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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and it's not often that I introduce guests by just confessing publicly.
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I love this guest's company name.
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I love the way that she articulates and messages the stuff that she does.
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I love the impact that she's so committed to for her clients, and that means that she's an amazing entrepreneur in person that I'm so excited to talk to.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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Her name is Joanne Merrick.
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Joanne offers over 25 years of global experience in helping individuals and organizations thrive.
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She has delivered transformative leadership programs across five continents in 22 countries, combining her expertise in neuroscience with a passion for building management and leadership capabilities.
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As the founder of, here's me introducing her incredible business name to you.
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As the founder of the Leadership Recipe, joanne designs impactful programs that enhance communication, emotional intelligence and team performance.
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Her global perspective, shaped by living in Australia, hong Kong and now the USA, draws on her leadership roles at major organizations like Deloitte, amazon and Juniper Networks.
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This diverse background fuels her fresh, practical approach to leadership development.
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Now not only is she a fellow entrepreneur, but she's also an author, because her debut book, game On, is management your best career play.
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Joanne empowers readers to make informed decisions about stepping into management and when it comes to the work that she does with a leadership recipe, I love her mission because she loves unleashing the extraordinary within you.
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So for all of us as entrepreneurs, this is a topic that we may want to ignore, but we certainly can't ignore, and we're all going to get challenged and invited to grow by Joanne today, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Joanne Merrick.
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All right, joanne, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much.
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I'm just jarring you to that music, Brian Trustanne listeners don't know.
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I have a little view of our guests at all times.
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I can always see their camera and I saw you bump into our intro tunes.
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I'm jiving, I'm jiving.
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I love that you're in the mood, let's kick this off by you taking us beyond the bio.
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Joanne, how'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Oh wow, I think it comes from an inner passion.
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Honestly, that was really started about 20 something years ago when I did my psychology degree and you know, then I was working at Deloitte at the time and just having a great time working and chatting and training and just being with a group of great people, and that's what I thrive to do and that's what I thrive to create in organizations as well.
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Yes, I love that.
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I would imagine the psychology background gives you such an interesting perspective, because it's a soft skill.
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Obviously, I'm not even sure I'm crazy about that term, soft skills but when we talk about leadership it almost feels like this ethereal thing.
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It's like what is it really that we're talking about?
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How do you begin to make sense of the scope of the work that you do?
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Oh, so true.
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You know, like soft skills, there's no such thing as soft skills.
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They're hard skills.
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They're hard skills to learn and to grow and develop.
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You know, they almost take a lifetime or a career to really put in place.
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But those soft skills, as we call them, are very much a part of every manager or leader's world.
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They're skills that they rely on every single day.
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I talk about, you know, leaders and managers needing to create a toolkit of skills, so to speak, that they can call upon at any given time under any given circumstance, usually with not a lot of preparation time.
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So they need to have, you know, a really well-defined toolkit of skills to put into practice at any given time as needed.
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But it's not easy, and you know, I truly believe that.
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You know, the role of a manager is underestimated in terms of its impact, not only on the manager themselves, but obviously on the people that report to them and the companies that they work for.
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I don't think that we're talking enough about management, management skills or how to be a great manager in general, and I want to bring this to the forefront because, you know, even the title manager is outdated.
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I mean, it dates back to probably what the industrial revolution.
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And funnily enough, brian, I was having a conversation with an executive and a tech company quite a few years ago now about that exact topic.
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The title manager was just not reflective of what we were teaching our employees at the time, so he decided to play along with me.
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He said, okay, joanne, what would you change it to, you know, if you could?
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And I thought, oh, this is fun, okay, communicator.
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And then I thought, no, empower, that's what managers do.
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They empower people.
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And can you imagine an organization full of empowerers or senior empowerers, brian?
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Like how cool would that be as a title?
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I think it would be a much more interesting and also much, much better reflection of what the actual role itself entails.
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Yeah, I love that, joanne.
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Surround me with all the empowerers.
