00;00;08;19 - 00;00;38;18
Wayne Turmel
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Long Distance Work Life podcast, the show where we are really determined to help you thrive, survive, get through, keep the weasels at bay in this crazy world of remote and hybrid work. My name is Wayne Turmel. I'm with Kevin Eikenberry Group. This is a Marisa-less episode. I don't want to say Marisa free because that's sounds like she's an undesirable thing and she's not.

00;00;38;20 - 00;01;03;08
Wayne Turmel
But when we don't have Marisa with us, that means that we have an interesting guest, which we do today. We are going to talk imposter syndrome and getting out of your own head and all that good stuff with Rico and Rico is in the Las Vegas area with me, which is kind of cool. And Rico, how are you, man?

00;01;03;10 - 00;01;07;13
Rico Nasol
I'm good. I'm good. Good to talk to you, Wayne. Thanks for having me.

00;01;07;15 - 00;01;33;22
Wayne Turmel
Thank you for being here. So you are a consultant and a coach, and we will have links to your organization and all that good stuff. But one of the things that you and I have talked about offline, and I think this is really important for especially newer leaders, is this concept of imposter syndrome and not believing that you are good enough.

00;01;33;25 - 00;01;39;11
Wayne Turmel
Can you give us that kind of working definition of imposter syndrome just to kind of kick us off?

00;01;39;14 - 00;02;05;01
Rico Nasol
Yeah. So imposter syndrome, how it showed up for me and I think how it shows up for a lot of people is you don't really believe that you have talent and that potentially you are lucky and that at some point in time someone is going to find out you're not as smart as they think you are because you yourself don't feel like you have the confidence or the intelligence or the smarts to have achieved the things that you have.

00;02;05;04 - 00;02;23;21
Rico Nasol
And the thing that drives that imposter syndrome are the stories that we tell ourselves, whether they're true or not true. It's just a running narrative that goes on in our heads. And what happened with the pandemic in remote life. It's exacerbated by the missing of real time feedback. Right.

00;02;23;21 - 00;02;33;28
Wayne Turmel
So, okay, so tell me what you mean by that. By real time feedback, because some of us have spent our entire lives coping with this nonsense.

00;02;34;00 - 00;03;04;03
Rico Nasol
Yeah, great question. And I had to get used to it because I was a mom before the pandemic, mostly in person leader except for my global teams which were distributed. But since the pandemic, when that camera turns off, you're kind of left alone with the thoughts that you have. So if you don't think you if you don't have the confidence, you will continue to reinforce that in your head as opposed to when I was in in person and I did a presentation right when that presentation was over and I walked out, I'd have a colleague, I would go, Hey, how was that?

00;03;04;03 - 00;03;25;18
Rico Nasol
Did that go okay? Was I did I sound too fast? Did I answer the question like you get real time feedback from people that were in there just naturally walking to your next meeting. And in this zoom environment or this remote environment, you don't get that benefit unless you explicitly and this is what I advise people to explicitly ask for it, whether it's through Slack or chat or some sort of mechanism after the fact.

00;03;25;18 - 00;03;51;02
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, that's really important because one of the blessings, of course, of remote work is that you don't have a million people around you, but then you are left with the voice in your head. And if the voice in your head is unkind and I'm really not being facetious about this, you know, I always said I would fire any manager who talked to an employee the way I talked to myself.

00;03;51;05 - 00;03;55;00
Wayne Turmel
Absolutely. Our self-talk is so, so critical.

00;03;55;00 - 00;04;14;26
Rico Nasol
Yeah. And that's one of the things that so I coach leaders and almost the problem solving and it'll parlay into this is I think we've all had here's the story we've all had those jobs, whether it's in high school or college, you kind of you don't think a lot of it, but you end up being good at it and then they promote you to like the shift lead or something.

00;04;14;28 - 00;04;37;29
Rico Nasol
For me, I worked at a theme park and I got promoted to the warehouse lead and nobody taught me how to be a leader. They taught me about labor laws, they taught me about harassment, but nobody ever taught me how to lead people. And unfortunately, what I what happened to me in high school and college, I see happen in the world today where people, leaders, whether they intentional or not, assume, hey, this person is really good at the tactician.

00;04;37;29 - 00;04;54;29
Rico Nasol
Part of the job, so they must be a good leader and they never develop them in the way that leaders need to be developed. So in that way, when you're trying to pretend to be something that maybe you were never trained to do, that's where I come in. And a lot of the folks that I work with are either new leaders or executives.

