[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 788. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I am so glad that you are here. We are talking about some big stuff today and I’m really excited about that. But I hope your fall is off to a nice kickoff. We’ve got lots of things going on here at Practice of the Practice. Just wrapped up our Level Up Week, that was early September, and pretty soon here we’ve got Killin’It Camp coming up and all those details over at practiceofthepractice.com. So whatever phase of practice you’re at, if you’re just getting started, we’ve got a membership community for you there, if you’re adding clinicians to your practice, we’ve got a membership community there, if you’re leaving your practice, we have a membership community there. So lots of ways to help you be in community with people that are at the same phase as you because it’s all about growing, it’s about changing, it’s about finding the best ways to do things, learning from others and being brave at work. That’s what I’m really excited about with Ed Evarts who’s joining us today. Ed’s the founder and president of Excellius Leadership Development of Boston-based coaching organization. Ed’s the author of Raise Your Visibility and Value: Uncover The Lost Art of Connecting on the Job and the host of the Be Brave At Work Podcast. Ed, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. So glad that you’re here today. [ED EVARTS] Thank you for having me, Joe. I’m thrilled to be chatting with you. [JOE] Yes, you just had me on your podcast and we clicked there and to have you on my show, I was just like, yes, I got to have Ed on and talk about being brave at work and your story and all that. So how did you get to this point where being brave at work, that’s your focus? What got you here? [ED EVARTS] Well, I have a classic corporate to consulting transition. I was a corporate employee for 25 years and left my last organization in 2008 and made the decision to transition to an independent practice doing leadership coaching and team coaching and small business strategy and along the way recognized the importance of being visible in my marketplace. I think this is an important activity for all folks, whether they run a business or are employed by a business to ensure that you are visible and provide value at all times. So as that opportunity and area of interest grew it became clear and clearer to me that a subset activity under being visible and providing value is bravery and that there are opportunities that we all encounter during our careers where we need to say something that needs to be said or do something that needs to be done and we don’t. We hold back, we regret it, we go to the proverbial water cooler and talk about it with others even though they can’t do anything about it. So I’ve done a survey and as you mentioned, I’m hosting a podcast called Be Brave at Work, where we talk with business leaders and individuals just like you and I and authors and educators and researchers on bravery to talk about what folks can do a little bit differently than they’re doing today to be brave at work. [JOE] Now were there moments when you either were brave at work or you’ve coached people through being brave at work that really stood out to you that that was one of those essential pieces of growing in leadership? [ED EVARTS] Well, there’s that old joke that psychiatrists are psychiatrists because they’re the crazy one and they’re looking for ways to navigate their own life. So I look back on my professional career and I don’t consider myself to have been someone who was very brave. I had many examples of times where I could have said something that I wanted to say or done something that I needed to do and didn’t do it and it was either due to pressure that I created in respect to relationships, it might have been a lack of knowledge on how to do it. There are a number of reasons that people avoid saying what they need to say or doing what they need to do and hence don’t demonstrate the bravery that they need to do. In respect to your second question, it really came to ahead for me as I began working with others to see that it wasn’t just me, that I’m not the only one out there who withheld doing what I thought I needed to do, regardless of how hard it would be to do it. Most of my clients, although they did not hire me to help them be braver, all had moments where they needed to say something to their boss or say something to a team or a colleague and they didn’t know how to do it and needed help figuring out the pathway to be braver at work. [JOE] Now when you think about bosses or business owners, because primarily we have private practitioners that either have their own business or are growing it or maybe even have larger teams, what unique challenges around bravery do you think that the average private practice owner deals with? [ED EVARTS] Well, I think there’s a couple of areas that all private practice owners should think about and reflect on as they look to operate their business as professionally as possible. The first one, of course is whether they like it or not, or believe it or not, they are role modeling and creating the culture at their organizations. If you want people to be brave at work, if you want someone to come up to you and say, hey, I’m not sure the idea that we’re engaging on is the best way to do it, I have some other ways that I think we should think about in order to make great progress, you have to role model it and reward it and recognize it. Unfortunately, most business owners don’t do this. They don’t create the culture. They don’t recognize bravery at work. They don’t reward bravery at work. So this is something that I think all business owners should think about in an effort to encourage it and create a culture of bravery. It is okay to be brave at work. Being brave at work is not bad. It is not hurtful, it’s not judgmental, it’s designed to be helpful. We want people to help each other, be better performers, we want to help each other do a better job. We want to help our organization be as successful as it can be and I can only do that partially by being brave and candid with others when it’s important. So role modeling and recognizing Joe, that how people