Melanie Parish’s Favorite Mistake, Responding to a Request for Proposal

EPISODE SUMMARY
In today’s episode, Melanie shares her “favorite mistake” about the contracting process with a client. Why was she “naive” about this process? We also discuss what it means to be an “experimental leader” and a “new kind of boss.” How can we cultivate a culture of innovators? What should we do when some experiments seem like “mistakes”?

Mark Graban (0s): Episode 17 Melanie Parrish, “the experimental leader.”

Melanie Parish (6s): I love this question. It’s a fantastic question. It’s really interesting to think about because we have all these happy accidents in the work that we do.

Mark Graban (18s): I’m Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you’ll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth and professional success. Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. Thanks for listening and now on with the show.

Melanie Parish (52s): Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I’m Mark Graban, and we’re joined today by Melanie Parish. She’s an author, speaker, podcast host. She’s the founder of Experimental Leader Academy and she is a master certified coach.

Mark Graban (1m 5s): Melanie is the author of the book, The Experimental Leader. I love that title. So I’m looking forward to delving into that. She is an expert in problem-solving operations, strategic hiring brand development, and she has consulted and coached organizations ranging from a fortune 50 company to it startups. So Melanie, thank you for being here. How are you?

Melanie Parish (1m 26s): Mark, ‘m super excited to talk to you. I can’t wait today.

Mark Graban (1m 31s): Yeah. So I want to, you know, explore, I can’t wait to get into talking about the book and some of the work you do, but as we usually do, we’ll jump right in. What’s your favorite mistake, Melanie?

Melanie Parish (1m 42s): My, I love this question. It’s a fantastic question. It’s really interesting to think about because we have all these happy accidents in, in the work that we do. And minus from my early days as a leadership coach, I had been an executive coach or I’d been a business coach for a long time, but I started to work more with executives. And so I had a website and I put that up on the website and probably even did a little SEO in those days. And, and I got this inquiry from a company that wanted to bring a coaching culture to their work. And I was so excited. I, and I was pretty naïve about how contracts work and all of those things.

Melanie Parish (2m 26s): But I, you know, in my mind it was like this great client was just reaching out to me to, to get a quote. So I don’t full in, I, I committed lots and lots of time to it. And, and I wrote a gorgeous proposal. I got some help from a friend who had done a lot of work and she took me through the process and I fully committed to it. And, and the, the shocker was I got the job and it ended up being one of, one of my best clients. And it was years later that I realized they mentioned when I was like on a retreat with them.

Melanie Parish (3m 9s): And we were all good friends by then that I was like the third bid they were getting. Cause they had already picked someone. And so they were just looking for me to throw out a number. So they could go with the center for creative leadership, which is a huge company. I was a tiny, tiny shop. And, and so my happy mistake was in my naietivity like that. I just let it that. I just let it happen that I went all in and you know, I wouldn’t do that today. I would have the seasoned approach of really trying to assess and really trying to qualify someone who reached out to me to find out if it was worth my time, my time is more valuable, but the, the reason it’s my favorite mistake is the mistake worked.

Melanie Parish (4m 2s): And, and it really has informed how I might approach a contract even now, because I think to myself, you know, maybe it’s worth going all in. Maybe it’s worth, you know, taking a risk and allowing myself to go for the ride. I, and so that’s, that’s my happy mistake.

Mark Graban (4m 26s): Sure. And so, you know, when I’m curious to learn more, let’s say, let’s say if you were coaching somebody who’s in a similar situation and they say, Hey, I’ve got this lead. They want a proposal, you know, even though, and so what, how do you think it worked out then in this case? Sorry, before we jump about into, you know, maybe coaching someone else, you said they were in sort of intending, like they probably needed three bids, bureaucracy being what it is. And then, you know, w w was it that you ended up undercutting everybody else or they, they loved the proposal. What were the factors that led to that working out when it sounds like you’re saying it probably shouldn’t have worked out?

Melanie Parish (5m 5s): Yeah. It probably shouldn’t have worked out like, well, I think there’s been multiple times in my life that I just pretended I could do the work that I knew how, and I realize now that I actually have a real strength in, in project design. So I’m really good at designing a project that has a flow and it makes sense and it works. And I really look for good outcomes and I think they liked all of that. Like the design was good. I think they didn’t expect to like me, but then I spent a lot of time with them, you know, in my, you know, sort of place in the world. I was, I had time to get on the calls and walk them through the proposal.

Melanie Parish (5m 45s): And so it worked out for, I think it worked out because I built a relationship because I had time. I was able to somehow convince them that I had credibility probably just through good marketing and the proposal was good. It was, it was a solid proposal and it wasn’t, I might have offered them. I offered them a coaching gym at that time. So it was a dedicated person for certain number of hours a week. And they could use it as much as they could. They were a manufacturing firm. And I think that it was a really good fit for them because there wasn’t any, there was nobody else competing with that product and sort of that flexibility of being early in startup allowed me to just think of what they needed and then make that product.

