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In the world of business, not all deals are what they seem.
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Fortunes rise, empires crumble, all with the stroke of a pen Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers.
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Welcome to Mergers, she Wrote, where we examine strategies and stories behind the biggest deals in business, because in M&A, the real risks are the ones you don't take.
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Welcome to Merger, she Wrote.
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I'm Paloma Goggins, the owner of Nocturnal Legal and your host.
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Today we'll be talking about how, even if you think you're communicating in your business, the likelihood is you're probably not.
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Today with me is Jen Kay, and she's going to talk to you about how to better your communication and become the leader you've always wanted to be in your business.
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That's a big nut.
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Thank you so much for being on today.
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Thanks for having me.
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So I know we had a conversation before we sat down today and I think it really sparked a great way for us to just have this conversation at all, which was you were saying that there's kind of an epidemic per se that people don't necessarily view themselves as leaders, even though they're in roles where leadership is key.
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Can you tell us a little bit more about?
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it.
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I'd be happy to.
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It's this really interesting thing that happens.
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And let me start by asking you a question, paloma, when you were a little girl and your parents or people asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, what were some of the things that you said?
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I wanted to be an oceanographer for a really long time, but I don't think I had.
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You know, it was like the little kid responses.
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I think at one point I wanted to be a judge, which is funny because I ended up becoming a lawyer, so I wasn't too far off.
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You're at least in the field.
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You're in the industry.
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Well, being a leader I want to be a leader is generally not a response that most kids have.
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As a matter of fact, when you think about it, our very first leaders are our parents, so it's very authoritative and hierarchical.
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Then our next level of leaders that we experience is our teachers and school.
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Again, there's a structure to that and, much like anything, when you have good teachers that really draw the best out of you, that becomes one thing.
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But you're looking at it through the lens of a student.
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So the level is here.
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The first time you actually experience what we might consider some type of self-governance or self-leadership is college, and that could be a little suspect, depending on your training and where exactly you're leading yourself or recovering from where you led yourself the night before.
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So that's really the first time where you get to make your own choices and you have this self-awareness of where you are going and how you are making decisions.
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Then you get into the workplace and then it's dependent upon.
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Do you have some great leaders who have modeled?
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What leadership is that make you feel seen, that challenge you to grow, or have you had leaders that made you feel diminished, that didn't hear you that were always interrupting, that chose others around you, and so you never really felt seen, and what happens is we model and emulate the leadership that we've experienced.
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You might take some leadership classes somewhere along the way, or maybe inside of an organization.
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They've got a really great leadership development curriculum right and know the importance of growing leaders, and if you haven't, you're, frankly, just making it up on the fly.
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You're, frankly, just making it up on the fly, and so if you've had poor leaders, then you have this subconscious belief let alone of what you learned earlier in your life around.
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Oh, I don't want to be that, so I'm not going to be a leader Not recognizing that at all times, you are, if nothing else, the leader of your life, the leader of your family, even in a relationship, you are co-leaders in the relationship.
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So I recognize that's not even inside business.
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That idea of leadership, though, isn't something that's front and center, and so we use the language relatively flippantly.
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Oh, you need to be a good leader.
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What does that mean?
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And at the end of the day, after longer than I care to admit I know after quite some time.
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what I've found is that, one, there is no one way to lead, and that, two, the more you know yourself, the better you are able to create what your unique blend or brand of leadership may be.
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You said so many good things and I was coming up with other things to spin off of that and I honestly my list is too long.
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I was going to say one of the things that I like that you said is that if you are having leaders that are modeling behavior that's poor, you start to disassociate from that leadership role and I think that's a really fascinating idea that you know you look at your leaders that are currently mistreating you or not giving you sort of what you need or want in your role as you're growing in business and you think to yourself I don't want to be like that.
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And to your point, you had said you know a lot of people model what they've learned and it's so crazy to to think that through about.
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I mean, even in law firms, you a lot of times see partners who have spent their whole lives being kind of mistreated in a lot of ways in toxic work cultures and, unfortunately, because they had to fight and battle their way to their role, a lot of partners tend to utilize the same.