see me and the behaviors that I demonstrate as a leader need to include being brave in the workplace. [JOE] What are some areas that maybe you see owners not being brave in the workplace? [ED EVARTS] I think owners sometimes feel disconnected from the day-to-day operations of their business in respect to observing or navigating through details. By no stretch of the imagination, am I suggesting that business owners be micromanagers, but they don’t say something that needs to be said to a person who is underperforming or there is somebody who’s underperforming and they move them to another department thinking that if I eliminate them in this role, they’ll get better magically in another part of the organization. I have had some client companies that have moved people a number of times, a single person a number of times in hopes that these new work environments within their own organization would help them get better and of course it hasn’t. So one area, Joe, is ensuring that when it comes to performance or behavior in the workplace, that if you see something or experience something that is not what it should be or is not meeting expectations or is problematic for other employees or for your organization, that you say something about it. Being brave is not disrespectful or rude. There are very polite, respectful ways to share with a colleague something that they need to hear in order to perform at a better level. So I think this is a key behavior that most leaders can do more effectively, which is to be helpfully and respectfully brave with others in order to help them. [NOBLE] Our friends at Noble have run their own clinics, worked with thousands of clients, and have seen firsthand the burnout and stress that can come with heavy caseloads, difficult topics, and a lack of time. With these things in mind, Noble built their app to support therapists by making between sessions support easy and offering and opportunity to build passive income. Now with new CPT codes coming in 2023, that will allow therapists to offer reimbursable remote monitoring support, noble is revolutionizing remote patient monitoring. The team at Noble’s built a program that you can quickly implement to allow you to reimburse code 989×6 for cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT remote monitoring. This is so exciting for therapists and clinics. This new CPT code, which is coming into play in January, 2023, will allow you to make more money per hour and earn passive revenue. Noble’s system provides everything needed to reimburse objective data gathering, device integration, assessment and data stream display measurement and integrations, HIPAA compliant integrations into other EHRs, and real-time and immediate interventions for elevated symptoms. If you’d like to discuss adding their plug and play remote patient monitoring for 2023 so you can reimburse the new CPT codes, schedule a time to talk with Eric, their CEO at pop.noble.health. Again, that’s pop.noble.health. [JOE SANOK] Now what about fostering bravery in your employees or contractors or assistances because I think about when I worked at the community college, I feel like I’m a pretty bold person and I don’t mind ruffling feathers once in a while, but you could definitely tell keeping your mouth shut in that environment was highly rewarded. They didn’t like people that said, no, that’s definitely not going to work. People behind the scenes would often say, oh yes, like we know that vice president’s new initiative is a total waste of time, but no one had the guts to say it. So how do you foster bravery in small businesses like a therapy practice? [ED EVARTS] Well, there’s a model that exists in the world called psychological safety and psychological safety came out of a Google study that asked why are some teams at Google better than other teams? The researchers came back and said the number one behavior that the more successful teams have that the less successful teams don’t have is this thing called psychological safety, which is the ability for individuals in a team environment to say what needs to be said respectfully and professionally. Of course, in order to help the team make progress, in order to make an environment and a team feel psychologically safe there’s three things that folks should do that business leaders should do. They all start with the letter R, one is role model, you need to demonstrate being brave, respectfully and professionally, of course with others in order for folks to see it and see that it didn’t have a bad or as bad an impact as you might have thought it had. Two, you need to recognize it so when others say something that took courage to say or was hard to say or may have had an impact that was less positive than what they hoped it would be, you need to recognize it as part of the team and say, “Hey I just want to pause for a second and thank Joe for saying what he just said. I know it was hard to hear, but it took bravery for him to say that and I think that’s fantastic.” Then the third R is really reward. You have to look for ways to not only recognize people for doing things that require bravery but rewarding them for doing it. It could be non-monetary things like Employee of the Quarter or it could be a monetary gift card or whatever it might be. The list is endless, but you need to reward it. By doing this role modeling, recognizing and rewarding on an ongoing basis, the likelihood of the team, the likelihood of individuals, your likelihood for being braver at work, which creates a more engaged, honest, fast-moving environment is significantly greater. [JOE] Yes, I think about we have a saying at Practice of the Practice that I actually borrowed from the community college I worked at, but they didn’t really enact it and it’s proceed until apprehended. The idea is I want people to lead with creativity. I want them to lead with trying new things. If at some point you miss the mark then we have a conversation but I’d rather they lead with innovation than to just wait for my approval on everything and be scared that I’m going to be upset about something. One other thing, oh, go ahead. [ED EVARTS] Just quickly, Joe, most organizations unfortunately don’t do that and they don’t role model it. Bravery as a behavior