Coaching and Caring for Others with Meredith Damore

Join us for a captivating conversation with Meredith DeMoore, Elevate's Senior Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness and Managing Director for Consulting for Elevate Talent. Meredith shares her remarkable journey from founding a leadership effectiveness division in a boutique healthcare executive search firm to steering strategy as a senior vice president at Concentric Health Experience. Her upbringing under the influence of her father, a hospital CEO, imbued her with a profound understanding of leadership and personal development, which she now channels into her work. She reflects on her unique ability to naturally connect people, a skill she's learned from her father, and talks about how intentional leadership became a fundamental lesson during her time at a healthcare tech startup.

Amidst the evolving landscape of the post-COVID world, Meredith underscores the transition of soft skills into essential leadership capabilities. We dive into tools like psychometric assessments that quantify these skills, stressing the importance of leaders adapting their styles to diverse team profiles. The episode also introduces Integral Theory, a comprehensive framework balancing metrics with self-awareness, encouraging leaders to maintain relational dynamics alongside organizational goals. This approach is not just a trend; it's a necessity as it helps create a common language within organizations to meet modern challenges head-on.

Our discussion would not be complete without tackling the impact of leadership in venture capital and private equity investments, especially in healthcare. Meredith brings to light the intricate dynamics of leadership effectiveness and its crucial role in investment outcomes. We also explore the SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact) framework, a tool for leaders to engage in honest and kind feedback, pivotal for moving the middle and improving organizational performance. With staffing shortages plaguing industries like healthcare, Meredith emphasizes that comprehensive leadership development is not just beneficial but essential for organizational success. Join us as we explore these fascinating insights and strategies for enhancing leadership effectiveness in today's business world.

The Anatomy of Leadership podcast explores the art and science of leadership through candid, insightful conversations with thought leaders, innovators, and change-makers from a variety of industries. Hosted by Chris Comeaux, each episode dives into the mindsets, habits, and strategies that empower leaders to thrive in complex, fast-changing environments. With topics ranging from organizational culture and emotional intelligence to navigating disruption and inspiring teams, the show blends real-world stories with practical takeaways. The goal is simple yet ambitious: to equip leaders at every level with the tools, perspectives, and inspiration they need to lead with vision, empathy, and impact.

https://www.teleioscn.org/anatomy-of-leadership

Transcript

Melody King (Intro)

00:01

Everything rises and falls on leadership. The ability to lead well is fueled by living your cause and purpose. This podcast will equip you with the tools to do just that Live and lead with cause and purpose. And now author of the book the Anatomy of Leadership and our host, Chris Comeaux. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

00:25

Hello and welcome to the Anatomy of Leadership. I'm excited Our guest today is Meredith Damore. She is Elevate's Senior Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness and she's a Managing Director for Consulting for Elevate Talent. It's so good to have you here, Meredith. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

00:39

So great to be here, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

00:42

Now I want to read from your bio. It's a great bio, and then I want you to kind of maybe extrapolate or just talk about a little bit more. But Meredith is Elevate's senior VP, again of organizational effectiveness managing director of consulting for talent. Prior to joining Elevate, she founded, grew and led the leadership effectiveness assessment and development arm of a boutique healthcare executive search firm, primarily partnering with private equity and venture capital investors and their portfolio companies. Previously she was a senior vice president of strategy at Concentric Health Experience and she served as the head of partnerships and business development for a Series B healthcare technology startup in New York. 

01:21

She began her career in management consulting where she oversaw large multimillion-dollar healthcare transformation engagements. And so, Meredith received her MA in organizational psychology and changed leadership from Columbia University. She holds a BS in economics from the Wharton School of University in Pennsylvania, where she also minded in German. My God, when did you have a life? But she also played four years of Division I volleyball. She is a certified executive coach to the Center of Executive Coaching. She's certified to administer leadership assessments, including Hogan, the five behaviors of a team, and Profile XC Select and intercultural development inventory. That's awesome, Meredith. What else do you want our audience to know about you. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

02:06

Yeah, no, I think that covers a lot of it. 

02:08

I mean a little bit maybe of background behind behind the bio. 

You know I spent many years either in consulting or in more operating roles and what kind of inspired me to pivot my career was when I was working at that healthcare tech startup. 