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I don't it's not hazing, but it's just mistreatment kind of, in a way, of their associates and it's just this kind of perpetuating cycle unfortunately, sure, and that becomes the culture.
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Yes, and the thing about it is they're not, there's not malice in it, they're not being malicious, it's simply what they know.
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I actually worked with a company recently very interesting, and it's a law firm and even the language right partner, senior partner, and so there's this very hierarchical perspective and they wanted them to be more developed as leaders.
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They did not even use the word leader as part of their lexicon in the culture.
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So here we are working with these leaders who are mentoring others and they're having these wonderful new awarenesses about how they can improve their communication and communicate with greater confidence and presence, and the overthinking and how to do that and to really lead inside of that, and yet the culture is not yet able to meet them with that.
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So it becomes this interesting tension point and so we only hope that as we learn and grow and find those new patterns for ourselves in our identity as a leader, then we can become better, even in an organization where the culture you can change the culture.
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One person, marcus Buckingham, who started this whole exploration of strengths, talks about as a leader, you create a microculture.
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Every leader creates a microculture and there have been studies done around performance inside of retail, inside of research, around performance and engagement, and it all comes back to the leader and the leader recognizing how to help others play to their strengths.
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I love this topic, there's so many things to discuss and so I think, kind of spinning off of what you were saying, which is that a lot of people like the original point of this sort of introduction, which was that a lot of people don't recognize that, even if they're not the president of a large corporation, a lot of times people are in leadership roles.
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They might not be the key leader of the corporation, but they're potentially leaders of their smaller team or leaders of their life.
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And I was joking around with you before we sat down to record this podcast, that in hiring people for my business, I was looking for resources on how to manage my people and finding that all of the keywords had to do with leadership.
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But it was like, oh, ding, ding, ding, I apparently am looking for leadership resources, not management resources, right?
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So to your point, this idea that leader is this, you know, highly visible, very public individual that we kind of conceptualize in our mind, as, like you know, highly visible, very public individual that we kind of conceptualize in our mind as, like you know, the CEO of Pepsi or you know, the president of the United States.
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You know what this like gigantic leadership role when in many ways.
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We're a leader at all times, in just different facets.
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So I love that, and so I think this is a great segue to say that, and so I think this is a great segue to say you are a leader.
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Take that, absorb it.
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Now that you know that you're a leader in some capacity, whether it's of your business, of your people in your family I want to ask, jen, what are ways that you've seen people once they've realized that they are the leader, whether that's, you know, in the business or in their life?
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What are some things that are their biggest pain points?
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What are what are and I know there's so many things you can discuss.
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So you, you pick the channel.
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We'll go down that road.
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Fair enough.
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Fair enough, I think, first, if you're being really honest, is recognizing your resistance to leadership.
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You've you've got to know what you're working against in order to work for what you want, that's well said.
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In that so many places to go.
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I've asked like the most loaded question of Jen right now.
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I appreciate your multi-layered, loaded questions, paloma.
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So simply going back to then the challenges is, I think first is clarity, is knowing, in any situation, what you want.
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What's in the way we often jump to a how before the what.
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How am I going to solve that?
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How are we going to deal with this?
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Or, you know, how am I going to say this to that person?
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And you know, I'm sure you've had those nights where you're up at night spinning over what you're going to say and how am I going to solve that?
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How are they going to respond?
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How are they going to do this when often stopping and asking what before?
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How is the first place of challenge that we need to get to reduce overthinking and get to at least an initial point of clarity.
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Does that make sense?
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I think for anyone listening who doesn't quite understand what like in the real world, asking what versus how looks like, can you give just an example?
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You know what I might actually be able to think of one I was thinking of.
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So it's a common issue among attorneys when working on transactions, especially large M&A transactions, that they're sort of I mean by default attorneys communicate all day long, and I think, unfortunately, at the speed at which transactions progress, sometimes communication can become assumptive I think is the best way to put it where people think that they're on the same page but we're really just talking at each other.
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And so I worked on a transaction in the spring and the firm that was working opposing me was a very sophisticated firm, and so my assumption was that they kind of were doing their side of things right.