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I want all of them, because that's the truth and I think it's really cool because, obviously, as entrepreneurs, we are, in certain ways, our own empowers, but we have to be empowers in literally all of the ways, whether we have employees or not.
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We have to be empowers with our clients, we have to be empowers with our vendors to empower them to do a great job on behalf of our businesses and on behalf of ourselves, and so empowerment is obviously at the root of all of this.
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Joanne, there's so many mechanisms and skills through which we can do that.
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Introduce us to some of those, because I'm going to get really picky about these skills that you speak of, because skill suggests that we can improve them and we can learn them.
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But walk us through what those ways that we can empower others are first.
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Absolutely Well.
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I see there as being kind of four major elements I talk about in the book of being a great manager.
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The first one is taking on a strategic perspective, because I think when you move from an individual contributor role, everything is pretty much about you, the work you do, the results you get, how you perform, to being a manager.
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It's not about you anymore, it's actually all about everybody else.
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It is to some degree about the work that you do, because if you're a manager, you're not only managing people.
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You've obviously got your own initiatives, projects, et cetera that you'll be working on.
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So taking on a strategic, broader perspective is something that's really important.
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The other one is communication skills.
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You know, communication is just one of those human skills I guess that is just so unique to who we are and what we do.
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Another one is team performance.
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You know, obviously you need to, or team leadership, you need to lead your team.
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You need to lead them through challenging, difficult times.
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You need to celebrate with them.
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You need to manage their performance.
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You need to set goals, you need to unleash.
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You know their potential.
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And the final one is around judgment.
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You know how to prioritize the work that you and everyone else is doing, how to make decisions, and you know how to problem solve.
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You know are typically all of that, but in each of those four segments there's a lot of skills that make up each of those.
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So there's a lot more detail to go into here and I think a lot of people underestimate the number of skills that managers need to learn and engage in.
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But they are indeed learnable.
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You know, there's a lot of misconceptions out there about management, and I also talk about that in the book too, but one of them is that management is an innate skill and something that not necessarily can't be learned.
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That is, you couldn't get any further from the truth there.
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And again funny story I was actually running a management and leadership training program.
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When was it?
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I won't mention the company, but it was one of the large organizations that I worked with and we're in the middle of this training program and one of the participants stood up.
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She had a very strong opinion about the fact that management could not be learned, that it was an innate skill.
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And, brian, I found that to be completely ironic given that we were in the middle of a management training program.
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But we had quite an engaging conversation about it.
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And you know, obviously you respect everybody's opinion, but my opinion is that these skills can definitely be learned and they need to be practiced and practiced for a career.
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You know the old adage practice makes perfect.
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You know amateurs practice to get things right, but professionals, they still practice, and that's to keep from getting things wrong.
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So that's the trick with all of these skills is to be introduced to them, to practice them through lifelong learning and bring out that, and doing so will bring out the best in you as a manager and a leader and obviously it will bring out the best in the people that work with you.
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Yeah, I love the way you articulate that, joanne, especially when you talk about practice.
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I'll tell you where my head goes is.
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Soccer is such a big part of my childhood and growing up.
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Soccer is such a big part of my childhood and growing up.
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I always played on very competitive teams, and everybody who's ever played a sport has heard that phrase of you practice how you play.
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And so, with that in mind, when hearing you talk about practice with regards to leadership, I think about how our coaches always tried to and had various degrees of success to get us to imagine that what we're doing here on the practice field isn't just for practice.
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We have to put ourselves in the shoes of a real life scenario.
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We have to pretend and get ourselves to believe that it's a match day scenario, and so, with that in mind, it's not practice to just go through the motions, it's not a worksheet that we can fill out in a seminar.
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Joanne, I want you to really share with listeners how we can actually practice in a way that delivers results, a way that is useful rather than merely just motion.
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Yeah, I think that's a great question.
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I think, to be honest, to set context up front, it takes humility.
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It takes a little bit of humility to understand that I am learning a new skill and maybe, as I am learning that new skill, I'm not going to be perfect at it immediately and I need to be open to feedback, to hear from other people what I'm doing well and what I can be doing differently in order to get even better at that skill.
