Michael Hunter
Hello!
Welcome to Uncommon Leadership.
I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams.
Today I’m talking with Wendy Moore.
Wendy is a founder, social entrepreneur, and technologist passionate about creating work environments so that everyone can thrive. Her career has given her opportunities to work around the world with top innovation leaders, companies, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Through her company, Eleve Talent, her focus is on helping amazing innovative teams grow in a strategic, scalable way.
Welcome, Wendy!
Wendy Moore 0:43
Thanks, Michael. Happy to be here.
Michael 0:45
Glad to have you here.
In your journey to seeing people as people and learning to leverage their unique gifts to best accomplish your goals, when did you first recognize this might be a valuable approach?
Wendy 1:01
I really love this question because immediately, my mind starts going a few different ways to respond.
In my career, in many roles, I’ve had the distinct opportunity to be able to focus on the people behind the business.
I’ve definitely been able to leverage this way of thinking often.
I also believe it’s very innate to who I am as a person, to be drawn to learning more about people and their unique gifts.
So your question was when did I first recognize, and really, from a very young age, I’ve loved story.
I love learning about people’s stories, their motivations, their history.
That informs why they do what they do.
When you say, when did I first recognize, it springs from the fact that I grew up moving quite a bit throughout my life.
When you’re always the new kid, you have to learn how to read people.
You have to learn how to make friends, wherever you are.
We lived in a really wide variety of states.
Each had a different culture, different sizes of cities.
The diversity I was exposed to early on in my life made me really fascinated about how do you get to know people on a deeper level?
How do you see how they work together, their unique perspectives, their gifts.
This shows up for me professionally a lot.
It started when I was young.
It’s very core to me.
Throughout my career, I’ve been able to really focus on who are the people building the business, who’s doing the work.
Whether that’s been in a very large corporate environment with distributed teams all over the world, or in that early-stage startup, very small core team, scrappy, they’re growing a team from the first couple founders to five to fifty, maybe.
When you can see people as people, and you can leverage their unique gifts in each of those scenarios, it’s really essential when you’re navigating any environment because the dynamics for that make all the difference in how you lead a team.
If you’re in a leadership role throughout that, and being able to see your team for their unique gifts, especially through major growth or transition, which is where I typically live, in those growth phases.
I’d say it’s shown up for me a lot throughout my life, and it has definitely been a huge asset to how I’ve been able to help build and work with teams.
Michael 3:27
How do you bring that fascination and interest in who people are into the workplace, where so often we’re told our brain can come in; everything else has to stay with our coat and bag?
Wendy 3:43
That’s a good question because there is a line to walk between seeing people as people who have real lives outside of work.
Work is not everything.
And then also holding that professionalism within the workplace.
I use “professionalism” loosely because that means different things to different teams.
When you’re talking about a startup, you might sleep on the couch at the startup while things, videos, are rendering, you might have to work through crazy hours.
You get to see people in a very different environment.
The corporate environment, that’s much more hierarchical, it definitely has a lot of structure to it.
Within each side of that, you still have to get down to the human element of, if it’s not necessarily getting to know everything about them, you at least need to know how they show up at work, what’s going to motivate.
I go a lot to motivation, because that’s very different for every person.
And so regardless of what type of a team you’re on, you need to figure out what motivates each person on your team, what’s going to drive them, how they like to be communicated with.
One particular role that taught me the most about this was when I was doing change management consulting in a large corporate IT environment.
Thousands of employees distributed around the world, large corporate headquarters where I worked, and you have every possible type of perspective, you have different generations in the workplace, you have different roles, you have the creatives, you have the highly technical.
When you blend that kind of environment together, you have to get down to the core of, if I’m communicating out something that’s critically important to every single person of these thousands of employees, how can I have similar messaging that is going to resonate with each one of them?
The things I learned in that role, the methodologies, the approach, has really translated over to everything else about how I work with teams.
If you can roll out change, you can communicate accurately, effectively; the effectiveness is just as important as the accuracy.
