When Bad News Is Good News

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a consensus in manufacturing that was so obvious it barely even needed to be stated. Never stop the production line. Stopping the line meant waste. It meant delayed production, missed quotas, money leaking out of the operation by the minute. And in most factories, the line was sovereign. Problems got worked around, defects got patched downstream. Don't worry about it now. Just keep the line moving.

Todd Henry [00:00:32]:

And if a worker on the floor thought something was wrong, well, that was a matter for supervisors. The worker's job is just one thing. Just keep the line moving. Tachi Ono, the engineer who built the Toyota production system, looked at this logic and reached a different conclusion. Starting in the 1960s, Ono installed a cord that ran the full length of Toyota's assembly lines. Any worker, the most junior person on the floor, could pull the line. And when they did, the entire line would stop. Not just their section, everything.

Todd Henry [00:01:09]:

From the outside, this looked like madness. Of course. Lines stopping multiple times a day, workers gathering around a problem while the whole operation held still. Western manufacturers who tore these plants reportedly couldn't reconcile it with what they knew about running a factory efficiently. But here's what Ono understood. A defect caught at the moment it occurs costs almost nothing to fix. That same defect passed down the line, built over, patched around, shipped out the door, could cost everything. The line wasn't just being stopped by the cord.

Todd Henry [00:01:42]:

It was being stopped by the problem. The cord just made the problem visible early enough to do something about it. Well, of course, we all know that Toyota's quality became legendary, and they built it not on better technology or smarter managers, although that certainly came about as well, but on a single belief embedded into the physical structure of their factory. The person who sees the problem is the most important person in the room. Whatever their title, whatever their tenure, when they pull the cord, everything else waits. That's not a manufacturing principle. It's a philosophy about what it costs when critical voices go unheard and what becomes possible when they don't. Today's guests have each built something like an andon cord in their own work.

Todd Henry [00:02:34]:

One in the world of deep space exploration and one in the messy human world of creative teams. Both of them are here to tell you the cord isn't the threat. Pulling the cord is the point. Lindy Elkins Tanton is a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley. She's also the author of a new book called Mission Ready, which we're going to talk about today. On her teams. The person who finds the problem is the hero, not the problem. Then we're going to hear from Gustavo Rossetti, or Gus, as he told me to call him.

Todd Henry [00:03:05]:

He's a culture change consultant and the author of a book called Forward Talk. He spent more than 25 years inside advertising agencies around the world before dedicating his career to a single stubborn question. Why do teams consistently avoid the conversations that need to happen the most? This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:03:37]:

So the backstory leading up to that 2am moment was six years previously. After three years of competition, we were selected by NASA for flights. So we competed against 27 other proposals, and in 2017, we were selected.

Todd Henry [00:03:52]:

That's Lindy Elkinstanton, author of Mission Ready,

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:03:56]:

which meant that we could go ahead and start the end of the planning and the building of this giant bespoke spacecraft to go to the first metal world that humans will ever have investigated. An asteroid with a metal surface, the biggest one in our solar system. So for six years, we've been building this spacecraft, solving problems like dealing with crises one after the other, built it during COVID overcame all the things. Finally, we're ready for launch. I had this terrible feeling when I flew down to Kennedy to spend the last month before launch working with the team. I'm saying it's a terrible feeling. At the moment, it felt great. I thought, you know what? I think I can just relax and really enjoy this.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:04:32]:

This is going to be such a moment for all of us to actually launch this spacecraft and then get the journey underway after having worked on it for all these years. And then 12 days before launch, I found myself on. It wasn't a zoom. It was some videoconned at 2am in the morning with 70 people in a jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena with me at Kennedy Space center in Florida. At other places around the world, everyone trying to solve this unbelievable problem that came up at the last minute. And all of that feeling of this is our moment to celebrate was completely smashed because suddenly everything that we were was under risk because if we missed this launch, there wasn't another one right away. We weren't going to the moon. It's not there, available every minute.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:05:16]:

