This episode features an interview with Tyler Muse, CEO and Founder of Lingo Live, a one-on-one leadership coaching program. Prior to starting Lingo Live, Tyler worked as an analyst for GE Energy Financial Services, where he focused on underwriting and portfolio management of energy investments. He also founded an internationally-focused mentorship program for multilingual youth in New York City. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Tyler to discuss work trends like “quiet quitting”, how to motivate leaders to invest in coaching, and the inspiration he draws from Maya Angelou.
This episode features an interview with Tyler Muse, CEO and Founder of Lingo Live, a one-on-one leadership coaching program. Prior to starting Lingo Live, Tyler worked as an analyst for GE Energy Financial Services, where he focused on underwriting and portfolio management of energy investments. He also founded an internationally-focused mentorship program for multilingual youth in New York City.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Tyler to discuss work trends like “quiet quitting”, how to motivate leaders to invest in coaching, and the inspiration he draws from Maya Angelou.
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“Maya Angelou famously said, ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ And I think that's really important when we talk about communication. Communication isn’t what you said. It is to some extent, but it's only important what you said in terms of how that made the person feel. What was the feeling that you elicited out of that person and was that actually in your or their best interest? [...] That doesn't mean you say only nice things, you have to deliver critical feedback. But if you do it in a way where you make someone feel blamed or all these other things, you're not going to get anywhere and they're not going to get anywhere either. I think it's important when we enter a coaching conversation, this is what coaches do for people; is they help them not only understand what is it that you need to say to this other person or to yourself sometimes, but also how's that going to land and are we sure that that's actually what you're trying to convey or is there a different way to communicate this?” – Tyler Muse
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:44): Tyler’s background
*(04:53): Tyler explains Lingo Live
*(09:18): Segment: Story Time
*(09:36): What inspired Tyler to build a coaching business
*(16:04): Tyler’s advice for coaching leaders to be better communicators
*(23:59): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(24:28): How Tyler works with HR to get investment for executive coaching
*(31:34): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines
*(31:45): Tyler’s thoughts on work trends like “quiet quitting”
*(38:30): Segment: Asking For a Friend
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Links:
Connect with Tyler on LinkedIn
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Tyler, thanks for joining me today. How
Tyler Muse: are you? I'm doing well. How are you, Amanda?
Amanda Berry: I'm doing really great. Thanks for asking. Start off by learning a little bit more about you. Would you talk about your career journey and how you got to where you are
Tyler Muse: today? So I studied international business at the University of Southern California, and I started my career in energy because I had actually spent six months living in China, and this was back 2007.
Not to date myself too much here, but I saw the. Growth in demand for natural resources that was happening over there. And I was like, This is insane. This place is blowing up. They're gonna be using so much energy and resources. And I was worried about kind of energy production and sustainability. So that's a big passion of mine and was where I took my career right outta college.
So I worked for General Electrics Energy Finance group and financed all different types of energy projects. But during the same time that I did that, I also. Into online learning. This was kind of a hobby that I was doing outside of work, but I was learning Spanish with a woman in Guatemala over Skype, and again, I just thought it was for fun.
I thought it was really convenient, really affordable, and just really fun. Like I really connected with this woman and had a lot of fun with her. And after about a. Or so, maybe two years of doing that, I became fluent and that was when I realized, whoa, this works. This could be a business which led me to start Lingo live.
Before we move on,
Amanda Berry: what are some good online resources people can use? Are interested in any kind of learning? Do you have like top three you would recommend?
Tyler Muse: I'm a big fan of. YouTube and podcasts. You know, I think a lot of times people think of learning and they think about credentials, and there's certainly a lot of learning where that makes sense and you need to go get credentialed.
The world that we live in now, it's all about content and high quality content I think is something where you learn something and. If I think about some of my favorite podcasts or YouTube videos that I like to watch, these are folks that I really respect and you learn a ton from. So like, this is just for me personally, but I'm trying to learn a lot about the economy and about kind of culture and sociology and how those things interact.
And so, Example, like journalist that I love. There's a guy named Derek Thompson who writes for The Atlantic and he has a podcast called Plain English, which I think is fantastic. But I've also geeked out on CRISPR technology and like gene editing. And I am by no means of physicist or scientists like this stuff, it can be mind numbing.
But I bought Walter Isaacson's. Book on, um, Jennifer Dota, the woman that kind of pioneered this, which is called the Codebreaker. I'd highly recommend it or just geeking out on YouTube videos like TED Talks about CRISPR technology. So I guess my advice would be for people that are trying to learn something new.
Ironically, the answer I think isn't in courses or schools. I think that a lot of it can be found. YouTube, TikTok, podcasts like this provided that the speakers. Really well informed and have done their research. So I know maybe that's an unconventional answer, but that would be where I would direct folks.