The how is really trying to understand in what way do they like to be communicated? By whom do they like to receive messages? If they have an opposition, how do you help address them? Help them have a voice, but not overtake their voice, not tell them what to think. But also in a way that still helps drive the company forward.
There’s a bit of tact involved there as well.
Michael 6:30
How do you identify that when there are more people involved than you can go talk to one on one and learn that directly?
Wendy 6:38
Good question.
In that kind of environment, we used a lot of sample groups regularly.
We’d use test groups regularly that were ideally representative of a bigger demographic.
That’s a good way to do it, trying to listen to actual teams being impacted.
That’s how you become really reliant on that middle manager level.
You have leadership up here, putting out directives, making change, and you have the doers actually impacted by, the end users, whether that’s internally or externally.
You really have to rely on that middle management, the team leaders, the people that know their teams better than anyone.
Because I can’t talk to thousands of employees.
I could talk to dozens of managers.
They know their teams, they can represent.
In that big of an environment, typically we had to rely heavily on them.
That’s why I say, whatever you want to call that middle management in any company is the most important core team across the board, because they’re the ones who are truly leading the day-to-day of what the employee base is actually going through.
Michael 7:57
How do you suss out how well they actually understand their people versus just think that they do?
Wendy 8:04
That’s a good question.
We would follow down a little bit periodically.
Typically, you can tell if a team is working ineffectively.
There’s big turnover.
Again, I’m in the people space.
Turnover is a huge indicator.
Asking to shift out of that team is a huge indicator.
If you start to see that kind of turmoil in a specific department, specific section, it’s almost always the management that’s causing it.
Or they’re not equipped.
They might be a great manager, but they don’t have the resources.
One of two things is typically happening there.
There’s other indicators that would point to that, or, again, you drill down into that team that’s not being effective and you go talk to the people themselves.
One of my favorite things to do with, and I tend to do it with small to midsize companies, I call it a staff audit.
It’s literally talking to every person on these teams that aren’t working as effectively.
It’s getting down into the nitty-gritty of, “What is the obstacle you’re encountering? What do you not have to do your job effectively? What’s going well? What’s not going well?”
You get down into that the same way you do a financial audit.
You can do what people deep dive.
You start to see those gaps.
You start to hear the themes.
You start to hear what’s missing.
Then you can finally work to fill those gaps.
Michael 9:33
Is there an upper limit to where you find that people audit is effective?
Wendy 9:43
That kind of a deep dive, I wouldn’t typically offer to a company over 500 employees.
At that point, it needs to look a little bit different.
Even if it’s hundreds of employees, you’re not talking to every single one.
You are reliant on teams, representative core teams.
It works really well in that early stage.
I work a lot with early-stage startups going through major growth.
If you’re working from that original core, maybe dozen, employees, and now you’re adding new to the team, the dynamics behind that, the shifting team personalities, who’s coming on board.
You’re moving from generalists to experts.
So, you tend to have a lot of shifting dynamics within that team that have to be addressed.
That’s one of my favorites, in that under-fifty stage.
Mostly because every one person you add makes such an impact to the whole team and that lessons as you grow over time.
Michael 10:52
What have you found is the biggest roadblock to teams being a higher performing, value everyone for who they are that I believe every team really wants to be.
Wendy 11:11
The first thing that comes to mind, I’m sure there’s many. The first thing that just comes to mind is the communication.
Because it goes back to that core person.
Different people like to be communicated with in different ways.
They like to have their voice heard, or don’t care about having their voice heard, they just want to do their job.
There’s so many different personalities, so many different motivators out there.
So much of it comes down to just the way things are communicated out.
The methods, but also just the core message of, if leadership is being directive instead of inclusive when they roll out change, they have big transitions happening.
The lack of transparency, that goes back to communication.
If the team feels like decisions are being made without even considering the impact on them, that’s going to always hit negatively.
If there’s a lack of transparency, and then all of a sudden things are thrown at them, that’s going to always hit negatively.
I would go back to that core of, how and when and why are you communicating to your team the decisions that are being made, and how are you including them in that decision-making process?
For some people, that doesn’t matter as much.
I wouldn’t say, sweeping across the board, every employee wants to be in a strategic planning session.
