Hello and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast where we talk all things leadership, business communication, and trends in organizational life. I'm your host, Dr Janel Anderson.

Have you ever wondered about the stories behind the episodes here on leadership, communication and the future of work? Well, today, we are pulling back the curtain on working conversations and diving into questions that matter the most to you our listeners, from the nuances of effective leadership to the latest trends shaping the workplace.

This Ask Me Anything episode is your opportunity to get the inside scoop on the topics that we explore on the podcast and the insights that we share. So join me as we answer your burning questions and discuss the ideas that drive our conversations, spark innovation and transform the workplace.

All right, I am so excited to do this episode. One of my favorite types of episodes to listen to on the podcasts that I listen to are these Ask Me Anything episodes. So I have gathered up questions that have come in to me over the past couple of months, whether they be in email or in direct messages from my social media channels or other places where people find me and listen to the podcast.

Now I've grouped them into two large buckets. One is questions about the podcast and the content that we cover on the podcast, and then the other group or bucket is questions that come to me about maybe more about me. I mean, they're personal slash professional. So what I've decided to do is do two AMA episodes.

The first AMA, or ask me anything episode is going to be those professional ones about the podcast, leadership and communication and the future of work. And then next week, I'm doing another episode that is also ask me anything, and those questions will be more of the personal slash professional realm, productivity, goal setting and all the things that pertain to me and how I operate professionally. All right, so let's dig in to this first group.

And again, I have grouped this group into three main areas, questions about the podcast, questions about leadership and communication, and then questions about the future of work. So let's dive into those podcast questions.

The first one is what inspired you to start the working conversations podcast. And really what inspired me to start the podcast is questions from my audiences after I finished a keynote speech. So lots of times, people would come up to me with wanting to know more, or wanting to get a review of some of the things I talked about, or wanting to share some of the key concepts with other people in their life, whether that be their co workers, their friends, their family members or spouse or partner. And I just got thinking, what if there was like a bite sized way to share some of the content that I deliver on the stage with people who either want to review people in my audiences, or people in my audiences who wanted to share. So that's really where the idea came from.

So that's why you'll see, if you've ever been in one of my audiences, you'll see some overlap between the topics that I talk about on stage, and, of course, the topics that I talk about here on the podcast. And sometimes the podcast is an experimental ground for things that then end up on the stage, and sometimes the podcast is a place for a quick recap of things that have been shared on the stage so that they are more shareable for others. All right, so that is what inspired the podcast.

Next question about the podcast is, what can we expect in the future on the podcast? Well, I loved putting this Ask Me Anything episode together. So I think you'll hear an Ask me anything AMA episode at least once a year, maybe a couple of times a year. And in fact, we are putting a link on the website to a form that you can fill out if you have questions that you want to ask for the next Ask me Anything episode. So it's just simply my URL janelanderson.com/ama for Ask me Anything. So that's going to be a place for you to submit the questions. And of course, you can continue to submit questions in the same format that I received these questions that would be email, social media, DMS and other places that you find me and asking those ways.

All right, you can also expect more interviews. This is something that people ask me about every time there's an interview episode, I usually get some feedback from people saying, Oh, that was awesome. Bring more experts on the podcast. So instead of doing interviews just a couple of times a year, I'm hoping to at least get them in every other month, starting this fall, and we'll see how that goes, and then maybe in 2025 we'll have at least one episode per month that's an interview.

Now, if there is a topic that you would like me to find an expert on, or somebody specifically that you would like me to interview on the podcast, let me know. So drop me a DM on any of the social media channels, or drop me an email. I would love to know who you would like me to bring on the podcast. Please, please let me know.

All right. Now on to leadership and communication. So I got a few questions in this category, so let me talk about these one at a time. So the first question under leadership and communication is, what do you think the most important qualities of a successful leader are in today's workplace?

All right, so I came up with four. I couldn't just limit it to one or two. The first is flexibility and willingness to change. Our world is changing so fast all the time, whether it's technology changing. I mean, we've had AI and all sorts of things happen over the last few years with remote work and the like. But really, your flexibility and your willingness to change is paramount in terms of you staying successful or gaining in your success in the leadership area. And I don't care if that's leadership, like you're managing a huge team of people, or leadership like personal leadership, and you're leading yourself regardless of how you want to think about leadership. You need to be flexible, and you need to have a willingness to change and explore change. If you're not, you're just going to stagnate.