No, I love it.
Amanda Berry: I love that cohesion. That's one of the things you just mentioned, podcasts like this, so we'll take it. Thanks Tyler. Yeah, no thanks for that information. There's a lot out there that's free that people can access if they wanna learn more. So tell us about Lingo Live and what you
Tyler Muse: do there.
Sure. So at Lingo Live, our mission is to empower human beings to contribute their unique potential at work. And the way that we do that is through what we call skills-based coaching, which everything I just talked about in terms of like things that you can learn. A lot of that is lecture-based. An expert stands up, delivers information, you digest that information and process it.
But when it comes to skills like how to build your own self-awareness as a leader, how to have uncomfortable conversations with someone on your team about performance, if you are English as a second language, how to speak up in meetings and keep with the pace of the discussion, like these are more.
Difficult, what we would call human skills, but are often called soft skills that where you really need another human being to help you and personalize to you what being able to gain that skill means and create a path for you to do that. And so that's what skills-based coaching is and that's what we deliver at Lingo Live.
We have a platform, we have hundreds of coaches across every time zone in the world. And we connect leaders to coaches who can help them gain those skills by meeting on a weekly or biweekly basis to kind of talk about very specific goals that they have and utilize skills like having difficult conversations or being self-aware of some of these other things that you don't learn in school.
You kind of have to figure it out in the workplace, and we think that that's a damn shame. So my job is founder and ceo, so that means a lot of things. We have an executive team, uh, head of marketing, ahead of product, and ahead of people. So I am able to do kind of less work on that side because I have such strong leaders in place that know like eons more about that stuff and are better equipped to do that.
I say that my job at Lingo Live is really three things. It is to paint a really compelling vision. And clear vision for where we're going, Bring in the leaders we need to make that happen and support them in making that happen, and then keep the lights on. So a lot of my job is those three things. It's a lot of working on organizational clarity and alignment.
It's a lot of getting in front of customers to make sure that that vision actually does make sense and that what we're delivering to them. As much, if not more value than we had anticipated. It's having conversations internally to figure out how do we get better alignment to towards executing on this vision.
And then it's a lot of kind of supporting these leaders and making it happen and frankly learning a ton from them along the way. And then the last thing is like finance and fundraising and kind of looking at our balance sheet and making sure I can keep the lights on.
Amanda Berry: I have to imagine working in a place where you're coaching leaders how to be better leaders.
I bet that's just gotta be a pretty amazing. Employee experience for people who work there. When you're working with leaders who are learning from other leaders and helping shape what kind of leaders they have, I think I've used the word leader like nine times. I apologize. That has to be a pretty amazing experience
Tyler Muse: for your employees.
I'd love to kind of pat ourselves on the back, but I think like most companies we're not great at it. Like we're good, but we're not great at it. And. I think is this misconception that like, Oh, well you don't need any external help. Like technically, if someone is in a position of leadership or management, it is their job to coach and develop and empower people, and you're a hundred percent right.
In theory, that is what you should be doing. But we as leaders, even though like we work in a leadership development company, we have. Spent a lot of time kind of researching and trying to learn about best practice leadership. We care deeply about it, and despite all that, it is still really hard for us.
And so that's where coaching comes in. We say that constantly, we eat that dog food ourselves, but we say it to customers. It's like, Look as good as your leaders are, they probably need support to be great. And that's where coaches can come in to. Expert and that thought partner, and also someone external from the company, which creates a whole other dynamic that I think is really important, right?
When it's your manager, they work for the same company. There's something about having an external guide who really is only focused on making you successful in transforming your own unique potential that can. Really powerful for organizations. Yeah,
Amanda Berry: absolutely. Let's move into our first segment of story time.
Welcome
Tyler Muse: to story time, story time, story
Speaker 2: time. Let me give your story.
Amanda Berry: You've mentioned that you create a lingo live. You are learnings. Spanish, you know, online with someone from Guatemala and you thought this would be a great business model. What inspired you to really look at the leader coaching as the way you wanted to build
Tyler Muse: this business?
I think a couple things. One in the back of my head was when I worked at ge, I had great managers and I had not so great managers, and I was always. Wondering like what is it? Is that just innate or is that something that you can actually learn? And of course I wanna be a great manager. I wanna be like Ramsey, who was my first manager.
He was fantastic. And I was always kind of subconsciously thinking about like, what was it that made him great, especially as I started to lead people. But in terms of the business of Lingo live, how we got into it. Was basically through a series of evolution, like any business. So we start, and this is our first kind of flagship product, was helping English as a second language professionals to improve their language and communication skills.
