Before BreakfastManage your team (and life) better, with Sabina Nawaz
Management expert and executive coach Sabina Nawaz shares tips for creating a more effective workplace
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning, this is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome, advice they have for the rest of us, and all sorts of things. And today we are talking with Sabina Nawaz. She is an executive coach and the author of the brand new book You're the Boss, which is all about how to take your management skills to the next level. So, Sabina, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Laura, it's great to be here.
Yeah, so why don't you tell my listeners a little bit about yourself.
I am someone who coaches executives one on one and then I do leadership workshops and talks. But at the heart of it, if you ask me what am I paid to do, I'm paid to raise people's heart rates.
Because yes, okay, we're going to get our heart rate up in the course of this episode.
How do you do that well?
Because I think that leadership. Acts of leadership require courage, and courage is when your heart is pounding and you still take action. So it's about really raising people's heart rates, as in pointing them towards the courageous actions they need to take, and then helping them with practical, pragmatic tools to be able to take those actions.
Absolutely.
And you know a lot of people at some point in their life will have this transition into management. I mean they've been working as an individual contributor for years and they get promoted to the next level and all of a sudden they are responsible for other people. What are some of the biggest misconceptions people come into that stage with.
I think there are a few, and I'll stick to three and can dig into the details if you want. But first is that when you're promoted, it is actually the most risky time of your career because the strengths that got you here are going to be viewed very differently from the people who's nexicraining up looking at you. View may not be as charitable. For example, if you're very detail oriented, now you're going to look like you're a micromanager. So that point of promotion is the riskiest time in your career. The second misconception is that it's not power that corrupts but pressure. We are all facing pressure, especially right now, from all directions, and that corrupts our actions in a way that demoralizes the people who follow us, and then it tanks business results. And the third one is that the more you know, and you didn't get to be a manager by not knowing a lot. The more you know, the more successful you are, the more senior you get, the less you know about how people view you, because power tends to obscure the truth, the real feedback from you.
Yeah, because people will not tell their bosses straightforwardly what they think of them.
Correct. No, who's going to say, hey, keeper of my paycheck, let me tell you something you did that wasn't quite that great.
Yeah?
Yeah, that would take a lot of courage and would be very hard to do, and I can see how that would make it difficult to understand what is really going on. But you say in your book that there's no such thing as a good boss or a bad boss. I'm sure we have some people listening to this who would disagree on the bad boss part.
But what do you mean by that?
Yeah? I think because pressure corrupts, it's not necessarily a binary good and bad. It is that the pressure corrupts us into bad boss behaviors. You can be a very good person. Look, most bosses, even the ones we like to revile, don't wake up in the morning saying how can I be a bad boss today? They're actually waking up going I want to be a good boss. I want to help motivate my people. I want to get some results. I want to get some stuff done. And then all that pressure meets us in the day and we forget empathy, we forget driving for clarity, we might forget to acknowledge somebody's good work because we're go, go, go, rush, rush, rush. So it's not that you're a bad boss, it's that pressure transmutes your best intentions and sometimes your good behaviors into bad boss behaviors.
Excellent, So what are then good boss be here?
So I mean, maybe we can talk about some regular actions of effective managers.
Absolutely, what a great question, because there are several that they can take, and these actions are paired up with concrete tools that can help keep you there in those actions. One of the biggest ones, Laura, that I find over and over again from the twelve thousand pages of data that I collected on bosses is around communication. Now, communication is a very very broad umbrella, and it is the longest chapter in my book because it has seven different sub pieces to it. One of them is, don't assume that people who work for you are clueless. Ask them first before telling, find out how they think they're doing. Find out what they have tried before to address the problem before saying have you tried this? Have you done this? Because when you assume that they don't know and you start to preach to them, it infantilizes them. They feel, wait, why should I bother? They're going to give me all this advice anyhow. So that's just one example around communication. That's really a way to turn from a bad boss to a good boss.
And one of the suggestions you gave in the book is is actually working on your shut up and listen muscle. I believe that was how you put it to like just even setting a target for.
Yourself of not being the first person to talk.
