Mastering Meetings: Building Great Teams in Remote Work with Rich Maltzman
Guests, Leadership, Working Remotely

Mastering Meetings: Building Great Teams in Remote Work with Rich Maltzman

Wayne Turmel and Richard Maltzman about the importance of meetings in building great teams. Richard emphasizes the role of project leaders in facilitating effective meetings and discusses the principles of project management and Agile methodology. He also introduces the concept of "meeting goblins," which are different personalities that can emerge during meetings. Richard highlights the need for leaders to manage these personalities and create a safe and productive meeting environment.

Key Takeaways

1. Meetings are a crucial touchpoint where strategy meets operations in a project.
2. The purpose of a kickoff meeting is to build the project team and ensure everyone understands the project's goals and importance.
3. Agile methodology has brought new meeting techniques, such as stand-up meetings and information radiators, that can be beneficial in any project.
4. Meeting goblins are different personalities that can emerge during meetings, such as the reticent person or the bully. Leaders must manage these personalities to create a productive meeting environment.

Featured Guest

Name: Rich Maltzman

About: Richard Maltzman is a master lecturer at Boston University and previously had a career at Nokia. He is an expert in project management and has co-authored books on facilitating great project meetings and building great teams.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
02:35 The Unspoken Power of Meetings in Project Leadership
03:11 Bridging Remote Work with Project Management
04:06 Meetings: More Than Just Info Sharing
05:03 Kickoff Meetings: The Team Builder's Starter Pack
06:03 Sustaining the Team Vibe Throughout the Project
07:07 The Facilitator: A Project Leader's Hat
08:21 Embracing the Agile Mindset
09:25 The Agile-Waterfall Blend: Taking the Best of Both Worlds
11:24 Agile Meeting Techniques Unpacked
12:17 Virtual Meeting Facilitation 101
14:09 Meet the Meeting Goblins
15:05 The Meeting Ensemble: Handling Different Personalities
16:12 Inclusion Matters: Giving Everyone a Voice
17:21 Leading Through Dominating Meeting Moments
18:14 Going Off-Script for Urgent Issues
19:09 Facilitation & Its Influence on Project Leadership
20:30 The Notetaker & Whiteboard Artist: Unsung Heroes
21:11 Closing

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Team

Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!

 Order
Read More
Essential Skills for Thriving in the Modern Workplace with Mark Herschberg on Long-Distance Worklife Podcast with Wayne Turmel
Guests, Surviving Remote Work, Working Remotely

Essential Skills for Thriving in the Modern Workplace with Mark Herschberg

Mark Herschberg discusses the essential skills needed to thrive in the modern workplace. He emphasizes the importance of creating a career plan and regularly checking in and refining it. Mark also highlights the need for effective communication, especially in the remote work environment where communication channels are more limited. He explains that writing skills and written communication have become increasingly important, as 70% of work is now done in writing. Additionally, Mark emphasizes the significance of networking, both internally and externally, for career success. He encourages reframing the perception of corporate politics and recognizing the value of building relationships within the organization.

Key Takeaways

1. Creating a career plan is essential for long-term success.
2. Effective communication is crucial, especially in the remote work environment.
3. Writing skills and written communication are increasingly important in the modern workplace.
4. Networking is valuable for career growth and navigating corporate politics.

View Full Transcript

00:00:00:21 - 00:00:34:02
Wayne Turmel
Greetings. Salutations. Hello. Bienvenue. The new all that good stuff to the Long-Distance Worklife podcast, the show that is really about making sense of the modern workplace, whether you are remote hybrid, stuck in an airport wherever you are, however you do your work. Welcome. Welcome. My name is Wayne Turmel. I am a master trainer and coach with the Kevin Eikenberry Group and I am really excited to have you with us today.

00:00:34:04 - 00:01:01:07
Wayne Turmel
Marisa is sitting patiently editing and producing this episode while I have a another terrific conversation with a really smart person. And today's topic is one that I am obsessed about, which is as somebody who doesn't have a formal degree and has done okay for himself, what are the skills that we need to live in thrive in this new workplace?

00:01:01:09 - 00:01:14:21
Wayne Turmel
And our guest today is author Mark Hirshberg. He is the author of The Career Toolkit Essential Skills for Success. No One Taught You. I love that. Hi, Mark. How are you.

00:01:14:23 - 00:01:17:12
Mark Herschberg
Doing? Great. Thanks for having me on the show today.

00:01:17:14 - 00:01:25:08
Wayne Turmel
Well, as always, thank you for being here. Tell us a little bit about you and what you do and then we'll jump right in here.

00:01:25:11 - 00:01:51:10
Mark Herschberg
I do do a couple different things. I am primarily a CTO, CPO, chief technology officer, chief product officer. I do that sometimes when I build my own startups. Sometimes I work for other companies. Right now I'm doing fractional work, so I'm consulting to a few different companies, giving them a few hours a week as they either need help or lately there's been a lot of questions about, I hope, and helping them with.

00:01:51:12 - 00:02:12:12
Mark Herschberg
Now I've also, in parallel, been teaching at MIT for over 20 years, developing these skills, teach them to our students because these are skills we don't normally teach. And we recognize that years ago I put them into the book The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success that no one taught you. To help reach a wider audience. And I now do speaking on that as well.

00:02:12:14 - 00:02:34:18
Mark Herschberg
And then I also have an app brain bomb, because when we read a book like mine or listen to a podcast like this one, we get information, but we need it months later, days later at the place, and we often have forgotten it. So Brain Bump is a free app to help people retain what they get from my book, other books, podcasts and other sources.

00:02:34:23 - 00:02:36:13
Mark Herschberg
So I do a lot of different things.

00:02:36:15 - 00:02:55:17
Wayne Turmel
Great, great stuff. And we will have links to the book and to Brain Bomb and all of that good stuff on the show notes, as always. So you and I were talking before we started. And by the way, if you ever get a chance to listen to the conversation before Dave rolls, that's probably the coolest part of the show, if I'm honest.

00:02:55:22 - 00:03:25:20
Wayne Turmel
This is something that I'm obsessed with as somebody who didn't get the formal business education and kind of certain stuff on the fly. I'm obsessed with how people succeed and why really smart people often don't. What first of all, what are the tools that we need? And then let's talk about how it's different in this world of remote hybrid work from the way that we've traditionally thought about our careers.

00:03:25:21 - 00:03:47:22
Mark Herschberg
There are ten skills covered in the book, and you've seen these before. Now you might see a list that has five of them or 50 of them, and they're really the same list. It's just where you're drawing the lines, how big those buckets are. But the ten that we really boil it down to three sections versus careers creating and executing a career plan skills, I call them working effectively.

00:03:47:22 - 00:04:10:03
Mark Herschberg
These are things like managing your manager and understanding corporate culture and politics. The word skill, interviewing. Now most of us know how to interview as a candidate, but many of us have to interview on the other side of the table and we have no training how to do that. Second section leadership and management. Or there's a chapter on leadership, one on people management, one on process management.

00:04:10:03 - 00:04:17:18
Mark Herschberg
They're separate. And the third section four Skills communication, networking, negotiating relations and ethics.

00:04:17:21 - 00:04:48:13
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so there's that first section in that third section really kind of set me aflame here because we spend a lot of time talking about leadership and management. There's a million resources around that. All right. There's no shortage of stuff. Talk to me about that first bunch, particularly the notion of setting your career track and working a plan, because working remotely has kind of changed the rules.

00:04:48:15 - 00:04:59:10
Wayne Turmel
Some people kind of knew instinctively when you worked in the office, you bump into people at the coffee machine and you can suck up people in the cafeteria, but it's different when you're not there.

00:04:59:13 - 00:05:16:11
Mark Herschberg
It is indeed. Let's first start with you need a career plan, because even in office, most people tend to skip that. You would never tackle a big project at work, a six month, a year long project without having some type of plan. You wouldn't say your boss. Well, cross your fingers. I'll see what I get done in six months.

00:05:16:11 - 00:05:34:21
Mark Herschberg
So I hope I hit the goal. That's crazy. You'd say, Let's create a plan unless you check things on the plan. Or are we on plan? Off plan? Do we adjust the plan? If you wouldn't do a six months or a 12 month project at work without a plan. Why are you doing a 20, 30 year career without having a plan?