00;04;55;05 - 00;05;13;27
Rico Nasol
They didn't have proper training. They don't know what they don't know, and they just have this low confidence and this imposter syndrome that, like the people who promoted me, think I'm good at what I do. I don't think I'm not good at what I do, and I don't know when they're going to find me out. So I'm either going to fake it till I make it or I need to get help.

00;05;13;29 - 00;05;14;17
Rico Nasol
And that's where.

00;05;14;17 - 00;05;42;22
Wayne Turmel
You find Do you find that that is. Here's the dirty little secret about our business, right? Is that the people who seek out learning, the people who want to get better at the job and are proactive of about doing that, are probably not the ones who need it the most. Because if they care enough to want to be good at it, right, they probably got some chops because wanting to do the job is a big piece of the deal.

00;05;42;24 - 00;06;04;24
Rico Nasol
Yeah, unfortunately that that is true. But what I do see is I put myself out there is people start to see themselves in me. So there's somebody that I worked with the he I don't want to say he was reluctant, but it was took him a long time to want to work with me because he didn't see anyone around him that looked like him.

00;06;04;26 - 00;06;26;22
Rico Nasol
Right. And so what I'm trying to do here and I think what we try to do with the work that we do is expose people, that there's more people like us out there, there's more ways to be successful. And nobody goes out and says, I want to be a toxic leader. Right? Nobody does that intentionally. But what happens is they have somebody who was never trained to train them and then they train their leaders the same way, or lack of training.

00;06;26;25 - 00;06;42;19
Rico Nasol
Right. And so you're right where, you know, the people who want to be better at it, I think are the ones that go after it. But I think it also takes leaders looking inward and saying like, hey, maybe I do need to get better than I can get the skills to help these folks get better. So I think it's a little bit of both.

00;06;42;19 - 00;06;47;28
Rico Nasol
You get people that want to be better and hopefully they will want to help the people that report to them.

00;06;48;00 - 00;07;08;10
Wayne Turmel
Now, one of the things, the way we connected is you heard the interview you have with Janice Chalker. Yes. On being a introvert and a remote leader, and Marisa will link to that in our show notes. For those of you who are interested, you're an introvert. Tell me a little bit about your journey because you've worked at some big oil companies.

00;07;08;13 - 00;07;17;03
Rico Nasol
Yeah, I so for me, introversion is not like shyness because I'm not shy, right? So, you know, that's a really.

00;07;17;03 - 00;07;21;22
Wayne Turmel
Important distinction right there that we need to put a pin in.

00;07;21;25 - 00;07;38;05
Rico Nasol
Yeah, and I say that because in certain moments I can be shy, but, you know, like if I'm comfortable, you know, I can have a conversation and things like that. But where my introversion shows up is like, I'm not the loudest person in the room. It's not because I'm not shy, it's just not my nature, right? I'm analytical.

00;07;38;05 - 00;08;08;20
Rico Nasol
I need time to sit with things. And then after big presentations to like four or 500 people, I cherish the time to myself just to recharge, you know, just to get my batteries back. I know some people I worked with that Netflix and why this was I had so much imposter syndrome in the beginning because you have this tape type A personality there where they're the biggest voices in the room and after like a 500 person presentation, they're like excited, mingling everywhere and like talking to everybody in the room and answering every single question.

00;08;08;23 - 00;08;29;21
Wayne Turmel
So an organization like Netflix is really interesting, and maybe you can check my assumption here because Netflix is what I call show business adjacent. It's full of people who want to be in show business and want to be in the industry. And at its core, it's a data and and analysis company.

00;08;29;23 - 00;08;47;28
Rico Nasol
Yet it's interesting because I was there for almost nine years and when I first started we were just an aggregator. So we weren't much of an entertainment company. We used to call ourselves a tech company that happens to be an entertainment. And then towards the last maybe four years of my career is when we had more originals, more productions.

00;08;48;05 - 00;09;10;26
Rico Nasol
We were an entertainment company backed by tech, so I was there for that shift. And the culture I started in was very Silicon Valley, like everybody is a Type A, everybody's high performing all those things. And so when I started there, they recruited me. I felt so much like an imposter, like I'm not as smart as these people think they are.

00;09;11;01 - 00;09;31;23
Rico Nasol
And one thing that I have to coach out of people is nobody is smarter than anybody else. They just have more experience in certain things. But what I would tell myself is Netflix. When I first got there, everybody sitting across from me is the smartest person in their field, so why and why am I here? But nobody said that that was just my negative self-talk, right?