is not even acknowledge or exist within the vision or the behaviors of people within the organization. We don’t talk about bravery, we don’t look to recognize areas of bravery, we don’t reward bravery. Bravery feels like an anomaly that, gosh, if I need to say something that’s going to be difficult for someone to hear, this is going to be mind-blowing here, because this is not something we do as an organization. So we can be so overly respectful and overly kind to others that we’re not honest with them because we don’t want to hurt their feelings or make them feel uncomfortable, et cetera. Again, I would tell our listeners and especially folks who are business owners, that there are very polite and respectful ways that you can be brave at work and tell people things that they need to hear in order to help create an environment where bravery is more of a day-to-day interaction versus some type of once in a lifetime anomaly that never ever happens. [JOE] Now I know you have an acronym HELP for people about how to have a positive relationship with your boss. I would love to look at it from the boss’s perspective of maybe how you can apply this acronym to really just help people have a better relationship with their employees. Will you walk us through those four steps that you’ve written about and then maybe we can talk about from the boss’s perspective how you can really foster that better relationship with employees. [ED EVARTS] Absolutely. This acronym is included in my more recent book Drive Your Career where I talk about nine behaviors that people need to think about. Not all of them may apply to all people at all times because all of us are very different but these are nine behaviors that people should think about in order to ensure that their career is moving at the pace and in the direction that they would like to go in. You’re referencing the first chapter, which is have a positive relationship with your boss and the importance of ensuring that you have a positive relationship with your boss. So the H stands for harness, which is really ensuring that when you think about your positive relationship with your boss, that you’re really harnessing the energy and excitement that can exist in that relationship and using it in order to ensure that you have a positive relationship with your boss. The E stands for evolve, which is ensuring that in our very fast changing world and fast changing organization that your boss is helping your career and your career development evolve. You know what might have been true last year isn’t true today and you don’t want to get stuck in a rut continuing to move in a particular direction that may not make sense or help you professionally. The L stands for learn, so as you’re hearing these new ideas and new recommendations, don’t get stuck in a rut and only think that the one direction you had is the right direction that you really want to learn about other options or other things that you can do in order to be successful. Then the P is for proactive, which quite frankly is a behavior that all of us should demonstrate all of the time professionally and oftentimes personally, which is ensuring that you’re proactive in respect to doing these things. If you think your boss is a white knight on a white horse who’s going to come in and save your career one day, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time. You own your career, you own where you’re going, you own your direction, and you have to be proactive in ensuring that you have a positive relationship with your boss and your bosses helping harness evolve and help you learn in order for you to make great progress. [JOE] So when we think about that from the boss’s perspective, what can we do as the owners to help people harness, evolve, learn and be proactive? [ED EVARTS] All people at all times should have at least once or twice a year what I call a career development conversation. This is not a conversation about clients, this is not a conversation about projects or initiatives or budgets, but this is a conversation about you and it starts with some very basic and simple questions like, how are you enjoying what you’re doing today? Have you thought about some things that you’d might like to do next? If you have, great, let’s talk about them. If you haven’t, let’s take some time to think about it so that we can ensure that you’re moving in that direction. What interests you in respect to what we do as an organization and are there some things that I can do to help you get there? So you can see, Joe, that this is all about you and how you’re doing and the direction you want to go into versus what we typically talk about which are clients, projects and initiatives. This is not a conversation that you have as part of a bigger agenda because most of our folks would recognize, and I’m sure our business owners would recognize that if we have 30 minutes together, we’re never going to get through everything that we want to talk about. You don’t want to leave this to the end and then talk about it for 30 seconds because it’s not going to have the impact. So I’m a big fan of going to lunch or having breakfast together, don’t add an activity to your day, but take an activity you already do and take time with your subordinates to talk about their career, how it’s going and what they want to do next in order to be more effective as a contributor to your organization. [JOE] Now where do you see just big picture even outside of being brave or having positive relationships with your staff, where do you see business owners just screw things up? Like what do they do wrong? [ED EVARTS] Well, every business owner is different in respect to the interactions that they have with their team and with their client base. By no means am I suggesting that nobody is brave or nobody has a good relationship with their boss. There are many examples of people who are great at these particular areas. I would tell you that it goes back to three things, Joe, that I believe most leaders need to do more of in order to be successful. The first is that they need to be curious. I don’t mean that they ask questions for the sake of asking questions or ask questions to things they already know the answers to, but if someone comes to