It would be another probably 14 months before we could do it, which that delay would cost tens of millions of dollars, and quite possibly the whole mission would be canceled. So everything rested on this. We had 800 people on the team at the time. And what had happened was some incredibly genius person who took full responsibility for Themselves and their role as a leader, no matter what their position was on the team, their responsibility for everything, had looked at some data and kind of on the fifth look, had said, I'm just not confident that this little component is working how it's supposed to. I'm just going to get one out of storage and put it in this test rig and test. And it turned out that if we had turned on, these are little extra thrusters that turn the spacecraft around. They don't propel it through space, but they do things like aim it toward the Earth so that the radio telescope can talk to us. Like, critical things like that.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:06:08]:

They've important, totally important, totally critical that if we had turned them on the way we planned, they would literally have melted and fallen into pieces. And it was a series of errors not within our team, I'm really proud to say. So that's the backup to where we were at that moment. We had to solve. We had 12 days to solve this. And the reason that it was the perfect place to me to start the book is I've never seen a team function at a higher level. These are people who are bone tired because they've been working seven days a week, literally, for years to overcome unbelievable challenges, including the COVID pandemic, The fact that Jet Propulsion Laboratory actually shut down for months. We did not have months of shutdown in our margin schedule.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:06:53]:

You can imagine. Oh, my God. And suddenly it's an even bigger crisis and everyone is totally calm, completely on target, staying on the topic, bringing up solutions, listening to each other. I've never seen a group of people work together better, and I've never felt prouder. Like, even just remembering it brings tears to my eyes. It was just people at peak performance. And so that's why I thought it was the place to start with the biggest crisis and the best performance.

Todd Henry [00:07:20]:

And we'll. Obviously, we'll talk about the outcome of that moment when I get there. But I do want to back up to a couple things really strike me in that story. First of all, somebody on the team felt permission, they felt freedom to raise their hand and say, wait a minute, something doesn't feel right to me. There is. I know I've read in some other literature and I've read about this sort of bias to launch, this launch bias, where it's like, you get to a certain point and the pressure is building. You've been working so long that you all, you. You're biased toward launch.

Todd Henry [00:07:52]:

You're biased towards saying, yes, totally. And so the pressure to do that is tremendous. So for a. For someone to feel permission to do that speaks to the culture that had been built on the team, that they felt permission to raise their hand. But also the fact that everyone was willing to listen and say, okay, let's do some testing, let's figure this out, rather than just moving forward, because chances are things might have been okay, but that really speaks to the culture. So talk about that a little bit. What do you think it is that created the culture where somebody was willing to raise their hand and say, hold on, I don't feel good about this, I need to do some investigation?

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:08:25]:

Oh, that question goes right to my heart. I think it's the most fundamental thing that I've tried to do on this team and that together, the leadership group of us have really tried to keep going. We've got a motto on the team, which is, the best news is bad news brought early. And really what we mean is the best news is bad news brought early enough to fix it. I think about a space mission, if you don't fix it before you launch, it's never going to get repaired again. It's off Earth. It has no access. You got to make it right the first time.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:08:54]:

So you think about how do you make it so that your bad news can be brought to you? One part of it is something that I think we all try to work on, which is be welcoming to bad news. Not just don't shoot the messenger, but don't even make the messenger uncomfortable. Welcome the messenger, ask the messenger questions. There's different forms of punishment for bringing bad news. You don't want to have any of them. You want to just welcome. So that's a part of it. That's the part that we can control.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:09:18]:

And then another part is, who is it that's going to have that bad news to bring? It's probably not you and me because we're getting our information third, fourth, fifth hand. It's the person who authentically knows their boots on the ground, person who's soldering that wire, typing that line of code, probably a really junior person. And so you've got to have a culture of respect. Get rid of those status signals that usually mean we respect that person and not that person and just respect every person for what they bring. And then your junior people can speak up and be heard. And then you can hear that news soon enough to fix it. And in this case, that 2:00am crisis, the person who found the problem was not a junior person. So luckily, I think he felt more courageous.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:10:03]:

But it was still a very courageous thing to do. And I'll just end with one little thought which is I don't think that any team is 100% successful in every cultural thing they try to create. And we were not. And I would say we're 80% successful with bad news is best news brought early. And we had another case where we were not successful, where the junior people weren't listened to. And it was the most gigantic fiasco and such a learning moment because it was a failure of culture, wasn't a failure of hardware, it wasn't a failure of software, it was a failure of culture. And you must have ways. How do you help people speak up to you when they have bad news to bring?

