We all hit those times when we get stuck, whether it’s momentary or in chronic patterns where the same situation keeps repeating with no way through. This is the core of today’s episode, where I’m joined by Dr. Robert Sicora, an accomplished author, thought leader, and consultant, who works with leaders and organizations to move past toxic patterns to thrive in the workplace.
We discuss getting to the root of stressors and how we can learn to respond creatively instead of reactively—a definite skill we can all use so we can get back in the flow. We also get to talk about Robert’s journey as an author. He has written four books, written collaboratively and often as fables (one of my favorite forms of writing!). He shares what it takes to have an impact—and it starts before you begin writing.
Recognized as an organization development and human resources thought leader and facilitator, Robert has helped thousands of leaders view themselves and their organization through the Leading from the Helm, Discover the Leader Within, and 8 Factors of Engagement methodologies. His goal is to provide every individual, team, organization, and community a unique perspective on how to transform into their full individual and collective potential.
If you’re in a place of “stuckness,” this episode is a must-listen, as you will be sure to benefit from the thoughtful perspective of what it takes to get back on track.
Book recommendation:
- Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Get to know Robert:
- Website Sicora Consulting, Inc.
- YouTube @sicoraconsulting8407
Follow me on:
- Instagram @stacyennis
- Facebook @stacyenniscreative
- YouTube @stacyennisauthor
To submit a question, email hello@stacyennis.com or join my email list http://stacyennis.com/join and fill out the form on the page.
Why we get stuck—and how to break the cycle with awareness and trust | Episode 272 Transcript
These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.
Stacy: Welcome, welcome. This week I am really excited to talk about a topic that all of us deal with, in small and big ways, on a regular basis, and that is stuckness. I’ve had a few things come up in my personal life recently that have made me really excited for this conversation with today’s guest. If you’re coming to this feeling stuck in any area of your life, whether small or big, I think you will leave by the end of this episode feeling like you can conquer it and move forward. So let me introduce you to today’s guest. Welcome to Beyond Better, a podcast that explores a simple but profound idea: we all deserve to live lives we love, and that includes our work lives too. I’m your host, Stacy Ennis, an author, book coach, speaker, and longtime location-independent entrepreneur, living in Portugal with my family of four. Join me as I talk business, location independence, writing, publishing, and so much more, all focused on building a life that is beyond better. Dr. Robert T. Sicora is an international organization and leadership development expert, founder and CEO of Sicora Consulting, and creator of the Leading from the Helm methodology and the Eight Factors of Engagement. He has worked with thousands of leaders and hundreds of organizations around the world to create transformation at the individual, team, and organizational levels by building trust, strengthening engagement, and achieving meaningful alignment and results. Get Unstuck: When Working Hard Isn’t Working is his fourth book, and it helps people identify what is holding them back so they can move forward with greater purpose, ownership, and confidence. A lifelong sailor, Dr. Sicora is passionate about helping people maximize their potential and live and lead with purpose. Robert, welcome. I’m really excited about our conversation today.
Robert: Thank you, Stacy. Good to see you again.
Stacy: Yes. So let’s dive right in. I would love to talk a little about what led you into the work that you do today. You are really invested in studying engagement. This has basically been your life’s work. Tell us a little about the pathway that got you to where you are today and what your core focus is in your work.
Robert: Reflecting on it brings me back to a moment when I was seventeen years old. You said life’s work. As a teenager, I remember sitting out on the soccer pitch during a phys ed class in high school. I was a junior, and I sat and just studied the behavior of everybody out in the class, and I thought, why do some people get it and have this energy and passion for what we’re doing, and others are just floating around, not doing much of anything? It hit me in different areas of my life too, and in what I was being exposed to. What drives us? What motivates us? That triggered right away. The next year, my senior year, the instructor for that class asked me to be his assistant. So as an eighteen-year-old senior, I was already teaching the class. By the time I was nineteen and in college, I was a recreational therapist working in different residential facilities, and it was kind of the same thing: people stuck with some aspect of their life. I don’t need to get into the different therapeutic environments I was in, but it became interesting again, where people were stuck in their lives, whether it was chemicals or other behavioral things, and really unlocking that and getting a chance to have a new chapter in life, as it were. I did that for years, went on to get my master’s in human resources, and worked for wonderful organizations, global companies and local ones here in Minnesota. Then I did my doctorate program, focused on organizational leadership development. During that work, we went deeper into the constructs around purpose and personality style, and a lot of depth on trust and understanding what helps drive and create trust within relationships. And of course the employee engagement side is something that has transcended that entire corporate experience that I’ve had.