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So with that comes famous Carol Dweck's work of a growth mindset.
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That means having a growth mindset yourself about yourself and understanding that you're doing your best and you're open to learning and changing and doing things even better, moving forward based on other people's perceptions of how you're going.
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So that's the way I would start to think about it and then I would pick a couple of skills.
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In my book I actually have a diagnostic.
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It's not a science-based diagnostic, but it is a diagnostic tool that folks can use to kind of understand, first of all, what skills they enjoy engaging in and, second of all, based on those skills, what their current level of capability is, whether it's, you know, beginner, intermediate, advanced, whatever.
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So I encourage them to kind of start thinking about what might be two or three skills that I can work on over the next couple of weeks.
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That will take me from a beginner level to an advanced level or an advanced level to or an intermediate level beginner to intermediate and then obviously, intermediate to advanced level.
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On that, on that skill and then pick two or three things that you can do in order to grow and develop in that skill.
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So a quick AI tool you know search can give you some really good tips on how to do that, particularly if you put into the AI tool a little bit of context about your current role and how you might grow and develop in that current role.
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Obviously, you can work with a coach or a mentor.
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Your manager might be a great person to work with there, a trusted peer, you know, someone who you engage with and is ready to give you open, honest feedback, knowing that that feedback is something that's going to help you grow, develop and improve over time.
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So you know an example of that like, if you want to build your communication skills, you might mention that to your manager and then put your hand up to lead a team meeting moving forward, so that your manager's not doing it, or you know, whatever you might do that with your manager and with your team, and in doing so, you might get clear on what are the objectives of this meeting.
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What would success look like or feel like as it results to this meeting?
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What are a couple of things that I want to make sure that myself and my team get out of this meeting?
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And then what am I going to do to follow up afterwards?
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So that's just like a basic structure for running a team meeting, but it's something that anybody at an individual contributor level so someone who is maybe thinking about becoming a manager in the future can start working on now.
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You know, volunteering for those extracurricular, so to speak, activities that will give them an opportunity to practice under a safe environment.
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I also encourage folks to identify some of these skills and even practice them in their home life.
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So are you running a family meeting?
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Are you planning a family event?
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Who are you engaging with in a family context to bring about whatever it is that you're working on?
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I think the key here is to just pick a couple of skills.
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You don't want to do all of them at once, but just pick a couple of skills that are going to work for you, moving forward, finding opportunities to practice them, getting feedback from folks around you on how you can do even better, and then continue to grow and develop that way.
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Yeah, joanne, when I hear you use that verb of pick pick two of those skills that you want to get better at what I really hear is that level of intentionality.
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Is that all too often in life and professional careers, in relationships, we think that things will naturally evolve over time because that's the way that the universe works.
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But it's that level of intentionality that brings about tangible changes.
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And so, with that in mind, I always kind of hear, when we talk about leadership, I hear a little bit of conflicting advice about pick those things that are your weaknesses and make those better, versus double down on your strengths.
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So, joanne, when it comes to us picking what it is that we should be working on, where do you fall in that debate of picking on those weaknesses versus making our strengths even more amplified?
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You know it's picking what's going to get you to where you want to get you.
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I'm a huge advocate of doing what you love and loving what you do, and I find that we have a lot more.
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We love doing a lot more of what's related around our strengths than maybe what our weaknesses or areas of improvement are.
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But there are some roles that require certain skills that maybe we're not too fond of and maybe it means for our future success that we need to gain a level of familiarity with them, even if we don't love them.
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So I am an advocate for playing to your strengths.
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I think that that makes a lot more sense.
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But I think we need to be real about the future roles that we want to work on, that we're not maybe going to love every single aspect of them.
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If we can make a majority of our time doing things that we love, obviously that would be ideal, but I think we also need to be practical about, you know, our day-to-day finding ways to do whatever we can do in order to be successful, and hopefully that is playing around our, our strengths.
