It’s Not Your Team… It’s Your Environment | Tanu Tiwari

Most leaders believe disengagement is a performance problem.

But it’s often an environment problem.

In this episode, Pam Dwyer sits down with leadership strategist and author Tanu Tiwari to explore how leaders unintentionally create microcultures that either activate initiative, or slowly shut it down.

Tanu shares how everyday leadership behaviors, patterns, and blind spots shape team engagement, and why awareness is the key to changing everything.

Because people don’t disengage randomly.

They respond to the environment around them.

What you’ll learn:

• why disengagement is created, not random
 • how leaders unknowingly shape team behavior
 • the concept of microcultures and leadership environments
 • why “performing but not thriving” matters
 • how pressure gets passed down through teams
 • why employees begin managing their managers
 • the hidden cost of fear-based leadership
 • how identity and labels influence leadership style
 • why leaders lack feedback loops, and how to fix it
 • how small shifts create better performance

🔗 Connect with Tanu

Website: https://theconsciousleaderco.com/

Instagram: http://instagram.com/coachtanutiwari

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coachtanutiwari

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Transcript

Leadership Is What You Allow

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most people think leadership is about what you say, but real leadership shows up in patterns, in decisions, in what you allow, in what you avoid. And the truth is, people don't disengage randomly. They respond to the environment around them. Today we're talking about what's really shaping leadership and what it takes to change it. Welcome to the Delay the Binge podcast. I'm Pam Plyre, and today I am sitting down with Tanu Tiwari, the leadership strategist, author, and founder of the Conscious Leader Company, who brings over 18 years of experience working with leaders across global organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to high-growth startups. Her work focuses on what's happening beneath the surface of team performance, how decision-making, ownership, and everyday leadership patterns shape whether people truly engage or quietly disengage. Through her upcoming book, Disengaged, she challenges the idea that engagement is the people problem and instead shows how it's created by the environments leaders build. Tanu, welcome to the show. Thank you, Pam. That was some introduction. I thought you were very worthy of such an introduction. So can we start out today by sharing with the listeners what you've been up to lately?

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, so I am, like you said, writing this book called Disengaged, and it's coming out in fall. It the full title is Disengage Turning Passive Teams into Proactive Microcultures. And it brings together interviews with a lot of industry leaders across different big and small company sizes and also people who are being led. So not just leaders' perspective, but uh employee perspective on leadership. And um this book is really um about how leaders can look at their role as architects of microcultures, not just conduits. Um and when we talk about culture, we think at a very organizational level, the values, what you see on the decks, and you know, um how senior leadership talk about culture. But what I'm exploring through this book is that leader, no matter how um, you know, big or small the organization is, and um no matter how many people you're managing, whether it's one person or it's a hundred people, if you are mobilizing people, if you're managing people, um you have agency, you have the power to shape how people show up and what they bring to the table, and also how they don't show up and uh how what they don't contribute. And oftentimes, whenever you know you see disengagement or people not doing so well, uh the first thing we blame is, oh, this person's underperforming, or there's something wrong with the pub with the person. We hardly ever look at the environment we are creating because we are all results of our environment.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

I so love that because I've been a leader in a corporate corporate, you know, world before, and I've also been the the Indian, not the chief. And I learned a lot when I was in my leadership role. But the one thing I realized was that I have to, I have to really work on myself first and not let my emotions get away from me, you know, and just lead with what I know.

Self-Leadership Under Real Pressure

SPEAKER_00 3:58

So self-leadership actually looks like what in real life? I mean, where do you see leaders disconnect from themselves?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