Stacy: I love how seriously you investigate your work. I’ve noticed throughout the years of knowing you that you care deeply and you keep learning, you keep digging. And I love that it started when you were a kid. That’s amazing. You used the word stuck, which is a great segue into what I want to talk about today, and of course what I opened this conversation with. Let’s start by level setting what stuck is. We have different areas of our life where we might feel stuck. Some of it might be more acute: something happens, or we have certain barriers that create this sense of stuckness. And then some might be more long term, more chronic. Can you help us understand how to think about this idea of being stuck?
Robert: Going back again to my work as a recreational therapist, it was all around health and wellness, and I had the privilege of getting trained in stress management. I went down to one of the universities in Wisconsin, and the individuals there who were teaching those programs brought a level of awareness for me that has transcended all the way through my work. With stress, we’re hit by stresses all the time. A deep breath is a form of stress. Well, what is your stress response? It’s to let go of the breath, right? So it’s this constant process of interacting with the world. Some things continue to add up, they compound, and all of a sudden it seems bigger than life, a heavy burden. If we tackled them just one at a time, life would be pretty easy, but that’s not the way life works. It comes at us in waves, as it were, and that gets back to the sailing metaphor. When we look at stress management, one of the biggest ways to overcome it is just awareness: to be able to acknowledge, this is what is coming at me, this is what is going on, or this is what’s happening within me. Taking a moment, doing that powerful six-second breath, and just acknowledging what it is, we’re able to release, and then we’re better set to say, here’s what’s going on, and here’s how I choose now to respond to it. We call that a micro stuckness, that little moment, and then we process through it.
Stacy: Could you give a couple of examples of what this might look like in a practical sense in somebody’s life?
Robert: Well, the day may start, you’re a little late getting up, or you’re trying to get the kids ready for school so you can get off to work and the kids aren’t behaving the way you’d like them to. You’re driving and you find out there’s construction in the area where you normally would get to work, and everything just kind of compounds, and each one of those is a little micro aspect of that. You get into work, you’re planning for the ten-thirty meeting with your supervisor and your team, and you find out it got moved to nine o’clock and you just got in at eight forty-five. So these things just compound that way, and those are micro examples. Where it becomes chronic is where we come into the same situation over and over again and we just don’t have a way of dealing with it, and that can magnify itself. We are not able to get unstuck. We don’t understand it well enough, and in some experiences we don’t even know what it is. Things are happening to us, we’re responding to something, and we just feel the weight of it continuing to compound. Any of these are opportunities. I don’t know if that was a good enough example for you or not.
Stacy: Yeah, it’s helpful to understand that some of this is very micro. There are moments throughout our day where we have that feeling of being stuck. We chatted about this before I hit record: my E key stopped working on my computer keyboard yesterday, and that was one of those moments where I thought, I am a writer, how is this going to work? Of course I found my way forward and I was able to get my work done. But my question would be, we have these moments of stuckness, what about the chronic sense? I think that can be more of a felt sense, where you feel like your life, or your team, or your relationship, or your parenting, to bring in that example, feels like nothing is moving forward, or you feel like you’re not reaching your goals. Can you clarify that for us in the bigger-picture sense?
