The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 367 - Tool Kits

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Pete.

Pete: I have a brain full of ideas.

Jen: Oh, lucky us.

Pete: I know...for what feels like the first time in four years.

Jen: Wait a minute, do you have a small child?

Pete: I'm only half joking. But I do have a brain full of ideas. I went to a conference in Sydney last week. And I saw like ten different speakers talking about culture and leadership. And I was sitting in the second row with my notebook, nerding out so hard. And so, I'm going to bring one of these ideas to you today. And it is around tool kits. I want to talk to you about tool kits. What are they? How do we build them? What tools do we have within them? And how can we use this as a way to think about leadership? Navigating change? And how do we use them to be more effective in the work that we do?

Jen: Pete, I think you know this...but maybe you don't know this. I'm obsessed with tool kits. So, I cannot wait to have this conversation. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: I don't know if I did know that. Do you mean literal tool kits, like hammers and screwdrivers and such?

Jen: I actually do own a couple of tool kits, but I'm talking about figurative tool kits. I just find the visual of knowing where things go and what they're used for, so helpful.

Pete: Okay. I mean, me too, and so does the speaker that spoke on the topic of "The Intentional Leader" was the title of his keynote. His name is Kirun Goy. I'll put a link to his stuff, his resources, his podcast in the Box O' Goodies. I am officially down the Kirun Goy rabbit hole. This guy is awesome, highly energetic, and actually, funnily enough (maybe this is why I was particularly drawn to him), used terms that we might use like "nudging" and "intentionality". And he started talking about Austin Kleon at some point. And I was like, "Oh my god, you're one of us."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Like, "Get him in here." And so, I will paraphrase what I recall of his idea, which will undoubtedly not do his idea justice. So I will put some links to his actual...he's got a book coming out, and a few other things. But what I loved about the presentation that he gave was the fact that as leaders in the companies he was talking about, but I think this applies far more broadly, we walk around with often an invisible (but sometimes a visible) tool kit at our disposal. And many of us don't even realize A., that we have one, or B., what's in the tool kit. And so, as he was sharing his findings in...I think he interviewed one hundred and twenty leaders around the world. And what he articulated was that despite the fact that he knew the leaders he was interviewing had tools somewhere in their tool kit, otherwise they wouldn't be where they are, when he asked them, "What tools do you have in your tool kit," something like one hundred and twelve of them couldn't answer the question.

Jen: Oh, fascinating.

Pete: Like they didn't even know what tools they had, off the cuff. They couldn't answer. And many of them, he said, came back to him and shared something with him. So his whole talk was about this idea of like, what does it look like to be intentional and deliberate about almost auditing your tool kit, writing down and thinking about the things that you have access to, at your disposal? So that when you find yourself in difficult situations, when you find yourself in a challenging circumstance, or when you find yourself reacting to something, you can almost intentionally go, "Oh, I have a hammer for this," or, "I have a screwdriver for this," or, "I have a framework, a tool that I can use for this moment." As I'm saying this, I realize this is, like, I think what you do so brilliantly. I also think it's perhaps what we try and do in this podcast, it's like, "Here's a tool. Try this." But for some reason, the way he framed it, the way he talked about it, it really struck a chord and lit a fire underneath me, to go, "When's the last time you, Pete, and you, listener, thought about what tools you have in your tool kit?"

Jen: Yeah. I feel like this is literally my job.

Pete: Right. Say more, say more.

Jen: This is what I do with actors all day, every day. Or if I'm working with people in corporate spaces in leadership roles, talking about what tools they have at their disposal and when the use of said tool is appropriate. It's the same thing when I'm coaching people who do public speaking. It's all about the tool kit, honey.

Pete: Right. So, I agree with you...and you think about it as a tool kit. What I found interesting was his assertion, which I tend to agree with, that people that aren't Jen Waldman don't know what tools they have. And so, what would it look like if they did? I just find that so useful and compelling.

Jen: Pete, maybe I've said this on this podcast before, but you know what drives me crazy?

Pete: Oh, you've definitely said this before.

Jen: When someone gives someone else a note to, "Make it organic," or like, "You'll find it," or like, "Just try something." And that kind of stuff makes me nuts. And I think it pings off of what you were just saying, that it's really hard to know what to do if you don't know what you're using to do it.

