Creating A High-Performing Team In A Multi-Generational Workplace With Ron Carucci

 

 

A high-performing team is essential to any organization’s success. But what does it take to build and nurture a high-performing team in the multi-generational workforce? In this episode, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner is joined by Ron Carucci, the owner and Managing Partner at Navalent. With a 30-year track record of helping organizations, Ron helps some of the world’s most influential executives tackle strategy challenges, organization, and leadership. Today, Ron talks about the multi-generational workforce, how to build strong relationships inside the organization, and how to prepare future leaders.

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What You’ll Discover About the Multi-Generational Workplace:

• The biggest challenges facing executives, managers and entrepreneurs when managing a multi-generational workforce.
• Why labeling segments of the multi-generational workforce is counter-productive.
• Two factors that contribute to multi-generational workforce dysfunction.
• Four simple ways to improve multi-generational relationships.
• How to create a safe space for employees to speak truth to power.
• How business size impacts multi-generational workforce dynamics.
• And MUCH more.

GUEST

Ron Carucci helps some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership as co-founder and managing partner at Navalent. He has a 30-year track record, working in more than 25 countries on 4 continents on everything from start-ups to Fortune 10’s, turn-arounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture, to re-designing for growth.

Among his many accomplishments, Ron is also a former associate professor of organizational behavior, having taught at Fordham University’s Graduate School. He is also the best-selling author of 8 books, including the recent Amazon #1 Rising to Power. He is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes and his work has been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, Inc., BusinessInsider, MSNBC, Business Week, and many others.

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Contact Ron and connect with him on LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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Creating A High-Performing Team In A Multi-Generational Workplace With Ron Carucci

A multi-generational workforce can be a blessing or a nightmare, depending on how you manage it. How do you build and nurture a high-performance team in this environment? How do you build bridges instead of walls? My next guest, Ron Carucci, has some suggestions.

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Ron Carucci helps some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership as the Cofounder and Managing Partner at Navalent. He has a track record working in more than 25 countries on 4 continents on everything from startups to Fortune 10s, turnarounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture, and redesigning for growth.

Among his many accomplishments, Ron is also a former associate professor of organizational behavior at Fordham University’s graduate school. He’s also a bestselling author of eight books, including the Amazon number one, Rising to Power. He’s a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and Forbes. His work has been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, Inc., Business Insider, MSNBC, Business Week, and many others. It is such an honor and privilege to have him here with us. Welcome to the show, Ron.

Hannah, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be with you.

It’s wonderful to have you. This whole topic of a multigenerational workforce is so pressing these days. We have more generations in the workforce at the same time than ever before. It is transforming the workforce. In your experience with organizations, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen it create?

One of the things I’ve been perplexed by is the need to segment these generations by the year they were born. I wrote a book years ago called Leadership Divided. It was before Millennials were called Millennials. It was on this emerging generation of leaders. I’m simply in the book delineating between emerging leaders and incumbent leaders rather than using the labels because what the labels are doing is dividing the organization and the workforce, not uniting it.

The labels make a problem with demographics. The problem is relationships. All the labels do is give me a bit of vocabulary to explain why someone else irritates me. It doesn’t give me a way to work better with you. I would love for organizations to stop believing that these delineations had as much meaning as they think they do. They don’t. There’s the question, “Which are you?” That isn’t the question. The question is, “Which are you when?”

There are days I’m a Millennial. There are days I’m a Boomer. The traits can be dangerous. There are certainly some patterns that are revealed but in most experiments about cross-generational relationships, what they consistently reveal is that people even across very vast differences of generations have far more in common than not.

That’s an interesting insight.

You have to stay at the table and in the conversation long enough to appreciate that because, at first glance, it doesn’t look that way.

The way power and hierarchy have been used in the past has become something that delineates a role as it was designed 500 years ago. Many emerging leaders resent that, and so rank can get in the way of a good relationship. Share on X

The thing too about the labels is it’s a form of stereotyping. Relationships cut across everything. Let’s talk some more about relationships. What kind of relationship dysfunction have you seen that crops up again as these patterns you were talking about?

There are several of them. The first one has to do with hierarchy and rank. In organizations, there is a definite difference among emerging leaders and their preference for a level playing field, and because of the way power has been used in the past and because the hierarchy has become something that delineates a role as it was designed 500 years ago in military authorizations to now where it delineates status, many emerging leaders resent that. Rank can get in the way of a good relationship. Another one is inclusion in decision-making. A lot of leaders have an expectation that they will get a voice in decisions.