All right, my second most important quality is optimism and having a growth mindset. If you don't have that growth mindset where you are willing to think positively about whatever it is that's happening, you are going to limit yourself. So, optimism and having a growth mindset. And I've done a podcast episode here on growth mindset, so we will link that up in the show notes.

If you need a refresher on growth mindset, the third most important quality that you need to have as a successful leader is curiosity. We always have to be curious and questioning things, to learn and grow again, otherwise we're going to stagnate. And curiosity is so helpful when things aren't going your way. Just to take that curious approach and say, what can I learn from this situation? Or what could I be doing differently? Also curiosity about other people's motives and other people's perspectives when you're not getting compliance or cooperation from others. Curiosity is your friend. It is your superpower.

And then the last skill and important quality I want to mention is communication. You really need to be in communication with people as a leader in order to be effective, and that means giving updates, even when there are no updates. If you've heard me speak in person, you may have heard me talk about MSU or making stuff up, and that's what human beings do when we have an absence of information. So making sure that you are staying in communication, especially in those moments where there's nothing to communicate or there are no updates, the human brain is going to fill in that vacuum with probably something that's more akin to gossip or something that's not accurate. So that's where I say making stuff up, or MSU. And you could insert your own word for s that begins with s if you don't think stuff is strong enough.

In fact, I often joke that over a cocktail, I would use a different word that began with s when I talk about the human brain making stuff up, and some of you have advanced degrees from MSU, you have PhDs, or you have co workers or direct reports who have PhDs from MSU, making stuff up. Okay, so communicate, even when you don't think there's anything to communicate.

All right, the next question I got a variety of versions of is, how do you approach difficult conversations at work? So if you have been around content any length of time, you know, I've written a book about difficult conversations called Head On How to Approach Difficult Conversations directly.

Well, when we think about working in the work from anywhere, work from home environment or a hybrid environment, one of the things that happens a lot is people want to have those difficult conversations over email, and it just doesn't work. So we've got an episode about why you shouldn't have difficult conversations over email and what to do instead, and we'll link that up in the show notes as well.

So you can't do it over email is my short answer. It needs to be a real time, synchronous conversation. Now, I don't care if that's in person or if it's on a video conference or if it is on the good old fashioned telephone, you need to at least be able to hear each other's voice, and when you are having that conversation, be patient, be curious, and assume positive intent. When you go in with those three characteristics leading the way, patience, curiosity and positive intent, I can guarantee you're going to learn something about the situation that you didn't know before, and is really, really going to help you come to some new resolution.

And then the third question I got, again, I got a few variations of this question, but it's, how do you handle feedback and criticism? So this is the third question in the leadership and communication arena, and my response is not very well, just like everyone else, I don't necessarily handle feedback, and at least negative feedback and criticism very well, but here are some specific things I do inside of that.

First, I try to have a good sense of humor about it. Hopefully you can hear that coming through in my answer to this question. Then I look for trends. So if I got some feedback from let's say an audience. Let's say I'm speaking to 350 people, and one person didn't like the presentation, and overwhelmingly the other 349 loved it. Well, then I'm going to take that in context, and I'm going to say there's not a trend here. There's an outlier, there's a one off that I didn't resonate with, or something like that. Now it doesn't mean I'm going to completely discount the person that I didn't land with, but I'm going to look specifically at what was it about that feedback where the person it didn't land.

Now, if it just didn't resonate and I wasn't their person, well, you know, I'm not going to be everybody's person, and I can handle that, but sometimes there's a very specific thing that I said or did that offended somebody. Now, when I have that specific feedback, I really take that to heart, and I work with it, and it requires a certain sense of humility. Maybe I used a word that was offensive to somebody. Now, I want to understand how I use that word and how I offended that person, and I want to really look at my language. Now, was that person being unreasonable, or was there something about my language or something I said or did that I need to really take a look at.

So when there is that one off feedback, I do specifically look at it. Now, if somebody just like I, they didn't like me. I'm not going to worry too much about that. I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep about that. It's still going to hurt me a little bit, but I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep about that.

Now I want to also acknowledge that the way I handle feedback and deal with the criticism is going to be different from if I had a manager. So my manager, or the people that I am beholden to in terms of feedback and criticism are the people in my audiences. So when I get that feedback from the people in my audiences, again, it's different than if I was getting feedback directly from my manager. But again, I'm going to look for trends, and then the next thing I do is I implement a waiting period before I respond.