That's a great question. And you said it, self-leadership. Um, and you don't have to be a leader for self-leadership, right? Every single one of us we lead ourselves. We lead ourselves to great things or we lead ourselves to disruption also. Yeah. And um when it comes to leaders, I think it's a lot to do with the demands on leaders. It's a lot to do with the autopilot that we get used to, right? We get used to our cadences, our routines, the expectations, the pressures that are coming from the organization. And especially with middle management, they're in a very peculiar position because there's pressure from above, from senior leaders, from the business, from the stakeholders, and then there's also expectations from the team below them that they have to manage. And self-leadership plays a very, very important role there because if you are not intentional, you're not conscious about how you are conducting yourself as a leader, you are pretty much just getting stretched in two different directions and constantly delivering to or giving in to the demands of whatever is expected of you in the moment. And surely enough, always you'll see that um the demands from above take precedence over whatever the team is expecting of you. And um somewhere there are blind spots for the leaders where they don't even see or understand how they're being perceived by the dead by their teams. So if you're not pausing, if you're not taking that pause to understand how you're showing up, how you're being perceived, and what impact that has on people. Because at the end of the day, you have to mobilize your people. You have to make sure that they are achieving their targets or they're hitting their goals. And while doing that, they are thriving in the environment you're creating. So whether or not you accept it, you agree to it, and when you're not intentional, you are creating microcultures around you.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

I love that a lot because a lot of times, um, I mean, do you see patterns in high-performing leaders that most people don't recognize?

Umbrella Versus Funnel Leadership

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

I mean, high performing leaders definitely hold themselves to high standards and they hold people around them to high standards. Now, there are high-performing leaders that um uh what I call are, you know, um there's two things that I name in my book. Pardon my French there a little bit. So there's the shit umbrella leaders or the shit funnel leaders. And you can find this in both like high-performing and and low-performing leaders. But um, what shit umbrella leaders do is whatever pressure is coming from above, whatever they're absorbing from other parts of the business that has an impact on their team, they triage it first. They act as an umbrella, they don't just let everything slide onto their teams and they make sure that things are getting translated the right way for the teams because there's a lot that they could bring from all the parts of the business, especially from above. And the um shit funnel leaders, what they do is they absorb all that pressure, they absorb that energy and and push it right through to their teams. And the teams that are under these kind of leaders, they're always, you know, uh very high cortisol in in high stress environments. And um they're not just managing the work that is being assigned to them or is coming to them, but they're also managing their manager a lot, like anticipating how they're gonna react, how to say something to them. And um, that's the difference between, you know, do you want to be a shit umbrella leader or do you want to be a shit um?

SPEAKER_00 8:09

I a lot of times I notice personally that personal issues can really get in the way of work, of you doing your job properly or well.

Quiet Depletion Behind Good Results

SPEAKER_00 8:21

And a lot of times it's just what's happening outside of the job place. But what are signs a culture is broken? Even when everything looks good on the outside, because that's what I call quiet depletion. Quiet depletion is when you look perfect on the outside, but on the inside you are exhausted. You're either overworked or just emotionally distraught, so you're unable to work in the manner that your leader is wanting you to, or they're putting too much on you. Can you tell us what some signs are?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yes, absolutely. So something that I talk about in my book is um the six stages of disengagement. So you must have heard the five or six stages of grief, but disengagement works in a very similar fashion. Um, and and there is this, you know, honeymoon phase that we are in when when we join a company, everything's going great. We love the culture, we love the people. And something changes, something shifts. Yes, there is the aspect of things going not so well in your personal life, but what I'm focusing on in this book is not those situations. Situations where leaders are creating those environments where people are disengaging because of their behaviors and and um their patterns. Um, and when you say, you know, personal life, I mean, this is the perfect time to discuss this because look at everything that's going on in the macro world around us, right? Right. It's not easy to be in any kind of corporate job right now. We have all these, you know, political things that are going on. Um life is not easy, things are expensive, inflation is high, and um there's you know layoffs happening for this cycles and cycles of layoffs for like what three years now. And we've been in this cycle of um the great resignation, and now everything's shifted towards employer, and employee is so dispensable, it puts a lot of pressure on people and how they you know bring themselves to work. And in these environments, it's uh even more important for leadership to really, you know, bring out the human side of that. Because we're all humans at the end of the day. And we come to work like we spend one-third of our lives at workplace, if not more. And for some people it ends up becoming a hundred percent of their identity. So when you introduce yourself to someone, what do you say? You say your name and you say, you know, where you work or what your title is, what kind of work you do. That's that's your identity, that's everything to you. And then when things are not going well in this area of your life, which is giving you your bread and butter, and you know, you're spending so much of your time there, and oftentimes you also get a lot of validation with the appreciation you get from workplace, from how your leaders, your your team talks to you. So the the impact on a human being of you know being in a work environment in today's world specially is profound. And what we don't realize is we're not, you know, robots, yeah, sure, AI is taking over, but we've not reached that point where we can all function like you know, non-feeling human beings, that that will never happen. Um, and when leaders, you know, look at a certain problem and bring the human side of it, like why did something go wrong? Instead of just looking at the person behind a mistake or an issue that came about, what made the mistake happen? Because at at the end of the day, first thing you have to trust is this person was hired to be in this position for a reason. And if mistakes are happening before going and pointing your finger at the person, how about you look at the process? How about you look at, you know, the environment around that person? And sometimes, you know, leaders also have to just take a step back and um connect with that person and and find out that is it really work-related or is something going on in your personal life that could be getting in the way and um, you know you you messing up or you you know, missing things or making mistakes. Um I understand, you know, um that this is happening right now, but like why and how can I help you to get in a better place, you know? Making yourself available, making sure that you are being, you know, an enabler for that person, for that team. So the the whole idea of servant lead servant leadership, right? That a leader is there for their people. At the end of the day, you have to enable them and then make sure that they have everything in place, break down the barriers, enable them, give them what they need to function well and and to bring their best selves, and you bring out the best in them that way. So there's a lot of nuance that goes behind it, right? From you know, the trust and um self-leadership, identifying what your own uh shortcomings are as a leader, making sure you're hiring the right people. You're not, you know, bringing in a fish and asking it to climb a tree and then blaming the fish for not being able to do that effectively.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