Not everybody does.
But some do, or some should be involved in a component of it.
It’s sussing out who on your team cares, who can help represent maybe a broader group, and what value can they add when you’re starting to plan for growth, plan for transition?
If you’re working through change; if you’re downsizing, a lot of companies right now are feeling that tightening.
So it’s not a growth phase, but it’s a major change transition phase happening.
If you can give your employees a voice, and then at the end of the day, when the decision is made, they see their voice was represented, that makes all the difference in helping remove some of those roadblocks.
Michael 13:30
If I’m on the downstream side of that, feeling that my voice isn’t being heard, how can I change that and bring it more into, feeling I’m having the input that I want to have?
Wendy 13:49
That’s hard.
What I see so often is that it’s unintentional from a leadership level.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, that they’re well-intentioned, they want their employees to be fulfilled and happy at work.
If you assume that, from the leadership level, then typically, they’re just busy themselves.
They’re busy, and they’re pushing.
If, as an employee, I recognize that leadership, the founders, whoever you’re working for, is making decisions to drive the company forward, then I go in from that perspective as an employee, and say, “Here’s the value I can add for your end goal.”
It’s making that tie to my core function.
How I can impact this positively.
I would always encourage people to bring up concerns.
But do it in a way that it’s not just complaining.
It’s not just coming up with a problem.
It’s saying, “I have solutions here I think could really impact, I think could really help.”
Coming forward with a plan, or at least some solid ideas, that plays out significantly better.
Again, assuming that the leadership is open to it.
They just didn’t think to ask.
Because, more often than not, I don’t believe it’s out of malice.
It’s out of either ignorance that that’s happening, or just lack of time.
Time is our biggest issue when we’re all building businesses.
We’re running, everyone is building fast, growing fast, everything’s changing quickly.
If you assume your leadership is well-intentioned, then that channel of communication feels different than if you assume negative.
Michael 15:50
My voice may be dropped on the floor out of accident or not even recognizing that it had slipped out from the pile, rather than intentionally being thrown down there as something that I don’t care about today.
Wendy 16:10
Absolutely.
I work with a lot of highly technical teams.
Especially in that environment, you have such a variety of personalities.
In business, it’s the extroverts that often have the loudest voice.
So then the loudest voice gets heard and then that’s the message that gets up to leadership.
I always encourage teams, especially when I’m working with managers, that they represent the voices of their team to leadership as much as possible.
If you’ve moved into a manager level, you should have that skill set of not only sussing out from your team, maybe hitting different types, the introverts of the workforce are often the most introspective, thoughtful employees you have, but they’re not the loudest voice.
I go back to that equipping your middle managers, your team leads, those core leaders to your team, equipping them with the ability to bring every voice on their team up to leadership.
Even if it’s not the individual employee’s voice, their voice is being represented by their team.
That helps with the variety of personalities, the variety of generational differences, within the workplace.
We hear a variety of, “It’s not always the loudest voice that needs to have the message that gets to leadership, to our stakeholders.”
I would encourage all the managers to understand that about their own teams as well.
Michael 17:44
That seems really important.
If I, as a leader, come to my management and say, “This is what we’re doing,” then they just have that one data point.
Whereas if I come to them saying, “These are all the things we considered, these are the reasons why each of these makes sense and don’t make sense, and this is why we chose the thing that we did,” then that gives my management all that additional data to point out, “You missed this option.” Or to probe into that and “Why did you decide not to do this?” Or, “This seems really important. Why did that app bubble up to the top two?” so that they can do their job of deciding what the right way forward is.
Wendy 18:45
Absolutely.
Michael 18:48
That brings to mind one thing I learned in the testing world: that our job as testers is not to say that the software is ready to ship or that we should or shouldn’t ship this.
Because that’s a business decision.
That’s what the business leaders are there to do.
Our job as testers is to provide information about, “Here’s what I know about the state of the product. Here’s the parts of the product I don’t have as much data on. Here’s where I feel the risk is if we shipped today, because of this, that, the other thing that might be going on.”