Every once in a while, somebody will send me an email. In fact, I got one of these not too long ago from somebody who is a longtime listener to the podcast. This was, I don't know, maybe six eight months ago. They sent me an email that said, Hey, I think you were really pro management in that episode. It sounded like it wasn't very employee centric, and it was all about what managers should do to keep employees in line. And of course, that was not necessarily my intent by any means, but I sat with that feedback for a couple of days first, before I replied to the listener. And then I thought about it some more, and I went back and re listened to the episode, and I was like, Oh, I totally see how she could have taken it that way. That was not my intent, but I can completely understand that when I listened through the lens of being an employee who was facing a very, very similar challenge to the one that I was discussing in the episode. So what I then did to, I mean, I replied back again, after a waiting period where I was able to really integrate it, think about it, go back and listen to the episode, and then I realized what needed to be done, is I needed to address that same issue, but really from a very pro employee side. And so I did a follow up episode on that same issue, again from the employee's perspective.

So I take this thinking period and I look for the truth in the feedback, because sometimes I just don't feel like there's any truth in the feedback. That's where the waiting period comes in, because then I can implement some humility and be intentional about what I do with the feedback. So I think that's, you know, a good, useful approach for when you are in a corporate role, when you are reporting to a manager again, still take that waiting period. You might get the feedback and they might expect an immediate response to it. And you could say, Hey, can I take some time to think about this? And then you can look for the truth in it and be intentional with what you do about it.

All right. Now, I also got, oh my gosh, a slew of questions about the future of work, so I chose three, and I kind of consolidated some of the questions and massaged them into just down to three questions. And these are the kinds of topics that I usually talk about in podcast anyway, so you may be hearing some deeper dives into some of these questions.

All right, so the first one was a little bit more personal to me. How do you stay updated on the latest trends and research in your field and in the future of work? Well, I read widely. I am always looking and I have a handful of Google alerts that are going to give me the latest things that are happening in the world as they relate to the topics that I talk about.

So first of all, I have a lot of information feeding to me based on what I do professionally, and that is immensely helpful. However, I don't stop there. I’m also into reading widely. I love to read a newspaper, a good old fashioned paper newspaper or print periodical of any type, whether it's an academic journal or the Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan magazine or the New York Times. I also read my local Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Business Journal in paper format. I am a subscriber, and I get the paper format in the mail. I also read the articles on the website as well, because there's more on the website than there is in the in the print version.

Now, people ask me, why do I like to read a print version of something. Well, remember I was saying, you know, I have these alerts set up, and there's a lot of information coming to me. Well, that information is curated based on my interests, based on my professional curiosities. What happens when I am reading a print publication, again, whether that's a newspaper or a journal, a magazine, is the information is not curated for me in the same way that that online news comes to me, the print version allows me to see what else is going on that isn't maybe something I would intentionally draw into me, and so it gives me new ideas, and it helps me see the future coming in ways that I wouldn't necessarily be looking for.

So it might hit another industry or sector change might come to another industry or sector before I'm aware of it because it's not the change that I'm looking for. So this will help me, and that information from other industries comes to me in ways that I wouldn't necessarily expect or go out looking for. And when things hit another industry or sector before I'm really aware of the change or shift, it helps me immeasurably. So it is invaluable for me to pick up print publications from time to time again, a weekly on a weekly basis, for my local business news, but also with a lot of other things.

On a monthly basis, I get the Harvard Business Review magazine in print. And again, when I'm looking at those things, I'm coming across articles that would not necessarily come to me based on what I'm curating. So it is incredibly, incredibly helpful.

Another question I got is, what skills do you think will be most in demand in the future workplace? Communication above all, and communication across all modalities, not just communication face to face, which is what we used to think of as communication, but now also how you structure your emails, whether you're using constant always on, modalities like Slack or teams chat, whether you're picking up the phone. I mean, we did the episode on telephonobia, about how people are afraid to pick up the phone these days.

So really, really honing your communication skills and being intently dialed in on what other people's communication styles and prefers are so that you can meet them where they're at, because that's where you're going to have the most impact, even if it puts you out of your comfort zone a bit to get into a modality or a communication style that is different from your own, in order to get your point across, and in order to really understand both your internal customers as well as your external customers, your boss, the people who directly report to you and all the above, the second customer, the second skill that will be most in demand in the future workplace is customer service, and again, that could be your internal customers.