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But sometimes, yeah, those those you know there's we've always, we've all got something to learn.
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You know, we've all got something to to work on and, surprisingly to brian.
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Sometimes I truly believe we don't know where our true strengths might be until we're open to discovering ourselves a little bit, a a little bit more.
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You know I'm going to age myself here, but imagine if Elton John never started to twinkle on the ivories of the piano.
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You know what if John Lennon and I heard his wonderful song Imagine the other day I guess that's why he comes to mind what if he never picked up a guitar?
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You know, his brilliance would never, their brilliance would never have maybe had the opportunity to shine.
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And maybe when they first started playing the piano or, you know, playing the guitar, they didn't really like it that much, but they wanted to.
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They wanted to to obviously make something of themselves and found an avenue to to do that.
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Maybe they had great days where they thought, oh yeah, this is really cool.
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And maybe they had days where they thought, oh, I just want to give up.
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But I think their resilience and perseverance is also key when you've identified what is it that I want to do, what is the impact that I want to have on this world and how am I going to do.
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What is the impact that I want to have on this world and how am I going to get there?
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And I think it's a bit of give and take on both sides.
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Yeah, and hearing you talk about that within the context of Elton John or anyone who's quote unquote made it in any industry.
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You brought up resilience, you went straight there and that's something that when people ask me, what are the ingredients to piggyback on your recipe, what are the ingredients to entrepreneurial success?
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Resilience has to be in that mix.
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And then where I start going is I broaden it and I say, well, so much of it just comes down to mindset.
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And, joanne, I love the fact that neuroscience plays into the lens in which you do your work and the lens in which you help people, because, for me, I majored in economics and I really love behavioral economics because a lot of it focuses on psychology and the way that the mind works and especially biases, recency bias, selection bias, all those different things.
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Talk to me about how that lens really shapes and is kind of your secret power when it comes to helping people understand these things.
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Interesting.
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You know I was introduced to neuroscience and the concept of neuroscience and leadership not long after I moved to the United States back in 2011 from Hong Kong.
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I'd lived there for three and a half years before living in Australia and this concept of neuroscience I had been introduced to great works of you know the likes of Stephen Covey from a leadership.
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You know Ken Blanchard, other people and it was always what those people, what those famous people, great minds, what they brought to the table from a management and leadership perspective, was always really interesting great books, etc.
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Neuroscience came to the fore and all of a sudden, a lot of what they were talking about or had been talking about for the last 10, 20 years and beyond was now provable in science by looking at the human brain and seeing the impact that doing certain activities or thinking certain ways was actually having on the physiological structure of the brain.
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So wow, like bam, fascinating stuff from a leadership development perspective.
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So that's what pushed me into doing my post-grad through the Middlesex University in the UK on the topic and I loved every single second of it.
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One thing I learned which one thing?
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A couple of things I got out of that.
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The main one was, as you call it, a lens.
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Once you've learned anything, you can't not look at situational circumstance through the lens of your education, right?
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So that was important.
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And then I started to, you know, really apply, uh, in the corporate sense, a lot of what the science was teaching us and that was starting to get really interesting when we got the opportunity to do to do that.
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And I can give you an example one of the significant areas that um are in on on impacts on the brain is this sense of having autonomy.
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You, so we've all heard of managers that micromanage us, and micromanagement is one of the worst things that managers can do, because what they do in micromanaging their team is they take away a person's sense of choice and control a person's sense of choice and control.
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So, and I'd seen a lot of micromanagers in my time, a lot of managers who really wanted to control situations, circumstances, people, and not only were they getting frustrated with their team, but their team was obviously getting frustrated with them.
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So something was not working around this whole concept of micromanagement.
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And I remember being in a lecture it was like, because I was traveling so much at the time, I think my lecture in UK time was like 3 am or 3 am in the morning in Japan, so it was like some crazy time and we were talking in this lecture about autonomy and the importance for having a sense of autonomy on the human brain.