Robert: Yeah. Let me give one quick metaphoric example. We call it the staircase effect. Think of each stressor or curveball that’s thrown at you, the keyboard not working or whatever else, as a little stair step. In the moment, if you recognize it and breathe through it and see what it is and come up with a creative solution as opposed to a reactive solution, the body naturally metabolizes that and brings it back, and you get into flow state. The classic flow state is where we’d all love to be, but that’s not always the case. If one staircase effect hits and we don’t deal with it just right and don’t metabolize it, then the next one happens, and then the next one, and so on and so forth, and the staircase effect occurs. For some of us, it’s just the chronic state of being at this hyper level of stress, or stuckness. I’m using stress a lot, but that aspect of being stuck, because you’re there and you’re not optimized. You’re suboptimized at that point. You’re in a reactive state of mind. You have this load that you’re working through and dealing with. Some of it you’re aware of, some of it you’re not, and it just continues, that chronic element. From a health standpoint, that has a lot of impact on us. And interestingly enough, there’s also a ceiling to it. At some point, if we add too much, we can hit that ceiling and experience what’s called a crash. A crash happens very differently for all of us. Some of us will get sick, some of us will get super tired, and there are other things that will happen to us in the moment. It can be severe in some cases, in some cases not. But the body will at some point tap out and say, this isn’t where I need to be, and I’m going to force you to take care of yourself. Then you work through that and you try to get back into some form of flow state. But for many of us, we’re so accustomed to being in a high-stress situation that we just allow it to come back up again, and it starts to manifest itself that way. So that brings us back to the example on the stress management side. I don’t know if I answered your question fully. I think there’s still another element to your question I could address.
Stacy: That was an interesting place to take that. We’ve talked about the bigger picture, that more holistic sense of, I feel stuck. We have all probably had that moment in our lives, if not once, many times. But I love that you brought up awareness, and it made me think of something. I just got back from Ohio from visiting my sister, and the last couple of times I have visited her, I have gotten really sick on the flight home. A horrible migraine. I have thrown up. I’ve been almost in tears from pain on these flights. I had attributed it to a food I’m allergic to, because we’d ordered the same meal when this happened. I’m allergic to coriander, and they use a lot of it in this food. But I realized it was actually a sad headache. I was so sad that I was getting sick from the loss of my family, for who knew how long. It could be a year, it could be three years before I saw her again. I still got a headache on my trip back, but I was able to manage it through awareness. I knew why I felt that way, and rather than it becoming this full-blown, debilitating experience, I had a more managed reaction to it. That’s maybe a really big example. It’s bigger than an E key breaking on your keyboard. But that sounds like what you’re getting at, that awareness around where that sense of stress or stuckness comes from.
Robert: Yes. You bring up a point that makes me think about how we prepared ourselves going into the trip.
Stacy: Mm-hmm. Right. Interesting.
Robert: We’re bringing in whatever it is. If there was a lot going on and you’re making it happen, now all of a sudden you’re in the trip, the trip is happening, you’ve got the different micro stressors hitting you, and then you’ve got this large one that’s just going to come, because you’re conditioned for it as you’re going through it. If we went into it in a state of Zen and were able to work through it, you may not have suffered as much on the tail end. I see it as a bit of a ceiling effect: everything got to that point, you hit the tipping point, and it went through. So we can lessen the magnitude and the impact, with micro awareness, the reflection time, the breathing time, taking the walk, doing whatever it takes physiologically. But also from a process standpoint, maybe it’s sitting back and having a conversation with the family about what all this means to you and what it feels like to have to leave and go back. Then you’ve been able to work through that, and it isn’t your body and your psyche hitting that ceiling and causing that crash. You’ve already had the opportunity to work through it, as it were. It’s funny, because I have a reverse situation. I used to get really stressed during my college semesters, with the exams and everything else. Back when I was in school, you could do standbys for flights, and every once in a while, for ninety-nine bucks, I’d get a flight to Hawaii and just go to the beach for a week, and everything melted away. I came back and I was good to go again.
Stacy: That sounds great. I love that solution. If only I could do that every time I felt stressed.
Robert: Right.
Stacy: That sounds awesome. So I know from knowing your work and our conversations that awareness is one piece of this, whether it’s a micro stuckness or a macro stuckness. But the other piece we want to touch on is that you also have to recognize that you have the ability to get unstuck. Can you talk about that a little?
