And that comes because they're inspired by you. Because they're inspired by the work that they're doing, and they feel supported, and seen and heard and valued. And once you continue to show them from a vulnerable place, Hey, I make mistakes too. You make it safe for them to take those chances and step up and be willing to say, I'm going to give that discretionary effort. I'm gonna give that extra 15, 20, 25% of my brains.

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between.

Doesn't matter if you're a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's. 

Welcome back to the show. Today. I am so excited to have Michelle King with me. Michelle is the founder and CEO of Soul to Soul and an HR executive.

So we are gonna talk about all things about people management and HR in the workplace, as well as how to be our full selves as leaders. Let me share a little bit more about Michelle before we dive in. Michelle is a 25 year veteran HR executive in Silicon Valley, and she's also a leadership and development consultant and executive coach.

She's the founder of her own coaching business, and she also does retreats around self mastery, which are really exciting. She's gonna talk a little bit more about today. Now Michelle and I met at an event for women entrepreneurs, and I had an instant connection with her about our shared passion for building great teams, for manager development, and really leading on a human level.

Michelle is a powerhouse in understanding people development and blends this with alternative modalities that help leaders show up for themselves and their teams in a better way. This includes things like breath work, sound healing, and self mastery, including a retreat that I just mentioned that she'll speak more about later in the show.

So Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. 

Thank you so much for having me, Lia. I'm excited to be here. 

Diving right in, you're an HR leader, like 25 years you just said, of experience working in companies and also as an executive coach leader. So you have two sort of points of view around people management.

What is one of the most common challenges that you see leaders wrestle with? 

I think for me it is, especially as leaders move up the executive ranks and you know, the more senior they get, it's the farther remove they get from the work, the less feedback they get and there's a lot less clear understanding of the impact that they're having on people.

And so it is, you know, this combination of they wanna do amazing things and they're really trying to lead their functions in the best right way that they can. But because no one's giving them feedback and because they're not working on that personal and professional development becomes really hard to understand how they're affecting the teams beneath them, and then how their managers are affecting their teams based on their leadership skills.

Absolutely. I mean, I hear the same thing in, in my workshops with teams managers saying, you know, when I get to a certain level, I feel like nobody's telling me the truth anymore. People are just telling me what I wanna hear, and it does such a disservice because we have our blinders on for knowing what our teams really need and how we're showing up as leaders.

So I could not agree more. And I'm curious, you know, what are some of the tools that you've used to help people have more visibility into how they're showing up? Well, we have this amazing tool, which I know you know a little bit about because you've had an opportunity to do, and it's an assessment that I really love called the HBDI, and it stands for the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument.

Part of the reason that I really love this tool, both for individual leaders as well as teams, to really get to know how each other work are, it's not a personality based assessment. It really is. How your brain functions, the order in which it processes information and gives you a good sense of how you show up.

Not just in times of, you know, things are going well and you're doing all the right things, but when you are in stress, which sometimes really changes the order and that processing for your brain. And so if you think about teams as a whole, right? Everybody shows up. They all are coming from their own unique space.

They all have this very unique thinking style preference and dominance. And the goal is to get a really whole brained approach to solving problems and to making teams more effective, and to make leaders more effective. So really knowing and understanding themselves, and this gives them a great opportunity to see how they show up when they're in stress and how that might look differently for their team.

but also then a really good opportunity to see what works for their team, what motivates their team and how they all work together. It's been such an effective tool for me over the last, I've been doing this for almost 15 years, so something that I really have seen land and work with teams across the organization.

I love that. And, and one thing that really stood out as when, when I did a session with you around this was you shared about how this really comes into play in group dynamic. Especially around making decisions and in the startup world where you work, where you have certain types of, you know, I guess defaults for how we process information that often are in the room and others aren't always represented.

and so share more about how this understanding this helps us build more inclusive leadership teams. Absolutely. One of the things that we look at when we do the HBDI for teams is that kind of how you show up every day and then how you show up in stress. And what we find when we look at a team kind of scatter plot is that they tend to move to the outsides of the circle, or they tend to move outwards from where kind of everybody, when things are going well, everybody's moving at the same place.

We have people who sit in all four quadrants and are really doing lots of good work together, utilizing their whole brains, and everybody has an opportunity to think and act the way that they want to. But when we get into stress mode, what happens is people go to those defaults. And sometimes what that means is, especially with, I see on a lot of executive teams, right?