00;09;31;24 - 00;09;42;17
Rico Nasol
And it's my fear of being found out that made me speak to myself that way. And it's almost like you said, if I talk to anyone else the way that I talk to myself, it'd be terrible.

00;09;42;20 - 00;10;05;29
Wayne Turmel
I would be in a jar all day. Yeah, to tell you the truth. Now, something about Netflix that I read not too long ago, which is kind of fascinating, is there's kind of a famous PowerPoint presentation, if you can call it, if you can call any PowerPoint presentation, famous that the CEO of Netflix was trying to explain the culture.

00;10;06;07 - 00;10;13;27
Wayne Turmel
And he came up with something called the Keeper rule that you work kind of under that mindset, right?

00;10;13;29 - 00;10;35;19
Rico Nasol
Yeah, I did. And it's interesting because this is probably one of the biggest things I came across and had a debunk. And if you go to Glassdoor, you'll probably see all kinds of reviews about keeper test and culture of fear. But it's the idea that if you built this team again, would you keep this person right if you had to build a team over?

00;10;35;21 - 00;10;48;24
Rico Nasol
And so the way it reads, it seems like, you know, you're just constantly every week what I keep this person, I keep that person. And in actuality, that's not how it played out, at least how it played on my team, because that would be a very toxic environment.

00;10;49;01 - 00;11;10;23
Wayne Turmel
Yeah. What is it like? Because there are lots of it was like Jack Welch came up with, well, you always fire your bottom 10%, which is fine for a couple of years when you have people who are underperform forming. But once you have a performing team, it turns really toxic really fast because everybody's trying to make sure they're not in the bottom ten.

00;11;10;23 - 00;11;21;20
Wayne Turmel
Right. So all these good ideas very often get used for evil instead of good. So how did you apply it and how do you not make that toxic?

00;11;21;22 - 00;11;43;08
Rico Nasol
Yeah. So on that point, you had the lowest churn rate and I had 235 people organization and over my nine years had like a 3% churn and then kind of encountered voluntary set a really low churn rate for my team. But so how I thought about it was maybe during annual review time, maybe once or twice a year and it wasn't like every week or even month.

00;11;43;11 - 00;12;00;22
Rico Nasol
So I would think, okay, if I because tech moves fast. So Netflix, we are always changing and evolving, building new tools and new skill sets. So I would look at my team and say, Hey, if I had to build this team, knowing what I know now, would I keep the folks that I have? And for me, it wasn't an exercise in letting go.

00;12;00;24 - 00;12;19;18
Rico Nasol
People is more of an exercise if I have the right people in the right roles. So maybe at this point in time where somebody was a motion graphics designer, now they need to move into like a UX field where they can actually do animations on the product. So it wasn't a who can it who do I need to let go?

00;12;19;20 - 00;12;27;04
Rico Nasol
It doesn't fit anymore. It's how can I be a better leader and find better fits for an evolving company in an evolving organization.

00;12;27;06 - 00;12;50;03
Wayne Turmel
One more time for the people in the back because that's so important. And also I would imagine that a piece of that is, you know, this person was a functioning member of the team and and they've been good and the team has changed. How do we get them to that new role, Right? How do we develop them? How do we train them?

00;12;50;03 - 00;12;51;27
Wayne Turmel
What do they need?

00;12;52;00 - 00;13;16;16
Rico Nasol
Right. And I can give you a story, an example, perfect example where I essentially automated a team. I led out of a job. And so it was a new AI technology, a computer vision technology. We were like trying to pick images, right? And we first had humans doing it and then eventually got to the point where they were so good that we could have computer vision do it, and we needed just less people.

00;13;16;16 - 00;13;41;06
Rico Nasol
We needed people just to verify and select. And most people would say, okay, so this team's job is eliminated. Let's just get rid of that team. Well, we actually did is, hey, they have value because they know the workflows they know all these other things, and they were big enough to work towards eliminating their own roles. So that told us that they had so much more value because the way they might in their minds thought the way they were strategic.

00;13;41;14 - 00;13;57;03
Rico Nasol
And so we actually we found roles, new roles on new teams for all of them in ways that they could find more automations. So perfect example where most companies would reorganize and let go. We reorganized and found better fits for their future.

00;13;57;07 - 00;14;19;17
Wayne Turmel
So in the little bit of time that we have remaining Rico, you know, you have, as you said, you had international teams, you had give us a couple of your best practices and what you coach your clients to do, first of all, for totally remote teams and then for hybrid teams.