The word empowerment came out of the scene years ago and convinced everybody that the way to make great decisions was to make sure everybody felt included. We had this phenomenon that I call full inclusion. When I give a talk, I’ll ask people, “How many of you have walked into a meeting before under the guise of you’re there to solve a problem and make a decision only to realize two and a half minutes into the meeting, the decision you would dare to make had already been made? You were there under the ruse of being able to make it look like you were part of it.”

Everybody raised their hands. Why we thought that the word empowerment was going to eliminate 500 years of hierarchical command and control, I don’t know but the reality is it’s difficult if we let go of that control but everybody wants the same. Younger leaders resent having fake inclusion. I’ve been with clients. A head of IT walked in all tattooed and pierced up. The CEO pulled out a document and said, “I wanted to get your input on this IT capital plan for next year.”

The guy looked perplexed and didn’t say anything. The CEO said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “You sent that plan to the board yesterday, sir. I don’t know what you want my input for.” I wrote a blog post called Better Together. It opened up with these words. It’s titled overly ambitious, feedback-hungry, lazy, and self-serving. I said, “It sounds like Millennials.” Those words opened up a 1969 Life Magazine article about Baby Boomers. We like to recycle the same labels because generationally where you are in life, we tend to have very similar tendencies. We forget that.

When you’re in your 20s and early 30s, you’re spreading your wings. You want a voice and a say. Back in the ’60s, they had different options for ways to express that than we do now. We didn’t have Twitter and Facebook then but the reality is we all have those needs. We forget that generationally. Let’s think about the Millennials. What I so love about them is this was the generation we told could and would change the world. They could do anything they want to do. It turns out they believed us.

Now our job is to get out of their way and help them do it. We’re frustrated with them because they want the shot to make the impact that we told them they could make. That means that for the rest of us who are ahead of them, our job is to make a way. That’s inconvenient. Unless you’re in a coma or if you can’t look around and see that the world does need a lot of changing and here’s the generation coming on with full force wanting to do it, I don’t know why we want to stop them.

In helping to promote better relationships, what are some steps that business leaders can take?

First of all, the needs of any relationship apply here. Can you participate in a relationship with somebody at a different level of experience than you and make it mutual? Most Millennials don’t want a “mentor.” They want that term but what they have watched is that mentoring means cloning. It means, “I turn you into me,” but as a seasoned leader or a veteran incumbent leader, can you participate in a relationship with a Millennial or someone of less experience than you and let them put as much mark on you as you put on them? Can you be open to their feedback and voice in your development and learn from them as much? That’s what Millennials want. Level the playing field of learning as well as status.

 

The other thing is to be a champion. Put someone else’s agenda on yours. Don’t just put your agenda on yours. The last thing I would say is this. Can you have an honest conversation? In most organizations, truth has been exchanged for pleasantries. The only place to tell the truth is in some private dark place. Can you be a person of authenticity that is authentic? We all know how to look authentic and sound genuine while still faking it but most people can see right through that.

I ask people often, “How many of you feel like you have great BS barometers? You intuitively know when you’re being BS.” Everybody’s hands go up. I asked them, “How come you think other people’s BS parameters don’t work as well when you’re doing it?” Put those away. Life is too short. The world needs too much work to be done. Let’s be honest. Sometimes being honest is uncomfortable. People are starved for relationships they can trust and conversations they can rely on. The thing I love about Millennials is they’re known for being feedback-hungry but they can take a hard hit far greater than any Boomer I’ve ever worked with.

In my peer group, you have to dance on eggshells. They were taught you should always include a nice thing with a hard thing. These younger leaders can take hard feedback and welcome it because they know they want to get better. You have to pull any punches with them. That’s so refreshing. They don’t have people mentoring them that share that value and who learned that degree of honesty was okay. If you can incorporate hard truths into your organization and conversations, people will want to be in a relationship with you.

Those are fantastic ideas. I can imagine though that would be difficult for certain people to be able to, for example, create a safe space to talk if the relationship hasn’t been strong. On the other side, the employees or the person reporting to the senior person, their BS meter is going off the charts. They don’t know what to believe. How does somebody start to create a safe space to talk and have that honesty?