02:31

You know I saw for the first time our founders were first time executives at a company and I really started to see how intentionality and leadership could impact the outcome of our culture and the work we were doing. And I know you talk about that a little bit in your book too, so I look forward to discussing it more. But you know, coaching people now I often say that we're so focused on our to-do list at work we don't always think about our to-be list and how we show up, and so that really became clear to me how critical that was in that role, which is why I pivoted my career to go into the organizational development type of work, pivoted my career to go into the organizational development type of work, and so I think that's a little bit of background. Additionally, in terms of kind of what inspired me to switch it up from being inside companies to helping advise companies on this type of thing. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

03:16

Hopefully you're okay. I was. We were just reflecting. We're doing show prep of the first time I met you and so you were very young then and I got to know your dad, who's a hospital CEO in the local area where I was, and you said that you did that ever since you were like four years old. Can you just talk about first? I just think that's so cool, and to see the work that you're doing now. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

03:37

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. 

So I definitely grew up in healthcare and literally grew up going to hospitals. 

03:45

My dad was a hospital CEO, as you mentioned, and my mom was a hospital social worker for many years, and so it just makes a lot of sense that I'm in the line of work that I'm in now, I think. But every Christmas my dad and I would go to the hospital to thank everybody who was working on Christmas and being away from their families around the holidays, to be at the hospital, to thank everybody who was working on Christmas and being away from their families around the holidays, to, you know, be at the hospital serving the community in their roles as providers and patient care support. And so when I was, you know, four and five, I used to dress up as a Christmas elf and we would do rounds with Santa Claus and hand out candy canes to everybody. And you met me when I was in college and I would still go to the hospital with my dad on Christmas Day with a Santa to thank everybody. So it was just a tradition we had for a long time. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

04:31

That's pretty awesome, that's incredible, and I feel like I don't think I told you this. My second son has now ended up in health care and so it's so cool to see you don't know the impression it's making at a young age. And then when you see that, like, yeah, that's really cool. Meredith, I want to ask you, and so we started this in the beginning of the show. We left it off, and I appreciate this question because I start to see, through the course of the conversation, the truth in this, but also realize it's a tough question. The question is what's your superpower? Because quite often other people see our superpower better than we do. In fact, my guess is you're not going to get into this. Probably part of your gift is other people probably honing their superpower. But what's your superpower? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

05:11

Yeah, it's always an awkward question to answer because you feel like you're tooting your own horn, but, to your point, I think it's an important thing for us all to ask these types of questions to the people that know us best and I've asked it to, you know, close friends and colleagues before, and I think what they've told me is one is the power of connecting people, and so that's always been something that's come really naturally to me, and I think I get it from my dad, the person you know. 

05:41

But being able to connect people like some of my friends have called me the fairy job mother where I know somebody who's looking for a great candidate and oh, I have a former colleague who is this exact profile connecting them together and then they've gotten, you know, a really important job in their career because of that, which is just sort of how my brain works and brings me so much joy to bring two people together like that. So I think that's probably the one that I hear the most. But, yeah, I think the bigger lesson is, you know, encouraging everybody to ask these questions to the people that are closest to them too, because often we can't see and you talk about this in your book too, but one of the challenges is, you know, not being able to see the things in ourselves that other people may. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

06:29

And I think, as I kind of reflect and maybe mirror back to you, because you've actually done that for me, you've connected me with a lot of interesting people that have ended up being very profound in a lot of different ways, but it probably is because you're, you know, I know some people that are like, well, you should meet this person, and sometimes I feel like they're rabbit trails, but it feels like you have some insight of a deeper element of why those two people should connect, and so, again, that might be an interesting segue in just a second. Well, mira, thank you for alluding to my book a couple of times. So name of the podcast, anatomy of Leadership, and we are using the book is. So when I wrote it, I'm an accountant, so it's kind of like a meta framework, and if you Google the word leadership you get 6 billion hits. So literally all I did was kind of create a meta framework, almost like a table of contents, and it's been so fun to do these shows. 

07:15

We actually started in January of this year and we cycled through the whole framework and so we've gone through self-mastery, caring for others, influence, intention, cause, purpose, mission, margin, meaning, management, message into the community, making people, making the organization mapping the future. 