00:05:34:23 - 00:05:43:14
Wayne Turmel
Now, just as we're talking about a plan, let's be really tactical and practical here. What are the milestones in that plan?

00:05:43:17 - 00:06:07:08
Mark Herschberg
Great question. What I recommend people do is you create first you've got your your vision, your long term. I want to be the VP of whatever in 20 years, whatever your goal is. Now, you know that if you want to be the VP in 20 years, you need to be somewhere probably about 15 years out. Just like if you're delivering a project in 12 months, where do you need to be ten months out?

00:06:07:08 - 00:06:24:03
Mark Herschberg
So you're on time so we can start to backtrack. Where do you need to be in about 15 years? What to be there in 15 years? Where do you need to be in ten years and in five years so we can start backing out now? The timeframe somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't have to be 15, ten, five and the ranges.

00:06:24:05 - 00:06:40:18
Mark Herschberg
But just like in your project plan, you might have these placeholders and you know what you're planning for month ten, that's kind of fuzzy and that might change. But what you're doing the next 30 days should be very clear. And so what you're doing in the next year or two is you backed out this plan, what you do in the next year or two.

00:06:40:18 - 00:07:01:04
Mark Herschberg
What I need to start by being a better communicator or learning some more technical skills in my discipline or whatever it is that should be concrete. And that's what you're working on. And just like these project plans, you want to have check ins and adjustments. So here's something simple you can do right now. I'm going to ask you to pause the podcast, but you have to promise to come back.

00:07:01:06 - 00:07:24:15
Mark Herschberg
Pause the podcast. Go to your calendar. Put in a calendar event that says, Think about my career and set that as a recurring event every six months. And now that you're back, what you just did by creating that recurring calendar event, you've created a cadence to check in and refine your plan. Just like on our projects, we have a weekly or monthly check in.

00:07:24:20 - 00:07:26:10
Mark Herschberg
You've now done that for your career.

00:07:26:13 - 00:07:29:19
Wayne Turmel
And assuming that folks are still listening at this point.

00:07:30:01 - 00:07:32:00
Mark Herschberg
That's why I made the promise to come back.

00:07:32:05 - 00:07:56:19
Wayne Turmel
And when we talk about developing skills, I just want to go to 30,000 feet for a minute. When we're talking about developing skills, we're not necessarily saying go back and get a master's degree, although that might be part of the occasion. There are a million ways to grow and develop some of both micro and macro skills that you're going to need.

00:07:56:21 - 00:08:17:23
Mark Herschberg
You're absolutely right. Certainly you can get a formal education. You can get informal education by taking online classes, reading books, listening to a great podcast like this one, exploring education is very important for some people. In fact, things like communicating leadership, it's like swimming. You can't just read a book on swimming and say, I know what I'm doing.

00:08:17:23 - 00:08:41:19
Mark Herschberg
You have to actually practice and do it. And so you can practice things by getting on certain projects. You can maybe do it with some volunteer work or things outside your professional work. You can also I have on my website on the resources page, a free download to create a free internal training program to upskill yourself or your entire organization on these skills because they are experiences.

00:08:41:19 - 00:08:44:05
Mark Herschberg
So there's many different ways you can acquire them.

00:08:44:09 - 00:09:19:14
Wayne Turmel
So time being what it is, let's kind of jump forward. Communication. I mean, communication skills are my personal passion. I think that they're all so important and too many really smart, good people don't possess them in the amount and style that they need. But it's also like this big thing. It's like a checkbox on an interview, right? Good communication skills to your mind, what's included in that and maybe how has the way we work in the last few years changed our approach to this stuff?

00:09:19:17 - 00:09:47:20
Mark Herschberg
You hit the nail on the head when you said this checkbox on these job descriptions, and I used to be guilty of that myself. Earlier was it mean to say good communication skills? Does that mean we want someone who can stand on the TED talk stage and do this global presentation? They'll get a million views. Does that mean someone who writes concise emails, Does that mean someone who can explain or discipline to people without the technical background in that field?

00:09:47:22 - 00:10:09:17
Mark Herschberg
These are all different types of communications. They're all important, but they may not all be equally important to the role. So whenever we define a role, we need to say what type of communication do we need? Because it could be any of those. And we probably in our careers want to develop some of all of them. But for a particular job, some will be more important.

00:10:09:17 - 00:10:33:22
Mark Herschberg
And so you as a hiring person should understand that you as a candidate should understand that and speak to that now as we get to remote teams, where I think this becomes particularly challenging is our communication channels narrow when we are together, we're in the same environment. Obviously we have facial expressions, body language, tone, even just the environment.

00:10:33:22 - 00:10:53:18
Mark Herschberg
We've all been meetings where everyone feels temps or everyone feels relaxed and you can just feel that vibe once you start going to video. We don't have that vibe that we can see some body language once we go to audio, we lose the body language. Once we go to email, we lose the tones, we get more and more narrow in our communication channels.

00:10:53:18 - 00:11:03:20
Mark Herschberg
And as we're remote, we're using more of those narrower channels. So it's important that we learn how to communicate despite the more narrow bandwidth we are communicating through.

00:11:03:22 - 00:11:29:04
Wayne Turmel
And I'm loving that. Talk to me a little bit. It's something that I obsess about, and I'm always shocked that more people don't find this worthy of obsession, which is what you're talking about. It's the narrow form of communication. For the first time in human history, 70% of our work is being done in writing, which is a huge deal if you stop to think about it.

00:11:29:08 - 00:11:36:19
Wayne Turmel
What are how do we need to rethink writing skills and written communication action as we look forward?

00:11:37:00 - 00:11:49:02
Mark Herschberg
One of the challenges is we kind of have this one size fits all. If you think about an email, we have this email. The email came out of a memo, What we used to do in the fifties.

00:11:49:04 - 00:11:53:19
Wayne Turmel
Or I was there when the email came about, I was there.

00:11:53:21 - 00:12:11:18
Mark Herschberg
There's almost different types of communications. In fact, we're of a we're not we're not the youngest generation anymore. And you see with younger people, why would you call us if you and I are trying to coordinate meeting up for drinks? They say, Well, why would you ever get on the phone and say, Hi, how are you doing? Are you free for drinks more?

00:12:11:18 - 00:12:32:22
Mark Herschberg
Are you free? Just text to be like drinks time date you counter with a different time date. That's much more efficient. That's how they look at it, said the whole voice. You don't need my tone. You don't need to go through formality. Hi, how are you doing to coordinate getting together for drinks so you recognize that certain types of communication say scheduling, very narrow and limited.

00:12:33:00 - 00:12:58:04
Mark Herschberg
There's other times where I say, Listen, I think there's an issue with our strategy and I'm going to lay out and all my thoughts and analysis, and that's a broader type of communication. But we use email for both of those. They go into our inbox sitting next to each other. They're in the same general format. And so we need to recognize that it might be time to split up how we do things, how we communicate.

00:12:58:04 - 00:13:22:08
Mark Herschberg
Now, the scheduling got a little easier because now the calendars, I can just propose a time on the calendar and you get this well formatted thing that can be processed. But one of the challenges, by the way, is that we now have so many communication channels. Should I be calling you, emailing you, texting you, slacking you, there's all these different channels and we might have different channel preferences because companies often don't define this.

00:13:22:10 - 00:13:27:00
Mark Herschberg
So we just have to recognize that it's it's a lot more complicated than just writing.

00:13:27:05 - 00:14:02:03
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. And in the long distance leader and all the associated books, we talk about the idea of richness versus scope, which is how do we make that determination? Right? It's not just what tools we use, but why do we use which tool when in the time in the time that we have remaining. I want to talk about something that is going to cause ions to roll into the back of skulls as we talk, and that is internal networking in our company because we think of networking as, Oh, I'm looking for a job.

00:14:02:03 - 00:14:10:19
Wayne Turmel
I better network and find something. But it's critical to our careers, even internally for those of us who are gainfully employed, right?

00:14:10:23 - 00:14:35:20
Mark Herschberg
It is indeed. Unfortunately, most people think of networking as this is how I find a job, and that's the only time they think about building. Their networks are using their networks. But networks can do so much more. It can help us for our external networks outside our companies. It can help us find candidates, customers, partners. It can help us be aware of changes our industry, how to think about things.