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And so what ended up happening was we got to the kind of final stretch of closing and I had been working on a set of documents, and it just so happened that they had been working on the same set of documents that they weren't technically responsible for.
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They were my responsibility because they were like my client's documents, and so we kind of had this aha moment of we were both doing duplicate work on certain things and it really came down to the fact that we had had a bunch of calls about who was responsible for what.
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But when you went back and looked at the notes, we kind of didn't ask the what, we just knew the how.
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We knew how we were going to close, we knew how we were going to get from point A to point B, we knew all the documents that needed to be done.
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We went over a closing checklist, but the what part, which was like okay, you've got X, y and Z, I've got ABC, kind of got glazed over.
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And so I feel like it's it's kind of a little bit of a glib explanation because I'm trying not to share client information, but I think in essence was, we really had great, if you looked at it, we had great communication, but it really wasn't deep communication.
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It was the surface level.
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It was here's the transactional, here's what we're doing.
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When it needs to be done, who's doing what?
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It wasn't a moment to take a step back and I love the way that you said that of go a little deeper and say, okay, let's take a step back, and that is a challenge.
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So, from a communication standpoint and a leadership standpoint, when we're on the hamster wheel of a project, of a case, of anything of work, you're going, especially now with all of this increased technology and AI.
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You're going, especially now with all of this increased technology and AI whole other subject we actually need to pause, slow down, take several steps back and say, okay, what are we actually doing here?
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What's my role, what's your role?
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Are we on the same page?
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Where are we?
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And taking that time to get to that deeper what, rather than the transactional of what's getting done, what got done, what's what are we doing?
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It's the wait, a minute.
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What's happening, what's actually happening and what are we trying to do together?
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I feel like the concept sounds so simple at surface level, but implementing it can be a whole nother ballgame, and I think you know this is kind of a you know me saying a kind of Jen has helped me in sort of streamlining my communication.
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And so I think, from your perspective, when you work with leaders, regardless of their roles, you know what are you seeing that helps them kind of just turn that wheel just a little bit further to say, okay, this is how you've been communicating, this is how we tweak it so that you're getting better results, you're getting the end of the project gets completed how you anticipated it right.
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Because, to your point, you know, everybody has a different communication style, and so not only does your inability to maybe communicate clearly enough what you want and need cloud the issue, but, in addition, you're also dealing with someone else whose mind works potentially entirely different than yours.
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Completely.
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It's human nature to think that if we have a way of communicating or processing information and acting upon it, that other people would do it the exact same way.
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What's wrong with that?
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How could they not?
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And it's just natural human assumption.
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To your point of it sounds a little bit easier said than done, and when you can keep in front of your mind that the greatest myth is that everybody else sees things the way that I do, they think the way that I do, and that they communicate the way I do, then you can begin to take a step back and translate.
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So I do believe that when it comes to communicating with confidence and presence, leaders need to be translators, and I believe actually you are.
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So I'll give you a very simple example.
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We'll play with your translation a little bit.
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So I majored in Japanese, I minored in Russian, I speak some Spanish, some French and a little Indonesian or Greek on a good day.
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I speak dog, cat and the occasional horse.
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I speak eldest child, which is different than middle or youngest child.
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Are you have siblings?
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I'm an only child, an only child.
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But you know what?
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That I feel like that whole idea of like where you are in your family, birthplace is crazy.
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That is a whole another conversation.
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It's, it's a.
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It's a whole different layer.
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I speak dance and the dialects of argentine, tango and salsa.
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I speak some xbox 360, some sig sour 380.
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Like you know, we all speak multiple languages.
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You know you speak the language of dog.
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You speak the language of merger.
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You speak the language of acquisitions, by the way, mer of acquisitions.
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By the way, mergers and acquisitions not the same language, would you agree?
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Agreed, okay, so you speak the language of law.
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However, that's very different from other, and you see where I'm going.
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We're constantly in a state of translation and, depending on which hat we're wearing or which role we're playing, we are constantly in a state of translation and when we can think about it from the perspective that other people do not wake up in the morning wondering how to make your life miserable today.
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That's not.
