[00:00:01] What I've learned in management, what I've learned in research, what I've learned in my relationship with Carlos, is that the only thing that I can actually change is me. He's not going to ask me how my back feels better. He just wants snacks. He just wants snuggles. Always giving love.
[00:00:25] I'm Jackie Clayton, and this is Sit, Stay, Hire, the podcast where we talk about what we can learn about leadership from dots. Hmm, Carlos is a Labradoodle, and he is three quarters standard poodle and one quarter Labrador.
[00:00:49] He's about 80 pounds, and these days he has very close cropped hair because it's hot. He's a black dog, and it gets hot being a black dog. The interesting thing about Carlos, when we got Carlos, somebody said, you know, he's mostly poodle, and what poodles do is they spend their time coming up with ways to get you to do what they want you to do.
[00:01:22] Carlos is that kind of a poodle. Carlos is very definitely that kind of a poodle, and he is extremely communicative and extremely consistent in being able to describe exactly what he needs and what he wants. And at our house, he's more like a member of the pack than he is fashion accessory.
[00:01:54] And our relationship, so in the beginning, he was my dog, and Heather, my wife, was his executive assistant. That was the way she told the story. Now, these days, he's her dog, although he's got this soft spot in his heart for me because of the earlier relationship.
[00:02:23] But Heather is the source of joy in his life. So I could go on and on about both of them, Heather and Carlos. Well, I do have to say, now, with the majority of these conversations, I only have met their dog on Zoom.
[00:02:44] I have had the honor of meeting Carlos in person, and John has had the extreme pleasure of meeting Shiloh and Scooby. And Carlos had a huge impact on us. Me and Todd were in California on the beach. It was time to go, and we know because Carlos came to get us. And now, I remember as Carlos was coming, I was like, he's not coming to get us, really, is he? Like, we're going to have to bring him back. Oh, no. He was very, very specifically sent.
[00:03:13] And so it made me feel good. I knew that he has accepted us into the pack. He didn't try to chase us into the ocean. He was bringing us back. And I'm sure he's smart enough to do all of those things. But now, you said with your pack, when Carlos was there, as soon as he got there, you knew it required all three of you to change and learn new ways of being. You, Heather, and Carlos.
[00:03:40] And most people talk about training a dog, but you're describing something closer to a negotiation. What did you have to give up? Hmm, I never thought about it that way. What did I have to give up? Well, because Carlos is a COVID-era dog. And so he's never been away from us particularly. And he goes everywhere.
[00:04:09] And so one of the things I gave up was eating indoors when we go out. Yeah. Because if they don't like dogs, they don't like dogs inside of restaurants. If they don't like dogs outside of their restaurant, we don't go. Right. So there's that. And there's some limits on what you can do if you're traveling with a dog all the time. That's right.
[00:04:41] Now, say more about that, because in the past I've shared someone wanted their dog to love them. And I said, no, I can help work on respecting the dog and helping it make the choice. But what does respecting a dog look like? Well, intellectually, the opposite is treating a dog like a piece of property.
[00:05:11] And the measure of success in the relationship is, does the dog do what I tell the dog to do? Mm-hmm. That's, I don't like relationships like that. Yeah. I don't like to be in them. And I don't think dogs like to be in them. Yeah.
[00:05:36] And so the expectation that my will is the ultimate decider in things, I have no idea where the latest P-mail has been left and whether or not to sniff there. That's, I don't know. P-mail. P-mail. That is so great.
[00:06:04] I've explained to everyone when they come to their house that their dog is probably going to poop within the first five minutes. Uh-huh. And now I should tell them just the poop mail. Or just check, they're like, oh, they found the poop mail. Because they're like, no, my dog won't do that. I'm like, they all do. They all do. Right. And it's because of, yeah, I don't know why, but they do. But you know why, and it's fine. Right, right. It's what they do.
[00:06:31] So a lot of the things that make Carlos' day and make Carlos who he is are really none of my business. Mm.
[00:07:13] Right. And you change and you change to accommodate. And that's how I think the relationship with Carlos goes. But I want to talk about your pronoun story because you wanted to indicate support. You have to be able to making those changes. And sometimes it takes a little effort.