And so if you think about a spectrum of fluency in any language, in the beginning stages, you're just learning kind of grammar and vocabulary and sentence structure, right? But what happened over the course of years is we started to help more and more advanced English speakers. And sometimes they were even fluent English speakers.
And the things that they were working on were things like, how do I speak up in meetings? How do I articulate my ideas clearly and concisely? How do I improve my emails and my project scope so that people actually understand what I'm trying to convey to them? Instead of getting confused by what I'm writing, how do I have a really uncomfortable conversation with someone on my team who's just not performing?
And what happened was we kind of started to coach on these foundational leadership skills. We saw native English speakers at these customers kinda raising their hands being like, Hey, Vlad. Yeah, he's from Russia, but he's been here 20 years. He speaks English fluently and he's transformed through this program in terms of how he manages the team.
Like, Can I have access to this? So that's what catalyzed it. We had customers kind of saying, Hey, we got more people that are interested, but they are native English speakers. And that was always part. Our vision as a company. So when I said at the beginning, our mission is to empower human beings to contribute their unique potential at work, that's the mission.
That means there's lots of different versions of that. So we always had planned to go in that direction. But yeah, that happened about three to four years ago. That transition started to take place. Given that there's like
Amanda Berry: an intense focus on the employee experience, and I wanna talk later more about things like quietly quitting and great resignation.
But I will start with the talk about the, um, flight experie. It's become a big hot topic. I'm wondering if the switch to all of these, this focus on employee experience has changed what you've seen and with your clients or in the field, different questions that leaders are asking you to help with different skills.
Has this renewed focus on employee experience impacted what you all do at
Tyler Muse: Lingo Live? I don't think it's really changed our strategy as a company. I think it's more been like jet fuel for our growth. It's the reason we've been taking. Of late is because of some of these trends and because of, you know, as what you mentioned is like this focus on employee experience, a lot more decision makers and executives in companies are recognizing.
Oh wow. We need to invest in career development. So McKinsey did a study, they called it the Great Attrition Report, and they, they literally asked tens of thousands of people who had quit their jobs. Like, why did you quit? Was it for money? Was it for, you know, just like a list of different things. And the number one thing by far, 41% of people in the survey said that it was lack of career development and mobility in the organization.
And so companies. Woefully Underequipped to be able to provide that. Like it's really hard to actually provide career development to folks and make them feel like they're constantly being challenged and learning new things and gaining their skills. And so that's really been, as employers focus on the employee experience, I think what they're really trying to drive into is, How do we reduce people walking out the door?
That's why you do it. It's not just out of the goodness of your heart. It makes business sense that if you're seeing one out of three people leave a job in any given year, that is really painful economically and from a time standpoint for your business. And so you have to solve that problem. Like how do we give them career development opportunities?
And the answer. Unfortunately not going to be purely within things that you develop as a company. You have to bring in external resources who have wisdom and knowledge and skills that are going to be valuable to these employees. And so that's where coaching comes in because again, these soft skills like how to articulate my ideas clearly, how to have difficult conversations, how to hold people accountable, like these are the things that people are asking for and they're the things that the business needs in order to drive.
Results, and so it's been a huge kind of win at our sales.
Amanda Berry: Who do you primarily work with when you think about career development? Is that a function of hr? Is it a function of the lead for that C-suite level? Is it people, managers? Who are you really targeting for those conversations?
Tyler Muse: Yeah, it's usually HR learning and development, so that's a function within HR learning and development, and their job and their passion is to create transf.
Learning experiences for employees, but they're usually pretty woefully underequipped to be able to do that at scale, particularly when you think about personalizing instruction to each individual employee. It's one thing to give someone a framework. For how to have an uncomfortable conversation or how to build your own emotional intelligence.
It's an entirely different thing for that person to situate that to themselves and where they are in the company and the interactions they have with their team and actually build that muscle. So yeah, that person is usually coming and saying, Hey, I've run some trainings on this. We've done some cutting circles of group coaching.
These people need to learn how to actually apply this, and I need support. I need coaches that can work with me and partner with me to provide this skills coaching at scale.
Amanda Berry: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about communication and the importance that plays when you're coaching leaders on these, you know, soft.
I put that in quote soft skills, cuz to me, communication and leaders being in communications. So important for so many reasons. But that's one of the top complaints that I hear in people in my industry in internal comps is that getting leaders to communicate better or getting leaders to communicate at all is a big complaint that they have.
And I'm wondering if you could just speak to that, um, just briefly about what are some big mistakes you see when you're coaching leaders about communicating, and then any advice you would have for communications with people on, on how to help leaders communicate
Tyler Muse: better. I muted my microphone to Google this quote from Maya Angelou, cuz I wanted to make sure I didn't butcher it.