Pete: Right. Agreed. So, one of the things Kirun shared in his talk was that a tool should help you solve a problem. So it's almost like the order of events is, "Oh, here is this challenge. Here is this problem. How might I solve that? Which tool can I use to help me with that?" Rather than, to your point, "Here is this problem. Hmm. Just find it."

Jen: "Figure it out."

Pete: "Figure it out." What does that even mean?

Jen: Is it helpful or off the deep end if I use an artistic example?

Pete: I mean, this is the whole premise of our podcast. So please try to blend your examples with my examples, to make sense for all of our listeners. I think, absolutely go off the deep end.

Jen: Okay. So in the current Broadway landscape, there is a lot of pop or pop-style singing being done. And a lot of singers who I work with are trained classically. So making the leap over to a pop sound feels daunting, because very often what they're told is like, "Just do it. Like, just sing in that style." And they're like, "No. Ah. Help. What?" And then, we say, "What are the tools that you have to create stylistic integrity here? You have vibrato. You have tone. You have texture. You have dynamic. You have resonance." And then, we just go through all of the different levers one can pull or the tools one can pull out of the tool kit. Immediately, you see the dots connect, and they're like, "Oh, I actually know how to do this. I just needed to know which tool to apply, in order to solve this problem." And I imagine this is true in a leadership context, where it's like, you know, you have to go in and have this difficult conversation. "Just have it."

Pete: Right. Right, right, right.

Jen: Well, again, "Think about tone. Think about eye contact. Think about body language. Think about silence. Think about breathing. Think about repeating," all of these things. These are all tools.

Pete: Yeah. So for some reason, in the past, I've thought about these more as frameworks than as tools. And maybe this is just me liking the metaphor of the tool of tools, is kind of the visual that it invokes. I literally pull out my little orange tool kit, and I open it up, and I go, "Hmm, what have I got that could help me in this situation," rather than like, "Where do my frameworks live? What's the home of a framework?" I actually don't know. They just live in the ether, in the cloud. Whereas for something, it's almost like this briefcase we carry around with us, you know, of tools. And we go, "Oh, I've got this," which feels empowering. Because when I find myself...not if, but when I find myself in a situation that feels overwhelming or hard or like I haven't done it before, I can go, "No, no, no, there must be a tool in here that can help me with this." Or we discover there's not. And then, we go, "Oh shit, I've got to be intentional about which tool I now go in at."

Jen: That's right.

Pete: "Which skill do I want to go and learn and build and have a tool around that can help me, next time I come across this situation?"

Jen: The other thing I find really helpful about imagining the tool kit or the tool box or the tackle box, or whatever visual lights you up, is that you put things in their proper place. So like, your finishing tools will be in a different place than your building tools. Your paintbrushes are going to be separate from your paints, which is going to be separate from your canvases. And I just ran into this actually yesterday with a client, where she was showing me some of her work on a piece of material. And I was like, "Oh, you started with the finishing tools. You actually have to go back and just go to like the basics. You know, what are the actual building blocks of this piece? Right now, you're giving me polish. But you haven't focused on building the structure."

Pete: Right.

Jen: So sometimes, just like being able to say like, "The category of tool that you're using is not appropriate for where in the project you are right now."

Pete: Oh, that's genius. "You're putting the overcoat on, before you've put the undercoat on. What are we doing here?"

Jen: Exactly.

Pete: Oh, that's good. I like that a lot.

Jen: And the thing that's helpful about that is, it's not like, "Oh, your work is bad," or, "You're bad." It's like, "You actually have the tool you need in this moment. You just picked the tool that was for a different moment," not like, "Something's wrong with you." It's like, "Just pick a different tool."

Pete: Right, yeah. One of the things I liked about this was, as he was describing, he was like, "I'm going to share, I'm writing a book on this. And there's a handful of tools in the book." And he said, "I want to share the top three with you." And I guess this was where he leveraged the Austin Kleon of it all. But he said, for one of them, "This is not mine. This is like straight from a bunch of the leaders. They said this is something they do. And I just thought that was useful to call out to people listening to myself, to go, you can learn and borrow tools from other people." These are not finite objects that you need to have your own of, like a literal tool kit, I guess. These tool kits tend to be more non-zero sum, where if you tell me your tool and I tell you my tool, now we both have two tools. It's not that we each have one. And so, I just, I liked that idea of like, it's okay to borrow tools off people, in the context of being a leader or being a performing artist or being a change agent of some description. I mean, this is why we read books. We take tools and frameworks and ideas from books, so that we can use them ourselves. So like, permission to steal like an artist was kind of the whole point.