Robert: Yeah. I’ll shift a little away from the health side and our personal lives. I want to be clear that the Eight Factors of Engagement, which we designed a little over ten years ago, was initially designed for us within our jobs. It’s a focus on work. One of the things that hit us as an aha moment a few years ago was that when people go to work, they’re bringing their personal lives into it. Back when I was in corporate, it was always, you leave your personal life at home, you go to work and leave your work at work, and you try to keep the separation between the two. But the reality is they’re intermingled. When we’re bringing stressors from our personal life to work, that’s also adding to it. So we developed a version we call the Eight Factors of Engagement for Life, and we included that at the tail end of the book so folks could go through and reflect on that as well. When we’re working through things from a work standpoint and certain stresses are hitting us, some of which we know and some of which we don’t, taking the time to pause and use something like the Eight Factors of Engagement helps us reflect and ask, where might I be getting stuck in these moments? Number one, you have to be aware of it before you can deal with it. Now, when you look at the twenty-four statements, there are eight factors, and each factor is measured at an individual, team, and organizational level, or another way to say it, intrinsically, extrinsically, and systemically. We measure at all three of those levels because that’s what ensures a balanced approach to measurement. That was Dr. Robert Hartman’s work. The Hartman Institute is actually doing their conference this week. I happen not to be there, but last year I got to speak at it. We need to make sure we’re measuring at all three levels, because if we’re not, we’re missing something. We’re blind to something that could be going on for us intrinsically, extrinsically, or systemically. When we measure on all three fronts with the Eight Factors of Engagement, we’ve got a balanced, holistic approach. And when we know, I’ve got a red score here, a yellow score here, another red score down there, it’s those added up that I’m now working through and dealing with. We may not even be fully aware of all of those in the moments they’re happening, but we can take the time to reflect and work through them. Some of those, when you read them, you think, wait, that sounds like something the leadership team needs to take care of, or the organization. There’s truth to that. When we enter into a relationship within work, there’s part of it that we’re responsible for: be well rested, well fed, well exercised, well educated, well prepared. We need to come ready. But then the organization obviously does as well. They need to have a shared purpose, they need to have the resources, they need to pay us, they need to have safety in the environment we’re in. So it’s a combined effort. When we look at the statements that make up the factors, we see, wow, this is where I’m stuck, and clearly it’s individually or as a team. We do this all the time: the individuals come together with their reports, and the team report, and within a matter of moments we’re able to identify the two or three areas that have the team most stuck. What they then process through is, what can I do about this? What are the things I can actually take ownership of to help with the unstuckness? And what can we do to work together to make this happen? It’s amazing how creative individuals and teams get around what they can do, as opposed to starting the conversation with what the organization needs to do to fix this. If they work through that process, it gets creative, it gets fun, they bring awareness to it, and they come up with amazing solutions. Then they present it to the leadership or the organization, and ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re all in. It is transformational. I have examples of cultures, teams, and organizations that were completely toxic, completely stuck. They were in bankruptcy, things were not working, people were leaving, and they were looking to try to sell. By running a very simple program around understanding where we were stuck, individually and collectively, and then empowering the staff to take ownership of working through that with creative ideas, within six to nine months it had all changed. The toxicity had gone, and the organization was heading in the right direction. It’s been over seven years for that particular case study. They have grown ninefold. They’ve rebranded, and the president wrote the foreword of the previous book that I did. It’s amazing what just taking the time to be aware and then to own it can do. We always say, it’s the four A model that we use. First is awareness. Then there’s acknowledgment of it. I’ve got to acknowledge or even appreciate it. Sometimes you just have to show appreciation for the feedback you’re getting from somebody, or whatever the situation is. Then you’ve got to take accountability for it. I have to own the fact that part of that is my responsibility. It’s never a one-sided deal. And ultimately I have to take action on it. That’s the four A model we work from, and working through that process helps us get unstuck: being aware, acknowledging what it is, then accountability and ownership, and then ultimately the action.
Stacy: It strikes me, listening to the example of the organization you just mentioned, that when we hear that story it’s happening at the team level, but really it has to happen at the individual level for it to happen at the team level. And one of the things I’ve read or heard you say is that engagement is ours to own. I’d love for you to dig into that a little more, perhaps with the example you gave us, but I’d also love to hear it for the person who is dealing with something, maybe a small business owner or solopreneur or stay-at-home parent, insert whatever it is, because I know that with your Eight Factors of Engagement, you’ve said there is no situation it doesn’t apply to. I don’t remember the exact phrase, but that’s the gist. So engagement is ours to own. How can we live that?