07:31

So now I've kind of gone through one cycle and I'm like I want to bring people that just keep taking us deeper on leadership, and you're one of those that it's going to be hard to come up with a title from the get-go. I think the title is going to be obvious once we're in, because I think you bring so much to the table about just putting meat on the bone of what is leadership. So, it's really why I was excited today. And so, it's really why I was excited today. And when you and I first touched base, I think it was early summer you mentioned something, and I made an immediate note the fact that you're a former D1 athlete. I want you to talk about that a little bit more because I wonder have you found some crossover learning lessons there that have enabled your own leadership, but also how you coach others about leadership? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

08:10

Definitely so. I think you know, having been an athlete all my life, and a fairly competitive one, I've always seen the value of coaching and I think in, you know, in organizations it's still. There's still maybe some stigma with coaching where it's like, oh, we've got a problem executive, let's bring in an executive coach, right Versus, thinking about it, we've got a problem executive, let's bring in an executive coach, right Versus thinking about it. How we do in so many other fields on the field, you know musicians, all sorts of folks who are at the top of their game. They have many, many different coaches, trainers, you know all sorts of folks surrounding them to help them get to their highest level of performance. 

08:52

And so you know, actually, one just interesting thing I learned when I was doing my coaching certification is that the origin of the topic of coaching, you know, if you think about a coach, you know back in sort of the Cinderella kinds of days, right, a coach is literally a mode of transportation, getting somebody from point A to point B, and so that's really how I view my coaching, that I do from an executive coaching perspective. 

09:18

But to me, the interest in this area and the belief that we can find great coaches to help us get to the top of our game is really rooted in being an athlete, I think, and always realizing that I can have a great coach that can challenge and make me better, and so I think that's just one fundamental thing that being an athlete has sort of shaped you know where I've gone today and why I believe so greatly that everybody could benefit from a coach. 

09:46

And then I think you know, I've just experienced all sorts of highs and lows from, you know, going to the NCAA tournament and winning, you know, the Ivy League championship to. You know, not making the really competitive statewide club team in high school that I wanted to make and them telling me to try again next year, you know. And so I just think it's the kind of learnings of putting myself out there, working hard and, you know, being resilient in the face of sort of rejection that prepared me for being in the working world too. So I think there are a lot of translations between sort of the lessons I learned in athletics and the things we experience at work and in life every day. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

10:26

That's good, and I love what you said about the coaching, and so I want to ask a follow up question. You know we're We've gone through some interesting things I'm going to use. This is going to be an analogy and so the word hospice has become synonymous with death, and so there's been this season where a lot of people removed hospice from their names because people associate it with death. I've seen the word coaching now. Oh yeah, well, coaching almost feels like that person's on a performance improvement plan, right, and so is the solution come up. Oh yeah, well, coaching almost feels like that person's on a performance improvement plan, right, and so is the solution. Come up with a different word, or is it to help them understand that this is actually what coaching actually means and how it can be efficacious? Because I've seen our own team struggle with that a little bit, like, well, maybe we need to quit using the word coaching because it's got this kind of negative connotation. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

11:14

Yeah, no, it's a great point, and I think we can probably combat that in a couple of ways. You know one I'm pretty sure some of the folks in business who are the most successful have some type of coach who's working with them, and so I think the more that people in places of visibility like that are sharing that you know one of the most critical tools in their toolbox is having a coach, I think that will help. I'm also starting to see, you know maybe not totally changing the name coach, but you know some people are starting to use things in the business world like a performance coach, right, and so it's more about the sort of positive side of coaching. How do we get you from good to great, like you're already performing at a top level? How do we get you to, you know, a plus? So I think you know there are probably some things we can do in the sort of reputation management of coaching to help. 

12:05

But I think you know a lot of it is sort of word of mouth, right. It's executives talking about how much value they've gotten out of it, and we'll talk about this a little bit, I think, later, but the idea of sort of measuring the value of coaching is a really hard thing, right? You talk about it Quint Studer talks about it as kind of soft skills, and so these are harder things to measure. If we're getting someone from A to B, how do we quantify that? And so, as we have talked about in some of the prep, you know I'm really interested in helping companies figure out how to quantify their sort of coaching and team performance related to leadership effectiveness, because it's a very nascent field, I would say. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