Jen: Yes. I mean, the phrase, "We don't have to reinvent the wheel," applies here.

Pete: It's literally, yeah. That's a tool.

Jen: Right. Like if something already works, use the thing that works. I feel like I remember a famous cartoon of someone saying, "Look, boss, I reinvented the wheel." And they're showing a car that has triangles. And it's like, "Well, that's not going to move." That might've just been the whole punchline. But yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel if the wheel works.

Pete: We've got the wheel, yeah. I love it. So you sort of mentioned a version of this in one of your questions that you asked your client, in the example you gave earlier. And I think it's like an activity worth doing, something I have got on my list of things to do myself, which is to answer the question like it's like a tool audit, "What tools do I have in my tool kit right now?"

Jen: Right.

Pete: "Can I get clear on what they are?" Because I even just was doing this in my head as we were talking, and I was quickly realizing, "Well, there's way more tools in my tool kit than perhaps I would initially think." And so, I think it's worth documenting and writing them down, and going, "Here are the tools I have in my disposal," into a, I don't know, like a literal Google doc called "Tool Kit".

Jen: Yeah. Agreed.

Pete: Great. And so, the other thing on my mind is, how many tools have you and I shared in the three hundred and something episodes of this podcast?

Jen: Oh my gosh.

Pete: Right? This was part of the moment where I was like getting overwhelmed but excited, as he was going, "You know, like what I discovered in interviewing all these leaders is like, A., they might not be aware of the tools they have. But B., a lot of them have great tools. And then, C., if they don't, there's really...this is what leadership development is all about, essentially, is like trying to build your tool kit." And as he was talking, I was like, "Oh my god, I don't know if I've ever thought about the fact that in almost every single episode, we are trying various tools to talk about the thing that we're talking about."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And I was like, "Maybe there's a world where we could summarize, you know, like The Long and The Short Of It's tool kit." Can you imagine?

Jen: I think it would be thousands of pages long at this point, Pete.

Pete: I know. Isn't that wild?

Jen: Because you're right. In every episode, consciously or not, we're trying to actually fashion the conversation into something that a person could apply...

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: ...as opposed to just think about.

Pete: Yeah. I think it's almost like a podcast episode of ours (not to get too in the weeds) is, "Here is this idea, this situation, this challenge, this inspiration." And then, it's almost like we both put our tool kits on the table.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And we go, "Hmm, which ones of these could help us in this situation?" And it's like, "Oh, I read this article last week. That could be useful. Maybe we could try that." And you go, "Hmm, that reminds me of this other tool that I like." So it's, I don't know, for what it's worth...this is getting a bit meta. But I just think about everything that we've shared, in so many capacities, is like trying to help us all build more tools in our tool kit.

Jen: Yeah. You know, during the pandemic, when I took the studio online -

Pete: Never heard of it.

Jen: Never heard of it. Blocked it out. Forgot it. I actually did this with one of my classes, is, I tried to enumerate all the tools we use in that class, so that I could pass those tools on to other people who were going to teach the class online, when we were online.

Pete: Nice.

Jen: And every now and then, I go back to that document and I'm like, "Oh my god, I forgot about that one. Oh my gosh, right. That one is so successful. Why am I not using that?" So I love your idea that actually quantifying what you know, what you have at your disposal, can be so helpful. So that if you're feeling stuck, you don't try to be "organic" about it. "Let me think up a new thing based on nothing." It's like, "No, no, no. I actually already have tools at my disposal, that I can use to solve this problem."

Pete: Right. And herein lies the punchline of Kirun's keynote, it was titled "The Intentional Leader". And so, the step once you've audited, and realized what tools you have, and built your tool kit, is, can you intentionally and deliberately use it? Rather than have it be this audit that you did in the Google Doc that you never revisit, and then, like to your point, you're constantly thinking you need to come up with something new on the fly. Versus, "I'm intentionally reaching for the right tool at the right time." And that, as a practice of a leader, is how we be more effective and solve problems.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.