But Maya Angelou famously said, People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And I think that's really important when we talk about communication. Communication isn't what you said, . I mean it is to some extent, but it's only important what you said in terms.
How that made the person feel. Like, What was the feeling that you elicited outta that person, but was that actually in your or their best interest? And so I think all this talk about communication and soft skills, blah, blah, blah, I think it's ultimately about what may Angello said, like how are you making people feel if you're making them feel judged or blamed or fearful?
That doesn't really help anybody in this situation. But if you're making them feel. Curious or motivated or. Energized or, or challenged or safe, all these good things. But I think there's also challenge, That's what I was trying to get to with curious is like introspective, thoughtful, like challenge, but in a good way.
Like I think there's legitimacy to what that person said. That doesn't mean you say only nice things, right? Like you have to deliver critical feedback. But if you do it in a way where you make someone feel blamed or all these other things, You're not gonna get anywhere and they're not gonna get anywhere either.
And so I think it's important when we enter a coaching conversation, this is what coaches do for people. Is they help them not only understand what is it that you need to say to this other person or to yourself sometimes, but also like, how's that gonna land and are we sure that that's actually what you're trying to convey?
Or is there a different way? To communicate this. And so I think it's important to point that out when we talk about communication is like ultimately what are we talking about is how do you make people feel and how do they remember you? And you make 'em feel like, man, that four years I spent at that company just totally transformed my career.
And it was because through a mix of positive and critical feedback from my manager and support, I was able to get to this incredible. Place of clarity and high performance? Or was it a place where I was misunderstood? Blamed, fearful, and all the data shows, Right? Psychological safety is one of the most critical, I would argue the most critical is like you have a psychologically safe team, then.
That team has enough trust that there's no fear of conflict. Therefore, they're willing to talk about things that are holding that team back. They're willing to pay attention to the results that matter. They're willing to hold each other accountable to those results. Like all this great stuff comes as a result in that.
But it all starts with that psychological safety, which goes back to May Angello quote, like what you say doesn't matter how you make them feel is what? Like you pointed,
Amanda Berry: you've had some really great bosses and you've had some really not so great ones, and I can do the same. And as you're talking, I'm picturing this folks in my head in both ways.
So what is the barrier? Is it just really a matter of coaching to get people from being a not great or a mediocre boss to a really great company leader?
Tyler Muse: Limiting beliefs? I think that's the. We all have them. It's funny, I was talking to this guy who's an expert in coaching like 25 years as an executive coach, working with lots of CEOs, some of whom we know you read about in the Wall Street Journal, and he said, 99.9% of us are just your garden variety neurotics, which I love that phrase.
He's like 0.1%. There's actually. Sociopathic tendencies and like those people aren't capable of maybe for whatever psychological reasons, are not capable of getting to a place where they can truly empathize and build their emotional intelligence. But like 99.9% of us is garden variety neurotics. And I think to your question of what limiting beliefs are, again, let's unpack, I say something inflammatory at garden variety neuros.
What does that mean? Limiting beliefs are beliefs that you hold. that have made you truly believe that you are incapable of doing something. Sometimes those beliefs are subconscious. Sometimes you don't even recognize that you hold these beliefs, which is why coaching can be unbelievable. A lot of coaching is building self-awareness, which is a lot of self discovery and there's a lot of work.
Where does this come from? Why do you feel these things? And you'd learn a tremendous amount about subconscious limiting beliefs that you have. But limiting beliefs, I think are what holds a lot of managers back. So examples of limiting beliefs. If the outcome is to, again, have communication such that the way you make someone feel is curious, supported, you know, all the things that we talked about before, limiting beliefs that stand in your way could be, you think that if you say, They're going to snap at you.
Why do you think that? Let's unpack that. Or you think that this person doesn't respect you because maybe you used to be their peer and then you got promoted above them, but they still think of you as their peer. Why do you think that? What's going on there? What evidence do we have to support that? And by the way, it's a two way street, so there's also limiting beliefs on the side of the person being managed.
You get some feedback that your manager provided to you, and it felt debilitating, didn't feel very supported. You work with a coach to figure out why do you feel that way? It might be because it was delivered. Been a very hurtful and unhelpful way, or it might be because you think that this person doesn't trust you to be effective in this role.
And then the question is, have you told them that? Have you had that conversation? Right. So these are examples of, I think, limiting beliefs, again, most of which I think are subconscious, that hold us back from actually discovering the root cause of problematic interactions and problematic. Issues that we have and creating a solution.
That's the other thing. So when I say skills-based coaching, a lot of people think of coaching and they think of it as this professional therapy where all you're doing is uncovering these limiting beliefs. You're unpacking these things. No, that's not, We say BS to that at lingo lives. Not that that isn't important, that's critical, but you gotta take action.