Todd Henry [00:10:39]:

That's a great question. I think one of the principles I try to teach leaders that I work with is that not all feedback is accurate or true, but all feedback is valid. Meaning that if somebody offers feedback, they're doing it for a reason, which means they perceive something to be true whether or not it is true. And so we have to listen to all feedback, we have to receive all feedback. Whether or not we act on it is an entirely different thing. But we have to be willing or posture ourselves to receive any feedback people want to give because regardless of whether it's true or not, it is their perception. So in their mind, what they believe to be true is more important than what actually is true in that moment. And I think sometimes leaders push away feedback because they don't want bad news or because they're pre filtering the feedback,

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:11:28]:

but they're kernel of truth for whatever reason.

Todd Henry [00:11:31]:

Yeah, yeah, or, or it's inconvenient or I know more than you do. So, you know, what you're telling me is an immature perspective or whatever, but that's a, that's also a tremendous opportunity to build into someone and to help them see things more, more holistically.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:11:44]:

That's such a good point. We, I think there's a tendency for us to say, I have 30 more years experience than you and I happen to know this isn't that big a problem, but that's not the right way to receive it. I think about it also in terms of when is a person able to listen? And so I try really hard to always be listening and I'm sure I'm not. And I definitely have cranky moments in every other kind of moment that humans have. But like you said, receive the information, then you can parse it how you want. But also in that moment when I am receiving that information, if I'm really receiving it, then the person who's giving it to me knows I am. They know they're being listened to, which also gives them a moment when they in turn will be listening. And so if I can say this sounds.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:12:28]:

I'm really glad you brought it. This is incredibly important. I definitely want to dig in with you. Here's some context that I think about. Maybe you can help me think about this context and then give them more information about the larger picture and then they can get the perspective on their piece of news and give you more information that's even more important because they're listening to you in that moment also. So I think both people can be. Can rise up from that exchange.

Todd Henry [00:12:51]:

Love that. That's so good. And to your point, I mean, obviously you built an incredibly healthy culture in what you were doing and an effective culture in what you were doing. But we have to recognize that, I think as leaders, our job isn't just to get the work done. Our job is to build the culture within which the talented people on our team can accomplish the work that we're doing. Right. And that's right. So, yeah, I want to talk about your perspective.

Todd Henry [00:13:12]:

You sort of. The book is parsed into three parts. You talk about the inward, outward at the above framework. Could you describe that framework for us and why it's important? Why do you think that building a great team begins inwardly? Because we always think outwardly when it comes to teams. Why do you think it begins inwardly?

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:13:31]:

So much of that insight came to me just from watching people in meetings and your meetings. People rail against meetings. We have too many meetings also. Probably true, but the fact is that's where so. So much decision making happens, where solution finding happens, where all of our interactions and communications tend to happen when we're not by ourselves, ironically, of course. And so seeing how each person acted, the way they brought information forward, what information they brought forward, how it was received by other people, made me realize that the very first place that anyone should start to be a great team player is in themselves. What can I do in myself to be a much more effective team player? Because so much of it just starts there. And I say team player, but I mean that in the most positive possible way.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:14:15]:

I don't mean subverting oneself in any way or underrepresenting or making it all about the team and not about yourself. It's a way to both make your team the most powerful possible team and also to make yourself a superstar at the same time. Because I like a team where Both of those things are true, where every individual is learning and growing and becoming more than and becoming more of an expert and more respected and more tied in. So they themselves are winning and the project is winning. And I think to start, you gotta start looking at yourself and the way that you interact and the way you bring your information forward. So start with yourself and then network into a team. And that's the next step because truly every team is just a collection of what I call not myself uniquely, but I'm using that term dyad just to mean the relationship between two people. So now you and I, Todd and Lindy, have got a relationship of some kind.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:15:08]:

We've now formed a little bit of a friendship in a way that we talk to each other and an initial impression each other. And then there's a lot of other pairs of people, me and this other person, you and that other person. Suddenly you're a team, but it's your relationship with each other individual in your team that makes the team great. Who's your go to person because you trust them, but who's the person you just don't know very well. And if you did know them, they would be an amazing resource. And then when the project's done, who is it that owes you that thanks and respect in the end, is it the team I'm putting air quotes or the organization and air quotes? The only people that remember, respect, honor and have loyalty are other individual humans. And so it's that networking with other individual humans into a team that makes us all great. And then of course, there's things the leaders can do to help the team succeed and to help each individual succeed.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:15:58]:

So those are the three parts of the book.

Todd Henry [00:16:00]:

I think part of the reason that some leaders struggle is because they either forget about that relational component that it is so important. Right. That we be building into. It is leadership is about people, which for introverts is not a very convenient fact, but it is, it is. Right. Leading would be easy if it weren't for all the people, but the reality is it's about the people, so. Well said. Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:16:21]:

And we so focus on that, the inner part of it and what am I doing? And then we focus on the what can I do to help the team. But we forget about that relational part. And so that's what I loved about your framework because I think it really helps us understand practically what that looks like, what growing a team looks like in that way.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:16:37]:

I find that it's not always completely accepted or understood, particularly on tech teams. Frankly, a lot of people go into science and engineering because they want to focus on the task, and they are introverts, and they're not really there to focus on the people. It's a stereotype, but there's some fraction of people who are there for that reason. And so pointing out that there's two things. There's the task, what we're doing, and then there's how we do the task. And unless you work on how you do, the task itself is never going to get done. And so in the end, it really is all about the people. And that's a message that I think is central to everything that everyone does.

Todd Henry [00:17:12]:

So I think we can all learn from you. Obviously, you've accomplished so much in your career. I would love to hear from you about how you manage the pressures of leadership. So the objectives, the things you're trying to do and the ways in which you're trying to navigate the team toward its objective, and the tension that comes with having to have high expectations and push people and sometimes challenge people and incite conflict. Incite healthy conflict, you know, because that's part of what a leader does, too, is to incite conflict when it needs to be. Sometimes the leader needs to be disliked in the moment in order to be effective.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:17:48]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:17:48]:

In the long term, how have you managed that in your life and in your leadership?

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:17:53]:

Yeah, I can't say that I'm great at it, but I definitely have thought about it consciously and have some things that have helped me and maybe can help other people. Every experiment, including being ourselves, is. Has successes and failures. When I was young, how old was I in my late 30s? Feels young from this point of view, coming into my first big leadership job and for a major position. And I went to talk to my uncle, who was retired from being chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Penn Mutual. So he had run really big organizations. And I said to him, how do you handle it? Like, how do you feel and how do you know you're doing the right thing when you're going into a meeting with someone who's really mad at you and you're making a decision that totally displeases you and them, and they're going to be really upset because this was a scenario that I was anticipating, having problems with it. And he said, I really never got upset in those situations because I was very clear that I was acting on my values.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:18:49]:

I knew what my values were, and I knew that the decision I had made was in accordance to my values and the correct decision for the organization. And so I felt very calm if I felt clear in my gut that I was doing the right thing. And so I tried to emulate that by reminding myself all the time that it's not about me, it's about the project and the organization and the other people. And I find that when I remind myself of that enough, I make much better decisions. And I don't get that kind of riled up, personally kind of feeling about it. And I don't get defensive. I'm just clear, and that's really helpful. So trying to remind myself it's not about myself, it's always about the project and the other person, I found to be extremely helpful.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:19:33]:

And then what you're saying about conflict, I actually think the fundamental job of a team is to discover problems and find solutions. And so the fundamental job of a team is to basically always be in a state of crisis. In a way, there's always a problem or a challenge, something you have to overcome, something that's not business as usual, like something that get you a little bit, like, awake and animated. And so if that is the fundamental purpose of a team, as I posit that it is, then the fundamental state of a team is everyone's talking about a problem and they all have different possible solutions. And so in that moment, they're all, in that sense, in a healthy conflict. And that's the most perfect way for a team to be, because what you want the most is for everyone to have an idea, to have a solution on the table, to have people thinking orthogonally or in totally different boxes than each other so that you have as many possible ideas out on the table. And then it shouldn't feel like conflict. It should feel like, honestly, it should feel like the most fun thing ever.

Lindy Elkins Tanton [00:20:31]:

Here we have a puzzle. We have all the pieces out here together. We're going to figure out what's the best combination of pieces to solve this thing. And the key there is, it's not Todd's piece and Lindy's piece and Sam's piece and Amir's piece. It's one idea, another idea. So as long as it's not personal, it's never about the person, it's not ad hominem about the idea. Then you can divorce your own sense of ego from it and just come up with the best team solution. And that's when I think it feels so good.

Todd Henry [00:21:03]:

Lindy Elkins Tanton's book Mission Ready is available now wherever books are sold. There's a phrase that she used that I haven't been Able to shake bad news is best news brought early. Simple. It's almost obvious when you say it out loud. And yet she also told us about the moment it failed. A giant fiasco, in her words. That wasn't a failure of hardware and it wasn't a failure of software. It was a failure of culture.

Todd Henry [00:21:28]:

Junior voices that weren't heard, a concern that didn't break through. The consequence of a team that hadn't fully made it safe to say the hard thing. So what Lindy showed us is the stakes. How do we become mission ready? What our next conversation is going to give us is the blueprint for doing so. Gus Rossetti spent years inside of organizations where hard things go unsaid. Not because people are cowards, not usually, but because of something much more subtle. He calls it the tyranny of harmony, the pull toward belonging, the unconscious math where we protect peace rather than protecting the project. The insight that connects these two conversations is silence in a team isn't neutral.

Todd Henry [00:22:10]:

It's not a pause, it's a decision, and often an invisible one that accumulates interest. Gus calls it conversational debt. And like all debt, it feels manageable right up until it isn't. We'll be right back with our conversation with Gus Rossetti in just a moment. Stick around.

Gus Razzetti [00:22:33]:

The thing is, people tend to think that silence is cheap, right? If I don't participate, nothing's going to happen. But in action has more consequences than even the wrong action.

Todd Henry [00:22:45]:

That's Gus Rossetti, author of Forward Talk.

Gus Razzetti [00:22:48]:

So when people imagine that you're reviewing a design or a new campaign idea, whatever, new concept, and people see maybe some potential flaws, really see, oh, I saw something similar somewhere, and they don't say anything about it. That's going to hurt the team, that's going to hurt the companies. The point is, there are many reasons why people don't speak up, right? And fear is not usually the most common one. One thing that happens, especially in creative teams, is good thing, right? We want to get along, to go along. And that's why people usually, for example, don't want to challenge maybe a creative leader who has a great reputation in the industry, who is me, I'm going to be the one to tell him you're wrong, or maybe you're missing some point, that idea is not going to fly. So people usually feel a bit intimidated to speak up because of that.

Todd Henry [00:23:41]:

And this is something you call the tyranny of harmony, right? Many creative team teams prize niceness, but you warn against that tyranny of harmony. Why Is prioritizing artificial peace a threat? Why is that such a threat to the team? We all want to be part of a team where we get along and everybody likes one another. And so why is that? Why can that be so threatening to a team environment?