Robert: Yeah. Looking at it through the balance of a work perspective and a life perspective, that’s why we bring both into play. When we designed those models, we could have had a survey or a model that went on to infinity. We could have had a hundred and twenty-eight statements and tried to answer for every little circumstance or situation that can go on within our lives or our work. That’s just the law of diminishing returns. Let’s focus on what’s core, the big enough rocks that we know we can work with and deal with. So we have the eight factors and the twenty-four statements. When I take that assessment individually, it’s clearly going to show areas where I’m engaged, areas where I’m cautiously engaged, and areas where I’m stuck, which we call disengaged. The concept of disengagement is something we have to be careful with, because it gets misused in marketing. People will say that people are actively disengaged, and it almost sounds negative. We actually celebrate it in the team sessions when somebody acknowledges that they’re stuck. I’m disengaged on this factor, and I’m letting everybody else know about it because it’s impacting me. Guess what? There are probably three to five or eight other people who are also stuck on that factor. So you just gave the team permission to recognize that and do something about it, and the team report allows for that. The ownership piece is, okay, now I understand what it is and where it’s coming from. How much of that do I own personally, or how much of that can I take action on in a way that will help get it figured out? One simple example we have: the work that I’m doing, I’m also passionate about it. So, the concept of purpose and passion. Purpose is the number one factor that drives engagement more than anything else. All eight factors are equal in their impact on calculated engagement, but when it comes to my perceived engagement, purpose drives the model more than anything else. One of the three statements for purpose is, I’m also passionate about the work. Passion is the wind in our sails. Purpose is the rudder that steers the ship. If all we have is passion, we’ve got sails flying all over the place and we’re not headed in any direction. If all we have is purpose with no passion, I’ve got a rudder steering but I don’t have any energy. I’m drained all the time. I might be part of an organization that has a wonderful purpose statement, which is why I joined them, but the work I’m doing isn’t the work I’m passionate about. So we take the time, and we have what we call the TOPS model exercise, where we think about what my talents are, what I’m really good at, what my passions are, what I love to do, and what the opportunity is on a daily basis. It would be great if we spent a hundred percent of our time on the things we’re passionate about, but even if we’re in the forty to sixty range some days, that’s enough wind in our sails to keep us going. And there are other things that I just have to do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in sessions where we spend some time on that one statement and people realize, my gosh, I’m spending this much time working on things I don’t have any passion about at all, and it’s having an impact on my overall performance because I just don’t have the energy coming in every day. Teams will start talking about that, and it’s wild how somebody else will say, well, that’s the stuff I love to do. I’ve literally seen teams shift their workloads around just because of what people’s passions are, making that micro shift. As a leader, I’m sitting back going, this is like a miracle, this is wonderful, because the team is figuring it out and re-engineering the way work gets done so that everybody is tapped into both their talents and their passion.
Stacy: Mm.
Robert: So just taking that time to be aware, and then taking action, they own that action. That’s where the ownership piece comes in. It’s always going to be collaborative. You’re going to have to work with others to do this. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but for each of the statements, we come up with different ways in which you can take individual ownership.
Stacy: So much to dig into in that. There’s so much goodness, and I love the metaphor of the sailboat. It fits perfectly with your nautical interests. One thing I would love to dive into: you said that purpose beats every other factor, and I know from some of our previous exchanges that that is only when trust is present. There has to be trust. I’d love to talk about self-trust, and this is a great opportunity to pivot into those really big things we want to accomplish in our lives. For the person who has this sense of stuckness and who, through this conversation, is starting to think through some ways they could move through it, and how they can use passion to fuel their purpose, we know we have to have self-trust present. If you’ve been disengaged, naturally you’re going to lack some self-trust, because you haven’t built and strengthened that. So how do you build that sense of self-trust to be able to move into that next phase, post-stuckness, and start to really sail that shit?