[00:07:41] But you shared a story that reminds me of that, of making sure that setting it up so that people are comfortable. You started adding pronouns after your name to indicate support. And the workplace that you were at at the time did not receive it well. Yeah. Like that? Can you tell us a little bit what you're willing to share about that story? Sure.
[00:08:11] Well, you know, just like my relationship with Carlos, I think the best thing that I can do for other people is remove things that are in the way of them being free. I don't understand why. Like, like, I don't understand.
[00:08:37] Like, we're trying to make life, try to make life easier for everyone so we can get along better, so we can do our best at work, so that we can all, like, come together on why people purposefully try to make life more difficult. And yet, expect people. And yet, expect people. I think we just have a history of trying to control or take over or have things in our way.
[00:09:05] And when we try something different, even if it works and it's simple and it doesn't cost anything. There's people that, like, refuse to, I don't know, change. It's like you had said that you could feel that unspoken judgment and not, you said, like, the other ring. Was that the first time you think you felt that in that way?
[00:09:36] Well, so that's a great question. And I am learning some things. That's the best part of being alive is getting to learn more stuff. But these days I'm learning about how older people are discounted. Right.
[00:09:54] And as I learned about that, it's easier and easier to see that there have been elements of that my whole life. But as a sturdy white guy, I was trained to ignore all that stuff. Yeah. Dissociate from it. Yeah.
[00:10:19] And so part of what's happening for me is that I'm starting to see that that's been part of my life all along. I think that is something that becomes more and more obvious.
[00:10:36] And you have to do more advocating for yourself and make choices because you almost get taught to accept whatever that is. Yep. You do get taught. You know, and so it's like, oh, well, I, you know, I'm 53. So I'm like washed up. And it's like, P.S., you'll probably be here for like another 30 years. What? What am I going to do for 30 years then?
[00:11:07] Nothing? I don't get it. And so many people do choose, you know, to do nothing and accept it. You're right when you talk about learning and those things. I want to talk about something that you said when you said like nothing changed about about you. Did you mean nothing changed in the system or nothing changed in you when you were talking about within the pronouns?
[00:11:37] I'm curious about that. Nothing that I could see in the organization changed. Right. My experience of the organization changed. I started to be able to see how it was a club with rules. Yeah.
[00:12:06] There was a club with rules. And one of the rules was don't use pronouns. Right. And so so there's a kind of a shunning that that happens that that means the emotional content of the relationship gets thinner because you can't you can't shun work. You just have to shun the person.
[00:12:31] Like what I'm finding, I tell you, I feel like it's funny because as you're learning, especially as you're you're working like you with dogs, we say we redirect or we like do a correction.
[00:12:56] You know, if you're doing it the right way, you are tuning in with your dog and trying to work with your dog and managing the situation for your dog. That's the trick that you're not managing it for your yourself.
[00:13:13] The other part of that that some people look at and we were teasing about earlier was a shock collar or a stronger method for correction. They never go to respect and never learn who they have in front of them or or their gifts. And it's it's it's freaked out.
[00:13:42] You know, I just freaks me out when they when you go straight to correction. I'd love if you have anything to offer or share about what happens when we go straight to correction without having teaching respect. So Carlos has never experienced that. Carlos is Carlos. We don't tell Carlos. No, we don't correct.
[00:14:12] Carlos. The question is, are we doing our part in building the routine that we're trying to build? Right. And so so just very gradually and very graciously, we have this little little tiny neighborhood. You've been here. It's got one street, a street that crosses it. And then there's a big, busy street that wraps around it. And so Carlos is free to wander inside of the community.
[00:14:42] He's free to wander inside of the community when there's somebody out with him because neighbors don't like stray dogs without somebody around them. He'd be fine. He'd be fine. He'd be fine. The neighbors wouldn't be fine. When you get over to the end of the block, Carlos sits and waits for the leash to go on. And we didn't correct him to do that. We just had our walks go that way. And it was time for that.
[00:15:12] It was time for the leash to go on. The leash went on and nobody thought anything of it. And now if you say to Carlos, leash, he'll come over and get ready to have the leash put on. So it's it's I don't think that I do think most most correction is of the kind that you described. It's humiliation in public.
[00:15:43] It's not guidance. It is take somebody out and embarrass them, shame them in public. And the correction matters most when other people see it. And lots of people raise their dog that way. Yeah. But but just like I don't think you should treat people like property.