00;14;19;19 - 00;14;38;17
Rico Nasol
Yeah. So for we'll start with totally remote and I'll talk about things how I, how I developed my teams and my leaders and I'll talk about the things I do for myself, for my imposter syndrome. So some of the things I do with my teams and my leaders is it's not nothing new, but I have everyone come up with three personal and professional goals.

00;14;38;17 - 00;15;09;27
Rico Nasol
It needs to be balanced. So the personal goals is so we can check in on each other. On like if you want to travel more, if you want to get into more cooking, things like that, and we have something to anchor our one on ones into. And I also provide opportunities and for real time feedback. So like this story, I said, if I have a director of mine who's presenting immediately after all, like, Hey, you want to talk about how it went or, you know, like, here's some things that went really well or I'll send I'll just send feedback in to know, Hey, this, this part really went really well.

00;15;09;27 - 00;15;29;15
Rico Nasol
I loved how you did this. If there's anything to talk about, it'd be like this. So when they are in a vacuum with their own thoughts, they have my feedback and they have my thoughts and my reassurance that they did a good job, that whatever negative self-talk they have is not valid. So that's when.

00;15;29;22 - 00;15;51;10
Wayne Turmel
I also want to tell you something you said because you said you get them to give you three personal goals and three professional goals and a lot of managers do that. It's kind of rote. You do it at the beginning of the year and then they never pay any more or attention to those personal things, right? It's like, okay, I did that check, check, check.

00;15;51;12 - 00;15;54;02
Wayne Turmel
But our one on ones are going to be about work.

00;15;54;04 - 00;16;15;07
Rico Nasol
Yeah, I mean, it's really important. I can tell you right now, even though I'm not there anymore, most of my team is still there. I can go back to my team Annapolis Recruiter studio and tell you who their kids are, who they're seeing, who they're married to, like, what their goals are, all those things. Because that's the thing that's important with leaders is you make to make everyone around you better.

00;16;15;07 - 00;16;35;10
Rico Nasol
You have to know who they are, right? You can't just make everyone about everyone better. In general terms, you need to really get to know them as people because people some people are type A, some people are type B, some people show up differently than others. And especially in this remote world, if you don't understand how each person shows up best, you start to create exclusive environments.

00;16;35;13 - 00;16;55;09
Rico Nasol
I have folks on my team who show up best in my comments in a Google doc and are deathly afraid of speaking in public, but they show up really well in comments and in in documents. So if I just relied on, I need to hear you to see you, I'm going to exclude very high level contributors on my team.

00;16;55;09 - 00;17;02;24
Wayne Turmel
Wow. Real quick, hybrid teams, anything specifically to that environment?

00;17;02;26 - 00;17;29;17
Rico Nasol
Yeah. So hybrid teams don't don't underestimate the power of team building. I did a lot when we were in person and just getting in a room and whiteboarding. That's the thing I think is most important when you get to be in person is not just sitting in a room. I think it's getting together and actually working on something tangible together and really get the creative juices running and that's when you get the most creativity and engagement from your folks.

00;17;29;19 - 00;17;55;06
Wayne Turmel
Yeah, I think that's such a key point. And again, we're just this is me underlining verbally, but this notion that being together in the same room doesn't create camaraderie or teamwork or innovation. It's focused work. And if some of the people are in the room and some of them aren't, it's still that focused work that's going to do the job.

00;17;55;09 - 00;17;57;20
Rico Nasol
Exactly. Exactly.

00;17;57;23 - 00;18;27;24
Wayne Turmel
Rico, I am sorry to say that is the end of our times. So much good stuff. Rico is in Henderson, Nevada. He is. He has his own consulting company, Rico Nassau Coaching and Consulting. We will have links to that in our in our show notes. Marisa will do her usual terrific job of that. Niko, I'm going to say goodbye to you momentarily while I close up the show.

00;18;28;01 - 00;18;57;25
Wayne Turmel
That is the long distance work life for this week. If you enjoyed it, please, please, please, like subscribe. You know how podcasts work. We beg for your feedback, but we actually want your feedback. So if you have questions, comments, vicious personal attacks, if you have a pet peeve or a topic that you'd like Marisa and I to tackle or ideas for a guest, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or our names.