You end up with one quadrant or two quadrants that are underrepresented.  and what it means is that we're kind of coming to that quadrant very last in things like sales, marketing, product development, people, right? And, and looking at things from a very different perspective because you're sitting on the other side of the quadrant and not really focusing on that.

If we don't have someone who sits there, or we have maybe one person on the team who sits there who feels uncomfortable and doesn't feel like there's a lot of. And safety to be able to speak up and say, Hey, I think we're forgetting things that happened in this quadrant that we need to really think about.

Then those things get missed, and that's where we end up with unhappy people or processes that don't land or, uh, really great ideas that don't actually come to fruition because of how much time and. An effort they take. And so it's really important as you think about building out teams and most especially executive teams, that you're thinking from this whole brain perspective and that you have all the voices in the room willing to be heard and that you've built that trust as a leadership team to have people speak up, disagree, commit, and then make sure that you're representing kind of all ways of looking at problem.

Yeah, I love that. And I think one of the Aha. For me in diving into this was really understanding, you know, this is a tool to have more empathy for other people and understanding, hey, it's an influencing strategy as well. But I think both the empathy side, but you know, understanding, hey, if this is someone else's, you know, way of processing information, this is how I need to frame it, to communicate with them better and to have that land and I mean, what a tool.

You know, getting people aligned around a strategy for making sure people feel seen and heard, as you said. And I'm curious, what are some of the other aha moments that folks have had as you've shared this tool? It's always interesting to me when people get their HBDI results because, uh, I, in the 14 years I've been doing this, I've not had any people who were like, Nope, totally not me.

It actually gives a language and a voice to what you likely already know. You've probably been given feedback about, especially how you show up in stress, and it's a really great opportunity to say, right, this is, now I know and understand why that happens in those moments, and here are some ways in which I can get myself out of that.

But to your point, no, I think it's important for us to all know ourselves and really have a good understanding of our impact and how we show up. But it is so important when you think about influencing or that cross. Functional communication, right? And where you have challenges with people who are struggling to have good communication or to make decisions together, very likely they sit opposite each other on the HBDI.

And so that means they're coming from these kind of very opposite places. And the goal in understanding all of that is really when you can say, Don't come from your place and we're not gonna come from my place. There's actually somewhere in the middle that we can meet and make decisions and communicate better.

And when leaders have those moments, especially with someone who's been challenging for them to work with or to communicate with, and we can set a really clear understanding of. This is a better quadrant to start from. This is a better way of approaching conversation that's neutral for both parties. I have so many leaders who can resolve confrontation easier, who are able to very clearly communicate with other people that they were before finding Very challenging, and it helps with things like when you say, give me an executive summary.

If you know where the executive's coming from, that's where you start and you meet them where they are very quickly. That helps your point land in the way that's best for you, and it makes it easier for them to understand. So it's about understanding others as much as it is about understanding yourself.

Absolutely. And I mean, we can all hear that this is such a powerful tool for feedback,  and feedback is something I talk about in all of my manager programs. It's talked about a lot on this show because this is sort of where the rubber hits the road on our interactions with our managers and leaders, and I can see how powerful this tool is for having that common ground conversation, for building empathy, for cultivating that relationship and trust so that you can have an effective conversation.

And both people are really understanding where each other is coming from. Absolutely. I agree with you. Feedback is truly a gift and when you can embrace that and hear it and you know, think about anytime you've had to have a feedback conversation with someone, having a tool like the HBDI to know what's gonna land with them and where to start with them, makes those conversations a little bit easier to brainstorm and to be ready and prepared for so that they hear you and they're able to make the change that you want and they're more likely to hear the feedback that you're delivering. Yeah, exactly. So give us a window into what are the four quadrants so that we can imagine where maybe we guess that we land. And then I'm gonna put a link to the assessment of the show notes and how folks can work with you to dive into that assessment. So that, I think it's a fun exercise.

I know we did this in the training you ran, first you guessed which quadrant you fall into, and then the assessment shows how close you were. But then again, as you said, under stress, maybe it's a whole different ballgame. 

So what are those four? Yes. So we do have four quadrants. The first a quadrant is, or we call it our blue quadrant.

This is where our analytical self lives. This is where we approach things by how much time, money, effort, energy they're gonna cost us. We do a lot of research and we develop ideas based on kind of what we know and what's happened in the. You then have the B quadrant, which is where our green quadrant sits, and this is really that planning place.