We're about behavior change. So based on what you've learned, what are you gonna go do? Or what does your manager need to do and how are you gonna tell them that? So we try to measure behavior change in terms of like, Based on what you're able to learn, which is so transformative for you, what are you going to go now do in the workplace over the next week that will put those skills or that knowledge into action, and then let's talk about it next week.
And so that's what makes our model really powerful is the supplied learning model that we've built in to ensure that you're not only removing these limiting beliefs, but you're actually putting knowledge and wisdom that you've gained through the coaching. Into practice in the flow of work.
Amanda Berry: I, so I was actually sitting here thinking that it sounds like almost like psychology.
So it was right before you said that this is almost like an organizational psychology kind of component to it. And I'll tell you, I'm totally bought in. I, I think it sounds amazing cuz you can see the impact of just some of those examples you gave and how that does limit people's behaviors and action or not acting.
Um, so I think that that's very interesting. So when you said it's not psychology, I see what the component that. But it's that, that next step, that action,
Tyler Muse: that, that, What are you gonna do about it? Get off the armchair and go do something about it. .
Amanda Berry: Grab my box of Kleenex. Sit on the couch. Let's move into our next segment.
Getting tactical.
Speaker 2: I'm
Tyler Muse: trying to figure out tactics and be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, Why did you sleep through tactics,
Speaker 2: tactics, tactics.
Amanda Berry: There's a part that goes, Why isn't everyone doing this? Sounds amazing. But I know that hr, it sounds like you work with HR, can often struggle to sell leadership on making an investment into this for leaders.
Can you talk about how you work with HR or leaders to make the case, to get an investment or get money to do something like this?
Tyler Muse: Great question. And probably the biggest challenge to like what you just said, implementing this so that everybody should have access to this. Why? There's kind of big picture and little picture.
So big picture. People think coaching, they think expensive because typically executive coaching is tens of thousands of dollars per person. Sometimes a hundred thousand, like some of these big wigs CEOs at Silicon Valley companies have executive coaches that make like. 200,000, maybe half a million. I think part of it is the conventional wisdom of what coaching is and just this association of a price tag to it.
But through technology we've been able to, through a coaching platform, drop that cost significantly to where you are just paying for the coach's time. And the other thing is that, A lot of people when they sell executive coaching, they sell it as a fixed fee. Like, Oh, you have all the access to me whenever you need me, and I'm gonna charge you $5,000 for the next year.
We don't do that. We actually create custom coaching programs where we'll say, What are you trying to achieve here? What's the business outcome that you're trying to achieve? Which gets to the heart of your question, but what's the business outcome that you're trying to achieve, and let's scope out a number of coaching session.
That we think is the right allotment to address that. So like one of the companies we work with is a huge Silicon Valley household name, and their culture is really big on memo writing. So this is a company where you go into meetings and you have to have written a memo. That people digest in the meeting and then they talk about it.
That's a very specific skill that they wanted to target coaching at. And so that doesn't need six months of broad leadership skill development that is focused on writing effective memos. And so we created a customized coaching program to address that skill versus another company may say, What we have is inexperienced managers who have been promoted into roles that they don't have the skills to actually manage their team effectively.
Okay? That's a number of skills. That's not just targeted on writing. That's a number of other things. So maybe for you, you need really six months of coaching. We think 18 sessions can be the right number, and we have data to support these numbers, right? So we measure behavior change over the course of the coaching.
By being able to get feedback from managers and peers and direct reports of the folks that we're coaching, so we can say to a client, in order to solve the your problem that you're talking about, this is how many sessions you're gonna need, and here's the data to support it. I think more specifically, Amanda, to your questions, how do you sell people on the ROI without geeking too much out into like the specifics of the framework that we use, there's something called the Kirkpatrick Scale, which is a really good model for evaluating any type of a learning program, which says that there's basically four levels of measuring learning effectiveness.
There's reaction, which is basically like, do people like the program? Are they satisfied? Are they engaging? , there's learning like, are they actually learning any of these things? Can we measure that? Level three is behavior change, which I just talked about, and that's how we measure that behavior change.
But the fourth, and obviously most important is business outcomes. So how is this helping to move the outcomes that we have as a business? It's not just about learning for the sake of learning, but it it's to actually achieve some type of business. And so to your point, what we've seen effective with our clients and with prospective clients is being able to show all four of those levels of Kirkpatrick, but really zero in on what's the business outcome that we're trying to achieve here.