Melanie Parish (6m 37s): I didn’t have to fit them into my offerings already.

Mark Graban (6m 42s): Yeah. So do you feel like that’s the case today? You know, now, now that you’re more established, you wouldn’t have that filter of, does this fit? What I do is that limiting?

Melanie Parish (6m 52s): Yeah. It’s so funny because I’m doing something very similar right now, but it is for a longtime client. They asked me to do something and I’ve been playing in the I’ve been playing in the online space, creating online courses. And so I’m doing I’m right now in the process of, I would say, I was going to say, no, no, I wouldn’t do that now, but now I’m doing it. I like to say yes to clients and then just put a price tag on it. So they asked me to do four workshops for their in healthcare. And so I’m putting on those four workshops, but then I’m doing an online automated course for them. That’ll be evergreen for two years.

Melanie Parish (7m 33s): So I’m more likely to develop something automated these days. Cause that’s kind of the land I want to play in.

Mark Graban (7m 44s): So maybe I’ll ask you to go into coach mode then. So let’s say I came to you and say, you know, Melanie, this organization reached out to me. They want her proposal. You, you alluded earlier, you know, this idea of, you know, checking more into the background or doing due diligence. What would you advise me to look out for just rushing into the work of writing, writing a proposal, you know, doing a RFP response. If that’s part of the circumstances can be really time consuming and I’ve sort of tried to square that off, but what, what advice do you have about checking in, you know, to things to make sure that it’s really the right situation to even go and put a proposal in for?

Melanie Parish (8m 26s): Well, I think my advice would be don’t write an RFP unless you’ve helped create the RFP. Yeah. Like, unless, you know, you’re the prime candidate on an RFP, but I think if somebody comes to you for something, the first question I would ask is around your passion. Like if you’re going to branch out into something new, do you get excited about it? Do you love it? Is it, is it, is it fun? Does it, you know, make your creativity flow or is it just that you’re doing it for the money? Cause I never recommend just doing it for the money. I think anybody who works for the money, like hates their work. Yeah.

Melanie Parish (9m 6s): So I always, I always want to call people forth to be creative, to find the place where they love their work. Cause there’s a place that the marketplace will buy. The thing you love to deliver, if you work hard enough at finding that thing. So that synergy between client and passion is so important, especially if we’re creating something custom for a client.

Mark Graban (9m 35s): So I want to follow up and learn more about your book. I imagine there was a passion that went into not, not just starting to write a book, but completing the book. And again, congratulations on that. The Experimental Leader and the, some, the subtitle is Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators. So I think there’s a lot, we can just unpack from the title of the book and use that as a, a bit of a preview. But before we do that, I like to ask authors like, you know, what was, what was the genesis of saying I I’m going to, or I need to write this book.

Melanie Parish (10m 15s): Yeah. So the genesis was, I got fired and I think I’m under an NDA about, you know, how that happened. But I was, I was kind mad and kind of sad and, and I didn’t want that to be the story in my head. So I wanted to take that time because all of a sudden I had some free time. I had been working 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week. I’d been working so hard and, and I had a minute. And so I wanted to see if I could sort of take some of the things I had been learning, some of the things I’d been working on and really turn it into, you know, make lemons, lemonade out of lemons.

Melanie Parish (11m 7s): And so I, I started and it took me seven years. It was a big, long process. And the book that I wrote, wasn’t the book that I started to write. And when I look at the parts of the book, when I use the book, it’s a better book than I thought I was going to write. Like I I’m really proud of it. And I say that because I had really great editors and collaborators along the way who really helped me flesh it out and make it better than I could see by asking hard questions along the way. So my thoughts evolved as I wrote it. And I loved that process. I felt like I was constructing another universe where the experimental leader lived, you know, and what was their world like?

Melanie Parish (11m 51s): And, and, and that was really cool. And, and that reality, wasn’t a simple process. Mark Graban (12m 1s): So w where did you learn that this, this approach of being an experimental leader and before we, we, we learn more about what, what that is and what you advise to others, but there’s something in your background that says, Oh, experimentation is good and leaders should aspire to thinking and operating that way.

Melanie Parish (12m 22s): Well, I, I had started to coach some leaders who were in software development. I’d started to learn about the difference between agile development and waterfall, and started to see just a different way of things evolving. I’d been studying continuous improvement. I’d been studying the theory of constraints with Eliyahu Goldratt. And I was seeing all of these methods. I think you do a lot with lean. So it was seeing all of these methods. And I started to ask myself as a leadership coach, what does it take to lead these?