12:47

That's really good. So, and I totally agree, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And thanks for mentioning Quint, because he helped such a great reposition. I guess it was our podcast two years ago and he said you know, coming out of COVID, things like you know, mental, emotional health and those tools in your toolbox are no longer soft skills, they're now essential skills. So, I love coaching for high performance, coaching for essential skills. Yeah, I love all of that reframe. Well, when you and I first talked about doing this show, you said, philosophically, you always start in the area of understanding ourselves as leaders so that we can better work with others. I want you to talk about that and I'm already taking like really cool quips and notes. You said this earlier your to-be list. I'm like that is so cool, so can you take it from there? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

13:36

Yeah, I think one of the ways that this has really come to light for me is that I use a number of different psychometric assessments in the work that I do. So when you talk about being able to quantify sort of softer skills, assessments are one way to do it, and so there's one assessment that I use that measures thinking styles, so how we process and communicate certain types of information. And what's really interesting in this assessment over a million people have taken it it's highly valid and reliable is that on a scale of 1 to 10, and it's a normalized sort of distribution curve. So it's not that 1 is bad and 10 is good, but essentially for someone who, say, has a verbal skill level of 10, that means they have a great breadth and depth of vocabulary, they are very precise with their words, but that represents only about 2% of the population, so 98% of people at work do not have a 10 in verbal skill right, and so I think one of the things that is critical for leadership is to know where you land in areas like that. 

14:49

So, what's your preferences related to the pace you like to work at, all different types of things, the way you like to give and receive feedback, because the majority of folks do not have the same sort of profile that you do, and so we're going to have to adjust our style to meet people where they are. 

15:14

And so, as an example, when I'm working with an executive who's a 10 on verbal skill, you know, I always ask like, what are the adaptive strategies that you've used in order to meet a two or three unverbal skill where they are right? And most people haven't really thought about it that way. Or, you know, some of these processes are a little unconscious, but we can't adjust our style to meet folks where they are and help them grow, develop, achieve their goals as leaders if we don't understand where we are vis-a-vis them and how we can kind of meet them in the middle. And so that's why, you know, I've seen it sort of quantitatively and I think we all sort of understand it a little bit, but it's so important to know about yourself and where you are on any dimension. Before you know you can effectively work with other people. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

15:52

From my perspective, Yep, that's really good, and we I've been through a lot of different organizations and unfortunately, some of these tools, like, they've been exposed to a one point in time and it's almost like, yeah, I have my palm read and it's no longer part of their understanding and so we use, like you've probably seen, predictive index, you've probably seen Myers-Briggs, all of those, but they end up becoming faddish. 

16:16

We love MBS, management by stress, because you could actually create a common language throughout the whole organization and it's sticky and it's based upon colors, so it's a way that you could all the way from the line level staff all the way up to the CEO. But I agree that that's not in lieu of incredible, more sophisticated tools like these different types of assessments that you have in your toolbox, because that one in particular kind of gets you in the ballpark. Those get you very, very specific to yourself and so, which is, which is really huge understanding ourselves and then, obviously, then understanding others. Well, you also mentioned, when we were beginning to prepare, you mentioned, integral theory and you said it's about focusing on the I, the we and then the it to create maximum effectiveness. Well, can you explain that more? What is that? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

17:09

Yeah, so it's something I've just learned about this year, honestly, A good friend of mine, Matt Aron. He runs a kind of coaching consulting firm called Evolution and this is really the sort of theory that a lot of their work is founded upon. And there's a guy, Wilbur, who is the sort of founder of Integral Theory, which is taking, you know, a lot of different theories from a century of psychology and trying to kind of bring them together. And what's interesting just about this framework that I thought like gave me a couple of aha moments is that so, especially in having come from management consulting, you know, most of the time in business and in work we focus on the it, which is really the sort of functional sort of pieces of business and organization. So it's metrics and goals, products and services, dashboards, things like that. 

18:10

And what we miss a lot of times is the more kind of relational component, the I and the we. And so, the I is a lot of the stuff we've already been talking about around self-awareness, our own reactive patterns, how we deal with stress, all of those types of things. And then the we is the relational dynamics and that dimension. So, team dynamics, culture, conflict, and so it's essentially a way for a framework to think about okay, when we're tackling a problem in an organization, it's not just about the it, it's not just about, okay, we've got to get our revenue numbers up. It's looking at the I and the we too and how that impacts some of the challenges that we're facing. And so I just thought it was a really interesting way to kind of think about how we approach challenges and organizations, because we often get so focused on kind of metrics, results you know we've got a product, market fit issue type of thing that we forget about those other components which you as, if not more critical, in my opinion. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