their office with a problem or if there’s a new situation that is impacting the organization, they need to be curious about why it’s happening, who’s involved, what decisions were made so that they can then help others move to a more effective outcome. If you’re going to be curious, then the second tip is that you need to be a great listener. You don’t want to ask people questions and then look at your cellphone or look out the window. You need to demonstrate great listening. One of the fantastic skills a leader can do as a great listener is after I ask you a question and you provide a response to say, “Hey Joe, let me just recap for you what I think I just heard because I want to make sure I’m hearing it correctly.” Then you repeat back to me what you just heard and I know you got it right. So that’s just a significant way to ensure that I am a great listener. Then the last suggestion, which plays into both of these, and this is something that I saw many years ago in Stephen Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is habit number five, which is seek first to understand and then be understood. If we lived in a world where people didn’t first want to be understood and came in and said, here’s what I’m thinking or here’s what we’re doing, but first work to understand what was happening and why it was happening before I worked to be understood, we would have a much different work environment. So I believe all leaders should first take time to understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, because it could influence the outcome significantly and then take a little time to be understood in respect to the experiences that they have had. So curiosity, listening and seeking first to understand before being understood, I think are three behaviors that business leaders must do more of in order to be more effective. [JOE] It’s amazing how often a lot of those basic counseling skills make their way into being a good leader. It’s fun when I get to see people realize, oh wait, the skills I have as a therapist are also the skills that can make me a really good leader. Even just reflective listening, I mean that’s like the first day of a counseling program. You’re learning how to reframe back what somebody just said. So frequently therapists think they don’t have any business skills, but the reality is they often do. They just need to frame it as it’s not just a counseling skill, it’s a business skill. I just love that. [ED EVARTS] Well, most of us can recognize that as we went through junior high, high school and college, there were never courses that we took on how to be a better listener, how to demonstrate curiosity, how to navigate conflict, how to be brave when you need to be brave. I don’t mean military bravery or Hollywood bravery, but just, hey, I’m having an issue with my boss there. This issue’s having a very negative impact on my career and I need to do something about it. We haven’t learned how to do these things. So when we get into the workplace, of course, it’s become extremely important we’re not good at them and this is why we have many of the problems that we have as leaders because we’re so focused on being the best economist as possible, or the best lawyer possible, or the best pharmaceutical engineer possible that we have it focused enough on how we operate as leaders in an organization. [JOE] Well, Ed, the last question that I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [ED EVARTS] I would want them to know that they need to think about and reflect on their own personal listening skills. When they think about their workday, when they think about the interaction that they’re having with customers and clients, when they think about the interaction that they’re having with employees and colleagues and peers, are they a good listener? Do they come to the conversation with the answer already in their head and are just waiting to be able to speak or are they there to really listen about what others think, where they’re coming from, why they are coming from where they’re coming from to help modify and influence the direction that they want to go in? I think if more leaders, Joe spent more time listening more effectively, the workplace and the environments that they have would be significantly better. [JOE] So awesome. And Ed, if people want to get your new book, if they want to connect with you more, where’s the best place to send them? [ED EVARTS] You can go to my website, which is excellius.com. The work that I do is highlighted there. The books that I’ve written you can order through there and everything you’d want to know about Ed Evarts is on excellius.com. [JOE] Ah, wonderful. Well, Ad, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast. [ED EVARTS] Thank you, Joe. This was great chatting with you today. [JOE] The great thing about having a podcast is you get to interview all these unique people that can fill in different parts of your learning. If you’re ever interested in starting your own podcast, we have a whole arm of our business where we support practitioners and starting their podcasts. We have over 17 podcasts that we support over in the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network over at practiceofthepractice.com/network. You can see some of those shows also over there. You can apply to have us help support you in launching a podcast. So if that’s something you’re looking for, we’ve got a full sound engineering team in-house, show notes team, we’ve got a social media team, so our whole team can just support you so that you can show up, do the recording and then just be done with it. If you want that head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/network. Also, we could not do this show without our amazing sponsors, and Noble is our sponsor today. Our friends at Noble believe in using technology to enhance, not replace human connection. With Noble your clients will gain access to between session support through their automated therapist created roadmaps assessments to track progress and in-app messaging. You can learn more and join for free over at www.noble.health/joe. Again, that’s www.noble.health/joe and you can sign up totally free over there. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.