Wendy 19:25
That’s a great example of what I’m talking around here.
That it’s all about the data points for leadership to make informed decisions.
When we talk about everyone’s voice being heard, it’s everyone’s voice is a data point within that company so that leadership at least makes some informed decisions.
And it may not—it won’t be actually, it will not be everyone’s idea.
It can’t be.
Everyone has differing perspectives, different ways that they think the company should go.
Different decisions on product or different features.
At the end of the day, leadership has to make business decisions.
But in an ideal, great, company structure, you’ve been transparent enough, you’ve gathered enough information from your employees, that that decision being made is representative of what’s truly happening on your team.
Exactly to your point with the testing.
It’s not each individual employee’s decision to say, “This is the way the business should go.”
Ultimately, that lands with leadership because that’s where their responsibility lies.
But it is your responsibility to share that data point, to share that information, to share your perspective, so that they know and those decisions are being made with the most information possible at the time.
That’s the best you can do when growing a business.
You can only make decisions off of what’s available at the time.
You can’t know everything.
Nobody has true foresight for all of the factors.
But you can make good decisions off of what you know.
Michael 21:09
It strikes me that for that to really work, the management has to have the courage to say, to give that clarity to each person, “This is the role I am asking you to do. This is what’s in scope. This is what you don’t need to worry about.” And then to stand behind that so that we don’t go back to that tester and say, “You told me if it’s okay to ship and then we have this horrible customer impact.” And, also, then, it’s okay to go the other way and say, “Okay testers, we are asking you to make the ship/no ship decision. We’re going to stand behind you on that. We’re not going to second-guess you. If it turns out that we ship when there was some big issue, we’re not going to come back and blame you for saying that that was the decision.”
Wendy 22:03
Courage is the right word there.
It does take courage to be that transparent.
At the end of the day, no matter what size of company you are, the buck stops with leadership, the people who have to stand by publicly behind that decision.
It does take courage for them to trust the information coming from their team.
That’s where that great relationship, when it is done well, is fantastic.
Those are the teams you see thriving.
When the employees’ information is being heard, their direct line to leadership is open and working and transparent and leadership is taking the ownership of the decision being made, “Stops with me. I trust my people that they were informed for the point in time we were at.”
That’s always the factor.
For that point in time, that was what we decided based on what we knew.
Michael 23:13
Right.
And being clear on what that was, bringing in all the stuff that we learned in the times.
As you’ve gone through this journey, what has been your biggest struggle in doing this as well as you’re able to today?
Wendy 23:38
Over experience, you start to see things done really well.
And you start to see things done very poorly.
You learn a lot from the way it’s done poorly.
I’ve been in companies doing massive layoffs.
I’ve been in companies doing massive growth.
In some scenarios, those communicated decisions were done effectively, whether the information was good or bad.
In some, it was done very poorly, whether the information was good or bad.
What I’ve learned that informed the way I approach things now, is that it goes back to how.
You can have great intentions but still do this very poorly.
Or you can have terrible intentions but still do it relatively effectively.
I’m talking mostly communication, because everything goes back to that when you’re working through change, when you’re working through transitions.
The biggest struggle for myself as a leader within companies, and what I’ve seen leaders struggle with, is transparency into the right level.
You don’t want to tell everyone everything.
That terrifies your employees.
Nobody needs to see all the things.
But you do need to be transparent enough about how or why.
When a company’s about to go through major reduction in staff, we’ve seen a lot of this on the news lately, I’ve lived through it a lot with companies, that can be done as effectively as possible and softening that.
As long as the transparency factor is there from leadership.
Not to the full extent; you don’t want to tell people two months in advance, “We might have to do this.”
But you could work through saying, “We’ve seen some market shifts and we think we need to shift some roles around, maybe do some internal restructuring first.”
That’s an indicator to employees.
If you start having town halls, you start having communication around, “We’re going through some major restructuring. We’re trying to prevent reduction in staff, but there’s no guarantee there.”
There’s a layer.
I don’t know that I have all the answers because each situation is so different.
But there’s a level of transparency that’s required to retain your people and their loyalty.