That's pretty good. A fish climbing a tree. I've not heard that one. But a lot of times, leaders that I have had in the past, they really had trouble with being proactive and they were reactive to a lot. They were just troubleshooting all the time. But to be proactive is a whole different story. And a lot of times leaders unintentionally create disengagement from fear of failure, or I mean, what why do you think they do that?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Energy Levels That Create Fear

SPEAKER_01 14:45

So again, um, a leader is also human, and there's a lot that goes into the lens with which you look at the world and the energy that you come to work with every day. So um I am also a certified leadership coach, and one of the areas that I coach in is energy leadership coaching. So um this is something that was um created by Bruce D. Schneider. Um, it's like the seven levels of energy that we talk about, and um, I'm just quickly gonna describe these seven levels. So there's like catabolic and anabolic energy that we're all made up of. So catabolic, think about um your digestion, right? You eat food and there's acid that's created that breaks down the food, and then there's anabolic energy, which is the building up force. You breathe, you know, there's oxygen supply to different parts of your body. Now, both types of energies are very important for your body, right? Um, and within these anabolic and catabolic energy, there's like seven levels. So level one would be the energy of apathy, you know, being able to move to action, um, uh a lot of self-judgment. Um, sometimes people are stuck in past and you know, replaying um things from the past and what didn't work. And then level two energy is the energy of uh frustration, anger. A lot of founders come from that place. So it doesn't have to be like an explicit anger kind of energy where people are yelling at everyone, although that also happens a lot in corporate. Um, but you know, sometimes that that anger that I I I want to make it, I want to, you know, defeat my competitor and do better. Um, then there's this level three energy, which is more of, you know, yeah, trying to, you know, uh understand and make do with whatever the situation is and just move on from there. It starts getting anabolic from level three. And level four is more of a service energy, you know, even you take care of yourself, this energy of care and take care of others, uh, that's more level four. Level five is more of a win-win energy where you're, you know, looking to um have uh, you know, win-win for both the parties involved, or any situation you want to win, you want to make sure the other person or whatever the situation is, that is also um getting a win out of it. And then level six is more of an energy of flow, and level seven energy is where you don't see yourself separate from the world around you, and that's like the highest level of energy. So that's like your seven levels of consciousness and in leadership position. If you are a person that defaults to level two energy, for example, whenever something goes wrong or there's a stressor in your environment, then you see a leader that's typically yelling, you know, and um getting upset and angry and saying things that they shouldn't be saying in front of the team that builds a lot of fear in the team. And um that's where I said that you know, you start managing your manager's emotions and you got the additional thing on your plate now, apart from everything that's you know work-related that you have to manage. And if the leader comes from a place of, say, you know, level one energy, that's their default. They don't move to action, they get you know really paralyzed by whatever's going on, and they depend on their team. A lot of weak leaders you'll find, you know, are stuck in level one energy, and they really depend on people on their team to really do something about whatever is going on. So when you ask about the fear that comes up, or people are operating from a place of fear, it's coming from you know whatever energy your leader is operating from. And based on the energy that they default to or they operate from, they create those kinds of environments. Those are the rhythms you'll see in the team. So a lot of rush requests, for example, a lot of you know, um anger and people just, you know, blaming each other every time something goes wrong. Who did this? Why did this happen? How could you do this? You know, those kind of rhetoric. And when the culture is, you know, about level two energy where people are just constantly blaming each other, angry with each other, what do you get? You get fear. People don't want to be in that situation. And the the thing about that is also that when something like that happens at work versus when something like that happens at home, it just hits you very different. It's a direct attack on your identity. It's not just about a situational thing that you don't take, you know, personally. Um and it it's something that I also, you know, recently um was speaking to someone, and there was this person who um had a situation with their leader who um did not trust them, did not trust them and constantly, you know, blamed them for things going wrong, and then ended up uh complaining about them to HR rather than with them. And then at the end of the day, that person got put under a pip performance improvement plan, and that person was devastated because you know they were like, I I cannot believe this. I've been uh an award winner, I've been an achiever throughout my life. How can I be on a pip? And it took a lot of coaching and a lot of conversations for the person to even start start to shift a little bit of responsibility or accountability to this other person that was leading them. So the impact that it has whenever something like this happens at work, it's just very, very personal. And that's the irony because you think it's all prof professional environment, people are going to take everything professionally, but no, it's all very, very personal.