[00:16:10] I don't think you should treat any living creature like property. That's that's interesting. I've been thinking in this conversation. One of my really early career things was the engineering department I worked in had 10,000 people in it. Wow.
[00:16:37] And we knew at least some of us did that that there was going to be a change in the way that people worked. That was coming because automation and computing was there. And in the new way that people worked, the theory was that it was going to be cross-functional groups instead of silos.
[00:17:01] And so I had the privilege of running the first big cross-functional team. I just left them the hell alone. They were all grownups. They were all good at their job. And the tricky part was we wanted them to get better at doing each other's jobs. Yeah.
[00:17:30] And that actually wasn't my problem was getting the team to be a team and produce. Their problem was figuring out how to work with each other. Right. And not have tight boundaries around what they did, but flow in and out of each other's work. The very best thing I ever did for that bunch was was.
[00:17:59] Interact with them as little as possible. I mean, I did a survey once and I remember it for HR, like, how do you feel? How can we support? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I remember somebody responded, like, can I just do my job and go home? How about I just do my job? Right. And it's true. It's like you'll work it out. A lot of times people will work it out.
[00:18:28] Most of the time people will work it out. The, well, I just told you about the extreme environment. And there were all sorts of people with very public idiosyncrasies. And they had learned to be public about who they were because it made it easier for other people to figure out how to work with them. Wow.
[00:18:52] When you, when you, when you got a universe of people who are hiding, a universe of people who can't do pronouns with their name, all sorts of conflict breaks out that it's hard to understand. When everybody knows who everybody is, you can figure out what's going on pretty quickly.
[00:19:16] But it means letting different kinds of people do different kinds of things and not insisting on a right way to do it. Insisting on an end result and let them figure it out. I wish somebody would have done that. You know, it's like, I always think back.
[00:19:44] It's always those situations where it's like, gosh, they could have really, I know somebody could have really used that advice 20 years ago. Or even more recently than that. Well, so, so this is where I tell the story about visiting you. Okay. Todd, your husband is a magician. He's just a magician.
[00:20:13] And I watched him one day as the dogs were coming in, taking each individual dog and onboarding it and building today's pack. And sometimes he didn't know the dog very well. So he had to look at his notes about the dog. And sometimes he knew the dog really well and didn't need to look at his notes about the dog.
[00:20:37] But it was like calming and getting them in the groove of being there so that as the pack arrived, it grew and evolved until it was a bunch of dogs having fun playing together. Yeah. Right? And that's what you want in the workplace is a bunch of people playing together. That's right. Right?
[00:21:07] I mean, how could you not want that? And how could you think that that was anything but really, really smart? But most people don't. Most people think that management is about control. That's right. Right?
[00:21:28] And imagine if the job of a manager was to make work so exciting that everybody who worked in the department couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. You're right. I've worked in environments like that where people just couldn't wait to get there.
[00:21:55] And it is amazingly productive. Amazingly productive. And if you are trying to keep your staff operating, it's actually, I think you might spend more time talking about your business a little bit because it's going to be a lot like that where not everybody is the same person all the time and everybody leaves. Right.
[00:22:21] And so what you want when everybody leaves is you want them to come back or you want them to want to come back when it's time. Right. So we were volunteering at the animal shelter and I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. Like, I can't figure it out. And then one day we decided to like, we're looking at all these side gigs because like, I don't know how I'm going to make any money.
[00:22:49] So we decided to watch Dogs on Rover. And then this dog, one time I was on my computer, like just pod, just like close my computer. And my husband was like, I think that's the first time you've relaxed in like a year. Like you're always on the computer. You're always trying to figure something out. And he just like jumped in my lap. And I was like, oh, like he doesn't care if what kind of job I have. He's not going to ask me how my back feels better.
[00:23:19] He just wants snacks. He just wants snuggles. Always giving love. Flash forward, they call us with an emergency. A dog had gotten hit by a car. Had a broken hip. And was, they thought they were going to have to amputate. And they were, and the dog was just crying in the crate. And they were like, this dog just needs love. Like we can't play. And it really wants to get out. And it just needs somebody. And I know that you can't do the things that you work.
[00:23:47] So I was like, okay, we'll foster this dog. I think if there was much more accountability on the side of leadership management trainers and say, oh yeah. I was busy a lot during the time of their onboarding. That's my bad. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Sponsors