00:14:35:22 - 00:14:58:20
Mark Herschberg
But then, as you pointed out, internal networks are so important as well because internal networks, they can do some of the same things. Certainly if you're at a big company, you might hear about job opportunities. Oh, there's a new department opening. They have a role, something you're looking forward to doing, being aware of what's happening in the company, strategic changes, understanding which way the corporate winds are blowing.

00:14:58:22 - 00:15:15:06
Mark Herschberg
Very important are networks help with all this? They help us with corporate politics. And you might not like corporate politics. Many people don't, but it's happening. It's kind of like government politics. You can say, I don't like it. You can choose not to vote. But guess what? Your life is affected by it. Your life is effectively corporate politics.

00:15:15:07 - 00:15:35:09
Mark Herschberg
Are your internal networks developing relationships with other people in the company can help you navigate the company and be more effective in your role. But now that we're not having those run ins at the WaterCooler, as you pointed out earlier, it's challenging. We have to be more proactive in building and maintaining these relationships.

00:15:35:11 - 00:16:02:04
Wayne Turmel
I think that's a huge thing for a lot of people and it's it to some degrees, it's cultural. And I'm not talking about national cultures, although some of that do, I think. But, you know, if your mother ever told you the nail that sticks its head up, gets whacked with a hammer, and if you keep your head down and do your work, the work will speak for itself, which is maybe the most terrible lie we tell people when they're when they're working.

00:16:02:08 - 00:16:20:14
Wayne Turmel
When you talk to people about this and you get the inevitable, either push back or just horrify and looks, how do you help people take the step to start being a little more interested in the politics and being a little more proactive? Because that's a huge thing.

00:16:20:17 - 00:16:41:21
Mark Herschberg
We need to reframe how we see it. And I'll use analogy with governance. We often have, no matter what country you're in, you probably have a distaste for the politics of your nation. We all hate it, but really we know we need it. We need governance. So we need to be able to elect because we don't want kings.

00:16:41:23 - 00:17:02:17
Mark Herschberg
And we also know that when done right, when we think about some of our greatest leaders, well, they really did a good job. They have changed us for the better so it can be done well. We just often focus on here's all the bad examples. And within corporate politics, if you just see it as, oh, this is bad, this is how people cheat and get ahead.

00:17:02:17 - 00:17:23:16
Mark Herschberg
And yeah, I'm not good at what I do, but I'm your buddy. So you're going to promote me? Yeah, that's a bad example. But there are also good examples where we are just using a different approach, more of a relationship oriented approach. And as long as you're not taking it to the extreme, it can actually be useful and helpful to the organization.

00:17:23:20 - 00:17:33:11
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so we are at the end of our time. I know that you have ten skills. Which one have we talked about that's most important? You got 30 seconds ago.

00:17:33:15 - 00:18:02:16
Mark Herschberg
It's not only one skill. Here's the key. By getting just a little bit better at any of these skills, you are getting incremental returns. If you get better at negotiating. For example, imagine every job you get, you're getting more money. How does it compound over time? Now that's with negotiations. It's easy to do the math, but this applies to leadership, to our networks, to any of these skills getting just a little bit better compounds over time and really helps us succeed in our careers.

00:18:02:18 - 00:18:38:03
Wayne Turmel
Dig in. And Mark Hirshberg, the book is The Career Toolkit Essential Skills for Success No One Got you. Thank you so much for being with us. I really, really enjoyed this conversation and we could geek out for a long time. Yet for the rest of you, if you are interested in learning about Mark's book, about his app Brain Bump, connecting with Mark himself, the show notes, as always, Marisa will have organized them in terrific fashion at long distance work life dot com.

00:18:38:05 - 00:19:02:04
Wayne Turmel
If you are interested in redesigning your team and thinking about your team and doing some of that development that we're talking about. Kevin Eikenberry In my new book, The Long Distance Team, Designing your Team for everyone's success is out there. You can get special deals and downloadable resources at long distance team. BBC.com You are listening to a podcast.

00:19:02:04 - 00:19:26:17
Wayne Turmel
I doubt it's your first one, so you know the drill. Please like and subscribe and tell people about it. Leave a review on your aggregator. That is always immensely helpful. And then finally, if you enjoy the show, if you don't enjoy the show, if you have ideas for way better shows, we want to hear it. Marisa is currently collecting pet peeves.

00:19:26:17 - 00:19:56:21
Wayne Turmel
You are not being shy about submitting those and that helps us plan future episodes so you can reach out to Marisa Ikenberry or myself on LinkedIn or at the email below. Links on the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us. We really hope that we're bringing you information that helps you ground yourself and survive and maintain your sanity in the changing world of work.

00:19:57:02 - 00:20:02:15
Wayne Turmel
As always, we will be back with another episode next week. Don't let the weasels get you down.


Featured Guest

Name: Mark Herschberg

About Mark: Mark Herschberg is the author of "The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You." He is a CTO and CPO, and has been teaching at MIT for over 20 years. Mark is also the creator of the app Brain Bump, which helps people retain information from books, podcasts, and other sources.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome: Intro to Mark Herschberg
01:09 Skill Set 101
04:48 Career Mapping in Remote Work
07:01 Career Plan Check-Ins
07:56 Skill Development Beyond School
09:19 Why Communication Matters
09:47 What is Good Communication?
10:09 Remote Work & Communication Shift
09:47 Diverse Communication Types
10:33 Remote Team Communication Hurdles
11:37 Rethinking Writing Skills
12:33 Navigating Communication Channels
14:02 Value of Internal Networking
16:20 Navigating Corporate Politics
17:33 Steps to Skill Improvement
18:38 Recommended Team Resources
20:02 Conclusion

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Team

Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!

 Order
Read More
Bots in the Boardroom: Decoding AI's Role in Zoom Meetings on The Long-Distance Worklife with Wayne Turmel and Marisa Eikenberry
Ask Wayne Anything, Technology

Bots in the Boardroom: Decoding AI’s Role in Zoom Meetings

Marisa and Wayne discuss the new AI features that Zoom is introducing to its platform. They explore the potential benefits and challenges of using AI in web meeting platforms and highlight the importance of staying informed about new features and tools. They also discuss the potential impact of AI on presentation skills and communication styles, as well as the value of real-time feedback in improving remote meetings.

Key Takeaways

1. AI in web meeting platforms has been evolving for years, with features like live captioning and simultaneous translation becoming more common.
2. Zoom's AI Companion can provide real-time feedback on presentation skills and communication styles, but it's important to use this feedback consciously and ethically.
3. AI Companion can help with research, filling out support tickets, and summarizing meetings, making remote work more efficient and productive.
4. Zoom's AI can analyze meeting participation and help identify individuals who may be monopolizing the conversation.
5. It's crucial to stay informed about new features and tools in web meeting platforms and to adopt those that make sense for your work and goals.

View Full Transcript

00:00:08:03 - 00:00:19:10
Marisa Eikenberry
Welcome back to the Long-Distance Worklife. Where we help you lead, work and thrive in remote and hybrid teams. I'm Marisa Eikenberry, a fellow remote worker. And joining me is my co-host and remote work expert Wayne Turmel. Hi, Wayne.

00:00:19:12 - 00:00:21:03
Wayne Turmel
Hello. How are you?

00:00:21:05 - 00:00:22:21
Marisa Eikenberry
I'm great. How are you?

00:00:22:23 - 00:00:28:14
Wayne Turmel
I am fine and ready to submit to our robot overlords.

00:00:28:16 - 00:00:49:12
Marisa Eikenberry
So today, listeners, we are actually going to be talking about A.I., which is not a new topic for the show, but it is a new topic for me and Wayne together. And specifically, we're talking about some of Zoom's new A.I. features that they've talked about recently. So I have a link to TechCrunch article about this in our show notes so you can take a look at it.

00:00:49:12 - 00:01:19:03
Marisa Eikenberry
But one of the things that they've talked about is that Zoom is updating and rebranding several of its AI powered features, including the generative A.I. assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ. So it sounds like now it's going to be called the A.I. Companion. And there's lots of different ways that it's going to do stuff. So before we get into the specific things that Zoom AI is about to do, I wanted to talk about this idea of like A.I. in web platforms and web meeting platforms anyway.

00:01:19:05 - 00:01:24:07
Marisa Eikenberry
Like, this might be new for Zoom, but this isn't new for web meeting platforms, right?