I want you to be thinking about your employees, for those of you who are managers, as your customers. If you're a direct report, think of your boss as your chief and primary customer, and then you probably have colleagues that work with on a project basis in other departments or other parts of your organization, and think of those as your internal customers. And then if you are in that external customer facing role, of course, your customer service skills are just absolutely paramount.

Increasingly, people are not being loyal. Your former customer base is not being loyal in the way they used to be, whether they're shopping for price, or they're shopping for quality of goods and services. When they have an amazing customer service experience, it will keep them with you. So customer service and then third leadership.

Now I was talking about leadership before, but here I want to distinguish leadership with a capital L that would be those of you who are in formal leadership positions in your organization or want to be, and then leadership of the lowercase L and that is leading from the side, leading yourself having that sense of personal leadership and speaking up about things when there's something to say.

So leadership is going to be a critical skill. It has been a critical skill for decades, but is going to continue to be a critical skill in the future workplace, and really be thinking about, when do I lead with that capital L, and when do I lead with that lowercase L, even if you have lots of direct reports, you're leading with a lowercase L when you're leading up in the organization or when you're leading across with your peers. So both are important.

And then the final question I'm going to address in this Ask Me Anything episode, and I have a lot to say about this, but I'm going to keep my response short. It is, again, in that future of work category.

And I've I get this question a lot, are we ever going back to the office forever? How is this whole work from home, work from anywhere, return to the office? Hybrid thing going to shake out? Well, here is the thumbnail sketch of my answer, and I will be doing a whole episode coming up soon on this because I've been getting this question so much.

I'm distinguishing between the organizations that put people first, those organizations I have seen really leaning into the work from home, work from anywhere, or hybrid arrangement. On the other hand, organizations who are putting Profit First, and we're seeing this all over the news headlines, with the large retail organizations, large banks, again, people who organizations that are very Profit First, are asking more and more for their people to come back into the office more days a week. If they're on a hybrid schedule, it is more days in the office than from home. Now that is just a high level sketch, and I'm sure that's going to just get a get me a flurry of email and comments right there.

But let me also talk about how there is a vast middle ground. It is not easy to just slice organizations down the middle and say these are the ones that are people first, and these are the ones that are profit first. Take, for example, a profit driven company that really does value people genuinely, and does their best to try to put people and profits on par with each other. These are the origins are going to have the toughest time with. Do we bring people back in mass? Do we let them work from home? Do we have some sort of a hybrid schedule? What are we going to do with that? So that's it, just in a very thumbnail sketch.

Now, I know there is a lot more to say about this, and I really do have a future episode coming up where we're going to dive into this much in a much greater and granular fashion, because it is so nuanced, but in broad strokes, people first, organizations are going to get to work from home more that could be government organizations, nonprofits and the like Profit First, these are people whose stock is publicly traded. They are going to be more likely to be the ones who are bringing people back to the office, and we'll dive into the reasons for that and all of the rest in a whole episode just about that.

All right, so my friends, this was so much fun to do this ask me anything episode. Again, watch for part two next week, when I answer questions that listeners have asked that were more about the person of who I am in my business, questions about productivity, goal setting, how I maintain boundaries between my personal and professional life and so on. It is going to be so much fun, also, just like this one was so much fun, so you don't want to miss it.

Remember, my friends, the future of work is not only about technology, it's about the values we uphold, the communities we build, and the sustainable growth that we all strive for, we need to keep exploring, keep innovating and keep envisioning the remarkable possibilities that lie ahead as always, stay curious, stay informed, and by all means, stay ahead of the curve.

Tune in next week for another insightful exploration on the trends shaping our professional world and specifically that next Ask Me Anything episode. Now if you learned something or you enjoy this content, please subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Subscribe to the podcast on your podcast platform of choice and follow me on social media. These are excellent, no cost ways for you to support me and my work over on YouTube. Make sure you hit the button and knock the little bell so that you get notified every time there's a new episode out, you'll find me on YouTube at youtube.com/JanelAndersonPhD wherever you're listening or watching, please leave a review. It helps other listeners find me, and it lets me know that you're along with me for the ride. Until next time, my friends be well.