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Yes, it is.

Blind Spots Like Favoritism

SPEAKER_00 20:57

And the brain loves patterns. I'm just curious. Sometimes awareness is everything, but leaders don't realize that they have a pattern that needs to be uh changed or just analyzed because anger, let's use that, or where they're yelling at their team constantly. Anger is just hurt feelings, really. Do you think leaders can learn how to evaluate their own patterns so that they can have better performance from their team? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

The book that I'm writing should should definitely help you evaluate every every single because there's also a section on um, you know, how leaders create disengagement unintentionally. So it's it's talking about habits of well-intentioned um, you know, mismanagement. So they they have good intentions, but they're mismanaging. So they're expecting one thing from their behavior. But a completely different thing starts happening. And I'll give you an example. If there's a leader that um favors a certain person on the team and is praising them, you know, always pushing them. They're thinking that this person's performing really well. So, you know, I'm giving them praise, I'm I'm pushing them, you know, uh in front of other people, I'm advocating for them. So I'm doing well for that person. But they might not be aware of how it's being perceived by the rest of the team and how they think of their relationship to this leader, they start seeing it as favoritism and that the leader's being unfair. Whereas the intention behind pushing that person is, oh, you're performing well. Let me advocate for you, let me praise you, let me keep talking about you. I'm so impressed by you. So there are a lot of such things that go on um in our day-to-day, and leaders are often unaware, and there there is a way. First of all, you need to be uh tuned in to your own energy, you need to have that willingness in you to grow and to be better. If there's one thing as being, you know, not aware, and then there's another thing as being aware but not wanting to do anything about it. And that is also the case. If you are someone that really wants to be a better leader, I've seen so many leaders that are, you know, uh talking about TED Talks they watch and books, and then, you know, they share anecdotes from different, you know, books and leadership. And in in such leaders, um, you know, cultures, microcultures, you'll see rhythms and routines that are um, for example, they'll have um team meetings where they don't start with status updates, they start with connecting with the humans in the room. They have um, I don't know, like Friday connects or uh TGI Friday kind of you know um meetings where people just talk about the fun stuff they're gonna do on the weekend and how their happen was. Um they make sure they're making time for fun as well as work, for the real connection, and especially now that you know everyone's remote. There's so many people that are working in different time zones. These kind of leaders make um an effort to bring people together, to have connectivity events. Um and they care just a little bit more, even while the work is going on, um, you'll see you know thoughtful um thoughtful things coming from them. For example, if there's like a project going on, they're not just gonna check on the project and how it's pacing and stuff like that. Do you need anything from me? The questions you get from these leaders are very different. Um the tone they speak to you in is very different. And the thoughtfulness behind everything. And that is again, you know, they say that people don't remember what you said to them, but they remember how you made them feel. So the the the warm and fuzzy that you feel under this leadership is is very different. And I'm not saying it's always coming from, oh, you know, like a loving tone. And I've worked, I have personally also worked with leaders that are really hard ass and they're very much of a taskmaster. Yes. But they have such high value systems when it comes to making sure there's justice being done with the workflow, with the workload, with the you know, decision rights, with the trust, with the ownership, with the accountability, that people don't even look for, you know, all the lovey dabby sweet conversation. And they're still very, very happy and thriving under those leaders.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