00:01:24:09 - 00:01:59:14
Wayne Turmel
It's been coming along for a while. One of the very first things, it probably had been in the background for a while right? When you do this Zoom or WebEx or whatever, automatically does this to compensate. That's been running in the background for a while. One of the first things that kind of caught my eye a couple of years ago is when WebEx was suddenly able to hold a live meeting but caption it simultaneously in three different languages.

00:01:59:16 - 00:02:01:16
Marisa Eikenberry
Which is so wild.

00:02:01:18 - 00:02:31:09
Wayne Turmel
And insane that that is a thing, right, that I can be talking to you. And in the bottom, somebody can follow along in German or whatever. Mm hmm. So that is extremely cool. The challenge. I made the joke earlier about my robot overlords. The problem when we talk about A.I. and this is true, and I know that a lot of people listening to this are already sick of the conversation because it's all anybody's talking about.

00:02:31:09 - 00:02:58:22
Wayne Turmel
Like, all but the way that I look at it is that artificial intelligence is a neutral thing. It just kind of says this is happening, this is something that you can do. It's up to us whether or not we do it. And the part that freaked me out when I saw the article and why I sent the article to you, was it will give you real time feedback on your presentation skills and communication style.

00:02:59:00 - 00:03:02:23
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes, that is the part that kind of caught my eye as well.

00:03:03:01 - 00:03:19:10
Wayne Turmel
Now, as somebody who has spent almost 30 years teaching presentation skills, I know that the first thing that happens when you say to somebody, you know, you say a lot is immediately they say more often.

00:03:19:12 - 00:03:27:17
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. Well, and I know that if it were me, it would be like, slow down. I already know I'm doing the best.

00:03:27:19 - 00:03:44:13
Wayne Turmel
You did not say and you said, slow down. So the feedback that you are get is accurate. In the long run, it's probably helpful. But as I'm running the meeting and up pops a little message that says, make eye contact with the camera.

00:03:44:15 - 00:03:45:22
Marisa Eikenberry
You're right.

00:03:46:00 - 00:04:06:20
Wayne Turmel
It is going to throw me off. And the good news is that these things, as near as we can tell now, I have investigated this a little bit. The key word there is very little bit. These tools need to be turned on. It's not like you're going to start open up WebEx and suddenly it's yelling at you for.

00:04:06:22 - 00:04:25:01
Marisa Eikenberry
Well, on that note, according to TechCrunch and Zoom's website, this has already been added. Well, the Hey I campaign in the you're talking about real time feedback that's going to come in the spring. So at the time that we're recording this, this is September of 2023, so you're not even going to see this until spring of 2024 anyway.

00:04:25:04 - 00:04:33:17
Marisa Eikenberry
But some of these other features are we're going to talk about are already turned on. If you have a paid account, it sounds like it's an opt out, not an opt in.

00:04:33:19 - 00:04:56:06
Wayne Turmel
Okay, Good to know. So time to invest it. Go into your account. Right. And see what the heck has been turned on. And this has been going on for a while. It's like I have been following web presentation platforms for 20 years. And the cycle time for new features has just gotten shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter.

00:04:56:06 - 00:05:03:08
Wayne Turmel
And every time you open up your platform, there's something new or some button has been moved and it's not where it was before.

00:05:03:10 - 00:05:10:01
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, and so-and-so has this feature now, so obviously this one has to catch up and Yeah, yeah.

00:05:10:03 - 00:05:34:06
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, there's a lot of that. The thing that we need to remember is every once in a while, stop and find out what's new. And the reason that that matters is they're putting in all these new features and all of this cool stuff. And at the end of the day, it's the same problem. 80% of people use 20% of the features.

00:05:34:11 - 00:05:46:02
Wayne Turmel
So you can have all of these cool problems, but you don't know whether they are cool features or evil features or whatever they are until you actually know they're there and try them.

00:05:46:06 - 00:06:01:09
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, thankfully some of these platforms will do notifications and stuff to tell you. I know Slack does that for us. It'll tell us that there's new features and then I go look them up. But for those people who are using platforms that don't do that, you know, periodically, look yeah.

00:06:01:09 - 00:06:28:20
Wayne Turmel
And it does matter. I mean, the whole point of using these tools, I know that most of us do the bare minimum because we're getting our job done and we're not techies and we don't enjoy playing and poking around and seeing what they do. But we have to remember the purpose of these tools. All appearances to the contrary, the purposes of these tools are to make us better.

00:06:28:21 - 00:06:51:13
Wayne Turmel
They invented these things so that we could do something better, faster, smarter than we did it before. Yeah, if you blithely ignore that A you're doing your job as slowly and badly and efficiently as you always have and not taking advantage of the opportunity to improve. But everybody else is right.

00:06:51:13 - 00:07:23:11
Marisa Eikenberry
I know that there's been a huge conversation about AI in general and you have some people that are just like, That's stupid. I'm going to ignore it. I'm not going to pay attention at all. And like, I'm not saying that you need to figure out AI and every piece of your job. Like, no, like, absolutely not. But people who are completely ignoring AI are going to be behind the people who have figured out how to make it work in their job or figured out how to utilize it in their business and doing things faster, better, smarter than those that aren't touching it at all.

00:07:23:14 - 00:07:36:20
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, and it's it's a it's an issue because there are things AI is behavior neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It is just a thing. That's what I have to keep telling myself. Yeah.

00:07:36:22 - 00:07:39:05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. It is only as good as whatever you put in it.

00:07:39:06 - 00:07:53:14
Wayne Turmel
Right. For example, and I can't remember if I've told this story before when Kevin insisted that I get a chatty account and start playing with it, the first thing I did was I said, Give me a bio of author Wayne Turmel, and I.

00:07:53:14 - 00:07:54:21
Marisa Eikenberry
Did this for you too.

00:07:54:23 - 00:08:07:17
Wayne Turmel
He gave me two paragraphs. Great stuff, well-written, concise. It also gave me a degree. I do not possess and credited me with a book I did not write.

00:08:07:19 - 00:08:19:15
Marisa Eikenberry
That happened to me when I put in my own name just to be like, What is it because I'm so intertwined with you? With this podcast? It had your credentials as mine, which I was like, It's very flattering.

00:08:19:20 - 00:08:48:04
Wayne Turmel
And hey, listen, bask in the past in the radiated glow and know you are welcome to whatever humble bits of glory I can share with you. But here's the thing. It took me 30 seconds to fix the problem, and suddenly I had a really good buy that I, by the way, have copied and pasted and used.

00:08:48:06 - 00:08:59:12
Marisa Eikenberry
Right. I use A.I. to help out with podcast features. Sometimes finding things like timestamps of our main points and things like that. Like there are good reasons to use A.I..

00:08:59:13 - 00:09:18:16
Wayne Turmel
So let's get specific to what some of the things that this is not. And I got no so of course qualified to have the, you know, do we need to worship our robots? Overlord overlords discussion but it's there's some stuff here that we need to think about, right?

00:09:18:21 - 00:09:33:03
Marisa Eikenberry
So I mean, like we talked about already, you know that the AI campaign is going be able to give real time feedback on how fast and how often you're talking versus listening so you can adjust in the moment. That's a quote straight from the Zoom blog. But some of the other things that I think are kind of interesting.

00:09:33:05 - 00:09:35:13
Wayne Turmel
Right now, the AI saying Marisa Brie, you.

00:09:35:18 - 00:09:56:09
Marisa Eikenberry
Know, which. Okay, actually, before we get on to that, like all I can think too, is some of these features and we'll talk about more of them here in a minute. To me, it feels like it's adding an extra distraction when we're already having an issue, keeping people's attention and engagement in meetings. What are your thoughts on that?

00:09:56:11 - 00:10:08:04
Wayne Turmel
Oh, yes. And okay. Yes, that's absolutely like I said, as a presentation skills coach, the minute I say look at your audience, people's brains freak out.

00:10:08:06 - 00:10:09:14
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00:10:09:16 - 00:10:36:03
Wayne Turmel
Because they have to consciously do something that they have been doing unconsciously. And the minute you do that, it's uncomfortable and weird. So that feedback in real time, if I'm expecting it, if I've said, Hey, you know, let me know if I'm speaking too quickly and it says you're speaking too quickly, that's valuable feedback to me. I'm expecting it.

00:10:36:05 - 00:10:43:06
Wayne Turmel
I'm looking for it. I am using that to achieve a goal. This is now useful information.

