The show’s guest in this episode is Melissa Boggs. She’s a leadership coach, and an employee experience design consultant. She’s also the host of the wild hearts at work podcast, redefining our relationship with work through stories and conversations, and those challenging the status quo of today’s workplace.
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Designing New Workplace Experiments with Melissa Boggs
Hey, it’s so great to be here live with you today, I am hailing you can see in the background, I’m hailing from my dad’s house in New Mexico. And this morning, I’m thinking about for my own leadership, I’m thinking about like remote work. And I’ve been kind of nostalgic about, you know, as I get set up to do a live podcast in my dad’s house, what’s the right background, I’m noticing the two flowers behind my head are like antenna, which I didn’t see when I was looking earlier. But you know, I like having antenna. And I, I’ve been working remotely for, you know, 20 years. So I’ve been on I used to do all my coaching on phone calls. And, and then I went on zoom on a three years ago or something. And, and it’s so interesting to think about AI. You know, in my head, I have this, like, incredible freedom that I can work anywhere. In fact, I tell my husband all the time, like if you ever want to leave your job and move somewhere else, I’ll just go I’m, I’m so free. And I always have to set things up. Like I always have to think about what do I need? And it’s really an interesting exercise for me as a human just to think, Oh, what do I need today? Today, I needed three little boxes. And, you know, I’m thankful I’ve been doing some online ordering and having things shipped here. And so I have three little boxes so I could change the height of things and position myself in different places in the house and and what do I need for chords? And what do I need for this and that I remember 20 years ago, or 19 years ago, when I moved to Canada, I used to it took us like weeks to get our phone line set up. So I used to stand at payphones and coach when I first moved to Canada. And so I have a little nostalgia about that this morning. And I think the question is a really good one, like, what do I need as a leader? To be good at what I do. So that’s my question for you today is what do you need as a leader to be good at what you do today.
And I am super excited. I have Melissa Boggs here with me today. And she’s a leadership coach, and an employee experience design consultant. She’s also the host of the wild hearts at work podcast, redefining our relationship with work through stories and conversations, and those challenging the status quo of today’s workplace. And I was on Melissa’s podcast. And I love talking to her because she is an experimenter. And so Melissa, I am super happy to have you here.
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Welcome to the show.
Hello, Melanie, thank you for having me.
Oh, it’s just it’s great to see you. And so fun to have you here. And we’ll just dive right in, I’d love to know kind of what you’re up to, in your work life right now, what’s going on for you?
Oh, it’s surprisingly a busy time considering that we’re going into the holidays. But, um, so I am now consulting and working with leaders working with organizations, on their experiments. In a way, I think this is why you and I hit it off so quickly. Because in a lot of ways, our podcasts are symbiotic. And just the work that we do is similar in a wonderful way. But I work with entire organizations, I work with individual leaders. And one of the things that I really focus on recently is the relationship between leaders and their employees. So there’s a often this like, finger pointing that happens if there’s a lack of trust between them, you know, like, oh, the leader doesn’t understand or, Oh, why aren’t these employees working harder, and it’s just become more obvious in this great resignation, that we’re in the middle of that what’s really happening is that we’re not tending to the relationship between them enough. And that’s where some of these experiments can come into play.
I love that you said that. I think I read an email this morning, that that’s going up tomorrow that’s all about that, like the quality of your leadership is the quality of the conversations that you’re having. Both, you know, to people that are reporting to you and people you report to. So you know, in both in all the directions it’s i The more I talk about leadership, the more I think about leadership, the more I just feel like the the free flow of information in a circle. Like how do you share? Emotion? How do you share thoughts? How do you share hopes? And then how do you find some collaborative way to move everybody’s hopes forward? And is is the the heart of leadership? It’s, it’s, it’s not about the strategic plan. It’s that’s like too distant from our hearts somehow. I don’t know. That’s what that’s I’ve been thinking about that today, too. It’s really, I like that, and I, the finger pointing like the two directional. It’s, it’s so painful, I’m sure you come in when there’s strife. And it’s trying to find that common ground and how to help this really. It’s the work I love to do.