So in the case of the Memo Writing company, the behavior change that we're seeking is that people get better at writing these memos, the business outcome. It's not just cuz they want people to write memos. The business outcome is that meetings are more productive and we spend less time trying to clarify what is it that this person is saying to us?
Or I spend less time as their manager giving them feedback on their memo. We measure all those things we create. Customized survey questions to be able to measure that so that we can go to a company just like them and say, Hey, you've got this writing issue that's holding you back. Here's data. We have that show that we cut meeting times in half for this company, the amount of time that managers spend cut in half on giving feedback on memos, and we drove a 40% increase in productivity according to the people that we work with.
So I think really leaning into not only the learning and the skill development, but like what is the business outcome that this is solving. Has been really impactful and I would recommend any learning program really double down on it and figure out what is it that you're ultimately solving for the business.
Cuz everyone's trying to save time or money. So if you can't connect what you're doing to how do I save you time or money, then all you have is really a learning program for the sake of learning. When you're meeting with
Amanda Berry: prospective clients, do you help them along that path to find what it is they really want?
Just working with leaders in a way different capacity. They may say, I want X and what they really want. W and you have to sort of help connect and get the dots. What do you usually hear that companies want? Like, I want this, but when they actually want this, what do they think they want the
Tyler Muse: most of?
Typically what we hear is we're growing as a result of that growth. We're promoting people internally into management roles, and those people don't have the skills necessary to lead their teams effectively, and so we wanna provide them some leadership training. If you stop there and just say, Okay, I get it.
That's a problem you wanna solve, We can solve that. Then you're not getting to the business outcome. Right. And so I think our sales team and our customer success team, we wear a coaching hat cuz this is what coaches do, is we'll ask why. We'll probe deeper. Why, why, why, why? And eventually you'll uncover, like in that example, right?
Okay. So they don't have the skills to manage their team effectively. Why? Well, they're not having regular one-on-ones with their team or they're not giving performance feedback cuz they're too scared to do that. Okay? Why does that matter? , it's so obvious, right? You think like, Well, of course that matter, but why?
How is that affecting your business? And so ultimately through that process, you'll land on very specific. Costs or time savings. I think ultimately, like, not to be too simplistic about it, but that's what it is, costs that you're incurring as a business i e, Well, what ultimately happens is people. Because they don't like their manager, and then we have to backfill them.
Oh, how much does that cost? It costs like one and a half times their salary. So we just go through that process with them to really uncover that. And yeah, your instinct is spot on. Amanda. Like even buyers, they're not really thinking about it this way. They're kind of stopping at that level two. Level three, they lack skills.
They need to learn skills. We need behavior change to achieve that. Like, yes, you're right. And how is that gonna move the bottom line? And I think that's especially important right now when everyone's just looking at budgets saying, Why should we spend money on this? Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Budgets being cut, People are gearing up for this big risk sessions.
I think that's a great call out. I'm helping people quantify what that could be. I'm gonna move this into our next segment. Rip from the headlines. You hear the news. Extra, extra. Read
Tyler Muse: all about it. Our stories rip from the headlines. Rip
Speaker 2: from the
Tyler Muse: headlines, the headline.
Amanda Berry: I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of these work trends, right?
Quiet, quitting. I've just been reading a lot more about quiet, firing, remote, hybrid, bringing or not bringing your authentic self to work. There's just a lot of conversation about that right now, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of these trends. Based on the coaching you're doing, the leaders you're seeing, this is kind of a broad question, I'm just asking for some thoughts you have, but just because you work in this space and are helping leaders to navigate these conversations and live.
Basis. If you have any thoughts on why these are coming to light now and then what you're seeing in the field.
Tyler Muse: Yeah, I've got a bit of a provocative, I guess, or no BS take on this. Like I think quiet, quitting. Let's talk about that one cuz everyone's talking about it. I think that this is a cute term that some brilliant marketer came up with to basically restate what has always been known as disengaged employees.
That's what we're talking about, right? When we say quiet, quitting, we're saying people are disengaged and they're still working there, but they're like doing the bare minimum and mailing it in a little bit, right? Is that what you mean when say quiet quitting? I think so, yeah. Okay. That's been around for as long as we've.
Work together as human beings. . Like you have people that just aren't disengaged and so what's the root of that? We talked about that before, the lack of career development. I think that's the biggest thing. McKenzie show 41% of people, That's 41% of people who quit a job. So think about all the people who don't quit that are quiet, quitting as you're talking about.
It's gotta be more than the 41%. So we've seen data that's anywhere from kind of two thirds to as high as 80% of employees. Actively disengaged. And a lot of that is just, I can do this job, but I don't really see where it takes me and I'm just gonna kind of stick around and do the job, but I'm not really going to be going above and beyond.