00:10:43:08 - 00:10:45:14
Marisa Eikenberry
Mm hmm. That makes sense.

00:10:45:16 - 00:11:16:01
Wayne Turmel
Right? So it's also really good where I expect this is going to be super helpful. It's forensically okay. And I don't mean cutting open bodies. I mean, after the meeting, you can ask it to analyze your presentation. You can ask it to analyze your mean who spoke the most on the meeting and how much did they contribute. And we find out that Bob is just monopolizing the meeting and we have the efforts.

00:11:16:03 - 00:11:20:03
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah. Now, it's no longer our word against Bob's.

00:11:20:05 - 00:11:52:21
Wayne Turmel
So I can see where and this caveat goes with everything involving A.I.. If you're conscious of what you are going to use the information for and you are ethical about how you use that information, it will be incredibly helpful. It's like the simultaneous translation stuff. How can that not be Google Friend? We have automatic transcribe option that is happening.

00:11:52:22 - 00:12:14:17
Wayne Turmel
I can take and they've had the app for a while where I can take notes which basically what it does is somebody talks for a period of time and then they summarize, right? So if I'm speaking on the meeting, there's going to be a big chunk of information there. But and then Marisa asked this.

00:12:14:19 - 00:12:16:11
Marisa Eikenberry
Right?

00:12:16:13 - 00:12:48:17
Wayne Turmel
That's useful. That's really helpful information. So, you know, this stuff is like I say, you have to understand why they're giving you. What are you supposed to do with the information? Because it it's easy to just get completely overloaded by all of the feedback that you're getting. I mean, one thing is, as a human being, if I'm giving you feedback on your presentation skills, I'd stick there.

00:12:48:17 - 00:12:50:05
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00:12:50:06 - 00:12:54:16
Wayne Turmel
If I said everything that you were doing wrong.

00:12:54:18 - 00:12:55:15
Marisa Eikenberry
Yes.

00:12:55:17 - 00:13:16:18
Wayne Turmel
Or that you could do better, you're I would roll up in the back of your head and your head would explode. And you wouldn't hate me forever. Right? I pick my shots if somebody is an experienced presenter. Mm hmm. I will give them very specific, like concrete, perhaps techie advice.

00:13:16:20 - 00:13:18:13
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00:13:18:15 - 00:13:52:13
Wayne Turmel
Because they're already working at a certain competence level and they want to get better and improve, but they're going to improve incrementally if somebody it's just awful. If somebody can barely put two words together and there are people like that and I've worked with them my entire career, if I can just get them to breathe and look at the camera, that's the way I'm going to coach them differently and give them different feedback than somebody who is super competent and trying to.

00:13:52:15 - 00:13:53:19
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, get to the next level.

00:13:54:00 - 00:13:58:07
Wayne Turmel
Get to the next level. I can make that decision.

00:13:58:09 - 00:14:00:16
Marisa Eikenberry
Right? I cannot.

00:14:00:17 - 00:14:17:04
Wayne Turmel
Right. And I cannot or at least doesn't. Yeah, Yeah. So if, you know, Bob gets feedback from the A.I. and it says, Yeah, you could slow down a little. And then Mary gets feedback from the A.I. that says page 105 and it's you.

00:14:17:06 - 00:14:17:14
Marisa Eikenberry
Mary.

00:14:17:14 - 00:14:22:22
Wayne Turmel
My list of stuff you're going to destroy Mary. And that's not the intent.

00:14:23:01 - 00:14:46:11
Marisa Eikenberry
All right. Well, and so, I mean, I know that we've talked a lot about what it will be like for presentation skills, but one of the other things that it also talks about is real time feedback on people's presence in meetings. Now, to me, I take that as, you know, they're going to zoom is going to tell, you know, my boss, whomever is running the meeting, if I look over at my screen next to me.

00:14:46:15 - 00:14:59:11
Marisa Eikenberry
But what the AI doesn't know is I'm looking over at my screen and I'm typing something because, you know, Kevin just asked a question and I'm going to find out what the answer is without interrupting the meeting. But I don't know that.

00:14:59:13 - 00:15:40:01
Wayne Turmel
This is a supercharged version of something that the original web platform tools used using guide and got away from because they got used for evil more than good early days, WebEx and the stuff that Microsoft started with and all the dozens of tools that no longer exist, they have a thing. They still have it called the attention meter, where you can tell whether the screen that somebody has open is your meeting or if they've minimized it or open another screen in front of it.

00:15:40:03 - 00:15:41:05
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00:15:41:07 - 00:16:12:06
Wayne Turmel
And as with all things that got horribly abused, people would say, don't you dare open a screen when I'm talking to you or you know, darn it, Marisa, come back. You know, I can see that you're not paying attention. Well, that's evil and stupid and largely untrue. So why are you using the tools now when I get that feedback that maybe people maybe it's time for a break?

00:16:12:08 - 00:16:13:07
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah.

00:16:13:09 - 00:16:25:20
Wayne Turmel
Maybe I should give them a compelling reason to actually pay attention. There's a wacky notion. I look at that as feedback for me as the presenter as much as anything else.

00:16:25:22 - 00:16:30:12
Marisa Eikenberry
And I can see that being a really good reason to use that kind of software for sure.

00:16:30:14 - 00:16:41:08
Wayne Turmel
And so again, to say we're going to give you feedback, then tell me what I'm supposed to do with it.

00:16:41:10 - 00:17:04:23
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, I know that we're still very much in the early days. They just announced this very recently, but I'm I'm going to be very interested to see that piece of things when it comes out in the spring. But one of the other things that I think is already enabled now is during a meeting you're going to be able to ask to a companion to help you research critical information, help fill out support tickets.

00:17:04:23 - 00:17:22:02
Marisa Eikenberry
So that way, to your point, we don't have to open up another window. We can be more engaged in the meeting, which is fair. But the other thing that I find fascinating with this companion is that if you're late to a meeting, you can ask the companion questions about what you've missed.

00:17:22:04 - 00:17:27:12
Wayne Turmel
And again, this gets back to the trend. You know, this is transcription on steroids, right?

00:17:27:13 - 00:17:28:09
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00:17:28:11 - 00:17:37:06
Wayne Turmel
I mean, how many times have you gotten to a meeting late and you turn to the person next? You can go, What did I miss? And they say this, this and this, and now you're caught.

00:17:37:08 - 00:17:43:16
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, yeah. Or you heard something, but you didn't pay attention for a second and you got to figure out what they just said.

00:17:43:16 - 00:17:56:19
Wayne Turmel
I don't have them or instance sitting next to me that I can lean over and whisper. Right. I've got whatever horrible Anglo-Saxon name they're going to give the guy all over.

00:17:56:21 - 00:17:59:14
Marisa Eikenberry
He's just a I companion, so it may not have a name.

00:17:59:16 - 00:18:03:07
Wayne Turmel
Oh, we're humans. We will name, you know we will.

00:18:03:10 - 00:18:25:09
Marisa Eikenberry
Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. So I do find that part really fascinating. And just this idea that, like, you can ask questions during the meeting without necessarily interrupting the meeting to ask a question. So that could be very helpful and very fascinating. And the other thing is that when the meeting is over, it will actually like we've already talked about, you know, it's summarizing as we're going.

00:18:25:09 - 00:18:52:18
Marisa Eikenberry
So it'll provide a summary after the meeting. It will also do what they're calling smart clips and so little pieces of the meeting about different subjects that you don't have to rewatch the entire meeting. You can just get that section about that particular topic. I know that sometimes AI is not always great about clipping, so I'll kind of be interested to see how it clips things because it tends to cut off things that should have been in a section.

00:18:52:20 - 00:19:00:03
Wayne Turmel
But we also know that a good percentage of the people listening to us right now came to us because I took some clips.

00:19:00:07 - 00:19:01:00
Marisa Eikenberry
That's true is.

00:19:01:01 - 00:19:26:11
Wayne Turmel
Goes and they said, Oh, that sounds really interesting. So we already know that this happens, but it's also and we're out of time for the other stuff. But I just let me wrap this up. Yeah. It's also one of the things that happens right now is if somebody can't make the meeting, Kevin records the meeting.

00:19:26:13 - 00:19:27:06
Marisa Eikenberry
Mm hmm.