Yes, it’s interesting because I thought I understood it until I actually became a CEO. And, you know, in that moment, or in that series of moments, for the two years that I was in that role, I came to recognize, like how often I was blaming my leaders for things that perhaps they had culpability in, but I too, could have been designing a better relationship, you know, between between us. And so there’s an empathy that I have now that as a coach, you know, I’m able to kind of connect those dots in a different way, which is why I do focus so much on the relationship, I try to, I hope that that’s, in a way kind of What sets me apart from like, a typical executive coach, because I don’t sit here and say, This is what you need to do as a leader. It’s, here’s what we need to do to, like you said, find that common ground, and, you know, figure out how to improve the trust in the relationship. And that’s what allows us to be strategic and do this strategic work. You know, it’s like you said, it’s sort of foundational, but I did not compared to pitch Melanie, so. Um, but yeah, I completely resonate with everything you said, of course, because it’s you. And that’s how we work now.
That’s so funny. Well, before this, we were talking about some experiments that you did before around hiring and you know, I do some hiring, consulting. And often I get called in I, I use DISC a lot to try to guess, but you had you shared an experiment that you did with hiring that I really want to talk about because I want to find out what you did and what worked and what you learned. And I want to learn all the things. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, definitely. So I’m at the organization where I had the privilege of leading. We were just finding like most people that hiring was taking too long. It was too painful. And you know, going into an interview, that either whether you’re the interviewer or the interviewee that you’re going to it’s going to be in this dance, where you’re going to try right to ask the right questions. And if you’re the interviewee, you’re going to try to answer it in the way that you think they want you to answer it. And it’s really difficult to actually get down to is this a good fit for either party. So this is a key component and why we did hiring events. I am a huge believer that the interviewee the candidate, or in our case, we call them our guests, is just as much interviewing the company, as the company is interviewing them. And I think a lot of us say that, but then we still go through the same song and dance, right? We’ve still act like as the interviewer is that we are superior, because we have the job that you want. And I kind of came into it going, I don’t know if I have the job you want. You may not want this job. And at scrum Alliance, and this was one of only or this was one of many experiments that we did as an organization. And so I wanted to also make sure that they knew who we were, that if you are saying yes to a job with us, that it’s enthusiastically you know, passionately because you understand who we are. And then we’re also not presenting, you know, our perfect selves. I wanted to do away with that delay with the perfect self in the interview. So what we did is we designed a day and I do have to give credit. Some of this was based on Menlo innovations, extreme interviewing. Richard Sheridan is a friend and I love they did his book Joy Inc, if you’re curious about that, but I always do like to teach them like that. So we designed a day of games and conversations, no resumes for the most part, and come in. And let’s figure out if we would actually do well working together. And so that day consisted of something called the empathy toy, that would actually have them come in and partner with an existing team member. And we’re in like a big room. Oh, and I had that part, they all came at the same time. The candidates love that. So if it depending on the role, if we had, you know, eight candidates, and we call them guests, because we felt like the candidate phrase sort of implied that superiority of us. And so we would call them our guests. But the picture is like, all in a room. And the empathy toy is a set of blocks that you basically sit back to back, and one person describes what you’re trying to build, you know, the game used to do or like, yeah, did make a peanut butter sandwich blindfolded. And like your partner would tell you, like how to make the peanut butter sandwich, basically, that but with, with blocks. And it was all about like, you learn a lot about their ability to communicate the ability to work through a problem with someone, you know, if they were frustrated, and you were like, on both sides of the designer or the builder. So that was one thing that we did, we did a Lean Coffee, where basically, we would take a we bring everyone in who was part of that craft, like who already did that role at the company and the candidates, and they would just have a conversation about their craft. It wasn’t interview questions, it wasn’t. It was like, a fully two way or eight way conversation about, you know, what are the important topics to software developers today? What do you think about quality? What do you think about test automation? What do you think about an AI developer, I probably picked the wrong road to go down just now. But just to have a real conversation, because these are the people on a daily basis that you’re going to be having these conversations with anyway. And it was also like, are we capable of making space for them? Are they capable of making space for us in the conversation itself. So that was Lean Coffee, we did a speed interview round, if you think about speed dating, where you like, move chairs, and you only have a certain amount of time at each chair. So we would position our team members at a chair, and then the guests would get to rotate and talk to each one of the team members. What else did we do, we also did like silly games, like I was known for doing Rock Paper, Scissors, tournaments at just our regular all hands. So we would do it, you know, at the at the hiring event. And again, the whole point of this was, we want to get to know you, but we want you to get to know us too. And the other thing is through this series of activities, it was impossible for either side to be fake. Like you can’t be fake, when you are putting together blocks. You know, your mind is like in the game, not in trying to you know, figure out what it is you want me to say. And so we hired some of our best people through these hiring events. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work on both sides, I think because again, we’re having to be real, and it was a little scary sometimes, but it was was pretty incredible.