I'm not really gonna be super engaged with this for XYZ reasons. And so I think that's where really invest. Development conversations and development of that employee of, Hey, you can do this job for sure, or maybe you can't do this job and you're giving that feedback, or like you could do so much better.
But it's also like, here's some other skills that you might. Be really good at given your strengths, like these are things that I think we could develop and that would benefit our business. So it would be kind of a two way street where you're winning and we're winning. And so I think a lot of what's at the heart of quiet quitting is disengaged employees.
Ultimately, the cost of that is attrition. People leaving, which Gallup did a study, it cost the US economy a trillion dollars last year. Disengaged employees leaving their jobs. But ultimately, yeah, that's what I think that one is quiet. Quitting is just disengaged employees who, if you look at the data, the vast majority of them, it's not about pay.
Some of them it is, and it's not necessarily about the job that they have. It's more about, My manager isn't super inspiring. and I just feel stagnant. I don't see career development opportunities. For me, that is a solvable problem. , it's a lot easier than hiring someone to replace them.
Amanda Berry: It feels like calling it quietly.
Quitting up puts the onus and the worker right. As a worker, I. Quit my job. My company doesn't quit for me. And I think you're right. It's, it's always been there. Just disengaged Sounds a little different than almost. I'm purposefully doing minimum cuz of quitting. I'm not interested in my job where I feel like a lot of that agency relies on the company, as you pointed out, to help me be engaged, right?
Challenge me in positive ways. Give me career development leaders who I trust and and wanna work with and for. I completely agree with you. It's nothing new. Like you said, the marketing person came with a great way to get to get these words in people's mouths, and then it causes huge uproar. I feel like there's been a change from like bring your authentic self to work to don't bring your authentic self to work.
Have you read a lot about
Tyler Muse: this? I hated that article. That was a New York Times article, at least that I read. Basically the gist of it was basically saying, Okay, when we lived in the pandemic, Post pandemic world, everything moved to remote and there was a lot of like leeway being given to people like showing up in their pajamas.
And also there was a huge demand on talent, but not a lot of supplies. So the employees held all the power and now that dynamic has shifted. So like you need to show up to work, you need to actually come into the office. You need to show up professionally. Again, kind of similar, like I guess you have to in some respect admire the marketing behind the catchphrase that was used there.
But I think the idea that somebody should be inauthentic at work and should be some different version of themself. We talked about psychological safety before. That is the crypta night to psychological safety. If you cannot. Be authentic and genuine in your interactions. You clearly lack the psychological safety to feeling like others are gonna create the safe space for you to share those thoughts, those opinions, those concerns openly and honestly.
And if you don't do that, You're gonna quit, and by the way, your company's gonna suffer. They're gonna have like the lowest common denominator, worst ideas, low performance. So the whole idea that like don't show up as your authentic self, it's just nonsense. I don't even know what it means. I think a lot of the onus is on companies for failing to create the psychological safety for folks to feel like they can speak up and share their authentic self.
Now I will caveat that by saying, yeah, if your authentic. Is wanting to spend your time at a company doing things that your job description does not. Say you should be doing or taking the time off, away from Mark, right? Like there is an agreement with your company that like you are hired to do a specific job and we want your ideas, we want your creativity, we want your camaraderie, all those things.
But like ultimately you're gonna be held accountable to these outcomes that we both signed up for. Then. Then, yeah, like obviously in that case, if that's what authenticity is being described as is like getting to do whatever you want. Like, no, you can't do that, but I don't think that's what it is. Again, 99 times out of a hundred.
The issue with authenticity at work has to do with not feeling safe enough to express your ideas freely, and particularly for underrepresented groups within the organization who don't have that psychological safety as much for reasons that are, you know, obvious. And so I just think it's really dangerous and hurtful to start going down this path of.
Don't bring your inauthentic self to work because of just the ramifications that that has on psychological safety at companies. Let's move into
Amanda Berry: our last segment, asking for a friend
Tyler Muse: who's asking for
a
Speaker 2: friend.
Tyler Muse: Hey, asking for
Speaker 2: a friend.
Amanda Berry: As you're talking about coaching leaders, there's a few that I, I've thought of from my past that could really benefit from coaching. My fear is there are some people who just don't see their gaps, and these can be big ones, and some of the ones I'm thinking most of is just emotional intelligence, right?
And having the. The awareness to notice that big gap in your emotional intelligence Asking for a friend here, how do you get leaders on board and help them identify a need for coaching in certain areas where they may think they're really good at it, but you have to help bring them along? What does that look like?
Because I, I know being in communications, I working with leaders, sometimes you have to really carefully step around and help them find those paths by leading them there. How do you all do that? The leaders really lacking emotional intelligence or communication skills or, you know, any kind of people skill or, or whatever.