00:19:27:08 - 00:20:00:02
Wayne Turmel
Well, a couple of things. First of all, a lot of organizations, their i.t department won't let them do that because of bandwidth and network problems. Right? And we don't want people recording stuff that shouldn't be recording, in fact, kinds of things. So that's not going to work. But even if they do record it, you really want to sit through an hour in the first 20 minutes as status reports and stuff you don't care about to find the piece of the meeting that you actually do want to hear.

00:20:00:07 - 00:20:01:07
Marisa Eikenberry
Mm hmm.

00:20:01:09 - 00:20:17:10
Wayne Turmel
I can help you do that. And you can actually say, you know what? We're not going to include the status report, so let's get right to the discussion on X. That's kind of cool. Yeah. And that's an actual productivity tool.

00:20:17:12 - 00:20:37:12
Marisa Eikenberry
Yeah, they could actually be really helpful. I know it'll also add like action items and here's who to email and all that kind of stuff. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this continues to play out and if any of you have access to some of these tools and are testing these out, let us know because I want to see how this works.

00:20:37:13 - 00:20:49:07
Wayne Turmel
Well, and I promise that I will be doing some more research on this. The important thing is that we are they're not going to be making fewer tools.

00:20:49:09 - 00:20:50:15
Marisa Eikenberry
Right.

00:20:50:17 - 00:20:51:08
Wayne Turmel
Away.

00:20:51:10 - 00:20:52:07
Marisa Eikenberry
There will always be a.

00:20:52:07 - 00:21:19:12
Wayne Turmel
Duty to happen. And every idea, no matter how harebrained, started with somebody trying to solve a problem, whether it does it effectively or not, is a open question. But these things were created for a reason, and so they are worth investigating and we need to adapt, adopt the things that make sense to adopt. We need to figure out what we want.

00:21:19:12 - 00:21:33:02
Wayne Turmel
Our machine overlords to help us with and what we don't need. And we need to maintain our critical faculties to not take everything that comes at us as gospel.

00:21:33:04 - 00:21:36:07
Marisa Eikenberry
Absolutely. I get things wrong all the time.

00:21:36:07 - 00:22:03:20
Wayne Turmel
Well, it's not even that A.I. gets things wrong. It can't create content. It can't tailor information to individual humans. It can't tell the difference between a joke and a statement, which, if it's analyzing me, is going to cause problems. Yes. So there will be much more about this. Thank you for joining us, Marisa. Bring us home.

00:22:03:20 - 00:22:21:23
Marisa Eikenberry
Thank you so much for talking to us about this. I have no doubt that this will be one of many A.I. conversations as we go. And like I said, any of you listeners that have questions about this, topics that you want us to cover in this, please let us know. And thank you for listening to the long distance work life for Shownotes Transcripts and other resources.

00:22:21:23 - 00:22:41:22
Marisa Eikenberry
Make sure to visit longdistanceworklife.com if you haven't yet, subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes. And while you're there, be sure to like and review. This helps us know what you love about our show. Feel free to contact us via email or LinkedIn with the links in our show notes. Let us know that you listen to this episode or even suggest a topic for Wayne and I to tackle in a future episode.

00:22:42:01 - 00:22:55:19
Marisa Eikenberry
We'd love to hear from you. And if you'd like to learn more about remote teams, order Wayne and Kevin Eikenberry's new book, The Long Distance Team, you can learn more about the book at Long Distance team book Dot.com. Thanks for joining us. As Wayne likes to say, don’t let the weasels get you down.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
00:49 Zoom's new AI features
01:19 AI in web meeting platforms isn't new
02:31 AI Companion provides real-time feedback on presentation skills
04:06 Importance of staying updated on platform features
06:01 Benefits of utilizing AI in job or business
07:23 AI is behavior neutral
08:07 Personal experiences with AI inaccuracies
08:48 Practical uses of AI
09:18 Considerations and discussion on AI usage
09:33 Discussion on the potential distractions of AI in meetings
10:08 Importance of conscious use and ethical considerations of AI feedback
11:16 AI's forensic analysis of presentations and meeting contributions
14:46 Real-time feedback on presence in meetings and potential misuse
16:12 Feedback on attention as a tool for presenter improvement
17:04 AI companion's role in research and catching up in meetings
18:25 Summarize and provide smart clips after meetings
20:37 Request for feedback from listeners testing AI tools
21:19 Importance of critically evaluating AI tools and information
22:21 Conclusion

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Team

Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!

 Order
Read More
Keeping Teams Engaged in the Digital Age with Vivek Nigam
Guests, Leadership, Technology, Working Remotely

Keeping Teams Engaged in the Digital Age with Vivek Nigam

Vivek Nigam, of ReTeam, discusses the challenges organizations face with team engagement and retention in the changing work landscape. He emphasizes the importance of building a culture of engagement, participation, and belonging to improve productivity, innovation, and retention. ReTeam offers a platform and service model that helps leaders and individual contributors enhance team dynamics and make engagement easier. Vivek also highlights the value of natural intelligence in combination with AI tools to augment human interactions and improve communication.

Key Takeaways

1. Organizations need to adapt to the changing work landscape and focus on improving team engagement, participation, and a sense of belonging.
2. ReTeam provides a platform and service model to help leaders and individual contributors enhance team dynamics and make engagement easier.
3. Natural intelligence, combined with AI tools, can augment human interactions and improve communication.
4. ReTeam's AI tools can assist with tasks such as drafting recognition messages, sentiment analysis, and providing personalized suggestions based on individual profiles.

Featured Guest

Vivek Nigam

Name: Vivek Nigam

About Vivek: Founder and CEO of BeRemote. With over 25 years of experience in software architecture, design, and development, he has a passion for creating innovative solutions that improve engagement, collaboration, and inclusion in the workplace.

View Full Transcript

00:00:08:05 - 00:00:09:02
Wayne Turmel
Hello there, buddy.

00:00:09:03 - 00:00:35:11
Wayne Turmel
Welcome once again to the Long Distance Work Life podcast, where we try to make sense of remote and hybrid work and just generally how the world of how we make a living is changing on a regular basis. My name is Wayne Terminal. I am a master trainer here at the Kevin Eikenberry Group. This is sadly an episode without Marissa.

00:00:35:13 - 00:00:53:23
Wayne Turmel
But the good news when we don't have Marissa is we generally have somebody else really smart and interesting. And that certainly happens to be the case today. Vivek Nigam is with a company called Re Team. He is going to tell you all about it right now. Vivek, how are you, ma'am?

00:00:54:01 - 00:00:56:17
Vivek Nigam
I'm doing great. Wayne, Hey, great to talk to you again. All right.

00:00:56:21 - 00:01:06:08
Wayne Turmel
Well, you say that now. I generally find that wears off. So who are you? What's re team? Sure. What the heck is the deal?

00:01:06:09 - 00:01:27:23
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. So my name is Vivek among the founder of the companies. Copy, Remo. We also go by re team, their product called Re Team in the market. We work with companies who are experiencing challenges with team engagement as they adapt to this change of work, work, work, working place and retention has been strained with 20 to 30% turnover.

00:01:28:01 - 00:01:52:23
Vivek Nigam
Team engagement is lower by 15%, innovation is low by 25%, and traditional methods of getting people engaged just aren't working the same way. Right thing. We need some different methods. And with the new inflationary climate, you find that companies are, you know, revenues are even getting strained as well. So we want to work with companies who are looking to change their engagement culture, improve team participation, and build a better sense of belonging.

00:01:53:01 - 00:02:10:05
Vivek Nigam
Those to us are the foundations of how do you improve productivity, innovation and retention. So that's who we are all about. We have a platform, we have a service model, and we engage with people and we've got some AI that we've been integrating, although we're really big fans of what we call natural intelligence.

00:02:10:07 - 00:02:37:13
Wayne Turmel
Okay, so let's hold it right there and what you just said there. And we will have links, of course, to Vivek's Company and all kinds of good stuff on our show notes on long distance work life dot com. Okay, So let's get back because obviously when I have ten people on the show, my question is always what was the problem you were solving?

00:02:37:13 - 00:02:49:18
Wayne Turmel
Yes. Yes. What what was going on or what is going on that in your case, team leaders in particular need assistance doing?

00:02:49:20 - 00:03:10:01
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. So I'll tell a quick story and then delve into a few more of those things. So Genesis for this whole thing was actually growing up and watching my dad and how he how he went through his life. My dad was born in India. You were super smart guy, but running through the organizations here, he never attained that sense of belonging.