And then there’s a level of transparency you probably don’t want to go into, which is, if we can work through this as a company and come out stronger on the other side, you don’t want to have terrified everybody throughout the journey.
That’s why it’s a struggle.
The level of that is challenging, and there’s no book for this, there’s no roadmap for this, because each scenario is different.
Some companies can fully weather the storm by doing some really good strategic moves in that time.
Some, to no fault of their own, have to make very hard decisions.
The way they do that, it’s the method is the most challenging.
But also the thing that can pull you through that and help you weather that storm without your company going under.
Michael 27:06
Is there a common thread that you’ve found through all the different methods and techniques you’ve seen, of what works well, versus what doesn’t?
Wendy 27:21
When I’ve seen this done well, there’s different tiers of communication for different groups of employees.
To get slightly more granular, when you think about the methodology of how you’re gonna communicate out bad news, it’s who needs to know what, at what time, and how do they need to receive that message?
I talk a lot about teams and managers and how they work within their departments because I see them as the heroes of the workforce.
Especially as a company scales up and grows, because that distance between employees and leadership starts to massively stretch.
When I’ve seen this done well, it’s when leadership is very transparent with that middle management tier.
And then the middle management tier softens the blow of communication to their teams, because that’s who they know and trust.
As an employee, I’ve been in one of those corporate environments, and you meet the president of the company maybe once at an employee breakfast, and that’s it.
You don’t know them.
You don’t know the CEO in those massive companies.
When you’re in a small scrappy startup, you know the CEO. You’re having breakfast together regularly. You live life together.
But as you grow and expand, who you trust is your core manager, that team lead, the person who is that buffer, essentially, between you and leadership.
When this is done well, leadership is transparent with that leadership level, that middle management level.
And then the middle management level helps disseminate information to their employees in their team in a way that they know they can handle.
If there’s any roadmap to success, it’s that’s a way of transparency that helps soften blows of bad news.
Good news could also be disseminated the same way.
Too often, we see the leadership at the top gets to blow the horn and all the fun things, they get to do all the congratulatory things, they get the wins.
I love when the team leads, the managers, get to communicate the wins to their own team, that the teams get to celebrate on their own, that they get up to be a part of the wins as well.
That happens in good or bad scenarios, that that line of communication, depending on how big your team gets at some point, that method of communication is so important.
Michael 30:05
I like that because it makes clear that that whole line of management is critical to the running of the company.
Not only do make you deal with the bad stuff; you get to have the joy of telling your teams about the good stuff.
It also bypasses the common—because people are smart. They figure out pretty quickly when it’s always the bigwigs who say the good stuff. When the bigwig calls the meeting, we know it’s happy news. But when my manager calls the meeting, we know we’re in trouble.
Wendy 30:45
Exactly.
It’s like when you’re a kid in school.
If the only reason you ever get called to the principal’s office is when you’re bad, you start to fear the principal.
But if you sometimes get an award for good citizenship, if you get called to the principal’s office, that’s great. It’s not always a bad thing.
It’s changing that relationship, that dynamic.
It also really saves your leadership level.
It really saves your management level.
Because they get to celebrate the wins of their team.
They get to be a part of that congratulatory phase.
They’re not just taking the brunt of the bad.
Because that’s very common.
They take the hit for their team, more often than not, and buffer their team from the bad.
Making sure they get the celebration is critically important.
Michael 31:32
It’s a way for upper management to demonstrate to the people below them that they respect and trust and value them.
Wendy 31:43
Absolutely.
Michael 31:46
It’s been a great conversation today, Wendy. What else should I ask you?
Wendy 31:54
What I love about the way you lead these conversations is it’s so many core themes that translate across a lot of different companies a lot different sizes.
So, I might ask you, what core themes do you hear? As far as struggles or or celebratory things that are common, no matter what type of company, no matter what type of industry?
I work pretty industry agnostic, because I find these core people, it’s all about the people who’s building the business.
People are people, no matter what they’re building.
No matter what the product is, the industry necessarily; there’s some nuances there.
So I’d ask you, are there any kind of core struggles or team themes that you see?