19:17

Yeah, and almost probably foundational. What I'm reflecting upon, Meredith, and is really why I wanted to have you on the podcast the fact that you've been doing this work in kind of as you look throughout the back of your career, like helping people in the private equity space because, okay, I may have a great idea, you bring the funding, but unless you have built the most perfect mousetrap and those are so few and far between that has the perfect moat around the business. More often than not, it is absolutely whether that team can execute, and it starts at that individual level. So, I love that. And there's another tool you had mentioned to me, which was is it Aldrich Leadership Capital Index. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

19:58

Yeah, yeah. So, as I had mentioned, you know, a lot of my inspiration for learning about this, all this stuff, came from working in a startup and seeing how kind of lack of intentionality and leadership could really make or break our investment thesis. So, you know, we had about 50 million in venture capital funding and I was reflecting on, you know, the leaders, the co-founders, who you know would sometimes yell at us in executive team meetings and just think, wow, I can't believe these investors gave these leaders 50 million bucks and did no diligence about their leadership style. And you think about it like private equity and venture. If they're thinking about making an investment or acquisition, significant amount of diligence is done on the financial modeling, basically all the back to the I, we, it framework, all the it stuff, and what they often don't do is the I and the we. 

20:59

And so, you know originally, why I studied, went back to Columbia to study this stuff was I wanted to help investors do that leadership and human capital diligence that often is being missed, and so I did a ton of research around any resources like who's talking about this, who's doing this, and the Leadership Capital Index. The book is one of the only books that I've been able to find on this topic, so how to basically create some quantitative and financial model-oriented ways to measure leadership effectiveness. And so it's just, if people are interested in this type of stuff, you know, I would one love to you know, follow up and talk to anybody about it. But that's to me the only resource I've been able to to find around kind of quantifying leadership effectiveness or for sort of private equity and venture investors who are thinking about human capital diligence and not just sort of financial diligence. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

22:03

Well, I told you in the show prep, and so we have a podcast coming out in September and so it's based on a book called Ethically Challenged. And so, Laura Katz Olson wrote the book, and me, growing up in nonprofit hospice-empowered care, when I first came in, it was about 30% for-profit, 70% nonprofit. It's now flip-flop and so you see large publicly traded even, but a lot of private equity-backed is certainly a rapidly growing area in this and you see some of the downsides of that. There's been some really negative press about just not good care out there, and so this book really kind of unpacked what the playbook of private equity is, and it's why I was so excited whenever you and I reconnected, because someone doing the work of helping those leaders be better and here's what I kind of said in a recent podcast is like because there's people like, okay, then all private equity needs to be banned. Um, I don't think that's the solution, because private equity is how you bring capital to be able to infuse an idea, to move it forward, and health care needs so much innovation and so, and so I kind of, in the people that maybe are kind of glomming on to that, I wonder if this is just really grandstanding, because I'm not quite sure how you could do that to begin with. And so, just again, it just made me super excited, because that, to me, is the crux. 

23:25

I don't care what business you're in nonprofit, for-profit if you can't provide a better service, a higher quality product and you're working to deliver it with as much timeliness as possible, and then you're working on the cost of it. That's true of any business and so. But I think probably some of the ills is so. There's people that are literally it's almost like I've used. My kids love different movies and years ago there was a movie called A Bug's Life and these grasshoppers came and they took all this stuff and they left. That feels like the bad side of private equity. That's gaining a lot of recognition. I don't know if that raises anything on your side, but again, it's what made me so encouraged that you're doing that work and some of the things just as psych, because I'd never heard of Aldridge's leadership model. But developing leaders, listening to your customers, investing in training, be an unselfish leader and invite investor input, run positive meetings that's stuff we're working on in our side as well. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

24:24

So, anything you want to say to any of that, yeah, I mean, it's a whole separate conversation and I'm sure my dad and I talk about this a lot actually too but just the involvement of private equity and kind of for-profit entities within healthcare is we could have a whole conversation around, I think. 