00;18;57;25 - 00;19;27;22
Wayne Turmel
Wayne at Kevin Eikenberry dot com Marisa Kevin Eikenberry dot com. If you are trying to reorganize your team, thinking about what your new work should look like, we urge you to check out our new book, The Long-Distance Team Designing Your Team for Everyone's Success. That's it. I hope you're enjoying the show. We really love bringing you a mix of kind of thoughtful trends stuff and tactical practical work.

00;19;27;24 - 00;19;45;04
Wayne Turmel
Very, very smart people like RICO. We're sure that you enjoy it. Check out all our past episodes. You can do that at long distance work life dot com as well. And for now, next week we'll be back with Marisa, my name is Wayne Trammell. Don't let the weasels get you down. We'll see you next episode.

00;00;07;27 - 00;00;40;04
Wayne Turmel
Hello everyone, and welcome once again to the Long Distance Work WorkLife, the podcast where we try to make sense of remote and hybrid work in people not being in the same place at the same time and helping people thrive through all of that. My name is Wayne Turmel. My usual co-host, Marisa is not here today. It's an interview show and I'm very, very happy and fortunate to be talking to Heather Hansen.

00;00;40;06 - 00;00;53;15
Wayne Turmel
And we're going to be talking about accents and working across languages and all kinds of good stuff, and she knows of which she speaks because she is joining us from Singapore. Hi Heather.

00;00;53;17 - 00;00;56;18
Heather Hansen
I Wayne great to be here. Thanks for having me.

00;00;56;21 - 00;01;06;01
Wayne Turmel
Well, as always, thank you for being had. Tell me, what does the Global Speech Academy do?

00;01;06;03 - 00;01;27;01
Heather Hansen
We are a global communication training company working with Multination is primarily headquartered here in Singapore, in the region, but working internationally. So we focus on everything from presentation skills to cross-cultural communication to articulation, training and clear speech, anything that can help us be better communicators in global environments.

00;01;27;03 - 00;01;54;01
Wayne Turmel
Well, that sounds like worthy work and important stuff. Now you are a little bit of a disturber because I see that. I see that with great affection. As somebody who has been accused of disturbing more than my share of stuff. You're in a talk recently called How to Speak Bad English, perfectly in which calm.

00;01;54;03 - 00;02;23;06
Heather Hansen
Yeah, people don't like hearing that. They don't want to hear, Well, why would you want to speak bad English? The whole point of that talk is the fact that there is no such thing as good or bad English. There's only communication that works. So either you get your message across successfully or you don't. And I it just pains me that so many people come to me and say, Oh, my English is so bad, my pronunciation is so bad, and we're having a full on conversation in actually fully grammatical English.

00;02;23;06 - 00;02;53;23
Heather Hansen
And I'm thinking, Who made you think that you don't speak well? What kind of perfectionism are you searching for and looking for? Because as far as I can tell, you speak just fine. But there's so much bias, so much negativity. We use power. We use language as a power for maintaining privilege in the world. And so as as native English speakers, it's very easy to maintain our privilege and power in the global economy by focusing on how bad people speak English.

00;02;53;23 - 00;03;35;21
Wayne Turmel
And well, this is all part of that. You know, you need to lighten your skin and not cover your mouth when you laugh and and make all of that cultural stuff that that goes with being and all of that imperialist that's going to go, Yeah, yeah. But one of the things that I know that you feel very passionate about is besides all of those other things, this notion of having to eliminate accents and the idea of accent bias, tell us what that looks like right in the workplace and then why does that make you so crazy?

00;03;35;24 - 00;04;00;29
Heather Hansen
Yeah. So we'll never eliminate accents so it's not so much that it's more of a bias against them, Right? Because first of all, we have to understand every single person in the world has an accent. I mean, I grew up in central California believing I didn't have an accent. It was everyone else with an accent. Right. And those of us who think that way have actually never experienced the bias that is there for people who sound different than the culturally accepted, prestigious norm.

00;04;00;29 - 00;04;22;13
Heather Hansen
So I hit the lottery, right? Being born into this variety of English that's globally recognized, seen as educated and eloquent. And I've based the whole business off of it, and I've been very successful due to the fact that I speak a type of English that people recognize and and believe is prestigious. And now it's not like that for everyone.

00;04;22;13 - 00;04;43;10
Heather Hansen
When when I went abroad, I first started learning about accent bias because I was living in German speaking society and Danish speaking. I'm fluent in both languages. My German is very rusty now, my Danish. I'm married to a Dane, so we speak it daily. And living in Denmark, for example, speaking fluent Danish, I'd be stopped in the middle of business meetings like, Oh, how are your accent?