Michael 32:54
One core struggle—and this is what my business is based around—is helping leaders resolve, “I don’t know how to bifurcate myself into what I feel I’m allowed to bring to work versus all the things I am, and I see my team is struggling with this as well. Attempting to resolve and handle the struggle takes up so much energy, that we can’t focus on doing what we’re here to do and what our leadership is asking us to do.”
What I focus on is helping leaders resolve that.
There’s always a way to bring all of who you are into everything you do, and especially into the workplace, and to do that in a way that helps your team and all those around you do that as well, however far along that journey they want to go.
A worse outcome than struggling with bringing who we are into the workplace is doing this in a way that harms other people.
This is maybe the biggest struggle.
“How do I do this in a way that helps everyone else rather than harming?”
Wendy 35:44
You communicate that beautifully.
There’s no easy answer in that—I hesitate to use the word “conflict,” but that’s the word that comes to mind.
Conflict between what historically work has been and what work is shifting to be.
You see this play out so much in generational differences.
Work historically has been a very clear-cut, defined space.
“When I go there, I do this role. I come home, I check out, I like to leave that behind. I am this person at home, I’m this person at work.“
That has started to ebb and flow.
We’ve seen, as different generations enter the workplace, different expectations for, “How I can bring my whole self to work? And is that a safe place for me to do so? And can I effectively do my job within the workplace and also still be me?”
There’s no real easy answer for that.
So much of that lands on that workplace environment, providing a safe space to do so.
And this can be on every possible spectrum of the imagination for what that means to you.
if I want to be able to show up, be my best person, when I’m physically in the office, or I’m logging into my work, how do I effectively do so?
I’ve spent a lot of time in the mental health space.
I talk about this a lot, as far as, how does your mental health impact your work self, and how does your work self impact your mental health?
It’s so intertwined and interchangeable.
If the leadership embraces that, and allows their teams, their managers, allows their employees to not only have a voice but also have space to vocalize, speak what they need, to say when it’s bad, say when it’s good.
I’m all about celebrating when it works, as much as when it doesn’t.
Because recognizing the small wins is really important as a team.
Too often, you do the day.
If it works, nobody really celebrates, it’s just, check the box.
But if it goes bad, then we talk about it for hours.
That celebratory aspect of what a workplace could be, when this has gone well, helps unify some of those self.
If I’m there and I’m able to celebrate with my team, when we do good work together, I feel like I’m building that trust with them that allows me to bring more of myself.
I see that as this nice intrinsic loop where, if we’re celebrating the work wins, and I’m just talking, work-related wins together, I’m going to eventually build my level of trust with my team to a point that I can celebrate my personal wins or struggles with them.
The teams that do well, you can feel that collaboration, you feel that community.
Community and connection is the piece of work that we’ve added that wasn’t there necessarily historically before that we’re now requiring to be a part of our work.
If I can feel that connection to my team—and typically it starts professionally and then moves personally—you can start to see those wins happen.
Then I feel safer when it’s not good, when it is a negative thing I need to voice, when it is a struggle I’ve had with my anxiety or it is a struggle with something that’s impacted me externally from work.
Michael 38:47
I really like your focus on celebrating.
I especially like that you said, not only celebrating our wins, also celebrating our struggles.
Because they are celebration worthy.
“These are, what we’re struggling with.”
That we’re showing up is struggling with that is worth as much praise as, “This is where we did stellar.”
Wendy 39:22
One of the startups I worked with, every time they got a “No” from an investor, they would read it out loud and celebrate it, essentially.
The way we looked at it in that environment was, “This is information we’ve learned, and that’s a win.”
Even though there are “No”s, even though it was hard, and that was trying to close an investment round and early stage startup, that’s a hard place to be as a team.
Hearing a “No” can be very discouraging.
When you hear hundreds of “No”s, it’s even more discouraging.
But if you celebrate the “No”s for information, one, and one step further into getting the “Yes.”
I see this play out with sales a lot, too.
Sales is a constant stream of “No”s.
Engineering, developers, is a constant stream of errors.