It’s a start. I’m not going to go into a room, flip a switch, and say, “I say it to be honest.” You have to build that muscle and earn your right. The way we work with our clients is we do an analysis that looks at the state of every critical relationship you have in your sphere. If you and I worked together in an organization and share our function with each other and we have to work with each other, we’re asking this relationship to hold a great deal of complexity, whether it’s supply chain and operations, sales and marketing, or whatever the body of work is.

There’s a degree of complexity and trust that getting this work done requires, if that degree of trust, complexity, and collaboration doesn’t exist between you and me, the work will suffer. The first thing is, “Do you understand with each of your critical relationships what’s required of that relationship? What is being asked to accomplish on behalf of the organization and those you serve?”

Do an honest assessment, “Where’s the relationship? Are we asking a 5-pound bag to hold a 10-pound body at work? If so, how do we increase the quotient of trust and mutual understanding? How do we increase the mutual body of trust where the relationship we’re participating in can do what it’s being asked to do? How do we increase the degree of ability to hold complexity, hard decisions, conflicts, and messy and complex collaborations? What is the degree of trust we have to have to be able to accomplish all that together? How do we build our relationship to do what we’re asking of it to do?”

Most leaders charge headlong into the relationship assuming all that’s in place. That makes it worse because if you ask somebody, suddenly you have to trust me or be able to resolve conflicts with me. Suddenly we have to make decisions together and trust each other when that has never been the case before. You’re going to be asking for trouble because you can’t turn that around in a pill or with the wave of a wand. It’s helping people create a pathway to start. If it’s people that you lead and you inherit a team from somebody else or a leader that was loved, suddenly you’re in the mix and they don’t know who you are.

How do you go about making your intentions known to build deeper trust-based relationships with those you lead and what you expect of them? Only over time can people come to believe, “He doesn’t want my honest feedback.” Every new leader says, “It’s an open-door policy. I want your honest feedback,” until you give it to them and they don’t want it. Over time, your ability to make the principles you espouse true in your behavior will build people’s confidence that they can be honest but it isn’t something that happens overnight.

People are starved for relationships they can trust and conversations they can rely on. Share on X

What do you think is a reasonable timeline for that to happen? The other part of the question is this. Is it normal or customary to have a third party involved to mediate or smooth that transition and maybe create that safe space to talk and be able to get to the bottom of what’s going on?

The first one would be this. The amount of time is commensurate with two things. One, how complicated is the relationship? How much does it have to hold? If there’s a tremendous amount of change or stress at the intersection of our relationship, then it may take longer. The second factor is what’s the state of the relationship. If we’re meeting for the first time, then I have no back baggage. That’s helpful.

If there’s a lot of distress, rivalry, silly competition, or even unresolved conflict between us and we’re starting in the negative, that’s going to take a little longer. If we have somewhat positive regard for our history that we can build upon, that can go a little faster. Those are the two factors. It’s the state of the relationship and what is it we have to ask of this relationship to accomplish.

When it comes to having third-party help or external help, I’m biased because I believe that it’s difficult to work. It’s not natural for leaders to be able to start a conversation or a new relationship by saying, “Here’s what you need to know about working with me. I’m often impatient. I tend to run over people and not listen very well. When I don’t get my way, I get moody. You need to know that I tend to be shy. I’m not very assertive. Often I have to push back because I’m afraid of how you are going to respond. I don’t want to make you angry.”

We could be that honest because if we were, it might change relationships. Having somebody that can help bring to bear some of those truths of what each person in a relationship brings to it both good and not so good can help go a long way to getting off on the right foot and then monitoring along the way to make sure the relationship is accomplishing what it needs to accomplish.

I couldn’t agree with you more because people sometimes get so caught up in fear of retaliation that they don’t know when to start trusting and having that safe space to talk, which is what a consultant such as yourself can create. It can sometimes go a long way to cutting through all the smoke and mirrors that other folks would like to throw up there. I’m wondering. With all of the discussion that you’ve had about leaders and the history that comes with organizations, it sounds like smaller startups and even entrepreneurial-type organizations might be better equipped to have these conversations. What do you think?

It’s interesting to explore. Sometimes they’re not inclined because they’re moving too fast or they don’t think they’re necessary. There’s so much sixth sense in a startup family because those are usually very tribal cultures but they don’t have to talk about what’s implicit. They just know it. When they start having to go from startup to grow up and the implicit has to become explicit so they can scale, it becomes hard because suddenly, people realize, “You used to read my mind. Now you don’t read my mind anymore.”