00:03:10:03 - 00:03:27:16
Vivek Nigam
And I remember the conversations in the kitchen between my my mom and dad. And I knew exactly what they were. Is my dad capacity for promotion yet again. And it wasn't like, say, the Met. He had three master's degrees and he worked hard and I thought he was out of the house all the time, but he never quite felt like he belonged.

00:03:27:18 - 00:03:55:17
Vivek Nigam
So as I was growing up, he gave me some advice and he would say, you know, when you start working, I want you to go out for a beer with everybody. Those are the things I didn't do and I never fit in. So when I started working out, find people that reminded me of my dad and people who are smart, quiet, hard workers, but just never really participated in team meetings, never really engaged with the team and wanted to find ways to get them to be more participative, give them a better opportunity.

00:03:55:19 - 00:04:05:14
Vivek Nigam
So I always made it my personal mission to help them. And I'll tell you, 100% of the time, when I gave them a stretch goal and they had that opportunity, they were absolutely brilliant.

00:04:05:15 - 00:04:28:16
Wayne Turmel
And so I love that you said that, Vivek, because that's actually my mission as well. I got into this crazy business because I knew so many smart, talented people with communication skills were holding them back. So whether they lacked the skills or they lacked the ability or confidence to use them effectively.

00:04:28:18 - 00:04:43:19
Vivek Nigam
Exactly. And sometimes you just don't know. It's not that you don't have the skills. You don't know what to say, how to how to use those. And so we built a platform around those trying to increase engagement, and we're finding some great results and robust mission of of a team.

00:04:43:21 - 00:05:08:22
Wayne Turmel
And I love that. Now, help me out because in our book, The Long Distance Leader, and what started this whole craziness for us is this notion that you think leadership first location second, right. That good leaders, people who are really good proactive leaders are making this remote thing work because they're doing all the things leaders have to do.

00:05:09:00 - 00:05:23:19
Wayne Turmel
What is the point of your technology and the work that you do? Is the point to reinforce those folks or is it to help everybody else who kind of isn't?

00:05:23:21 - 00:05:24:08
Vivek Nigam
Yeah.

00:05:24:10 - 00:05:25:18
Wayne Turmel
Doing so great.

00:05:25:20 - 00:05:42:09
Vivek Nigam
Yeah. Yes. And yes. What we find, a lot of times we'll run into people that say, hey, we got these recognition programs, we're doing these things, we're doing this stuff, engagement. And and I just love that. And especially somebody who says to me, Yeah, we built psychological safety and starts using those terms like, this is a kindred spirit.

00:05:42:09 - 00:06:07:17
Vivek Nigam
These are the people that really are making a lot of effort to do all the right things. So how do we help them? They're doing all the right things. They don't necessarily need what we provide, and that's okay. They're already achieving the mission that we're on. What we can do is make that easier for them, right? They're doing a lot of activities, doing a lot of preparation, and we can provide them some tools and some processes that just facilitate and make that easier.

00:06:07:19 - 00:06:24:08
Vivek Nigam
AS Yeah, so for example, a lot of our our tools are all about getting to know each other. And so these are things that you can use in the platform with one click and say, Hey, I'm just checking in to see how you're doing and get, get some responses and start to see a trend. Or I want to say thank you.

00:06:24:08 - 00:06:41:17
Vivek Nigam
And instead of having to do a formal event and make a big thank you, you can do it in one click. Record your voice and record your video and make it very authentic. Say, Hey guys, I just want to thank you for the work you guys did last week. And it's amazing how how impactful that is for people.

00:06:41:19 - 00:07:05:15
Vivek Nigam
So those are the things we want to get people into the habit of, of being being recognition based and thankful culture. And it just helps those people do that. For the remaining, I would say 95, 96% of people who have the right intentions and are doing these things but are so busy doing other things, we provide a platform to really help them build engagement and make this make this easy for them.

00:07:05:15 - 00:07:28:02
Vivek Nigam
So it doesn't is not something that has to take 20 or 30 hours a week to really engage your people. And we've heard numbers like that from a lot of people. So we do want to help that that that other, you know, I think is about 95% of people who know they want to do this, do some pieces of it and all, they generally feel like they could do this better.

00:07:28:04 - 00:07:54:22
Wayne Turmel
Now, you spend a lot of time talking about natural intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I know the minute I said artificial intelligence, about half the audience's eyes rolled up in the back of their head, and the other half are, you know, willfully submitting to the robot overlords. But what is in your mind? What's the difference and how do they work together or compete?

00:07:55:00 - 00:07:57:14
Wayne Turmel
Help me with that. Yeah.

00:07:57:16 - 00:08:17:00
Vivek Nigam
Anybody who's played with chatbots or some other A.I. technologies and boy is just exploding right now. Right. These things have come a long way in a very short period of time. It'll give you the sense that human beings are going to be replaced and completely obsolete in a matter of years. It just feels that way. And we don't think that's the case.

00:08:17:01 - 00:08:39:10
Vivek Nigam
Right. So these tools are absolutely amazing. But we talk about when I talk about natural intelligence is the stuff that you and I, human beings can infer that we can see from each other. A.I. can pick up some of those things, and it's great at that. But it gives us the insights. It helps us be better. So we believe in taking A.I. and constraining it.

00:08:39:12 - 00:08:59:04
Vivek Nigam
So it's not just an open ended, you know, solve all the problems of the universe. It really starts to be okay. Let's go straight down to let's solve this problem. And the first one that we rolled out with, which we absolutely love find a better way to say something. It could be anything. Let's say I want to say thank you, Wayne.

00:08:59:04 - 00:09:16:03
Vivek Nigam
Thank you, Wayne, for for giving me this platform, letting me be on your show and people who are very good at it, they'll come up with something beautifully eloquent and it's wonderful people who aren't. And we have a person on our team. She's from Brazil and she says, Looking is my second language. And sometimes I struggle with this.

00:09:16:05 - 00:09:33:00
Vivek Nigam
They can go back to what we call the reaching assistant, leverage some AI, and say, Hey, I want to say thank you to Wayne and I want to make it sincere. How do I do that? And we'll come up with a nice paragraph that sounds really formal, sounds very businesslike. It's really nicely written. And they can use that and make some minor edits and boom.

00:09:33:00 - 00:09:42:23
Vivek Nigam
Now what you've done is you've taken I made it in a way that will enhance what we do interpersonally, and we think that's very valuable.

00:09:43:01 - 00:10:21:16
Wayne Turmel
So just so I catch this as a leader, you say I need to reward and recognize this person and I want to do that. I'm not really sure how you use a AI to give you that first draft to put it together, and then you can tweak and adjust that or you can say, Yeah, that's great. Zuckerberg I think that's the thing with A.I. and my fear is not that I exist, it's that people are inherently either lazy or rushed for time, depending on how generous you feel.

00:10:21:18 - 00:10:44:02
Wayne Turmel
For example, you know, the first thing I did with Shaggy and I don't know if I've ever said this on the show, first thing I did with Chad JP was write me a one paragraph bio for author Wayne Turmel, because I hate when people say, Send me your bio. And it sent me this very lovely, concise bio, which also gave me a degree I do not possess.

00:10:44:08 - 00:11:07:11
Wayne Turmel
And I did not write. Yeah, yeah. Now, you know, if I'm rushed and in a hurry, it would be really easy. And by the way, since Chatbot thinks I'm smarter than I am, cool, It's cool to just use that without using the the human thinking up front and then on the back end. Right.

00:11:07:13 - 00:11:23:16
Vivek Nigam
Right. Yeah. You know, and and as you as you recognized earlier. So I came from the tech world and it actually reminds me a lot of when I was in college, at one point, someone said to me it was a professor who said it said to give us all these software tools to analyze how do you do this?

00:11:23:20 - 00:11:46:20
Vivek Nigam
This an electrical engineering class, I think was and I said, remember, design happens here, right? So the thought process has to happen here and you have to strategize here. Everything else is a tool. And so in our minds, we take A.I. in the same way, even as fascinating and as amazing as it can be as much of a time server as can be.