00;04;43;10 - 00;05;05;21
Heather Hansen
So cute. Oh, more. Oh, I love you and your accent. It's like we're in a business meeting. Why aren't you listening to what I say and taking me seriously? You would never say that to me if we were speaking English right now. Right. But that shows the privilege that I have because I would say we can do this in English if you want, you know, and then like, Oh, no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay, because that would give me my power back, my respect back.

00;05;05;23 - 00;05;44;03
Heather Hansen
But what about the people who speak Mandarin or Tamil or Malay or Indonesian or languages that aren't global languages? They don't have that option. They're dealing with this every single day, day in and day out, trying to compete in a world that is dominated and run by English speakers. So that's what fuels all of my work. It's how can I help these people to better compete, to feel just as confident and to get the rest of the world to actually start listening to what they are saying and accepting them for who they are instead of constantly thinking about, Oh, that's funny the way they said that, Oh, their English is so bad and oh, why

00;05;44;03 - 00;05;53;04
Heather Hansen
don't they speak better? And oh, you've lived in America 40 years. Why do you still have an accent? All of these kinds of biases that come to the surface.

00;05;53;06 - 00;06;10;29
Wayne Turmel
And I know I'm not trying to steal your thunder, but one of the things that occurs to me is with the rise of asynchronous work, you know, you encounter a little bit less of that because as you know, in cyberspace, no. One, you don't type with an ex.

00;06;11;02 - 00;06;47;20
Heather Hansen
Yes and no. Right? Because the type of English is spoken globally. There are there isn't just one global English. And that's one of the problems. Singapore English has its own rules, its own grammatical structures, its own vocabulary. Indian English has many different varieties, English spoken in the Philippines, slightly different, and some are more British English, some are more American based, depending on who colonized them first and so even in the writing, when you when you write with someone from India, the terminology they use, maybe some of the different grammar markers that you find will be different.

00;06;47;22 - 00;07;13;14
Heather Hansen
And so if you think of it that way, there's is almost a written accent as well where we're thinking, Oh, why can they never put an F on the third person singular key works. Not he work like, Oh, their English is so annoying. It comes up both in writing and in and in speech. I mean, just look at the comments section of any social media site and the way people will will break down the writing of what someone said, usually because they have no real argument.

00;07;13;14 - 00;07;31;25
Heather Hansen
So they go to the language as the way to make themselves superior. So the grammar police I'm talking to you, it's that is not necessary because if you understood the message, then communication happens and that's where we have to start approaching all of our communication, especially in the working world.

00;07;31;28 - 00;07;45;13
Wayne Turmel
Well, and I love that you are not trying to educate the individual workers so much as the leaders and the organizations who.

00;07;45;16 - 00;08;11;07
Heather Hansen
It really does start from the top. It needs to the leaders need to fully understand this in order to make it quite clear that, listen, we're accepting of everyone. Now, the problem in organizations is that we talk about everything. And I from age to race to gender, to sexuality, Abel is an all of these things, but language is never discussed, and it's the foundation for all of them.

00;08;11;07 - 00;08;33;10
Heather Hansen
When you hear of someone on the phone, you're immediately categorizing. You're giving them the gender you believe they have, not how they identify you are deciding what race they probably are. You are deciding their education levels, probably where in the world they're from. You have decided all this information and created a vision of that person without even seeing them, without knowing them.

00;08;33;13 - 00;08;53;21
Heather Hansen
And and this is not discussed in the workplace. It's not included in the policy. It's not protected by law unless you can link accent, bias and discrimination to national origin. So that means, okay, if you're a foreign language speaker in America and someone is discriminating against you and saying, Oh, you can't speak English, go back where you're from.

00;08;53;23 - 00;09;17;08
Heather Hansen
Well, that's an easy link to national origin and you have a court case. But what about the the white American man from Alabama who is going up to work on Wall Street and is being made fun of because of his accent or isn't taken seriously? What kind of national origin clause can he fall back on? So this is not only a native non-native foreign speaker.

00;09;17;08 - 00;09;34;04
Heather Hansen
We experience this within the United States. And if I say, you know, the South, New York, New Jersey, Boston, California, Valley Girl, Florida, we have immediate ideas of what these accents sound like and what the characteristics for those groups of people are.

00;09;34;05 - 00;09;36;28
Wayne Turmel
Right. And the humans attached to them.

00;09;37;01 - 00;09;50;09
Heather Hansen
Yeah. And so this is this is an issue for everyone. It isn't only a native non-Native, although we see it happening even more when we're trying to deal with people from a different culture and background as well.