Melanie Parish (13m 2s): It’s one thing to do them tactically. But if you’re going to lead that, who are you? What do you have to do? How do you do with that? And those are questions I asked to this day. I think they’re the hardest questions in my sphere of influence. So it’s, it’s one thing for me to teach you, how do you do an experiment? How do you iterate? How do you collect data? But on a large scale, if there’s a lot of those going on in an organization, how do you lead that? How do you inspire that? How do you manage that? How do you check in, how do you pay attention, all of those things. And so I realized there was a real space that was within lean, within continuous improvement within all of those things.

Melanie Parish (13m 45s): That was the leader’s role in that. And that’s what drove this book.

Mark Graban (13m 50s): Yeah. And, and, and you’re, you’re right. I do a lot of work with continuous improvement methodologies, and it’s often framed using language like scientific problem solving, or, you know, instead of implementing something, forming a hypothesis that we then go and test, which is more of that, you know, experimental language, the difference between knowing the answer and figuring the answer out in experimental ways.

Melanie Parish (14m 18s): Well, knowing the answer is probably, you’re probably just wrong. You probably don’t know the answer. You know, it might be a mistake. I mean, you might luck into the answer, but you don’t know the answer until you try it. And that’s true. Almost universally. You can, you can guess at the answer, but to, unless you query the answer, unless you collect the data, then you’re just guessing and you’re, and in many cases you’re investing thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in your guests.

Mark Graban (14m 51s): Yeah. So to become an experimental leader or to make strides in that direction, you know, again, the subtitle talks about being a new kind of boss easier said than done, maybe, but what’s an example of somebody, you know, who has said, yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to change my leadership style, be a new kind of boss.

Melanie Parish (15m 16s): Well, I, I have multiple clients who do, but I don’t know that I can say their names online, but, but I can talk generally about that process and what I see. One thing I see as it’s not like you just flip a switch and overnight, you’re an experiment, a leader. I often talk with my clients about seeding ideas in organizations start talking today about the thing you want to happen three years from now. So the, the first way to become an experimental leader is to start to use the language of experimentation. Just like you just did a minute ago, we’re going to, we’re going to have a hypothesis. We’re going to test that hypothesis. And then we’re going to make decisions based on that hypothesis.

Melanie Parish (15m 59s): That’s great experimental leader language, right there. You, you, you get the checkmark. The, the other thing is I think that often what I see in leadership and I have a whole chapter about it in my book is about reactive leadership styles. So we, we feel like we have to be powerful or we have to create rules, or we have, there’s a, there’s a variety of traps that we fall down as leaders. And, and I believe that this happens because when we’re new leaders, we’re looking around for examples and we don’t have any data to evaluate which examples are good, and which examples aren’t. So we try on things like I know for myself as a leader, I tried on, you know, I thought about, you know, powerful white men who made declarations.

Melanie Parish (16m 47s): And so I tried that for a while and that didn’t really work so well. So then I tried other things. And, and so the first step to becoming an experimental leader, I always say, is getting to neutral. How do you, how do you almost be a blank slate so that you are listening more taking in information, evaluating data so that you are moved by that data you aren’t coming in with a preconceived notion or a preconceived idea of what you want. Cause that really gets in the way of, of leading toward innovation.

Mark Graban (17m 21s): Well, and that really resonates with me. I like the way you put that we, you know, without theory of how to lead, it’s natural, that people would tend to, to mimic or follow their own leaders. So they figure out what works, what doesn’t work. And sometimes people get stuck in the trap of not reflecting and evaluating. Is this working or not? It’s just, it becomes a habit. This is the way, the way I lead. So I think it’s, it’s, it, it can be difficult, but I think it’s helpful to try to challenge some of the way we’ve always done things, even if that leads the way we’ve led.

Melanie Parish (17m 59s): Well, and I think, you know, there’s so many different sort of ways you can lead the servant leader, the, the powerful leader, you know, the, the technical leader, there’s all these different styles, but making sense of that, ourselves, translating that into something that we do, you know, what’s the action or the inaction of each of those stands. I think it’s really important to understand those.

Mark Graban (18m 30s): Yeah. And I was just thinking back, I went and checked the episode number, episode eight, with Jamie V. Parker. She talks about that exact same scenario that you raised Melanie, that when she was a new leader, she followed the command and control structure that was being told by others. And then she eventually, I think eventually came around and I’m paraphrasing that, that, that just didn’t feel right to her. And she learned other methods felt more authentic to her and were more effective.

Melanie Parish (19m 1s): Yeah. And, and I talk about that in my book, but it, a lot of it comes from Stephen Bungay and his book, The Art of Action, where he’s talking about intense in leadership. And, and I, I’ve sort of added some layers to that around mission and vision and values and, and putting those in the context of timelines and things like that. But, but knowing what you want to have happen and then experimenting on the best way to achieve that is, is really powerful in leadership. And it also allows all the brains in the organization to be firing rather than the leader pointing to something and saying, do this, do that, do this, do that.