The startup part of it slows them down long enough to ensure the process can be hard. In larger companies, you have people who are more relationally intelligent because they have been through some training program where they read some article but politically, it has become difficult to have the conversation. People are far more aware that it’s needed but far less able to do it. There, you have to break down the fears of retribution in people’s minds, which is far more irrational than true.

Usually, when I ever hear the whole, “We can’t talk out loud because people get fired here,” then I ask, “How many people have been fired for being honest?” There’s nobody they can point to. It’s the irrational fear floating around, “The boss we had lost his temper one time years ago. It has never been forgotten.” Depending on the maturity of the organization, it requires different ways to set the stage to get the conversation to happen. It’s difficult to put in place the norm for people being honest.

 

Let’s say people do stick their necks out and start to have these conversations. What other types of things should they be doing to grow the relationship?

Any garden has to have weeds pulled. You have to check and make sure, “We made some commitments to each other. Are we doing those?” It’s like a marriage, “I told you I loved you when I married you. Now it’s 25 years later. I’m not so sure anymore.” You have to be tending to the relationship. Many people look to chemistry, “How does it feel?” That’s one indicator of a productive relationship, especially a cross-generational one.

There’s also a result one, “We’re not just paid friends here. We’re meant to accomplish something together. One plus one has to equal four here. We have to make sure that the relationship doesn’t just feel good or that we both feel good in it but that it’s contributing what it’s meant to contribute. A blend of my contribution and your contribution is producing the result we say we produce.”

It does no good to the organization if we both feel good, enjoy each other, and have lunch every now and then but no results are happening. The relationship exists in a context. The last thing I would say is in the broader team or set of departments you sit on, how are others experiencing the relationship? Sometimes they become so good that they become exclusive. People start fearing you, “I and my boss are so close. People stop talking to me.”

Every relationship plays out on the jumbotron, especially at senior levels of the organization. Any relationship that has too many tensions in it or is overly close has the risk of sending mixed signals. It’s very important that the two people in the relationship are monitoring how others are metabolizing that relationship so that you’re not strengthening relationships so much at the expense of other people.

Any leader has got an awful lot on his plate when it comes to maintaining relationships. It’s a mess. How does anybody be successful?

It’s unfortunately scary but it’s a harsh truth. We did Leadership Divided and Rising to Power. You graciously mentioned that. It’s a ten-year longitudinal study on how people rising to senior levels of an organization stick and succeed since we knew that more than half of them failed within the first eighteen months, which has been normal. Statistically, they accepted it as the way things are.

Recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them but why have we allowed that to be okay for so long? Half the carnage of people’s careers and families lost opportunities and squandered millions of dollars. It has been normal. When they started becoming our clients, we thought, “We can do better.” With ten years of research and 2,700 people later, we studied. Aside from all of the landmines organizations put in the way of these leaders on the way up, we were able to isolate the ones that stick and succeed.

They did four things incredibly well. One of them was relationships. These are the people that everybody wants to work for. They have great relationships with their direct reports, peers, and bosses. They were also great decision-makers. They had incredible contextual intelligence. They knew the business and how it made money in the industry, in which it sat. They had incredible breadth. They knew how all the pieces of the organization fit together. They go from playing the first violin to being a conductor.

If you could incorporate hard truths into your organization and conversations, people would want to be in a relationship with you. Share on X

We ran 99 regression analyses on this data because I did not want to say that these leaders had to do all four of those things well but the reality was the sample was very clear. If you did 3 out of the 4 well, you probably have a high likelihood of failure. The cost and requirements of leadership, especially senior leadership are profoundly difficult. Organizations are not doing enough to prepare leaders to be successful, which is why half of them are failing.

You can make great executives if you prepare people from the very beginning of their careers to form and sustain great relationships with people. They lead people, people they are peers with, and people they report to. If you teach them how to make hard and data-based decisions and how to see all the pieces of an organization, not just their own, and if you teach them the context in which they work, their industry, business, and department and how to read the contextual tea leaves.

To assume that people are going to rise up all finished is silly but the reality is that’s what it takes. Leaders who find out too late that they have very low relational intelligence or IQs are at a deficit because that’s 1 of the 4 patterns that will kill you quickly. If you look at the failure rates and study the people who have studied why they failed, it’s typically your relationship with your direct reports or your peers that are the first ones to back away from you and send you over the edge.