Robert: That’s a wonderful question. A lot of times when we’re looking at trust within the context of a group or a team, one of the classic statements Gallup used was, I have a best friend at work. People would say, what? My best friend doesn’t work with me. They’re my friend that I do these other things with, and it just doesn’t fit. So we reengineered all of the Gallup Q12 statements, so as not to violate any intellectual property, and we reworded that one as, I have somebody at work that I completely trust. People look at that and ask, what can I do about it? I don’t have somebody at work that I completely trust. Maybe they scored it at a three. I say, one of the powers of trust is the reciprocity of trust. What can I do to be a little more vulnerable in the moment? Where can I do that? Because vulnerability is what actually helps create trust. If I’m able to be more authentic, a little more vulnerable, and willing to share something, people will mirror that. They’ll lean into that and want to do the same. So creating trust for ourselves also helps create it with others, being able to have relationships. Now I’ve got somebody I can say, hey, I’m feeling a little uncomfortable about this, or I don’t have the confidence in this, or I have an idea, can I bounce it off you? Again, rarely is self-trust something that’s just going to happen in a vacuum. Like I said, I could go to the beach in Hawaii and sit there for a week and feel better as a result. But if there are things I’m trying to get over in my work or my life, typically it means engaging with somebody in a way that’s going to deepen that relationship, and that in return helps me process through it. We need each other. We need relationships to get through it, from a spiritual level to an interpersonal level, there’s a relationship, and there’s a level of vulnerability that needs to be had. You have to be careful with that. As we found, if you overextend your vulnerability, you may actually put yourself at risk. That is the extreme. We call that a curvilinear effect, where you go too far with something or put too much of a burden on somebody else trying to work through it. I’m just putting that out as a caution. But typically it’s just starting and showing that. If you want to build deeper levels of trust for yourself and for others, it’s taking that step of vulnerability in a safe way that allows them to also mirror that and show it back to you. So it’s taking a chance for yourself, taking risks in a way, but being willing to be vulnerable and authentic with who you are. A lot of times authenticity is the piece. We put up whatever barriers we have, so it’s not really our true self, and we’re putting up a front. Part of it is saying, nope, this is who I am, this is what I’m dealing with, this is what I’m trying to overcome, this is what I’m trying to work through. Being honest with yourself so that you can be honest with somebody else is a wonderful place to start. And that was the dissertation research we did. We looked at personality styles. We’re all familiar with the classic introvert or reflective personality style, the expressive or extroverted, the more logical or thought-based, and the more feeling or relationship-based. We have all of those within us. The question is, where do we have a preference for ourselves in working with others? So we looked at those personality styles and did research around who has the higher propensity to trust others, who shows and demonstrates more trustworthiness, who’s willing to extend. I’m not going to use this as a time to get into the research, but just understanding that engaging with ourselves and others is a way to help build that trust. Then that reflects back on ourselves and gives us the confidence to take steps that would allow us to get unstuck. Rarely do we get unstuck completely on our own. Usually we are reaching out to others as part of that.
Stacy: I’m happy you brought up the dissertation, because it’s a wonderful segue to my next question. I want to talk about your author journey, Robert, because this is your fourth book, and we have a lot to learn from you as an author. In these various books that you’ve written, I’d love to hear about a moment that stands out as a challenge you overcame in your writing process, and how you overcame it.