It's the safekeeping, it's the practical. I'm creating a plan of action. This is where people really like to be timely and they wanna understand exactly what the next five things are that they need to do.

You have the C quadrant, which is where all of our feelings are in that red space. And this really is about how do we collaborate with people?

How do we partner with others? How are people feeling about this? How do I teach this? And what is my intuition telling me? And then we have the de quadrant, which is our yellow quadrant, and that really is about ideation. It's about risk taking, it's about stepping outside of the box and willingness to look at the world in all kinds of new places and new ways, and it's important to know that we all think in all four quadrants. We just have a pattern. We have a dominant section where we start and we have a pattern in which we go around the four quadrants. And so it's really, everybody thinks with all four quadrants, but it is the order. 

Your order is very unique to you, and especially in times of stress.

While you may have one normal pattern when you're not in. You may have a very different pattern when you are in stress, and so that is where you get a really good sense of kind of what's going on with you. Yeah, I remember I was more in that green, I think the sort of getting things done, planner mode, but then in stress I lean more into the red of, what about the people?

We gotta take career care of the people, which as you called out, it really lines up with exactly the kind of work of work I do, which was funny. And I think one of the reasons that drove me to want to do this kind of work around team development and team workshops and programming really at scale, because we're all under stress right now, and I was really destined to be able to support that in a bigger way.

So as Michelle said, it's never wrong, it gives you more of a language to understand. And I think what I've found as I looked at my assessment now know. That, uh, go to the people side. When I get stressed, how do I communicate that back with leaders who maybe go towards back to the process or back to the vision or back to the results?

How do I connect the dots there? And this has already become a really powerful tool for me in communicating with my clients, with the folks that I'm working with. Because I understand now I have to use the language that lands with them and it may be very different than my default. And it explained why I had some frustration in the corporate world when I'd say, Hey, you know, things aren't working because people aren't getting along.

People aren't being seen and heard. And potentially folks were coming from a place of just gotta get the work done. Focus on the work first.  and why there was disconnects there. So it's such a powerful tool for, as Michelle said, understand yourself, your group dynamics, and then influencing others. 

Yes, I love it.

It has been such a powerful tool in helping executives and leadership teams really get to know themselves as well and how they work really well together and be able to give a language to when there's friction, like what's happening there. So it's not anybody's right or wrong or not good or bad. It just, it is, and this is how we think.

And really having an understanding and a foundation for that makes things so much easier. Yeah. And so in that context, you know, there's so much change and uncertainty and, and all of this happening right now. There's layoffs happening and, and recession. What do you recommend for leaders and in helping make change and transitions easier and, and potentially if they understand this composition of their team, where that might play?

Yeah. There is so much change happening in the world if we think about it. Over the last three years, it's been nothing but constant change and it continues to evolve now, and things that we've never done before. And so what I would say when you have a tool like the HBDI to lean into is making sure that you do speak to all four quadrants when you're managing change.

Really no one understand your audience and leverage the folks who have. Certain dominant thinking style preferences to really help you to send the message to the organization, right? This is about change management is really something that the senior leadership team has to embrace and be ready for and communicate, but they have to empower their leaders.

To know and understand what to say and answer questions and meet team members where they are when they're nervous or concerned or angry or upset. And so I would say, you know, in this time of change, taking that extra time to ensure that you are speaking to everyone. That you're being really inclusive of everybody's perspective and the way that they're looking at the world and the way they may be approaching this and giving as much context as you possibly can.

And then really hearing people. For me, at the end of the day, we can talk as much as we want and we can say as much as we want, but people really need to be heard and and the only way for us to do that is to stop as leaders and be really good listeners and make sure that they feel like we understand where they're coming from and we're empathizing and we're doing everything we can to develop them in every way we can so that they feel like they're getting what they need out of this as well.

And a lot of this sounds like it comes down to self awareness. As a leader, and I know self mastery is something that you talk about, you coach on, you have an upcoming retreat about. I'd love to talk a little about what is self mastery and how do people sort of understand that for themselves? 

Yes, it's a great topic. I could talk for hours about self mastery. Really, it boils down to kind of being conscious and present, I think. You know, so many times with so much change happening and so many things going on, we get in this mode of just doing the things we think are supposed to happen, or we get in a mode where we aren't really being conscious and we're kind of going through the motions.

And so taking some time and really stopping to understand. Where you are. What's happening, not just with you, but with your teams is really important. Then you really look at what are all the perspectives, what are all the possibilities? What are all the things that we can do, and take some radical accountability for what got us here.