Gus Razzetti [00:24:03]:

The thing is there's this paradox. Only creative industry. Before establishing my own consulting, I firmly work for 25, over 25 years in advertising agencies across the world, right? So I've been in the room where big ideas are discuss not only in the kitchen, but also when they are shared with plants. There's this idea that people want to belong. That's still one of the most important things that we have as human beings since we started here on Earth. We learned that in order to survive, in order to thrive, we need one another, right? It's easy to build a house, to hunt, to cook, and so on and so forth with other people. We need that tribe. So the moment you create friction, we fear that we're going to be rejected by our tribe.

Gus Razzetti [00:24:48]:

They're going to be that maybe send somewhere else and we don't want to do that. So unconsciously, even if we see, hey, I rather say something, we put that sense of belonging, being accepted as a team member first and then making the best work second. And I know it sounds like a paradox and especially in a creative industry, but unfortunately that's how we are wired.

Todd Henry [00:25:15]:

One distinction you make in the book, which I think is an important distinction, because when I first, when this book first came across my desk, I thought, okay, this is a book about difficult conversations. But it's not that. And you make that distinction. There are hundreds of books about difficult conversations. But what you're talking about is something different. It's about focusing on the future instead of dwelling on the past, right? What is the distinction that you make between forward talk and difficult conversations?

Gus Razzetti [00:25:39]:

Not every conversation we avoid is hard. Sometimes we are lazy, sometimes we don't care. My research shows that a lot of people stop sharing their ideas or challenging someone else's idea because they think that nothing's going to change. So it's not that it's hard, it's simply, I don't matter, I don't care. This is how things work. So forward talk to your point, is our focusing on the future, but not just as a gimmick of hey, let's move forward. But basically there are two axes that describe the conversational patterns that most teams have. Either we focus on the past.

Gus Razzetti [00:26:16]:

Imagine for example, blame when we say that idea is going to be great and then the Client rejects it and everyone starts finding who was the one who came up with the idea. We get stuck in the past, what happened versus what have we learned from that experience and move forward. The second axis of that forward talk model is when we address the issue instead of avoiding it or dancing around it. We talk about group, think group. Thing is when we all are aligned and we say, oh yes, sure, we're on the same page, but we actually avoided the real conversation and we decide to move forward, but we're not actually there.

Todd Henry [00:26:56]:

One of the reasons that people don't engage in forward talk is that they don't feel a sense of agency. Maybe they feel like this isn't my place or I, who am I to step into this conversation? And often people surrender their voice in meetings. What is a step that we can take to begin to re regain that conversational agency, to begin to be more forward in how we address what is unspoken within the organization, Address some of this conversational debt.

Gus Razzetti [00:27:29]:

There are many. But let's say the first thing that comes to mind, which is a great test. So especially for creative minds and creative leaders, it's the regret filter, right? If we don't bring this issue, we don't address this question, if we don't challenge this idea, what's going to happen in a week from now? Or even worse, in a year from now? Right? Let's say that, for example, we know that AI is totally transforming how the creative industry, right? How we not only create ideas, but how we curate ideas, how we produce ideas. If we don't discuss that openly and how we frame the role of each team member, we're going to pay a price. So the filter, that regret filter is saying, okay, the consequences of not saying something might seem like cheap or maybe little thing, but what about six months from now? What about one year from now? How it's going to harm the team and putting yourself into that point, start to open up interesting conversations.

Todd Henry [00:28:31]:

One of the concepts you talk about in the book is the drama triangle. Could you describe what that is and why it's important for a leader to move from the typical role we think of, which is hero, to being more of a facilitator? Why is it important for us to understand that concept?

Gus Razzetti [00:28:50]:

John Lee, you mentioned the hero. So a drama triangle involves three roles and they can be more than three people playing those roles. And it's not. The roles are bad. They're bad in how they get stuck in the past. So we have, in order for a leader to play the hero role, another Team members need to be the victim and the victim, usually someone that's being attacked by someone else or doesn't have the skills or allegedly the skills that the leader has. So if I'm weak or I'm bad at doing something, then the leader comes to save me. And the third piece or component is the villain.