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And one of the gentlemen that I was studying with was living in the UK and he told a story about getting home from work and he had a four or five-year-old son and as he entered his home his son was playing on the staircase as there's often a lot of staircases like right in the front door of those homes in the UK, from my experience.
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So he greeted his son and then went to the kitchen and helped his wife prepare dinner.
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So it's dinner time and he calls out to his son, who's still playing on the stairs come to the dinner table for dinner.
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The son was having so much fun playing on the staircase that he said no, dad, I'm not going to come to the dinner table tonight to eat dinner.
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You bring my dinner to me here on the stairs.
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Well, this was not acceptable to this gentleman because it was their family tradition to eat dinner at the dinner table.
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So he'd been studying this work or doing this work on the importance of autonomy, choice and control and rather than just tell his son to get to that dinner table and eat his dinner.
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He took a moment, took a step back and he said okay, you need to eat your dinner at the dinner table, right?
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So he set clear expectations, which is really important as well.
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He said but I'll tell you what you don't have to sit at your normal seat when you eat your dinner.
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You can sit at any seat at the table.
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That's your choice.
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The kid was interested.
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Why?
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Because his dad was automatically giving him a little bit of choice, a little bit of control over his circumstance.
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But the dad didn't stop there.
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He doubled down and he said and I'll tell you what you don't have to only choose where you sit.
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You can also choose where daddy sits and where mummy sits at the table.
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That kid was at that dinner table so quickly.
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Why?
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Because he had a sense of control over his situation.
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He had choices to make and from those choices the control and the sense of autonomy came shining through.
00:24:05.356 --> 00:24:09.488
So how do I refer that from a management and leadership development perspective?
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As a manager, sometimes it doesn't matter how things get done, it just matters that they get done.
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And if managers can be a little bit more creative sometimes and, rather than tell their direct reports what to do, ask their direct reports what might be the best way that we can get this done.
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First hear from their direct reports, and then maybe their direct reports have actually got a better idea than what the manager might have had in the first place, or the manager can then share their perspective and they can have a conversation around the best way of getting things done.
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So neuroscience changed my life, gave me a completely new lens through which I could engage managers and leaders also from a training perspective as well, and how I can maybe encourage them to think a little bit differently about how they engage with and manage their team.
00:25:06.321 --> 00:25:15.087
Yeah, joanne, I love that real life story that you gave us, the example of the dad getting the son to come to the table and giving that control and power.
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What I hear and what really resonates from my own personal experience is even just creating that environment for someone else to step into.
00:25:23.544 --> 00:25:25.057
Joanne, I'll share this with you.
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Is that all the way back?
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It was probably my early 20s, I was taking my soccer coaching licenses and I remember the instructor.
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I played my whole life and so I thought you know, because I'm a good player by default, I'm going to be a good coach.
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Of course, it's absolutely not true.
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And so the instructor that day challenged me with coming up with a practice plan that teaches kids how to dribble a soccer ball.
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And so I, of course, went a little analytical and I said well, you use the inside of your foot and you push it and sometimes use the outside of your foot.
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And the instructor stopped me and he said look, you'll never be able to explain to somebody how to do it.
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Create an environment that forces them to dribble.
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And I said well, how do I create an environment that forces them to dribble?
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They're just going to kick the ball as far as they can.
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They're kids.
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That's what kids do with a ball.
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And he said how about we have a practice drill where you can only pass backwards?
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And I thought to myself you can only pass backwards.
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Well, what's going to happen there?
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And he said the kids themselves will realize that the only way forward is to dribble because we can only pass backwards.
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And he called that style guided discovery.
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He said you don't need to teach them how to dribble, you need to guide them to the point where they discover that.
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Joanne, this is a little soccer example and I'm excited for you to connect the dots.
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Yeah, for both me and for listeners.
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How do we implement that in our businesses?
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How do we implement that as leaders?
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Because, to your point about, we don't care how it gets done, we care that it does get done successfully.
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What's the business and the management equivalent of that soccer coaching example?
00:26:53.914 --> 00:26:54.539
What's the business?