I think this is a step. A lot of times that gets missed in the, we're trying to come up with an answer or a plan, right? Owning your choices and making decisions and being really comfortable in saying, I've made every decision that put me in the place that I'm in today, and I can help make every decision to get me out of this if I wanna do something differently.

That radical accountability really leads to a place where you are transformed, right? It leads to a place where you are not. Leading from the front in the sense of like, I have to be out here and doing all of this. You get to step back and look at your team that you've built. You get to look at the people around you because you've attracted them to you and you are growing them.

You are developing them, you are giving them feedback and making sure that this is a choice and a team and a place where you want to be. Being really, really mindful of mastering kind of the way that you show up in every moment and the way that you show up in every decision. I'm not saying that we make all the right decisions all the time.

It is a self-mastery journey for a reason. It never ends. There's, you know, change in transformation that happens within all of us every single day. But if you're not present, Here and really conscious and being aligned with the choices that you're making. You get into this place where you'll look up and you don't know how you got here, or you'll look up and you'll have built a team around you that you don't know what they're doing or you don't know how they're delivering or if they're not, why they're not.

And so for me, this radical accountability and this self-mastery is not just for your personal, like how you show up in the world as a person, but it is, it affects how you show up as a leader and how we lead and grow organizations. 

Absolutely. And that's why when you shared this concept with me, I was like, oh my God, spread the word. Everyone has to think no about this. Because in my decade of working in big tech and longer even across the corporate world, I just kept seeing this show up again and again is there's an accountability. That in, in avoiding accountability both for ourselves and, and holding people accountable on our teams that I'm seeing across leaders and witness firsthand.

You start to see all these other breakdowns and I think there's a... I talked a lot about reframing accountability. I think there's a fear around saying the word accountability. It's has a negative connotation. It often means we think it means blame or punishment or micromanagement, and yet it's actually liberating.

And that's what you talk about in your work is we can finally see, hey, when we hold people account. When we set expectations, when we are taking responsibility for our choices, people step up as owners. That work gets done faster, that people trust us more as leaders. And I feel like if we could all reframe accountability and start with ourselves and say, okay, I am accountable for all the things that I'm doing here.

We don't then say the ask the questions, why is no one listening to me? Why are things not getting done? Why, why, why? These, why questions don't. Because we see our own role in the situation. Absolutely. And you know that mindset of why, why, why is this happening to me is truly the epitome of I am a victim to what's going on in my life.

Right. It's not about things are happening for me and I can see the lessons and be grateful for it. It really is. How. Here, and if you stop and take those moments and the time to look in the mirror and reflect and be willing to take accountability for how you've shown up, you will see how the path unfolded.

I think the other big piece of that is as we think about accountability and inspiring that for our teams, when you start taking that accountability personally and you're willing to be vulnerable and share it, you build trust with people, which is the foundation for any organization to be able to be successful.

You give people space and psychological safety to be able to disagree and commit, right? And you can get them to really buy in to what you're building, the vision and the values and the mission that you're trying to accomplish. And that creates this internal accountability for the. So it's less about you holding them accountable and more about you inspiring them to want to be accountable to deliver that.

Right. They wanna show up as amazing because they have skin in the game. The ultimate, you know, I've been doing this work for 25 years and the ultimate thing that we're always looking for is discretionary effort. It's not something you can ask for. It's not something you can demand. Discretionary effort comes from people wanting to give you this whole part of themselves that is above and beyond anything you could squeeze out of them in any amount of time.

And that comes because they're inspired by you. Because they're inspired by the work that they're doing, and they feel supported, and seen and heard and valued. And once you continue to show them from a vulnerable place, Hey, I make mistakes too. You make it safe for them to take those chances and step up and be willing to say, I'm going to give that discretionary effort.

I'm gonna give that extra 15, 20, 25% of my brains. Base and my creativity and kind of my energy to making this even better because I am invested in my soul. And that is what creates amazing companies. It's what creates amazing products and cultures. It's that really that special secret sauce that you can't require, you can only inspire.

Yes. Oh my God, I love that so much. And is everyone listening? This is the way we do more. Literally right there, that discretionary effort because when we are feeling squeezed, undervalued, when we don't have trust, we're not gonna put that effort in. But as Michelle said, this is the secret to accessing that.