I'm at the organization where I had the privilege of leading. Share on XI have so many questions by this. So, um, when you were looking like was there a feedback portion, like at the end of spate speed, interviewing or anything, where people like said, I liked this person I like, how did you gather feedback? That’s, that’s my first question.
Yes. Um, so we broke at lunch. And then we broke, you know, obviously, at the end of the day, and so there was always like a moment at each of those junctures where we would bring everyone together and just start collecting feedback. And we wouldn’t say like, I like this person, or I don’t. But we would say like, here’s what I’m observing. I want to learn more about this with this person. Here’s the very, very funny thing though. One thing we didn’t count on, is, in my tenure there, we probably did half a dozen of these. And every time I’m pretty sure without our prompting, the candidates would go to lunch together. Like these people who are competing for the same job, but if you think about it are in the same car and are in this crazy weird thing together or like, let’s go to lunch. So I always thought it was pretty cool. They, you know, they were debriefing us to, like, you know, they were at lunch, and they’re like, What did you think about this person? You know? So yeah, we would collect the feedback. And at the end of the day, we would essentially vote. I say we, but generally, I stayed out of the final decision unless there was, you know, some sort of tiebreaker that needed to be made or whatever. But generally, it was the people who were on the cross functional team, that the person who’s going to be working with that would say, like, Yes, this is the right person for our team.
Was there like, did it? Did it sort of consensus emerge? Like, did you in this environment? Did you? Did people have the same experience of people, and they were sure of who they wanted?
Most of the time? Yeah, I would really say most of the time, it became really clear. And there were also times where it was like, it’s clear that this person is right for our team. And then this other person is probably right for our org. But we don’t have a role right now, we would always tell people like part of the reason that we did it this way is we wanted to develop relationships with people who did the same work that we did in our local area, this was pre pandemic. And so we actually did have at least one instance where someone wasn’t right for the specific team. But we ended up calling them back in the future, because they were right for the company. And there was a, you know, an opportunity in a different team later. So but yeah, generally, there was consensus, which I, I hoped for, but didn’t necessarily anticipate when I was sort of designing this, and I’m working through it. So generally, there was consensus, I’ll add one other thing that was quite crazy, we actually did one, where we actually had multiple roles, all at the same time. So we actually had almost like multiple events going on at the same time. Because some of the things, it didn’t matter which role you were like, the end of the toy game, it didn’t matter if you were developer or digital marketer, you know, we’re just working on the toy. And then they kind of separate and go talk about their craft. And so there was one particular day and I think we hired six people in one day.
Wow. I have another question about whether personality types are certain behaviors that just got people off the list? Like, what were the things people did that just made? Everybody go? No?
Well, so we were really on fire, I will say about our values as an organization. And so that was one of the things that was always a, like criteria in the back of our head. Now, understanding people act differently under stress. And we knew that and we would do our very best at the beginning of the day, to put people at ease. It’s why we did empathy toy first, because it put you in this like child’s childlike mindset. You know, if people would tell us later, like that did put them at ease. Because like, how bad can it be if I’m playing a game of blocks, you know But yes, we would definitely be looking out for, you know, not culture fit, where, you know, we didn’t want everyone to be exactly the same. But, you know, does this person demonstrate the type of behaviors that align with our values? And that sounds like total, like a cliché line, when I say that out loud, the truly like, that was a very important thing to us.
And I’m not sure it’s kind of a general question, but what was your big learning from this whole process? Like, what are you left with after some time has passed? After you had these successful days? Like what what’s left as the takeaways for you from that experiments?