How do you help them identify that and then get on board to help to coach and get
Tyler Muse: better at it? I mean, I wanna say off the, It's not easy. I don't wanna make it seem like, Oh, Amanda, like what? You just do this and it's fine. Again, 99.9% of us are regard variety neurotics, and so you've got something to navigate there if someone is not willing to view themselves objectively and stand out and really look at the impact of their actions.
So I think you kind of have to take it on the case by case basis. If this is a leader that you know is motivated by. Right. A lot of people talk about being data driven. Well, Tyler, here's the data. The results are in from your team and your peers, and here's what they say your strengths are, and here's what they say your growth opportunities are, right?
So if you can show them, here's what you're really great at, but also like. A lot of people said, You're really struggling with this one thing. It doesn't mean they're gonna embrace it and be like, Oh, no know that's not a problem. You know, I'll do that. Right. You're still gonna have people push back. But I think if they're truly data driven, like they're going to kind of understand like, Hey, this isn't just like a subjective, like this person giving me this feedback.
This is like, there's a substantial amount of data here. The vast majority are saying, I need to work on this. I think the other thing is showing them a path to solving it, because like if you just give someone, this is a growth opportunity, something you're not super strong at, that's not really helpful.
But if you can say, Then here's a program that we have. It doesn't have to be a coaching program. It can be any kind of coaching program to say, if you're open to it, I have a suggest. Okay. What is that? I would suggest you either work with a coach and you can work on this thing. I have examples of coaches or I would suggest maybe just you try something in your next one-on-one meeting that's gonna be helpful.
I think all of us inherently. There's not a person on the planet that doesn't want to feel valued and respected and heard. And so if someone is struggling with their communication skills or their emotional intelligence skills and you can craft the narrative in a way that's gonna resonate with them, which is a big if, and again, like I said at the beginning, it's not easy.
I think that the more important thing is to show them the. To solving it. And again, that motivation's gonna be in their core. They're gonna want to feel valued or heard. Now you're gonna have people that are still going to push back or say, I don't have time for this. That happens a lot. I don't have time for this.
So then that gets to the business outcomes that we were talking about before. Okay, cool. You don't have time for this. So let's play out what's gonna happen now. And again, if it's a data driven person, , the data shows 41% of people say that, like lack of career development in port managers and it leads them to leave the company.
So we have a hundred employees, half of whom report to you. I'm just playing out the numbers here, right? But like you can kind of show them here's what's going to happen. We don't solve this problem, it's going to cost us time and money through people leaving the organization or staying in the organization, their performance dropping.
So I think having those business outcomes to show someone how this is actually gonna save you time or money in the long run is a, a great way to do that. So just recapping. Deliver the message in a way that you know, aligns with how they process information. If they're data driven, collect data. If they're more empathic, think about a more empathetic kind of storytelling way to do it.
Second thing is show them a path to solving it. Don't just give them the information, but show them a suggestion of how you might solve it. And third, show them the cost of doing nothing. From my experience,
Amanda Berry: most leaders are very data driven. So that that is something I always recommend in my profession in terms of why should you do a town hall or you know, whatever it is.
I love that suggestion. Using data to convince leaders to change or get better at certain skills. So this has been so much fun. Before I let you go, let our listeners know where they
Tyler Muse: can find you. You can find us, our company lingo. is@justlingolive.com. You can email me directly. I'd love to hear from you.
My email's, Tyler lingo live.com, and we got all the social networks as well. We're on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. You can find us at Lingo live.
Amanda Berry: Is there anything else that you would like our listeners to know that we didn't cover
Tyler Muse: today? I think particularly in a time like this, when people are stressed and they're worried about the economy and about the future, I think about this mission of unlocking your unique potential is to remind anybody who's listening, if you're in a work situation where you don't feel like you are able to, Contribute your unique potential that that's not all on you, that that's okay.
There's a lot of people who are feeling the exact same way, and that's okay. It's gonna be a marathon, not a sprint, but there's a way to get out of that situation, but just don't think it's your fault or it's on you. I think that's far too often. What. The default is for us as as garden variety neurotics, to understand that like that you're not alone.
A lot of people are feeling the same way, and there are solutions out there, whether it's coaching or having uncomfortable conversations with your manager or friends, hopefully knowing that. This is a very common thing and that you inherently do have this unique potential. You just might be in the wrong organization or you might just need access to tools and resources and people who can help you, but I think that's the most important thing.
Just acknowledge that it's okay to not. Feel okay about this and know that you're not alone.
Amanda Berry: That's great. Thank you so much for joining me today. This has been awesome.
Tyler Muse: Great. Thank you, man. That's been a lot of fun. Thank you
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