Yet some people can rise to some pretty senior positions and still not have great relationships. Isn’t that the Peter principle? How did those two things square?

I was sitting at a very large global 115,000-person organization doing a presentation to some senior leaders who are in the middle of a difficult situation or transformational journey. They have done a huge reduction in force. They’re trying to work their way through it. The leadership person turned to me with great shock and said, “Do you ever see people get promoted into jobs that they’re not prepared for?” I didn’t want to laugh because she’s probably in her early to mid-30s but she’s wanting to make a difference there.

I said, “It happens every day. We move people along under the guise of their high potential. We’re going to fast-track them. This is a stretch assignment.” We had labels for this neuroticism to justify it but we take otherwise pretty good people with a lot of potential and we may set them up to fail. We have to say, “They weren’t a fit. That didn’t work out. They didn’t stick.” We have some other set of labels to explain our failure. It is incredibly cruel to continue to take great talent in whatever form you have it, move it along without preparing it, and then waste it.

You waste the domino effect of what that misplaced talent causes throughout the organization. It’s a ripple effect.

It’s a huge ripple effect starting with that person’s family. Since recruiters are going to feed off this frenzy, I have to replace that person within the first twelve months. You have to pay double. I get to find you for your failure, not that the search was bad. If I had to put my reputation on the line to find you another candidate and answer the question of why the last one failed, then you’ve got to pay me twice. There are some consequences to organizations for their failure in this process. They felt the financial pain of the billions they were wasting. They might do it differently.

Here’s a weird habit. It’s not like we don’t know what to do and what it is to prepare a leader for their future careers and build the muscles they need. Some companies are doing a brilliant job with this moving talent around across the organization and businesses, investing, cultivating, and coaching work, not just training. Training is the least of the issue. It’s cultivating people’s abilities and preparing them so it can be done.

 

If you’re choosing not to do it, it means you’re lazy. There’s no other reason. It isn’t because you haven’t got the money, your business is in too much trouble, or whatever excuse you’re making. You’re being lazy. For harming people’s lives and careers and your shareholders’ opportunities that you could deliberate on, you should be penalized for that.

In the long-term, they will be because they suffer from the turnover. The thing is though on the outside when somebody is interviewing or being heavily recruited by a firm, you never know what you’re going to find once you peel back. You’re sitting there and you’re there for a week, a month, or a year. All of a sudden, you see where all warts and blemishes are and go, “What have I done? What was I thinking?”

Whenever I’m coaching executives who are in need to be processed, I give them very hard questions to answer in the process. I make sure you’re seeing these kinds of people, “Here’s how you test an organization to see if it’s a worthy place.” I tell executives, “You’re hiring your next boss. Make sure they’re worthy of the job. You’re selecting them as much as they are.” Candidates get so focused on selling themselves.

When the organization is recruiting somebody because I didn’t want to sell them a piece of talent they want, they’re blowing smoke. There are ways to get at warts. First of all, assume they are there. The question is this. Can you tolerate them when you find them? More importantly, when you find them, what will be tolerated of you? How will you be allowed to address them when they’re discovered? If there are warts that people want to leave unaddressed, that’s an entirely different issue.

They may say they want them addressed just as you said when we first started this conversation, “I want to hear the truth.” You can be honest but in reality, you may see one of your coworkers walk into the boss’s or the CEO’s office and then come out holding their head. You’re like, “You told them the truth. I’m not going to do that.” They got their head handed to them.

The time to test that is before you get in there. I often have executives who are candidates for big jobs. Ask those right questions. Let’s rehearse our first conflict and imagine I’ve discovered X, Y, and Z problems in your sales department, a major flaw in your consumer data, or a major set of costs. I’m coming to you to tell you this. Let’s assume I don’t do it judgmentally, harshly, or like a jerk. Let’s assume I reasonably bring you a well-thought-through assessment of things that need change. Let’s have that conversation now. I tell them, “Rehearse it.”

Ron, this is terrific advice. Thank you so much. For those readers who are job hunting, looking to hire their next boss, or if they are the boss, an executive, a manager, or an entrepreneur who is looking to improve their relationship within their organization with their reports, peers, and supervisors, this is valuable content. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Navalent
• Rising to Power
• Leadership Divided
• Better Together
• LinkedIn – Navalent
• Twitter – @RonCarucci
• On The Reins Of A Family Business With Vincent Curatola – previous episode
• If you liked this interview you might also like these Team Building episodes

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