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They're not setting out to make things challenging.
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Like you said earlier.
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They may simply have a different way of thinking or processing or looking at the information and doing things differently than you do.
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Your job as a leader is to learn what their language is Now, you don't have to be fluent in it.
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Let me be clear you can be a bottom line communicator, yet when it comes to pre-exit, you might need to speak the language of details for a while, and that doesn't have to be your strength.
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You don't have to be fluent in it.
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That's why you surround yourself with people who are fluent in that.
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There are people who communicate more from a people first and they want everybody to get along and be happy and collaborative, which is great.
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Sometimes you can't be coming from that space and sometimes, especially if you're a bottom line communicator, it's like oh, hold on, let me take a step back, use a few more words and include people in the conversation.
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It's just recognizing what strategy is going to best serve me in making sure this communication is heard.
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We go back to the first part of our conversation.
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Just because you're exchanging words doesn't mean you're communicating.
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Up to 40% of all communication I would hazard to say it's actually probably more than that can be lost between the transmission of the sender and the receiver, the communicator and the listener.
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Now, with all of the distractions we have with you know, phones and instant messages and ding-dings and everything coming up, I would suggest that has probably increased.
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Communication is actually when someone has heard what you intended to communicate in the way that you intended it, even if the words that they used to describe it are different.
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I feel like I just got on a soapbox, so I'll step back.
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No, I think all the things you're saying, I think, hit home for anybody who's in a leadership position and feeling the pain points of.
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I can't tell you how many times I've spoken with clients who are the owner-operator of their business or, you know, one of the co-founders, and they're struggling with not being heard right, people not doing the things that they want them to do, and a lot of it stems from communication.
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It's not necessarily that people are intentionally not doing what that person wants.
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It's that they can't fully understand or appreciate the level of, you know, performance that they're supposed to have, or whatever it may be, or they just don't know what's being asked of them.
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Yes, that too, it's not more complicated than that.
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And as leaders, as we grow let me put it this way we evolve and we grow as leaders.
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It's learning how to not take it personally.
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It's learning how to not take it personally.
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They're not understanding doesn't mean we're a bad leader.
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It just means we're learning how to communicate differently and, on the flip side, doesn't mean they're a bad employee.
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100, because they just may not understand what you need or want, right?
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Um?
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I was reading, uh, bernie brown's book on um, I think it's like braving, braving to leader.
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I can't think of the title actually the wilderness um, it's, it has to do with leading, with vulnerability and and I think you had said it well in a separate conversation we had which is that vulnerability allows you to be honest about what you need and what you want, but it's not to be confused with oversharing, which I feel like maybe that's a more universally female problem to deal with.
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But I do think the interesting part about what Brene Brown talks about is that if you can't kind of peel back the layers and have some vulnerability in speaking with people and leading, in a way that kind of demystifies, like why we're doing the things that we're doing, right, because a lot of people they're, you know, I'm even seeing this in my own business, you know people will say like I know how to do it because we're working on that, but like, say like I know how to do it because we're working on that, but like why?
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Like clients will say I understand why you've put this in here because you've kind of told me, but like what's the deeper reasoning for this?
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And that deeper reasoning part is what really gets them.
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Because if they can't understand the whole picture, there's, you know, anxiety, there's concerns, there's all these lingering emotions, that kind of follow.
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So I think, maybe just shifting a little bit into some of the things that I'm seeing and you kind of giving some explanations too, to like round this out.
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You know, when someone is exiting their business and they have key employees whether it's 100, which I've seen and it's a little more impersonal or it's 15, and they've been with the business for 40 years Regardless, at some point during the transaction the owner has to tell them that the business is being sold.
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Granted, there's a lot of when to do it, whether offers are going to be made and negotiated prior to closing.
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There are some business owners who opt to wait until the final moment.
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And then, of course, offers are handed out, like around the closing or immediately on closing, which I think is sort of a whiplash disaster, but that's beside the point.
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You know, thinking about communication and vulnerability and kind of all the things that we've talked about so far, you know what are, what are some ways that someone who's thinking about selling and transitioning their business, how can they approach this and the communication that they're inevitably?