I think that a a great leader actually communicates with his team, even if he's wrong, even if he doesn't know something. Because that's the the hard part is when leaders act like they know everything. When when in reality they're not, if they're not in the trenches, so to speak, with the team, they sometimes don't know what's going on, but they should be able to say, okay, I'm not up to speed. Can someone do that for me? Can someone fill me in? But a lot of leaders, um, they are more controlling than they are leading. How do you know when that's happening? What do you see as a result?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Yeah, I I love that you bring it up because it is something that I have coached so many people on. Um, and you would often see that happening because there's this not very clear understanding of how to be an authentic leader. Everyone hears this term authenticity, authenticity, be authentic. But what if I'm scared of who I am, you know, and my authentic self? A lot of performative stuff going on with leadership. And what they don't realize is that your people smell the bullshit. They they see the bullshit that you're putting in front of them. They know when you're being real and when you're not. So if you're passing it off as, oh, I know it all, and then you know, you're showing them with your actions that you did not know something, they don't focus on what you said. It's like, you know, children, right? With kids, we say they learn more from watching you than from listening to you. You could give them sermons and instructions all day, but if you're not leading by example, and if you're doing something completely opposite to what you're saying, that's what they're gonna watch and learn. And that's what they're gonna trust that you're all about, not what you're saying and what your values deck is saying. Yes. Um so yeah, I mean, it's very important to um own up and you know, like your your topic becoming podcast. So when when I think of becoming, it's really about meeting yourself honestly, and then shedding the parts of you that don't serve you anymore, and that were created by conditioning. So leadership more than anything else, you know, needs to be in this constant process of becoming becoming better, becoming better for yourself, becoming better for the people that follow you and depend on you.

Values Labels And Personal Agency

SPEAKER_00 29:03

I love that. That's beautiful. And our focus on becoming, it means so many different things to people. It's incredible when I ask them, what does becoming look like for you? I would ask you, what does it look like for a leader in real life, but not theory, but in reality. Um what does that look like for a leader? Are they just performing to get the job done? Or are they being true to themselves, or do they even know who they are? Oftentimes they don't know who they are.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

