due to malice.
It’s just the fact that leaders lead how they were led, and many times, they are new to leadership. And because they’re new to leadership, they believe that they have to have all the answers in some circumstances. And they might look to the left and the right and try to remember how they were led, and they start to utilize these unhelpful tools.
And it’s just not a, it’s not a condemnation of the, that individual, it’s just the fact that they’re using the wrong tools for the job. And your goal is through diplomacy, through partnership, through being helpful, through emotional intelligence, to try to help them understand that, understand the impact of these unhelpful tools, and to help them build helpful tools, and you have the power to do that.
Michael
That sounds great. Thank you, Eric, for fabulous conversations today and for all these amazing tools.
Eric
Michael, it was great chatting with you today. Thanks for having me on.
Michael
You’re very welcome. This is, I’ve learned a lot today. And audience, please let Eric and I know we’re so curious. What tools are helping you transform you, helping you on your leadership journey today?
We’d love to know. Thanks and have a great day.