Robert: Thinking about writing a book, why did that come about? Well, I wrote the dissertation. I’m huge on collaboration, so I always use the term we. I rarely use the term I. My dissertation committee asked me if I had a mouse in my pocket. I said, no, I’ve just got folks that I work with on everything I do. I’m a big collaborator. That’s part of my personality style. When the dissertation got finished, one of my classmates, a cohort member, a wonderful gentleman down in North Carolina, and his wife, I was down there with them. I have clients in the North Carolina area, and his wife happens to be an international PR expert. She does a lot of PR work and she’s connected with a lot of publishing firms. When she heard about the dissertation, she said, you need to get that published. You need to write a book related to that and get it published. She created different connections. There are reasons why I didn’t write right away, and we don’t need to get into that. It wasn’t a stuckness at all. It was due to work, and due to various tools I used as part of the dissertation. I wanted to evolve things a bit more, and there was more work I wanted to do, quite frankly, on the employee engagement side. So when we finally did decide to write the book, it evolved quite a bit from what the dissertation had in it. It was about the Leading from the Helm model. You mentioned I’ve been sailing my whole life. Well, I’ve been on a sailboat my whole life. My brother-in-law and my brother both had boats down on Lake Pepin, the wide section of the Mississippi River just south of Red Wing, where the Red Wing shoes are made. It’s a beautiful section between Minnesota and Wisconsin, with beautiful fall colors right now. When I was on the boat with my brother in 2010, that was the last time I was going to sail with him. He was unfortunately suffering from cancer, and it was just a matter of time. But we had this incredible trip. He was also an über-entrepreneur, a very, very successful individual. And it hit me at one point when he asked me to grab the helm, which was rare, because he wanted to be in control of everything. I grabbed the helm, and that’s when it hit me: the metaphor I was looking for for the organization and leadership development work that I do was going to be the helm, being at the helm. That’s what the basis of the book was about. We looked at the organizational helm, which is strategy, leadership, culture, team, engagement, process and structure, the customer, and the impact that we have. All organizations have all eight of those spokes. But then, during one of my trips to Peru, it hit me that the first book couldn’t be about the organization or the team. It needed to be about the individual, which gets back to Robert Hartman’s work: the intrinsic, the extrinsic, and the systemic. It needed to be intrinsic. Intrinsic is where things really hit. It’s when it hits us individually, deep within us. So we developed the individual helm, and that book was all about navigating with purpose. A good friend here in the Twin Cities who’s done research for over sixty years is Richard Leider, and he’s got wonderful books on purpose. He’ll say that if a doctor could give you one pill that would solve most problems and issues, it would be the construct around purpose. If somebody is given purpose, they’ll get through most anything. The whole Viktor Frankl experience that we read about is based on that construct. So we wrote the book, Grab the Helm, all about navigating with purpose. At that point, the question was, what kind of book to write? We had read and listened through Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, so we thought maybe we could do this as a fable, as a story. And we did. That was the first work. We decided to go hybrid with it, because I had never gone through the experience and I really wanted the help of a publisher who could work through the different steps with me. From a cost standpoint it was a little higher. And again, I’m a collaborator, so I brought in other people to work on it. We framed it out, got clear on characters and things of that nature. Then I worked with a writer who was able to put everything into words in a way that could tell a beautiful story. It’s not that I don’t have the confidence to do that. I didn’t have the time, maybe, to do it the way I would like it to be done, and I had a large trust in the writer I was working with. Even there, we always worked with an additional writer to review and proof, and to go through that process. So that’s how it started. And from there we continued with self-publishing for the other three books.
Stacy: It sounds like a lot of it for you is collaboration, and working with people who help you keep the momentum moving and see it through. As you reflect on that journey, maybe on your most recent books, whether that’s Get Unstuck or The Eight Factors, or perhaps the very beginning of your journey, is there one thing you would tell your earlier self, or a future author who’s listening to this right now?
Robert: I don’t know where the aha came, whether it was working with you or in one of the sessions we worked through, but it’s getting clear on what the book is going to be used for. The first book we wrote is a book I would love to see people have in their hands. It applies to everybody, and there’s great benefit. I’m still very proud of the work that was done in that book, and it’s used with the leadership teams and the programs that I have, and we receive a lot of feedback from that. But it wasn’t a book I wanted to put on, say, the New York Times bestseller list. That wasn’t the intention. The intention was to have it as part of the programs we ran. With Chart Your Course, we work with high schools in the area here, and the students said, this is a great book, but can you write one for high school kids? So we wrote Chart Your Course, which is an homage to the COVID time here in Minneapolis with George Floyd. Again, it was a collaborative effort. We literally got a small team together and said, okay, let’s come up with characters, let’s come up with a storyline, let’s put it all through. Then the writers went to work on it, and we would tap in and touch base at different times. Those just kind of naturally flowed. The third book, The Eight Factors, is a thick book. It’s almost like a textbook manual on how to create an employee-led culture of engagement. We had done so much research on it, and so much work on the e-learning and the different self-service programs we’ve created, that I asked my crew, can we take everything we’ve been capturing in this work and somehow put it in book form that people could use moving forward? That one’s a lot different. We don’t even do an audiobook for it, because it’s just too heavy that way. It’s more of a manual. Now the latest book, Get Unstuck. The Eight Factors of Engagement is near and dear to my heart. It’s the basis of most of the work I’ve done around employee engagement over the years, and we had a lot of fun coming up with the characters and making sure that when people read it, they can find themselves in at least one of the characters, if not multiple, where you can see where you might be at, because everybody gets stuck. I can be a highly engaged employee and still get stuck. But you can also see others in your team or your organization, where they’re at, through the characters as well. That character recognition was super important for us. So the big learning, when you go into the writing part, is ultimately, where do I want this book to have an impact? Get clear on that and build out from there, knowing that it could take off in a lot of other directions as well. But if you have that clarity, it’s going to help quite a bit.