Exactly, what if you set a target that you're the third person to talk, third or later. It's that simple, and of course that difficult to do when you're really wanting to say something. So another way to exercise your shut up muscle when you're on video calls, is to put yourself on mute by default, because by the time you go and unmute yourself, maybe you've gotten rid of the urge to speak. If you're the first two people to speak.
I love that.
I wonder if there's another example of an effective manager habit you could share with us.
Absolutely. So another one, of course, is someone who delegates. Well, now, unfortunately, most people make a horrible mistake when they delegate, and the biggest mistake they make when delegating is treating it as an on off switch. Here, Laura, go do this. I'm delegating this to you. I'm empowering you. You go off and do it. Now. Maybe Laura has never done that task before, or she doesn't fully understand what it is that I want her to do. But because of my position of power, she's not gonna ask me. So Laura goes and does the best she can. She gives it to me the day before the deadline, and it's not what I want. So now I'm swooping in. Forget that, I forget that delegation, and forget my weekend because I'm going to now jump in and have to do this work. So Treating delegation as an on off switch is a really big mistake. Successful bosses use what I've created called a delegation dial instead of a switch. So look at the person, find out what their level of experience, comfort, familiarity is with the task, and if they're still learning. There are five notches in this dial. First one is you just do it. You have them watch you, shadow you, but you're doing the work. Then you tell them, You tell them step by step, here's what you're going to do. Next, you teach them here's why we do it this way versus that way. Next, you coach them what if you thought about how else would you approach it? Where you stuck? Ask them great questions and only then do you'd flip the switch and be just a safety net for the person.
Got it all right?
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and we'll be back with more from Sabina on how to be an excellent manager.
Well, I am back with Sabina Nouaz.
We are talking about how people can manage effectively what she has learned from studying thousands and thousands of managers and managerial situations. Sabina, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your career because you started off or at one point in your life at least. We're working at Microsoft, I believe, and we're promoted through various ranks and had to learn a lot of this stuff, perhaps the hard way on your own.
Absolutely absolutely. And so your question is what was my career paths.
Or yeah, yeah, it was a career path to this.
Yeah, to this current job. Oh my gosh. So I started as an engineer, and I worked in various software product developments Internet Explorer, Windows, MSN, and a number of version zero products that went nowhere, kind of dead on arrival, failed experiments. And as I worked on those and loved the job, loved what I was doing. Microsoft gives you an eight week sabbatical if certain conditions are met, and for the first time in my life, a lot of that eight weeks I was not doing anything. I wasn't just go, go going, And as I'm sure you talk about, Laura, when you have that kind of time, wonderful insights start to come to you. One of my insights that landed with crystal clarity one fine day was that it was no longer a matter of if, but when I would become a corporate vice president, and I, of course had ambitions. I wanted to pursue that path, but once I realized that I was going to get there, the strange thing is I didn't want to spend the next five years of my life trying to chase it, because I figured I've cracked the code. It's going to be boring to and chase something I already know how to get. Shoot, what do I do with my life? I've thought of my career as an engineer, and that made me reflect on the feedback I've received from my team about being a good manager. So I thought I should do some of that people's stuff, not really knowing what that was or what I was signing up for, but fortunate enough to know the person who was in charge of hiring for that department. She had seen me speak at a conference and she said, yeah, absolutely, let's do this, and I had it was a really no risk proposition because she wanted me and my manager that I was leaving said you have a blank check to come back. So that's how I then, at Microsoft itself, spent almost six years creating the company's management development, executive development programs, succession planning processes, working with Bill Gates and Steve Bomber on all of this. It was an amazing and exciting and incredibly educational time. And that was twenty years ago when I left, and now I work and coach CEOs.
Awesome.
So I have a question with this, like, when you start coming in, you know, you've either been brought in because somebody is having issues, or you know somebody brings you in and you start by doing a three hundred and sixty degree feedback assessment from what I understand, can you talk a little bit about what that is and what you are asking people and why they feel free to talk in a situation like that when you know they might not say things to their boss right.