You get so much negative hits before you get the positive that, if you don’t start to look at that as information versus negativity, you can drown in it.
The celebration of the struggle is just as important.
That’s the unification.
If you think about what brings the team together, more than anything, it’s having some sort of common struggle, common problem to tackle.
When we talk about connection and community, it is unifying, at least around the problem, if you can’t unify around the win.
“We’re all attacking this together. We’re all fixing this together.”
When that’s done well, you have really cohesive teams.
And they’re also sharing more of themselves as they go.
Michael 41:07
So really, what you’re saying is, “Everything is a win.”
Which I 100% align with.
Wendy 41:22
Everything is information.
I’m that person, where, in an interview, if I ever got asked like, “What was your biggest failure?” I can’t answer that question.
Not that I’ve never failed.
But because I think every failure is a lesson to learn from, to grow from.
Nothing is truly a closed door.
You just pivot to something else.
If you think in that way, it’s this mindset of abundance.
It’s not that this “No” means “No” forever.
It’s a “Not now.”
It could be a “Yes” over here.
It’s just redirecting you.
That’s a different mindset.
It’s a different shift.
It’s easier said than done.
I really don’t believe that a straight failure in the workplace or personally is really a thing.
It’s just information.
Michael 42:18
100%.
This is why I focus so much on tiny steps and tiny experiments.
Because experiments don’t succeed or fail.
They just give us information.
Wendy 42:30
Love that. Think like a scientist.
Michael 43:36
And the tiny step, we can always take a step.
So that’s always something to celebrate, that we did that.
And if that step feels too scary, too big; there’s always a way to take a smaller step.
So, we always have a way forward.
Wendy 42:53
That’s great.
When I talk to people about systems, pushing through, I’m transparent about having anxiety and it’s something I struggle with.
If that day is particularly hard, you take the tiny step, the tiny win, the thing that you know you can do and accomplish, and that’s the motivator.
That’s the system you can set in place.
Easier said than done some days.
But, to your point, there’s those micro steps.
Those micro habits.
That system you set in place on the good days so that on the bad days, you could still do it.
That’s a great approach to have.
Because there’s a variety of days that show up.
Michael 43:39
Absolutely.
If people would like to connect with you to learn more about clarifying their communication, celebrating everything, and the other wonderful things we’ve talked about today, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you?
Wendy 43:58
I would love to connect with anyone.
I work with company leaders as well as employees, and I do coaching as well as, through Eleve Talent, I do a lot of work through growth or transition phases and how your team dynamics work.
Free consultation with anyone working through growth team dynamics, pain point of hiring right now, great team members.
It’s very competitive right now.
So please connect with me.
I’m most active on LinkedIn. So Wendy Moore on LinkedIn. You can find my company Eleve Talent, e l e v e talent, anywhere on any of the platforms.
LinkedIn is probably the best.
Or you can email me directly at wendy at Eleve Talent dot com.
I would encourage anyone to reach out.
I would love that.
Michael 44:47
Great I’ll have those links in the show notes.
What would you like to leave our audience with today, Wendy?
Wendy 45:01
At the phase I’m at, growing my own company as well as working with other companies going through growth, there’s been a quote that’s really been resonating with me by Helen Keller.
It says, “Be happy with what you have while working for what you want.”
It goes back to having gratitude, recognizing the wins and what’s going well, while you’re in the process of building and growing.
I’m a big fan of, strive for the growth, stretch outside your comfort zone, keep working for what you want, but also have gratitude for that present moment, what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished.
I’m a big fan of that quote right now.
Michael 45:47
I resonate with that.
Thank you so much, Wendy, for being here today.
And thank you, audience, for joining us today.
Please let Wendy and I know: How have we helped you today? What are you struggling with that we didn’t talk about, that we might be able to help with? We want to know.
Thanks.
Have a great day.
Thanks for joining us on Uncommon Leadership today.
If you found these stories interesting, inspiring, and illuminating, sign up for my newsletter.
Use the form at the top of this page.
You’ll be the first to know about every new episode of Uncommon Leadership.
You’ll also discover how you can build uncommon teams.
Thanks so much!