Gus Razzetti [00:29:26]:

So the villain victimizes the victim and then they get in a fight with the leader. So each role reinforces each other, but they're not about. That's why it's called drama triangle. It gets the team stuck in that drama versus moving forward into a better kind of a more solution oriented mindset.

Todd Henry [00:29:45]:

Ethical think. All of us have been in situations in organizations where we've experienced that, where you have cults of personality that emerge. Certain groups feel, always feel like the victim. They're always pointing fingers. But then the group they're pointing the finger at, they feel like the victim of some other part of the organization. How does this impact us and how do we as leaders, how do we begin to break that cycle? Because that, that is like you, I'm sure I, I counter this in almost every organization I work with. Everybody will say, you don't understand. Our team is unique because we're at the whim of this other group.

Todd Henry [00:30:19]:

I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much every single organization. By the way, that other group, I've already talked to them and they feel like they're at the whim of some other group. Right. So how, as a leader, how do we begin to counter this dynamic?

Gus Razzetti [00:30:31]:

The first thing to point is understanding that the dynamic exists. So you say, hey, I observed it, but many leaders, maybe they were part of it. And because they were, because sometimes it's even funny. People don't realize they get stuck into this. And that's why it's called drama. We're all playing our parts and each role reinforces each other. So awareness, it's where things get started. The second is understanding.

Gus Razzetti [00:30:56]:

To your point earlier, we are surrendering our agency. The moment we become victims. We're complaining that other team has more budget or more resources or more technology than we do. Instead of saying what can we do with the resources, the money, the things that we have? So instead of being in control, we surrender our control to someone else. So there is to shift roles and for example, the victim needs to become a creator. So start owning your part. What can you do with what you can control versus complain about what you can't. The villain needs to become a challenger.

Gus Razzetti [00:31:36]:

It's great to have someone that plays the devil's advocates and try to poke holes and see what's missing. An idea, but not just to victimize a team member, but because they want to elevate the quality of the ideas. And lastly, instead of having heroic. Whether our team members or leaders that come to save the day, they need to facilitate the conversation but allow other people to come up with ideas, not be themselves. The one who say, hey, this is the idea that's going to save us as a team.

Todd Henry [00:32:09]:

Gus Rossetti's book Forward Talk is available now wherever books are sold. So I want to leave us with something that Gus said that I think is worth considering. He said that most leaders assume that silence means agreement, and they're wrong. Silence is often disagreement that doesn't believe it has a home. Lindy built a home for that disagreement. She called it the best news is bad news brought early. I love that it looked like respecting every voice in the room. The engineer who looked at the data a fifth time and said, I'm just not confident, even if it's on the eve of a launch, which is crazy.

Todd Henry [00:32:45]:

But to function at a high level, that's what teams need. And Gus gave us some tools that we can use to build that culture in our own rooms. In my book Die Empty, I wrote about the fear of carrying your best work with you to the grave. Those insights, the ideas, the contributions that are left undeposited that don't make their way into the world. And that concern certainly exists, right? But it's important to understand that that's a choice that we make. We have to be willing to put our work into the world each day, even when it might cost us something. And as a leader, understand you are the culture. Every time you invite a voice that would have stayed quiet.

Todd Henry [00:33:21]:

Every time you treat bad news like a gift that it actually is. Every time you sit with the silence long enough for the real conversation to emerge, rather than filling the vacuum with your own certainty. That's how the best work makes it out of the room. So the challenge this week is this. Are you creating an environment in which bad news can be brought forward and in which you're willing to collaborate not out of a place of insecurity, but out of a place of confidence that we are moving toward the objective together. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like our full interviews, you can get them@dailycreativeplus.com just go there, enter your name and email address. It's absolutely free.

Todd Henry [00:34:04]:

We will send you a feed to let you listen to the full interviews in their entirety. My name is Todd Henry. If you want more about my books or my speaking events, you can find it@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see.