And I do this um work with them where we do value finding with leaders. Um if you think about it, when we are growing up, we get these labels, right? This, you know, you're creative, you're analytical, you're so smart, you're this, you're that. And then uh um our parents, our teachers, whoever's around in our surrounding that's an author uh authority figure, we allow them to give us those labels. And then in our grown-up life at workplace, as soon as we, you know, become professionals, we start accepting labels from these unknown people that are not technically related to us or hold any importance in our life for a long term, just like you know, you know, your parents and teachers did in an impressionable age. And those labels end up sticking with you, and especially leadership. Like um you're a you're a taskmaster, or you're uh you you love being so it happened to me, you know, in one of my previous roles. I was considered to be um very no-nonsense, hard ass kind of leader, and I wore that as a badge of honor because I was known as someone who could get shit done and like a bulldozer of a leader. So like had a lot of different labels. And oftentimes when I am coaching the leaders, trying to understand the who behind the person, right? It's very important for them to understand what's in their who bag. And for that, they have to understand what labels are they carrying, what do they think they're all about? And it's very fascinating that they start with pride in the labels they've been given. And as you get into how that's served you so far, how is that serving you now? And then when you talk about all the problems that they're facing, and then you know, juxtapose that against these labels they've been carrying, it's very, very fascinating that their actions are coming from a place of those labels because they're being expected to be a hard ass leader, or they're being expected to be a taskmaster, so they end up being that taskmaster. They're expected to be a micromanager, so they end up. It's really about our conditioning and the labels we carry. So then the next thing we do is we do a value exercise. We get intentional about, okay, you were known as this all this time. What do you want to be known as today? If you were to choose your own labels, not labels that other people gave you that have been serving you or not serving you so far. If you had to choose your own labels, what would you choose? And it's amazing to see that they end up choosing some things like that are completely out of the blue. Like I don't even expect those words that they come up with. And then we look at, you know, what are the values that go with those words, that labels that you're talking about, and why that's important to you. Now that you've chosen your labels, now that you know the values, how does it show up in action every day in you working as a leader? So then they define the action that they want to take to be a better leader, to be more aligned leader with the value system that they believe in, not something that was given to them by the company. Because that's that's what happens. Companies change and you know, values change and and we change along with that. And one example I would give you of that is uh think about what happened when the new administration took over. DEI was so big and huge. Like we had chief diversity officers in every company, and there were rules around diversity and inclusion, and then one by one, um, every c every company out there that's you know big and important, they have uh let go of their DEI budgets, they've let go of their DEI people, and they're not even allowed to talk about DEI. And if you think about it, the very people that were actively creating all these events around DEI that were hiring, that were talking, like you listened to them talk, it was so inspiring. They are the very people who are creating comms around why we will not talk about DEI now. So, what happened? Did you really stop believing in it? Or are you just agreeing with whatever's happening in the company or in the environment around you? So understanding that, you know, that agency that you have, it's so important within your microenvironment. You obviously cannot do too much about what the administration is doing or where the world is going in general, but just like zoom into your own orbit, your own circle of influence. What can you do there? Are you showing up as your best self? Are you showing up with the value systems you believe in as a leader?

SPEAKER_00 34:57

Yeah, that's where that fear shows itself again. And also just being vulnerable. A lot of leaders have trouble with that. And so if they're not vulnerable, they're not going to connect with their team. Do you agree with that? I love the labels. I I love how you describe that. Because as a leader, if you were to ask me to label myself and I knew what my label was with my team, I would be worried about getting a different label because maybe it would just change the whole dynamics of the team. Do you ever hear that from them and that exercise?

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yes.

Bottoms-Up Feedback Without Retaliation

SPEAKER_01 35:33

So there have been a couple of times where we have gone and, you know, uh surveyed their teams, not to get exact labels, but to get an idea of what they think about the leader and their leadership style. So it's easy for the leader to also understand that kind of feedback. And again, it takes a lot of courage to put yourself in that position where you're asking your team to rate you because most companies don't have effective bottoms-up feedback. There's a lot of feedback, you know, mechanisms in place. You have performance reviews and everything. But I have interviewed a lot of leaders and a lot of people. And when I ask them, Do you have an effective feedback mechanism that's bottoms up where you can give feedback to your leaders? And something happens about that feedback, every single person I've interviewed have said no. And the only places where this bottoms-up feedback has worked is where the leader himself or herself has taken that ownership that I want feedback, and they have um inserted those in in their day-to-day sort of cadences, like in their monthly one-on-ones, in their quarterly all-hands meeting, where you know people can just give feedback, or even like you know, around a certain project. You know, what else could I have done better? So um when it comes to really being able to give feedback to your leader or being able to um say what they're doing or not doing well, there's a huge fear of retaliation. Yes. And people worrying about whether, you know, this will go against um whatever they're trying to do and somehow bite them in the back, backside. Um, so uh the thing that you asked me about whether um I have seen this like in in the work that I'm doing with the leaders, um, they have gone, taken the feedback from their teams, and then come back and been surprised that the kind of perception that was created. And it's very easy to get into a rabbit hole. That has also happened where there's been like a couple of coaching sessions where we're just exploring. I don't believe they said that. I don't believe they didn't mark me for this one. Uh why? Um, maybe because of that project, maybe because of that incident. So it does become a rabbit hole in the end. Yes. Yeah, so it's very hard to like I like I said, you need a lot of courage to put yourself in that position where you take feedback as a leader and then also do something with it. Feedback means nothing if there's no like closing the circle, right? Right. You do not implement all feedback for sure. But when you get the feedback, at least tell them, hey, you know, I heard you. These are the things we can do about it, these are the things we still cannot change, but we heard you.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