00:11:46:22 - 00:12:16:16
Vivek Nigam
We also believe that the human capital, the human condition, the human intelligence that national intelligence is really critical. And we use that as a tool to augment what we're doing. And, you know, my lesson learned back then was I went to no cool software and I relied on that only tool. And sure enough, I didn't realize what I was doing and spare you the details, but I saturated a circuit and and handed in really proud, got back F and Y because guess what you did?

00:12:16:17 - 00:12:37:19
Vivek Nigam
You relied on the tool and not on on your thought process and your human condition. We think it's the same way. If we rely completely on AI, it is going to bite you at some point. We think the combination of what you do, what you think about that, you know, focus on human experience and that interpersonal experience, plus A.I. is really powerful.

00:12:37:20 - 00:13:07:12
Wayne Turmel
AI That's great, and thank you for that explanation. This is really in the weeds and I really don't want to spend a lot of time there. But does the AI I yeah, I take into account things like work stats. So for example. Yeah. You know, Bob is an introvert and Rajesh is you know really out there will is Taylor and adjust some of that to.

00:13:07:18 - 00:13:30:05
Vivek Nigam
Yeah exactly exactly right so what we do when you're kind of say something and say a thank you it does not right It tries to give you a level thank you. And that's done on purpose. One of our missions is to level the social playing field work to help people who aren't as comfortable and people are comfortable give them a little bit more of a closer.

00:13:30:07 - 00:13:49:16
Vivek Nigam
We never wanted to be everybody equal and one line, but get it, get the plane feel a little bit closer. So for things like that, it does not, however, we do a lot of other things. We do sentiment analysis. We do a lot of other components. Actually today we just talk about one that's going to be rolling out very shortly.

00:13:49:18 - 00:14:12:22
Vivek Nigam
We're based on the speech that you use. Like, you know, we do a lot of video. If you post something in a video, it is not going to take that and extract from it some to do some natural actions that we should take as a team based on what was being proposed. A lot of we would do is share ideas for innovation and based on the ideas in fact out what those are.

00:14:13:00 - 00:14:41:03
Vivek Nigam
When we do that, we actually feed in profiles for the user. And the reason we do that, if I'm talking and it knows when I talk, I, I talk all over the place, right? My, my mind will go this way and that way of, you know, kind of, kind of have a little bit of a tree of thought sometimes it will give me a series that may be a little bit lengthier, but one of the guys on our team really smart, much more reserved, much more organized.

00:14:41:06 - 00:14:56:19
Vivek Nigam
It's going to give them a shorter list. That is something that he can really manage and that the team can manage according to his profile. So, yeah, there is a combination of feeding in behavioral information and of an information perspective.

00:14:56:21 - 00:15:04:09
Wayne Turmel
One of the coolest and also scariest things I have heard in a long time is the notion of sentiment analysis.

00:15:04:10 - 00:15:04:23
Vivek Nigam
Oh yeah.

00:15:05:04 - 00:15:12:00
Wayne Turmel
That that is. And in the fiction writer in me is fascinated by yeah.

00:15:12:02 - 00:15:34:18
Vivek Nigam
It's it's really powerful we've got an engagement where we you know we working with the company that started out actually back in December and rolled out a whole new process and we were just there just to help build the engagement as well. And at the same time, watch the comments and the behaviors in the platform. You can see in December everything was very negative.

00:15:34:21 - 00:15:56:08
Vivek Nigam
People were not happy. People don't always react to change very well, but there's a lot of factors why. But then but the condition was that people were not happy. That's just sentiment. That's just based on what they're saying, what they're posting, what the things that they're doing was to see as as the company engaged and spent the time investing in the engagement month over month.

00:15:56:13 - 00:16:15:09
Vivek Nigam
Little by little, it got better and better. And I remember we had a little celebration when it hit neutral and said, Hey, now they're neutral this great today, they're positive, which was a great thing. And just use it as a as a tool. Like what am I dealing with? Like, how are people feeling? I think that's I think it's actually very powerful.

00:16:15:11 - 00:16:29:21
Wayne Turmel
So let's flip this. We don't have a lot of time left. Sure. Fascinated because this started with your father, the individual contributor who is feeling it. Let's put this on its head as an individual contributor.

00:16:29:23 - 00:16:30:02
Vivek Nigam
Yeah.

00:16:30:05 - 00:16:39:09
Wayne Turmel
How will I and the different tools that are available to us make their life our life easier?

00:16:39:11 - 00:16:58:21
Vivek Nigam
And so I'm going to jump to the grandiose vision piece here and you will see this and I'll give you a prime use case in working at a corporation years ago and and working with a woman I work with, she she'd been working at the same company for 30 years, 30 plus years, and she was a vice president.

00:16:58:22 - 00:17:18:00
Vivek Nigam
She heard her career was great. But she told me the story that she had started with another woman who's still at the company, same number of times. They started the same week. Both started as engineers, but the other woman was still an engineer. 30 years later and said, well, why is that case? And we spent a lot of time talking about this.

00:17:18:00 - 00:17:40:08
Vivek Nigam
And in in the traditional world it was that somebody from higher up grabbed her and said, You're coming with me. Let me teach you how to do these things right. So now think about that. She got a lot of attention and and her career blossomed and she grew through the organization. But the other one, her her peer did not get all that and didn't blossom.

00:17:40:08 - 00:17:59:13
Vivek Nigam
So what we want to offer to people who are individual contributors were maybe a little bit on the quieter side. Let us show you how these things are done. Let us give you some tools that let you contribute and be noticed and be heard a little bit more so that your career can also advance the way others do.

00:17:59:15 - 00:18:07:03
Vivek Nigam
You have that that opportunity? That's our goal. That's our mission. We've seen some great success with it and we're hoping to see a lot more.

00:18:07:05 - 00:18:35:14
Wayne Turmel
I love that because I know that went in 25 years of talking to managers. Yeah, the one thing that we feel like we don't do as well as we might, but is the coaching and mentoring piece and the fact that this allows support and encouragement on both ends. So this is really fascinating and it'll be interesting to see how all of this works out.

00:18:35:16 - 00:18:59:14
Wayne Turmel
Vivek, thank you so much as always. Folks, we will have the show notes links if you are intrigued and I can't believe you're not and want to check all of this out, please look at long distance work like Dot com. I am going to boot Vivek out of here just long enough to wrap up the show and say thank you for listening.

00:18:59:14 - 00:19:18:17
Wayne Turmel
You all are podcast veterans. You understand how this works, right? So please like subscribe, tell others about the show. We think we're developing a really great community of people who are interested in the future of the workplace.

00:19:18:18 - 00:19:25:23
Unknown
If you are interested. 4949 30.

00:19:26:01 - 00:19:51:17
Wayne Turmel
Check out Kevin in my new book, The Long Distance Team Designing Your Team for Everyone's Success. And please, please, please don't be shy. Marissa is doing a wonderful job with the show on Social media, particularly on LinkedIn. We are looking for your questions, topics, people that we should talk to and your pet peeves. Quite frankly, we're having a blast with that.

00:19:51:22 - 00:20:15:17
Wayne Turmel
So you can reach myself or Marissa through email or through LinkedIn. The links are in the show notes. That's it. Thank you so much for joining us. We are really, really excited to bring this show to you. We're excited to bring you very, very smart people like Vivek and our other guests. Thank you for joining us. Talk to you soon.

00:20:15:21 - 00:20:17:12
Wayne Turmel
Don't let the weasels get you down.


Timestamps

00:00 Introduction
05:23 Supporting proactive leaders and helping others improve
07:05 Differentiating between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence
08:17 The belief that humans won't be replaced by AI
08:59 Constraining AI to solve specific problems
09:16 Using AI to find better ways to communicate
09:33 AI enhances interpersonal interactions and is valuable.
09:43 AI can be used to save time and effort.
10:21 AI can make people lazy or rushed for time.
10:44 AI can generate a concise and impressive bio.
11:23 Human thought process and intelligence are critical alongside AI.
12:16 Relying solely on AI can lead to negative outcomes.
13:07 AI takes into account behavioral information and sentiment analysis.
15:04 Sentiment analysis is powerful and can track changes in attitudes.
16:29 AI tools can help individual contributors advance their careers.
18:59 Conclusion

Related Episodes

Additional Resources

Order The Long-Distance Team

Remote leadership experts, Kevin Eikenberry and Wayne Turmel, help leaders navigate the new world of remote and hybrid teams to design the culture they desire for their teams and organizations in their new book!

 Order
Read More