24:48

I agree, I think there's definitely a bit of a sort of reputation and PR management challenge that private equity and healthcare is going through right now, because I know for sure there are amazing stories out there where infusing private equity capital into healthcare companies has changed markets and patient populations for the better too. Even one of the companies that I work with is in the pharmaceutical space and they've been able to grow and scale significantly through private equity investment so that more patients have access to lower cost pharma drugs than they did before. So there are really great stories out there too. But I think, you know, often there's a lot of concern and media coverage is interested in this topic too. But yeah, it's a, I think, a whole separate conversation we could probably have. But I'm really looking forward to that episode in September because it sounds like you'll dive into a lot of that. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

25:49

Yeah, it's really interesting to unpack it, but again, it makes me so excited that you're you are working on the good work. Yeah, get the whole. There's going to have to be a PR aspect to it as well. Well, let's get back on the main trunk line then. So what tips do you have then, Meredith? What can leaders do in regarding to help their key leaders develop and learn and grow? Based on your experience and the work that you've seen and done, yeah, I think a couple of things. 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

26:15

One is, you know, one of the best definitions of culture that I've heard is it's the behaviors that are tolerated, not tolerated, encouraged and discouraged, often starting with the leadership team, the beginning, and thinking about our to-do list versus our to-be list. You know, I think all leaders need to come up with their to-be list, how they want to show up at work. You know, one question I often ask people in our first coaching session is how do you want to be described by your colleagues? And so I think, you know, having the opportunity to reflect on those types of things so that you can hold yourself personally accountable to the behaviors that you want to encourage within an organization is key. So, because those behaviors as leaders cascade within the company, right, and the people who report to us and who report to our reports see those behaviors every day, and those are the guardrails under which people believe the behaviors that are acceptable and not, and that's what makes up culture. So I think we all have to reflect on our to be list and, you know, hold ourselves accountable as leaders to the visibility we have in contributing to the culture. And then I would say too that in working with. 

27:29

You know, I've done 300 hours of coaching in the last two years, so a ton of exposure to different companies and leaders, and the one common theme I see within organizations that I feel is the sort of linchpin of the challenges that anyone faces is the inability to have difficult conversations at work, and so that's one of the leadership behavior skills that I work on most with people, and so I think if there's one area where leaders invest in their skill building because it is a skill, it's a muscle we have to work right. 

28:05

It's not our natural tendency for most people to be able to give and receive difficult feedback, and so to create a culture of feedback and to practice, you know, having those uncomfortable conversations, you know, I think is really critical to driving accountability in a company, driving results, and so one framework that I usually train companies on is called the SBI framework, and it stands for Situation Behavior Impact, and if you Google it you can see lots of different resources for it. But it's a framework for, if you're really uncomfortable, you know, giving that feedback, it kind of helps you think about it in an objective way and to deliver it in a way that is, you know, totally honest and totally kind to the recipient. So I would say those are the two. Things is kind of our own accountability around our behaviors and our to be list and then practicing difficult conversations. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

28:59

That's good. Can you unpack that SBI approach a little bit more? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

29:02

Meredith, I heard from a colleague that they were having challenges, you know, working with me, but they didn't come to me directly. I heard it from somebody else and I want to address the fact that you know, coming to me is much more productive than sort of complaining about me to somebody else. So I would describe the situation which is you know, I understand that you know you may be going to others to share feedback with me. So that's the S and again, it's objective, right, like you want to really describe the situation in terms of facts, not opinions, so that someone can't kind of poke holes in it, right? And so the behavior, the B part, is the behavior that you observed, which was sort of combined with what I said before. 

29:56

But you know that you're going to somebody else to share feedback about me, and then the “I” is the impact. So, it's less about you know and you shouldn't do that, and more you know it made me feel like we don't have the trust in our relationship. That, I think, is, you know, important, and so it's about the impact that it has on me, nothing to do with them, and so that is enables you to start a conversation about sort of what's happened. It's objective, it's fact based and it's about how the impact. It impacted you personally. So, yeah, it's a. It's a great framework, I think, for people to leverage and practice, and I have like a worksheet I can send it to you or we can link it to some show notes as well. Yeah. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

30:42

That would be great, Great. So, I think I shared with you before a gentleman named Dr Lee Thayer. He was woven throughout my book, he was my mentor, he was Stephen Covey's mentor, and so he would say something that just feels very appropriate. And so he would say okay, the general population can be graphed via the bell-shaped curve. And so he would say so you know this kind of mantra of we'll just go hire the high performers. 