The experiments are worth it. That’s the takeaway. I remember the night before we did the first one. I was terrified, like literally terrified, and I woke up that morning, and I thought I was gonna bomb it all morning. I was like, What have I done? This is crazy. Why am I doing this? Why don’t I just do this is like this existential thing about myself. Like why can’t I just do what everyone else does? Why can’t I just follow the path and do the four interviews one of them is a group interview and boring and At the end of the day, like literally not the phrase end of the day. But literally the end of that day, we actually did ask the folks that were in that interview to kind of stick behind and give us feedback. And of course, we said, this has no bearing on the choice that we’re going to make. But it would help us to know what this experience was like for you. Because the intent is for it to be good. The intent is not for us to, you know, make people more stressed or upset or feel like it’s harder, the intent was that it was easier. And one of the gentlemen got up and said, I was scared to death coming into this, because we were very clear within when we invited them to the interview about what to expect, because like, I was scared to death, he’s like, but I look around this room. And I feel like, if you chose any of these other five people, I would completely understand because I know now that they’re fantastic. I otherwise would have been sitting home thinking about my competitors, you know, like you create this story for yourself about these other people. He’s like, now I have five more friends. And who knows whether I get the job or not. But I appreciate that you’re creating community. And I almost cried on the spot. I was like, this is exactly what I wanted. I wanted us to have an experience together that went beyond am I going to get this job or not. So it was worth it. But it can be terrifying, like stepping out and doing something that is completely different from what anybody else does. And not knowing what the result is going to be.
The experiments are worth it. Share on XAnd I’m curious, so you hired six people in one day? Which is amazing. And how would how might somebody apply this? If they weren’t hiring six people at once? Like if they had a single hire? Because, gosh, it would be a lot of resources to pull full teams out for a day for you know, one hire I think, but maybe not. I’m curious, your thoughts on all of that?
Yeah, so most of them were just one roll, that six people in one day, across different teams and whatnot? was an experiment within an experiment like him? Are we limited to doing just one. And for what it’s worth, we actually only did that once, because it was actually a lot more like exponential more than six times the work to like, manage all of that. So yes, very easily done with one roll. To your question about like pulling people in time, and whatnot. If you think about the amount of time that we spend doing four interviews across, you know, because I think on average, most people end up doing four interviews, if you count the recruiter, you know, the manager, the team, etc. If you extrapolate that over, however many candidates you end up needing to hire or interview to get to your person across four interviews, and your team and just the mental and emotional load that is required to do that. I think we save time and money.
I think it’s I love this so much because people can like, like, it’s almost like behavioral based interview questions on steroids. You know, it’s, it’s like you can ask, tell me a time when you ask them what their behavior is. But instead you just observe their behavior. Right. And, you know, I know from you know, years of hiring, consulting, and just profiling, people can hide it for an hour. But that’s about it. Like, after that you’re going to emerge and, and it is always about fit. And I think to your point about people interviewing the company, while the company’s interviewing them, that’s never more true than it is right now. You know, right now it is the employers are competing for the employees, not the other way around. Like, you want to be innovative. You want to be interesting. You want to be kind and compassionate. And and I love this. That’s why we just took so long to talk about it. I just think it’s fantastic. And I haven’t heard about anybody doing it. Maybe I’m not in the loop or something. But I really enjoyed talking about this.
Inviting people to a new dream Share on XYeah, thank you. I think we’re the only ones who did it this particular way. Like I said, Menlo innovations. They do a version of this, but they mainly only hire software developers. And so they’re just much more focused on coding and pair programming and whatnot. But I asked Rich’s permission and like, can I iterate on what you did? Can I like, do it different. But one thing I will add to your point about just competing for employees and whatnot, I have, we had a staff member who is still a friend who has told me multiple times, he wasn’t looking for a job. He hadn’t even updated his resume. But a friend of his was coming to the event. And kind of nudged him and said, like, you should put your name in here too, just for the experience, because this is probably our second or third one. So locally, there was a little bit of buzz like people were starting to hear about it. And so he came, knocked it out of the park, and was, and we ended up hiring him, it was an incredible employee, and wasn’t even looking for a job. So there’s something about this, like the the difference of it and like the, like you said, like being kind of innovative just in our processes that drew people in.
For sending people to a new dream of a relationship with a company.
Yes. I love that. inviting people to a new dream.
Yeah, I think that goes, I think that contentious interviewing style of we’re gonna ask you hard questions, and you’re gonna answer the hard questions like that, that belies the idea that the company has a dream when they post a position. And the and the employee, the person who wants the job has a dream of a new role, like they have a dream of a new work life in some way. And, and really pairing those dreams and finding fit. It’s just so important like that, that the flow of the way people think and work is aligned. That’s how you get really successful employees to so you don’t spend a lot of time trying to mitigate deficits or, you know, solve for those things.