00:23:50.136 --> 00:23:54.491
I mean these are conversations nobody probably ever wants to really have because they're tough conversations, right they're, they're inevitably.
00:23:54.491 --> 00:23:57.260
I mean these are conversations nobody probably ever wants to really have, because they're tough conversations, right they're.
00:23:57.260 --> 00:23:59.848
They're conversations you avoid for as long as you possibly can as an owner.
00:24:01.133 --> 00:24:19.772
So you know what are ways that, when you have those tough conversations, that you can be better about communicating, knowing full and well that at all times, if you're acting as translator, having tough conversations layered on top of having to translate can be even more precarious.
00:24:21.965 --> 00:24:27.999
Multi-layered and wonderful question and exploration.
00:24:27.999 --> 00:24:29.771
So a few things.
00:24:29.771 --> 00:24:47.631
One, there are differences between insecurity, so the more insecure we are, the more we tend to overshare male or female, by the way vulnerability and influence.
00:24:47.631 --> 00:24:48.933
Okay, so there's some interesting dynamics in there.
00:24:48.933 --> 00:25:10.431
Coming back to what you think of as crucial conversations, or what people think of as I'm going to avoid this conversation as long as possible because I don't like the feeling of dissonance or conflict that it provides within me and what it boils down to is I don't know how to say it there's this magical gap between what we think, what we feel, and the words that come out of our mouth.
00:25:10.431 --> 00:25:25.194
We're thinking it, and maybe over and over and over and over, because we can't quite align what we're thinking with what we're feeling, let alone figure out the right words to say to the right person who may take it totally out of context.
00:25:25.194 --> 00:25:33.316
So it becomes a matter of what I think of, in order to be honest, authentic and transparent at all times.
00:25:33.316 --> 00:25:37.627
Now, there are levels of that, because there might be confidentiality issues.
00:25:37.627 --> 00:25:55.946
You're not going to go over, share information inappropriately, so it always helps to have advisors, whether they're in your organization and part of your organization, which I do think is important that you have that as well as a completely objective third party that is outside of your organization.
00:25:55.946 --> 00:26:02.569
That's one of the things that, frankly, I love about coaching is, I don't need to know the ins and outs of your business.
00:26:02.569 --> 00:26:05.016
What I need to know is what's important to you.
00:26:05.016 --> 00:26:07.388
Where do you feel aligned?
00:26:07.388 --> 00:26:16.585
What is it that you're both thinking and feeling, so that then we can craft and create the strategic messages that you can speak that feel like?
00:26:16.585 --> 00:26:20.637
Oh, that's exactly what I want to be saying.
00:26:20.637 --> 00:26:27.174
You're just spending so much time thinking about it and feeling about it that the words don't come, and so it becomes this strategy.
00:26:27.174 --> 00:26:28.285
So think about it.
00:26:28.285 --> 00:26:37.234
Level one of letting everybody know, regardless of how long they've been with the organization and regardless of how many people they are, there are some changes happening.
00:26:37.234 --> 00:26:50.974
Here's what we're thinking we don't yet have a timeline and not but and here's how we're going to keep you informed along the way, and that comes down to mid-level manager and so on.
00:26:50.974 --> 00:26:57.896
That that gets passed down and as a at the C-suite or as the founder you're modeling and letting them know.
00:26:57.896 --> 00:27:11.756
This is how we're going to communicate and this is how we're going to let others know about our decision-making strategy so that they feel like they're a part of it, because if they don't know to your point, they are going to make stuff up.
00:27:11.756 --> 00:27:13.558
Do you like that self-editing?
00:27:13.558 --> 00:27:19.307
I'm going to make shit up.
00:27:19.307 --> 00:27:19.929
Do you like that self-editing?
00:27:19.929 --> 00:27:21.191
I make shit up.
00:27:21.191 --> 00:27:23.414
Man, and we are meaning making machines, and so that's sort of level one.
00:27:23.434 --> 00:27:31.193
Then maybe set a cadence, because the exit starts at least two to three years before actual exit, a hundred percent.