31:07

Statistically there are not enough high performers, so you're going to have the middle. So, he would lean forward, and he'd say this is the key Great organizations move the middle. So, he would lean forward and he'd say this is the key Great organizations move the middle. In other words, you improve, and I'm thinking about, like the work you know you, it's not just a high performance, you’re trying to get funding, and so the ability to bring coaching and tools and just the whole performance improvement area is so critical to kind of move the middle. So, I don't know if that resonates with you at all, but I'm just sitting there reflecting as I'm thinking about the work that you're doing. That is so, and I've said that many times, especially as in healthcare, you know, we're going to have so many staffing shortages, there's just not going to be enough people. So, we're going to have a very diverse group of people and they're not all going to be high performers, which makes this work just super important. But does that raise any thoughts or questions on your part? 

Meredith Damore (Guest)

32:00

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think that's why organizations investing in leadership development across many ranks is so critical, and I've found, obviously it's been a very tough capital market situation in the last 18 plus months, ever since the SVB crisis and again, I work with a lot of venture-backed companies. It's been really hard for those earlier stage companies to fundraise and often I find the first thing to get kind of chopped from the budget is, you know, team coaching and leadership coaching, and that's often the time frame that organizations should double down. It was interesting last year, while a lot of my clients were really trying to manage cash flow and not really hiring a ton, I was doing a lot of 360 assessments on leadership teams. It was really about how do we invest in the people that we have here and help them understand their superpowers and their areas of development so that we can get the most out of the team we have, because we're probably not going to make a ton of changes right now, and so, you know, a lot of those organizations are now kind of off to the races this year because of some of the investments that they've made. So, you know, in terms of this idea of moving the middle. I think it's so critical and you know organizations investing in both coaching at the individual level as well as for, you know, managers, leadership teams, I think is so key in order that I love like, even in in this idea of sort of moving the middle and how do we build high performing teams? I mean, one of the one of the resources that I love is, um, the five behaviors of a teamwork, um, so I use that a lot and I think, again, just investing in these types of sort of resources for teams. I have a million different ones I could suggest, but I think you know so many, so many resources for us to improve as leaders, both as we lead teams and as we think about our own individual leadership. 

34:23

I think I was listening to a different podcast, because I'm also a podcast nerd like you and you know. One of the things that was mentioned was there are three main ways that we can build sort of emotional intelligence and self-awareness, and it's through 360 feedback, psychometric assessments and journaling and writing reflections. And there's a really good quote by John Dewey that I love, which is we don't learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience. And so I would just say, if there are leaders listening to this that want to think about how they can improve their leadership ability and effectiveness, investing in those three areas. Investing in those three areas you know, 360 feedback or even, just, you know, regularly soliciting feedback and writing and reflecting on sort of our experiences and the opportunity to use different assessments whether it's DISC or MBS or Myers-Briggs are, all you know, key to understanding ourselves and being able to sort of move forward effectively in leadership and in organizations. 

Chris Comeaux (Host)

35:30

Wow. Well, thank you for the work you're doing, Meredith. That was just solid gold right there. So, thank you, and to our listeners at the end of each episode we always share a quote and a visual. The idea is to create a brain bookmark, a thought product about our podcast subject, so it'll further your learning and growth there by your leadership and hopefully it'll stick in your brain like a brain tattoo. So be sure to subscribe to our channel, the anatomy of leadership, so you don't miss an episode. Check out the book the anatomy of leadership on Amazon. Tell your friends, families, coworkers about it and so easy rail against the world, be frustrated. Let's be the change we wish to see in the world. We're going to go ahead and link to that SBI tool and then any other links that Meredith wants to give us. We're going to actually put that in the show notes. So, thanks for listening to Anatomy of Leadership, and here's our Brain Bookmark to close today's show. 

Jeff Haffner (Brain Bookmark)

36:17

“We are so focused on our To-Do list that we don't always think about our To-Be list,” by -Meredith Damore. 

Jeff Haffner (Ad)

Thank you to our Anatomy of Leadership sponsor, Dragonfly Health. Dragonfly Health is also the title sponsor for April and November 2024 Leadership Immersion Courses. Dragonfly Health is a leading care-at-home data. Dragonfly Health uses advanced technology and robust analytics to manage durable medical equipment and pharmaceutical services as part of a single, efficient solution for caregivers, patients and their families. The company serves millions of patients annually across all 50 states. Thank you, Dragonfly Health, for all the great work that you do.