00;09;50;12 - 00;10;25;06
Wayne Turmel
Well, that obviously gets to the point of in an increasingly global world, right? This notion that, you know, you can't really you can't get the benefits of globalism without dealing with other humans from other places, and it goes with the territory. And you said something and I'm dying to get into what the heck you mean by this, because as somebody who has spent 30 years teaching communication skills, your big battle cry is communication is not a skills problem.

00;10;25;13 - 00;10;28;00
Wayne Turmel
And what?

00;10;28;03 - 00;10;47;24
Heather Hansen
Well, that statement comes from my frustration as a corporate trainer where every october i get phone calls from h.r. Saying we really want to commit to changing the communication culture in the company. Can you come and do a two day program on presentation skills? And it's like, that's not going to cut it. That's not going to change anything.

00;10;47;24 - 00;11;17;14
Heather Hansen
That's not going to move the needle even a little bit. And this is not simply a skills problem. It's much more than that. It has to do with the entire culture of the work environment. Are people conscious communicators? Do we have cultural intelligence, cross-cultural skills? Are we good listeners? Are we aware of our environment? And when we have the loud voices and we're dominating and when we aren't letting people in, when we're interrupting and do we have connection in the company?

00;11;17;14 - 00;11;42;09
Heather Hansen
So is there psychological safety? Are we building strong relationships? What do those social networks look like inside the company itself? And, you know, do people have a fear of failure? They're not speaking up because they're always ridiculed or they're put back down. So they press mute and they they don't want to contribute. And then the last piece of the puzzle is the confidence piece, and that's both skills, confidence and self confidence, self-worth.

00;11;42;11 - 00;12;10;25
Heather Hansen
So it's only that very little sliver of the skills, confidence if you truly don't know how to communicate, you truly have such a heavy accent. No one on earth can understand you. Then we do need to work on some skills, but that is a very small part of the puzzle. I could teach you everything I know about a great presentation being a good presenter, but if you're in a toxic environment with a boss who doesn't listen, you could give the best presentation in the world and it's not going to do anything for you.

00;12;10;27 - 00;12;26;23
Heather Hansen
So. So the skills is just one teeny little piece of the puzzle, and we like to focus all of our attention there and place all of the responsibility on the individual to say you're not a good enough communicator when really so much more is based on how those messages are being received.

00;12;26;26 - 00;12;54;23
Wayne Turmel
I'm going to take us off topic for a moment because I'm fascinated by this. Having taught presentation skills in your corner of the world, does the expectation of what makes a good presentation from the leadership standpoint, how much work is it to take somebody from a what's called South east Southeast Asian culture and have them present to the white guy from New York?

00;12;54;25 - 00;12;59;01
Wayne Turmel
You know how traumatic and dramatic is that?

00;12;59;04 - 00;13;35;24
Heather Hansen
This is the entire problem because and this is why I run a successful business in the whole hypocrisy of my career is that why should that individual from Southeast Asia have to change the way they communicate their style of communication, their their personality, even to fit the expectations of the white westerner sitting in New York? Will that white Westerner ever even consider ever in a million years changing the way they speak, adapting their style, being more adaptable in general to cultural difference when they come to Southeast Asia?

00;13;35;29 - 00;14;18;14
Heather Hansen
And this is exactly the problem in the world right now, is that this Western ideal, the way leadership ideas, communication, you name it, business strategy is very Western dominated and we don't value the different styles that are coming from the East. So my whole job is trying to help these people to fit in to this global expectation that is a very western, western world and completely move them away from who they are, how they normally communicate it, how they articulate sounds to fit that picture, because that is the goal and it still is, especially in these countries that are old colonies that have just grown up with this feeling of somehow being inferior.

00;14;18;17 - 00;14;42;20
Heather Hansen
And Singapore itself has a government campaign called Speak Good English, implying that Singapore English is not good and it is a native variety. They grow up, they grow up speaking it, they're fully educated in English, they work fully in English. The government is run in English. And I don't think people outside Singapore really understand that the English is their language, but it sounds very different and their cultures.

00;14;42;21 - 00;15;06;07
Wayne Turmel
And so I'm giving you 10 minutes in a room with the average white Anglo American, Canadian project manager or division manager, you have 5 minutes and we have duct tape him or her. Yeah. So you will not be interrupted.

00;15;06;10 - 00;15;10;07
Heather Hansen
Captive audience So the mouth is duct tape. That's the most important.