Right, because power obscures they don't say those things to their boss. And pretty much every single person I have done this assessment for is shocked by the extent to which their power is misinterpreted translated into fear some behaviors on the part of the employees, how much of a gap, how much of a power gap they create. So basically thees I ask the person to identify about twelve of their coworkers, people on their team, their peers, their manager, sometimes even their partner at home, and we agree on a set of questions that I'm going to ask these people. These questions are derived from the things that this person most wants to work on. Let's say they want to work on decision making or some aspect of communication, or some influence skills. So I ask those questions. I write down everything people are saying verbatim, hence the twelve thousand pages of data I've collected over twenty years, and I create the themes where I can go back to the person and say, hey, no matter who I talk to, fan or critic, here are the five things people tend to say about you. And then we set about working on well, so what do you want to do about this?
And when people are surprised by it, what is the surprise? I mean, is it just like, wow, everybody hates me? Or is it something more nuanced than that.
It's much more nuanced than that, because I do the feedback in two stages. Stage one, I just have a conversation like I'm having with you, Laura, and I say, hey, I talk to these people. I've got like fifty pages of verbati and feedback. It's going to be hard for you to hear they start to get scared. I say, don't worry. I say this to everybody, and then I give them the themes broadly speaking. Here, you know, people think you're great, you're very smart, you've had a huge impact on X, you're doing this well. And then these are the three things that they're struggling with. And the person invariably will say, oh, phew, you had scared Jesus out of me. This is not that bad. That's not a surprise. I can work on those things. And I say, wait till you read the report. So the thing that really hits them hard is the visceral experience of reading in the words of their coworkers how they're viewed. Yeah.
Yeah, and that's interesting.
How you are giving feedback to people, because of course managers have to give.
A lot of feedback to people.
Yes, I wonder if if you could talk a little bit about this, because you make a distinction between you know, even if things are going well, there's a distinction between praise, which might not be terribly useful, and positive feedback, yes, which sounds like it's more actionable.
Can you talk a little bit about that.
Yes, the distinction between praise and positive feedback, praise is good job, thank you, And there's nothing wrong in saying those things unless you're doing it too much, in which case you're going to come across as patting someone on the head all the time. I take that, I get a temporary hit. Feels nice to be seen and appreciated. Who doesn't like that? Great? Bring it on? But I cannot replicate that. So, for example, somebody had told me in a class that can I give you some feedback? And I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, you know, what's the feedback? And then they go, yeah, right, and I'm like sure, and I put on my best facilitator face praising for the feedback, and they say, you're very passionate. And I went and I is that a good thing a bad thing? What do you mean by passionate? So I ask a few questions and he says, no, no, no, it's a really good thing. And when you talk with your hands a lot and have you vary your vocal tone a lot, and when you do that, A it keeps me awake in the classroom, but B it shows me you're really connected to what you're speaking about. And then that makes me pay attention and it lands the things that are really important. So that passion that you express through your voice in your hands is really helpful. Well that was gold because that allowed me to actually then go get more coaching, to study gestures, to understand more the nuances of how I could convey more of that passion. So that's the difference between praise and positive feedback.
And I suppose it's the same thing with negative feedback, that the best negative feedback is what is going to actually change the situation at.
Hand exactly again, it is what is it about it? So often and that's why an interview based three sixty is so helpful because of course most people will say, oh, yeah, my boss is just being a bully. Okay, well could you help me understand what is it that they're doing or saying that makes you think they're a bully. And that allows more people to give me a play by play so we can say, ah, okay, when they interrupt you, that's what you think of as a bully, because that might not be what someone else thinks of as a bully. So really getting specific and granular will allow me to shift one way or the other.
Excellent, Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break, and then we'll be back with more on being an effective manager and a little bit about Sabina herself. Well, I am back interviewing Sabina Nouas, who is the author of the brand new book about Sorry Again.
They say you're the boss. That's the name.
I want to make sure I get it, get it right, not becoming the boss. You're the boss, right, that's the name. So I to ask a little bit about you and your own sort of habits because we're always interested in people's time management here on this show.
I'm wondering if you.
Have any rituals in your day that help you be more effective.