00:27:31.193 --> 00:27:41.626
And so, as a leader, you've got to be thinking what's beyond exit, both for myself, which that's kind of another subject, as well as for the business and how I communicate that.
00:27:41.626 --> 00:27:48.651
So, when you think about it through the lens of transparency, here's what's happening, here's the cadence that we're going to communicate that.
00:27:48.651 --> 00:27:54.859
Whether that's a monthly town hall I'm sorry, that's quite all right.
00:27:54.859 --> 00:28:06.244
Whether that's a monthly town hall or a bimonthly update not necessarily a status update, but a story update this isn't just about the numbers and transactions.
00:28:06.405 --> 00:28:32.336
Going back to what's the deeper conversation, when you can connect with people as people and think about what might they be thinking and feeling right now, even to the point where, if you know, as an example, that you're going to be laying people off, letting the mid-level managers know hey, here's how we're going to communicate around that, and here's how caring we're going to be, and here's how we're going to language that we don't know what this looks like.
00:28:32.336 --> 00:28:35.728
We want to make sure that we take care of everyone as best as possible.
00:28:35.728 --> 00:28:48.633
Thank you for your patience as we navigate this and we will continue to keep you apprised as we learn and grow and make these changes, or we're all going through changes and I'm learning about leadership at a whole new level.
00:28:48.633 --> 00:28:49.654
Right now.
00:28:49.654 --> 00:28:54.074
I'm having to think about the business in ways that I haven't before.
00:28:54.074 --> 00:29:00.329
So again, thank you for your patience as we navigate these challenging times together.
00:29:00.329 --> 00:29:03.557
Then you humanize yourself as a leader by being vulnerable and authentic without going.
00:29:03.557 --> 00:29:05.090
Yeah, okay, here's the numbers, folks.
00:29:06.526 --> 00:29:19.752
Whenever Jen goes into like PR mode, I'm always just so impressed because the phrases she comes up with just sounds so great there's such, there's such like professional, corporate, like it.
00:29:19.752 --> 00:29:25.153
Just when you're saying them, even though I'm not even the intended recipient, I'm like, oh, I feel so much better.
00:29:25.153 --> 00:29:44.392
I strive to be able to communicate in that that sort of way that provides clarity, comfort, but still at that professional level, and I do think it's just an art form in a lot of ways, and obviously an art form you've crafted over many years of experience.
00:29:44.786 --> 00:29:45.549
It's what I love.
00:29:45.549 --> 00:30:11.214
I love helping people find the right thing to say at just the right time, first and foremost for them to feel like yes, that feels good for me, because the better you feel about what you say, no matter how challenging it is, when you know that you've said it the right way, no matter how hard it was, and that you set up the circumstances and the conditions, then you can say I felt good about that.
00:30:11.214 --> 00:30:12.436
Then others will at least hear it.
00:30:12.436 --> 00:30:13.406
They don't have to like it.
00:30:13.406 --> 00:30:18.542
People don't have to like what you say, as long as it's honest.
00:30:18.542 --> 00:30:20.868
When you think about the people that you know.
00:30:20.868 --> 00:30:33.417
I'd rather have someone be honest with me and lay it down, Even if I'm like, oh, I've got, I've got some mentors in my life that I go to specifically for that, and it's like, oh, oh, that hurt.
00:30:33.417 --> 00:30:40.750
Okay, you're right, you know you need to hear that, because otherwise we're constantly in a state of self-confirmation bias.
00:30:40.750 --> 00:30:42.035
So true.
00:30:43.829 --> 00:31:03.846
No, I think one of the risks once you become a leader, truly stepping into that role, is that you don't allow for the space to have even subordinates come to you and say, hey, I have to tell you something that's not working for me, because that's I think you know.
00:31:04.228 --> 00:31:16.724
We're talking kind of high level about all the ways to be a better communicator in a leadership role, but in a lot of ways, making room or space for someone who you are leading is also a part of this conversation.
00:31:16.724 --> 00:31:19.817
Like you're saying, like maybe the feedback based.
00:31:19.817 --> 00:31:25.855
You know, I think thinking about back to, like you're saying, college is the first time you self-lead, potentially, and how many times.