00;15;10;09 - 00;15;18;21
Wayne Turmel
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I'm giving you every advantage for the next 5 minutes. What do you tell this person?

00;15;18;23 - 00;15;48;01
Heather Hansen
Oh, it's about shifting our entire view of the world, of us not being in the dominant position. First of all, understanding that we do not own the English language. We speak one variety of it. We also have an accent that is different from everywhere else in the world. We have to completely change that mindset that we're walking into global conversations in the powerful position and look at people as our peers and listen for understanding.

00;15;48;04 - 00;16;15;22
Heather Hansen
So the focus has now shifted that when we go into a global environment, we are also speaking a foreign language. The way that English is used, the way that we communicate in global settings is not the same as how we communicate with each other. Over coffee at home, we must learn how to adapt, how to change our speech, to drop idioms, to try to remove as many phrasal verbs as possible, which is incredibly challenging.

00;16;15;25 - 00;16;16;15
Heather Hansen
It's hard for me.

00;16;16;15 - 00;16;18;10
Wayne Turmel
To do over, not be.

00;16;18;13 - 00;16;37;16
Heather Hansen
A verb, plus a preposition that has a completely different meaning. So for example, I pass out verses, pass on verses, pass over one woman was an immigrant, and I believe this is in the UK. The story I heard called from the school. The school says your son is passed out on the playground, you need to come pick him up.

00;16;37;18 - 00;16;57;11
Heather Hansen
She didn't know what pass that was that she knew passed on and so she was distraught. She thought she was picking up her dead child at school. So this is how easily misunderstandings can happen. And we don't think of this as a native speaker born and raised in America, you know, we rule the world. We're so amazing and and to a degree, that's very true.

00;16;57;11 - 00;17;19;04
Heather Hansen
Globally, we have a huge reputation. We do have a lot of power in the world, but we can't abuse it. And we need to remember that there are people all over the world just as well-educated with us who have grown up speaking English, who sound different, but are just as educated, have just as many good ideas. And if we don't start closing our mouths and listening to them, we're losing so much potential.

00;17;19;04 - 00;17;38;14
Heather Hansen
We're losing our talent. We aren't taking advantage of the skills that are right in front of us. And because we have this chip on our shoulder that we think that now while you sound different, you must not be as good. And this comes from all the way back to the movies we watch as children, Disney movies, the bad guys all have accents and people are other.

00;17;38;14 - 00;17;43;14
Heather Hansen
We we try to create that distance and we make an enemy out of them.

00;17;43;16 - 00;18;07;06
Wayne Turmel
You know, this is so important and we can keep going forever. It occurs to me that Kevin and I have said for all of these many years that managers of whatever help, wherever they are, often forget that there is an inherent power difference. Yes. Even on your team between you and your direct reports, you can be as benevolent in kind of thinking.

00;18;07;06 - 00;18;39;23
Wayne Turmel
You're being open and understanding, and that exists anyway when you add the complications of working overseas accents. Not really listening to understand it only becomes that much more complicated and in a perfect world, the responsibility falls on us as leaders. So, Heather, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We are going to you says pushing the right button.

00;18;39;25 - 00;19;00;26
Wayne Turmel
We are going to have links to heather and global speech academy and all that good stuff in the transcript of the show on long distance work life icon. Heather, I'm going to remove you from the room just long enough to finish wrapping up here, but thank you so much for being with us. It's been a fascinating conversation.

00;19;00;28 - 00;19;03;19
Heather Hansen
Yeah, thank you. Really fun to be here. Thanks so much.

00;19;03;24 - 00;19;46;04
Wayne Turmel
And if you didn't fact like this show and with this one, there wasn't much not to like. I found this fascinating. Please like subscribe to your podcast listeners. You're seeing this on YouTube. You know how this works. By now, I was delighted to come across this topic and if you have a topic that you would like us to talk about or interview somebody about, or you just have a pet peeve that you want Marisa and I to riff about while we're at it, contact us on LinkedIn, Wayne Turmel, Marisa Eikenberry or Wayne and Kevin Eikenberry dot com, or Marisa and Kevin Eikenberry dot com.

00;19;46;07 - 00;20;09;27
Wayne Turmel
And of course, if you are putting together a team please contact us and Kevin Eikenberry group or you can pick up in my new book The long distance Team Designing your team for Everyone success that is it. Thank you for joining us on the long distance work life. Don't let the weasel ski get you down. We will see you next episode.