So I love that. Thank you. Yes. Diving a little bit more into the self mastery, how do people sort of dive into that? What are some of the ways in which we tap into that and what are some of the ways that you're supporting people and tapping into that as well? Yeah, so I think, you know, coaching is always a super important part of this, right?

Um, the work that I'm doing around self-mastery. You talked a little bit earlier and I'll tell you more about the retreat that I have is for, you know, folks who are at a place where they've done some of that work, right? There's a willingness to see and understand that you have a part in how you're showing.

There is a lot of people I'm talking to right now, kind of this, I'm doing all the things and I've gotten to this place that I think is what success should look like, but I know there's more. I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I don't know what's next and I can't figure out where to go from here. And so there's this willingness to say, I have to get uncomfortable in order to jump into that next version of me and, and jump into what is next and the impact I truly wanna have in the.

And so I think coaching is the first place to go, right? If you're just starting with this work, if you're really leaning into learning more about yourself, your impact, how you show up and the kind of leader you wanna be, you find an amazing coach. You find someone who can help begin to show you what that looks like and give you a sense of that mirror and what you're looking at.

And then this retreat that I am doing, Three days. It is three full days of looking at yourself in the mirror for the entire time. Really, it is this amazing opportunity for you to step back and say, how did I get here? What are all those things that I get to be accountable for? That has gotten me to this?

Place that I am, and this place is likely not a bad place. You're probably successful. You've done all of the good things. You have the job, you have the things that you want, but there's this internal drive. There's this something deep down in you that you know that there's more. And so we're gonna explore that.

We're gonna see how we got to where we are. We're going to get really clear and accountable for the things that are showing up in our lives, and we're gonna do some. That are going to make us uncomfortable and step us outside of our comfort zone and walk away this entirely new version of ourselves. But most importantly for me, some of the modalities that we integrate into this work are things like breath work and sound healing coaching.

Because you leave a retreat like this, and I know we've all done it, we've all taken trainings or we've all done these things where you walk away and you're like, that was amazing. I learned all of this stuff. And you go back to your regular everyday life and everyone else walks around in that not accountable way.

And it's really easy to get sucked back in. You've been doing it for 20, 30, 40 years, in my case, 47 years. And so I want to ensure that people also have all of these opportunities and tools. To practice what it looks like to talk about what's working and what's not, and how we integrate life back into you maintaining that kind of transformation that you're going to have out of the three days.

I love it. And it sounds like you have them in, you're doing three more retreats this year, April, July, and November fall timeframe? Yes. Okay, awesome. And there's a few spots for April. I'm gonna be joining in July, so folks wanna meet. I'll be. And then you can learn more. I will put in the show notes, the links to learn more and sign up.

Thank you. Well, anything you wanna leave our audience with before we wrap up? I would say the last thing is truly embracing just where you are. There is no good or bad if we can really approach the world from a place of perspective, from this place. I am where I am now today because of my choices, right?

I'm accountable for that and I'm grateful. Like I really like myself, I love who I am, and I have made a ton of mistakes, and so if I can see the value in all of those, if there's nothing else you take away from this, it is pre-practice gratitude every single day. Practice gratitude for the lessons you've been taught, for the things that have worked sometimes, most importantly, for the things that haven't worked.

I know on your show, Lia, you're talking about good managers and bad managers, right? Sometimes we learn more from those bad managers than we do from great managers, and so looking at that as a less. Them. If you had no idea, you only had amazing managers your entire life, you would not know what you want to aspire and do differently.

You would only have kind of this baseline of good. Instead, you know what you don't wanna do, and you get to develop yourself into how you wanna grow and be as a leader. And that comes from this place of being really present and then grateful for everything that showed up for you and what you're learning from it.

Pull the lesson from everything. Thank you so much. Love that so much here. HBDI, feedback, self-mastery. I'll put links to everything in the show notes and thank you so much, Michelle. Always so, so wonderful to talk with you about all of this. So good to see you, Lia. Thank you for having me. 

 In the workplace right now, we're all feeling stuck. Managers are burning out. Employee engagement is on the decline, and women are leaving the workforce at record numbers. And if you have a small business, you're wondering when is the right time to scale. The good news is you do not have to solve these problems alone if you're looking for tools to better support your managers.

Finally improve those employee engagement scores. Retain that woman talent you worked so hard to attract. Or make sure that in your small business everybody's on the same page about how to get things done. Then my programs were designed for you. Reach out at hello@liagarvin.com and we'll chart the course to building your best possible team.

That's all I have for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.