Melanie Parish (19m 46s): Which I always see as the, the lowest form of leadership is the, let me give you a tactical work list today and should be avoided at all costs.

Mark Graban (20m 1s): Yeah. So what would be your elevator speech version of somebody saying, you know, cause I’m, I’m sold already, personally on the idea that we should have an organization full of innovators as your subtitle refers to, but if you’re on the elevator and someone’s skeptical and they’re like, Melanie, I don’t know why. I mean, we, we have a hand, we have a specialized department that does innovation. Why do we need an organization full of innovators? Why is that necessary or helpful?

Melanie Parish (20m 28s): That’s it? That’s what an interesting question. I just assume we want an organization of innovators because I think, I think that innovation, I think for one thing, every company is a tech company today, whether it’s in their marketing and the way they do client attraction or, you know, front, you know, their product, they have a product that’s in tech or if their product just should be in tech, they they’re becoming tech companies. So because of that, you know, tech is the ultimate alchemy creating something from nothing. And so we want brains working at every layer of the organization, innovatively, or you can’t keep up with just the basic tech that’s required today.

Melanie Parish (21m 12s): I think of my, you know, my, my dogs like to escape my yard. So I have a, you know, one of those radio fences. And I think of all the tech in that one, you know, in my dog collar, now it’s a dog collar. It’s a chain, essentially, it’s a chain and a collar, but now it’s tech. If that’s tech, then everything is tech. My groceries are tech. They come through Instacart, you know, it, it, so I think that there is no place to hide anymore. Funny. One of the funniest things is that there are legacy products and tech organizations, and that may be the best place to hide.

Melanie Parish (21m 53s): If you’re not an innovator is you can work on a legacy product in a software company for a really long time, but everybody else is innovating. So I guess my elevator speech is sort of what are you waiting for? Don’t miss the boat. You know, it’s, it’s, everyone’s, everybody’s already on the boat. It’s time to get on board.

Mark Graban (22m 14s): Yeah. So one of the questions I wanted to ask about, you know, being an experimental leader, how does an experimental leader react when an experiment doesn’t work out the way they predicted some might frame that as a mistake, but what, what would you say an experimental leader does when that happens?

Melanie Parish (22m 34s): The only time I would say it’s actually a mistake is if you extended the timeline so long that it was, you spent more money than you can afford to lose. So it’s really important that the experiments be safe to fail, which means I always want to experiments to be either 24 hours or seven days. Like anything longer than that, if it takes you longer than that, you’re you haven’t prototyped well enough, you want, because it’s only a mistake if you’ve you’ve harmed yourself, otherwise it’s just data. Yeah.

Mark Graban (23m 6s): Yeah. So I hear you saying it’s small mistakes and I think of mentors and coaches I’ve had, who have said basically, you know, through experimentation, small failures prevent large failures. Yes. That’s a helpful frame. Yeah.

Melanie Parish (23m 20s): Yes. And the, and the data’s going to save you. It’s not, you’re not guessing if you’re guessing and investing you haven’t collected enough data to find out if your, your idea is, has validity in the marketplace or that the, the solution that you’re putting in place has proof of con.

Mark Graban (23m 41s): Yeah. And if we’re experimenters, those failures are learning opportunities and almost seems cliché at this point, but it’s true.

Melanie Parish (23m 48s): Yeah, the failures are, I mean, I don’t even, it’s not, it’s like if you’re experimenting well, failures just information

Mark Graban (23m 59s): Well said, well said, so our guests has been Melanie parish. Her book is The Experimental Leader. You can find more melanieparish.com. The book is available on Amazon, but Melanie, you had a special offer that you wanted to share.

Melanie Parish (24m 15s): Yeah, sure. I would love to offer the book free to your listeners. I’d love for you to check it out. I can give you a digital copy book.experimentalleader.com and the promo code for it is podcast100

Mark Graban (24m 32s): Podcast100. So I’ll make sure that link and everything is in the show notes in the podcast app and on the blog post the webpage for this episode. So Melanie, I’m really glad that that we could meet and do the podcast look forward to reading more of the book. The sample really kind of drew me in, and this is right at my alley, this idea of experimentation. So thank you for being here on my favorite mistake.

Melanie Parish (24m 57s): Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to be here. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Mark Graban (25m 3s): Thanks for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to pause and think about your own favorite mistake and how learning from mistakes shapes you personally and professionally. If you’re a leader, what can you do to create a culture where it’s safe for colleagues to talk openly about mistakes in the spirit of learning, please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. See you next time.

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