I have to tell you, I I'm just so impressed because all this research and you sharing it in your book is all about um curiosity. Um it curiosity has to happen in order to do research. But curiosity creates clarity. And clarity is probably much needed in a lot of leader team situations. Connection and clarity. All the C's. The C's. Very true. Yeah.

PARC Framework And Where To Follow

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Cool. Before we close, I just can you tell can you share with everybody how we can follow your work and and see what's going on and stay up to speed with what's going on in your life? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Um, so I am very active on TikTok and um Instagram. You can find me with the handle coach Tanutavari. And also uh I have a LinkedIn newsletter called Invisible Lessons. And there also, my name's Tanu Tavari, and you can find me on LinkedIn and subscribe to the newsletter because um I give some really hard, invisible sort of uh, you know, facts and ideas in that newsletter that I've been getting great, great responses for. Like people are coming in telling me, oh my god, I can't believe you said that, and I've been feeling this way. And even with the six stages of disengagement, like identifying how you know you you see who's getting disengaged, what stage they're in, all of that stuff that I'm researching in my book, exploring in my book. Um, and I'm gonna be sharing because my book is coming um end of this year, uh, around late fall. So if you want to get a sneak peek of all the great stuff that I have explored in my book, the way to do that is subscribing to the newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Yes, and it is a great newsletter. And your videos, they're very powerful. And people are told all the time about what we're feeling about emotions, about mindset, the pause, the small steps, all the things. Everybody is talking about that. But what I like about your work is you're not only talking about the issues, but you offer solutions. You know, you offer reason you offer what can be done about it. Right? Because a lot of times understanding what's happening, but actually doing something with it is another story altogether. You agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Absolutely. And that's why even in my book, I haven't left you high and dry with just discussing the problem of disengagement. I actually have introduced a proactive framework. That's what I call it, proactive, which will help leaders really implement some of the things based on whatever they learn throughout the book as the problem and implement based on their own use case, things that are going wrong. So, for example, if things keep getting escalated to you over and over again, where is the problem coming from? And this framework is backed into the Stanford's framework of PARC, which is people, architecture, routines, and culture. So research-based, um, very scientific, and you'll be able to use those different areas based on whatever is going on in your life as a leader and implement some of the changes right away.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

I love that so much. So if that's happening, do this. Very simple.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Very simple. We don't have to overcomplicate. We don't have that kind of attention span anymore.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

I know. It is hard. We're we're just spread thin. What stands out in this conversation, everybody, is that leadership isn't about control, it's about awareness because the patterns you don't notice are the ones shaping everything around you. And change doesn't happen in big, giant moments. It happens in small decisions. The moment you pause, the moment you choose differently, the moment you lead on purpose and one decision at a time. How do you feel about that? Beautifully put. I want to make sure I have the right understanding.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

Yes, yeah, you summarized it really well. And yes, wonderful. Remember that it's all about the microcultures that you build and you have control over that. So stop fussing about things you cannot control and focus on the microcultures you create, and you'll see magic happen with your teams.

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Yes. Thank you for caring so much. I mean, how wonderful that we have you out there just trying to figure out how to instill a little bit of uh happiness in the workplace.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

We need it. Thank you. I'll see you all next week.