Absolutely, Laura, I have a dual ritual. It's called micro habits, which I pair with something called a yes list. So micro habits are tiny, tiny, ridiculously small steps towards building a better habit, a big habit. One example for me in my personal life in twenty twenty two, actually, for about twenty years, I've fantasized about being a runner, but never quite made it. Those New Year's resolutions remain stuck until January fifth, and so in twenty twenty two, I decided I was going to use micro habits to get into a running habit, which meant first day I ran one point one miles. Next day I ran one point one miles. The day after that I ran one point one miles. And I did not increase that because that was something I could do and not with ease, but I could do and so increasing it in very very tiny increments. I think it was about a month when I went from one point one to one point three miles. That's more fast forward a couple of years and I ran three half marathons and now I'm training for a full marathon. So the only way to overachieve is to underachieve, is to start by underachieving. So even today, I have a set of micro habits and a spreadsheet called a yes list. In that yes list, I list the micro habits and then I have the dates, and at the end of the day, yes, no, did I do that or not? And it's really fun to see at the end of a year or at the end of a month how I'm tracking. It's also useful data to show, oh, this is the one that doesn't get done at all. Maybe I'm not interested in it, or maybe I need to do something different. I need to shift my ritual in order to make that happen.
And in your book you talk about how managers might make a similar list of micro habits that they want to try in the workplace. For instance, like you said, being the third person to speak instead of the first person to speak? Did I do that at least once today? Do I get a yes in that column for this? Is that how that would work?
Exactly? That's how exactly how it would work?
And so have you seen some transformations with this? I mean, does this actually make a difference in people's performance over time?
Absolutely? Absolutely. There is one person who's written about who's shared their own journey in the book as well, and in their case, the manager had called them into the office and said, there are three people threatening to leave because of you, as the manager. You need to fix this. And we did the three sixty. We got the feedback. They developed these micro habits and this yes list and followed it. This person followed it more religiously than most people I coach, and it made a massive difference. People started to praise this person instead of condone them, I mean, instead of criticize them for the very things that were tanking their performance as a manager. And these their employees remained with them, did not leave, and when they left it wasn't because of the poor manager.
Well that's that's great when that can happen. I love things that actually work out.
It's always wonderful to hear when people can in fact change.
Yeah, yeah, right, self help. You never know if it's actually going to happen exactly.
And also the other thing that's really interesting is that it changes people's personal lives. It improves their relationships, it makes them more healthy depending on what micro habits they adopt.
Awesome, Well, Sabina, I always ask people this question, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Wow? What have I done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Make a day better? You know, something that's added a lot good stuff to your life.
It's actually happened yesterday, Okay, And yesterday I was exhausted. I am jet lagged because I've just come back from London and so I've been breaking up at like two and three in the morning. So I was exhausted, depleted. I couldn't go running because I was too tired to run, which then makes me more depleted, and I was slammed by a number of things, like most of us are, and suddenly I realized that just about everything in my day was generated by me. It was my choice. I chose to be on a certain podcast, I chose to meet with a certain client, I chose to write an article, and I just shifted. Thanks to a wise woman and her wisdom, I shifted one word from I have to do this to I get to do this. And the minute I said I get to do this, I thought about how privileged I am to be able to write an article, how fortunate I am to be working with one of my favorite clients today, how joyful it is to get on a podcast and talk about my life's work. So simply making that shift got me to this amazing, amazing day, and I was able to sleep through the night as well. I'm not I'm not sure everything had to do with that word.
Yeah, sleep always takes a day from great to awesome, for sure.
Sure, Sibita, what are you looking forward to right now?
I am looking forward to the launch of this book, and I can probably learn from all the books you have written, Laura and your guidance, But my senses once the book leaves my hands. It doesn't become my book anymore. It becomes the book of the reader, of the manager or the aspiring manager. And I would love to hear what they make of it and what they do with it. What are their micro habits? What did they populate the yes list with? Are they creating a time portfolio? Are they using the delegation dial? So? I would really love to know what are the lived experiences of people as a result of having read this book.
Absolutely sounds wonderful. Well Sabina, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to everyone who listened to this. Please check out her book, You're the Boss, And if you have feedback on this or any other episode, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