Stacy: That early clarity is so important. I love that you highlighted that. Okay, let me ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. I know for a big reader like you, this is going to be tough. If you could recommend one book to listeners, one that has profoundly impacted your life, what would it be and why?
Robert: The book I continue to bring up in my sessions more than any other has been around for a while. It’s Jim Collins’s Good to Great. The reason I bring that one up is because it really allows us to go from a place where we might be comfortable, where things are good and happening well, and ask: what could I do to differentiate? What could I do to make that great? What could I do to make customer service go from good to delighting? From an employee engagement standpoint, I worked with an emerging leadership group that had amazing engagement scores. They were feeling good about themselves. I said, all right, let’s go a little deeper. Let’s go into the team report and go to the Good to Great section. They said, well, what’s that? If they have high scores in the five areas, then they’re great. They got to the second factor, which went from purpose, which was great, to accountability. There was nothing great about accountability. They spent the next hour and a half figuring out how to make their accountability go from good to great. There were some big rocks they had to deal with, and it made all the difference in the world and allowed that team to really take off and accelerate. There’s research in Jim’s book that has since not stood the test of time. Not all the organizations he studied are still in existence. But I love that construct of going from good to great, and I love the level five leader. I bring that up a lot. The level five leader is somebody who knows how to show compassion and humility and really helps build trust, so it ties back to a lot of the work we do. That’s one from a historical standpoint. Dr. Edgar Schein, who recently passed away, one of the godfathers of organization development, wrote a lot of wonderful books around inquiry: Humble Inquiry, The Humble Leader, The Humble Consultant. It’s really about taking an approach to how you ask really good questions of others, one that helps draw out the positive in others, and really, as a leader, how to do that. Leaders ask all the time what they can do. I say, learn how to ask really good questions, and then listen.
Stacy: Listen. Yeah, that’s the kicker, you have to listen.
Robert: You’ve got one thing to do.
Stacy: Robert, this has been such an interesting and thoughtful conversation, and it’s got me thinking about some of the things going on in my own work and life, and different ways I can develop more awareness and deal with those areas of stuckness. I really appreciate your time today. Can you share with our listeners and viewers where they can get your books, and learn more about you and your work?
Robert: All the books are on Amazon, so you can find them there. All but The Eight Factors of Engagement are also available as audiobooks. We also did Grab the Helm and Chart Your Course in Spanish, because I had some connections that way. On the website, which is sicoraconsulting.com, under Resources you’ll find the book section, but there are also the self-service tools and the assessments. There are other things we have built around these. It’s not just the book. It’s the ability to take the assessment, which helps create the higher level of awareness, and we’ve built some e-learning modules as well, for folks to go through and have the benefit of working through it either by themselves or collectively. And of course, we can also do facilitation and coaching.
Stacy: Wonderful. We’ll be sure to include links so our listeners can find out more about you. Robert, thank you so much for your time and energy today. I really appreciate it.
Robert: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Stacy: And thank you to you, our listener, our viewer, for sticking with us. If you’re still watching or listening, you must have loved this episode, so do be sure that you are following. And if you have a moment to leave a comment on YouTube or rate and review the podcast, I would be hugely grateful. Now, I normally say “as always” to Rita, our producer, but Rita has gone on maternity leave. So this week I get to thank Margarita, who is our interim producer for the podcast. Margarita, thank you so much for all the work you do behind the scenes to get this podcast and this information out. I am grateful. And I will be back with you before you know it.
Comments +