I’ll tell you one more very quick story, I promise be quick. But this is indicative of the experiment itself. So for the first one, we sent out, again, like a pretty detailed explanation of what to expect when we invited people to the interview, which is the hiring event. And we got back a message from a lady who was furious. She was absolutely furious. She was like, How dare you? This is, you know, I don’t want to be in the same room with the other candidates. I don’t want this I don’t like it was just she was livid. And for a minute, like, my heart sank into my stomach, and I was like, Oh, my God, you know, same thing, what have I done? And it was really funny, because like, my team member from HR kind of looked at me and she goes, No, this is perfect. She would have hated it here. Truly, and she was right. Like, if I look back through the email, I was like, everything that she talks about, that she didn’t like about what we were going to do. All of those things are representative of how we behaved every single day. And like how we work together and how our team operated. And that particular team member was like, This is great. Like you just filtered out someone not that we wouldn’t like them, but they would have been miserable here. That’s like, Oh, yeah. So being yourself, even in the introductory email, is a really good way to figure that out.
I think this is one of the pieces. You know, I talked about it with my clients, you want to if people are fully expressed as leaders, they’re going to attract people to work with them that are going to like working with them. They’re gonna like the energy of all that. And as coaches, like being fully who we are as coaches, like, if someone wants to spend a lot of time on strategic planning, I’m probably not their coach, because I hate strategic plans. Strategic plans to of course you do. Fun, like, club fan girls for each other. Yeah, so I think that’s really interesting. I’d love for you to just tell people where they can find you. And also like, if somebody is interested in this experimenting piece, I know that’s something that you help leaders do. So you know, talk about that, too.
Cool. Thank you. So definitely find me on LinkedIn. I’m also pretty active on Twitter @MelissaDBoggs. I do have a website that is currently under construction. You can still find me there. It’s just the lift about calm. I also do keynote speaking so you can find me at www.melissaboggs.com for more information about the talks that I give.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I love this deep dive that we did just into this one thing, because I think it’s so powerful. So thank you so much for sharing. Your journey has just been a pleasure to be with you.
You too, Melanie, thank you for having me.
Okay, bye bye.
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Well, that was really fun. And I just love Melissa spirit. I love that she talked about experimenting. And you know, of course, that’s near and dear to my heart. But what this was, was a really clear experiment. And the thing that I loved about it so much, is that there was a clear intention behind it. We knew what we wanted to change, we wanted to change the way the hiring process felt in both directions. She also wanted to have better outcomes. And as somebody who does hiring, I really see how observing the behavior is better than hearing about the behavior. And so trying this experiment, and then trying it multiple times. And then I love that she collected feedback probably both internally and in tech about that, but from the candidates as well and got feedback on the process, and was able to use that in her iterating. And in their iterating as they did this. I really want you to think about where you can do some experimenting around processes that don’t feel good, or around processes, hiring processes. How can you change your hiring processes in ways how can you experiment with that to get better outcomes, especially right now, when things are so competitive? It’s worth the effort to plan new processes right now. Because the stakes are so high. It’s so competitive. And innovation is super attractive to the kind of candidates you want to attract. So, my challenge to you is figure out where you can experiment. It’s been great being with you today. Go experiment.
Melissa Boggs
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Melissa Boggs is host of the “Wild Hearts at Work” podcast, redefining our relationship with work through stories and conversations with those challenging the status quo of today’s workplace. She is a leadership coach and employee experience design consultant, uniquely positioned to help leaders and employees design an intentional employee experience that bridges the gap between them, increasing engagement and inviting joy for all.
She is a former executive with a background in leadership, business, and product development. She is a former nonprofit executive and board member, having served on the Board of Directors for both Scrum Alliance and Agile Denver. She was privileged to present at the 2020 World Business and Executive Coach Summit and at the 2021 WomenTech Summit, and has been featured in Business Coaching, Business Agility Emergence and Authority magazines.
If you are interested in various letter combinations (certifications), Melissa is a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Certified Team Coach (CTC), Dare to Lead Trained (DTL), Training from the Back of the Room Trained (TBR), Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP), Kanban Management Professional (KMP I), and a Project Management Professional (PMP). She holds an MBA in IT Management and a BS in Information Technology from Western Governors University.
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