JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 126. I am John Sawers and I'm here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.

CORALINE: Hi everybody. I'm very happy to welcome our guest today, Suzan Bond. Suzan has spent much of her career focused on leadership: both leaders who are conferred but also those who are leaders who rise for leadership without a title. She writes for the leadership section of Fast Company. Suzan is also a certified executive coach. She helps tech leaders with their personal effectiveness to avoid burnout so they can have the impact that they want and works with C-suite leaders and organizational strategy. Suzan is working technology for over 15 years in various positions from project management to marketing and most recently, was the COO of Travis CI. Welcome, Suzan.

SUZAN: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on.

CORALINE: If you've ever heard the podcast before, you know what we're going to ask you next. We always ask them with this question. Suzan, what is your superpower and how did you develop it?

SUZAN: To tell you, I love this question because I work on it with my leaders in the work that I do, so when I saw that, I was like, "Yes." I consider my superpower to be asking questions and what I mean by that is when I went to coach training, we learned this thing called 'powerful questions' and we learned the power of questions. Lots of times, we tell people things and especially as we get further in our career, we think we've got smart advice but actually, I think asking questions can really out lots of really good information and assumptions that we're making. I consider that as my superpower.

CORALINE: Is that something you're always going at or is that a skill you had to develop?

SUZAN: I was the kid who asked everything -- why is the sky blue? -- that kid. However, I do think it was a skill I learned and really honed when I went to the coaching and training.

CORALINE: Maybe we should make this podcast turn it around and have you ask John and I questions.

SUZAN: It's one of the reasons I love doing my podcast because I never run out of questions to ask. Actually, you know what Caroline, I was thinking about what you just asked me. I also have a master's in social work. You are asking me, was I always good at question and I actually really remember now. The answer is no because I went to school to get a master's in social work and my track was basically organizational effectiveness and community organizing for non-profits organizations and I had to take a class in a more of therapeutic range of things, like that track. I can't remember what they called it, like clinical or something.

We did this computer program and I was terrible at asking questions. It was supposed to be a coach-like and I was not good. I passed the class but only with B+ which is not great in grad school. I wasn't very good at asking questions back then. I think I wasn't really dialed in. It's true. I wasn't great at it and now I am, so I think you can gain in it for sure.

JOHN: Were there a specific things that you did to get good at that or is it just a matter of practicing over the years?

SUZAN: Two things: one coach training really help you because coaching is all about allowing other people to find their answers rather than telling. That's a big difference between mentoring and coaching. Mentoring oftentimes doesn't have to be this way, so I'm going to make some assumptions here. I call them out but oftentimes, mentoring looks like we tell other people what we did or our experiences, we advise them on what to do. Whereas coaching is really about other people finding their wisdom.

We might advised them here and there but the school I went to, the Coaches Training Institute, one of their core principals is powerful questions and so, the first course at all of us, you should do this, you should do that. We are all horrible at it. We're all like putting on our advisor hat. We're so smart. I think it's a weekend course. I really stumbled a lot with it but as I took more course and I kept practicing it, it did get better, so I think it's a combination of taking classes and having someone really, to specifically say, turn that into powerful question or how can you make them to a powerful question and then practice really helps me.

CORALINE: I find that's very true in the mentoring that I do and I'm actually inspired a lot in my mentoring by my relationship with my therapist. She won't tell me what to do in a given situation. She'd rather ask questions and help me find the answer within myself. I try to mirror that and my experience in mentoring can involve coaching. I think there are different styles of mentoring and one of the ways you can become an effective mentor is by determining what style of mentorship your mentee needs at the time and being open to that changing over time. Sometimes it's [inaudible] mentorship, sometimes it's just listening, sometimes it's coaching and sometimes it's advocacy.

SUZAN: Oh, my gosh, I love those that's so good. You're absolutely right. We don't spend enough time to think about what do they really need and the different ways that we can present that support. I love that.

JOHN: Yeah, that's a good break down. You should write a blog post.

CORALINE: Maybe, I should write a book, John. What do you think?

JOHN: Oh, God. That's a good idea.

SUZAN: I love it. Oh, my gosh. It would be so helpful for people.

CORALINE: I am actually writing a book.

SUZAN: Oh, okay. I'm not in on it. That's awesome. Can I ask what's the book about?

CORALINE: It's called The Compassionate Coder. It's about practicing empathy in software development. We start with the basics of empathy, defining our terms and talking about the importance of emotional intelligence and then, in subsequent chapters in the book, we track the career of the developer from starting out all the way to being very senior and being very influential within our field and give them guidance on how they can look at the world and look at their work and their relationships through an empathy lens. I've been working in the book for way too long.

I have a co-author, Naomi Freeman. We actually did an episode on the show about some of our early ideas and we're hoping to come back when the books actually written, which is going to be later this year and I'm super excited about that.

SUZAN: That's awesome. I feel like empathy is something that is such an important skill and what we really need more of in tech.

CORALINE: But Suzan, tech is just about technology. It's about being the smartest person in the room. It's all about --

SUZAN: It sure is.

CORALINE: -- loner geniuses, cranking out the code in the middle of the night in their copious free time and changing the world. Don't you know that?

SUZAN: Absolutely. That's why I joined tech. It's funny because I obviously get your sarcasm and as a person who deeply works in technology -- I've worked in technology for over 15 years -- and I know how to code a bit in Ruby and I've obviously done some PHP related to WordPress but sometimes, I'm an outsider because I am more on what we might call the people skills side. I love podcast like this and folks who are talking like that and really technical people who are talking about that. It makes me really excited.

CORALINE: Suzan, do you still actively code? I'm really curious as to how you blend technology with your coaching if they're very distinct or if you find a utility in staying current with technology through the work that you do.

SUZAN: I've always coded for fun. I was really clear. I was never going to be a software developer but I wanted to learn how to code. I was really fascinated. I found all my friends -- my closest friends and even my partner is a software developer. I learned it more for myself. I do code here and there. I'm making some small apps like a digital Magic 8-Ball with really interesting quotes from Shakespeare and with also modern influences like The Matrix and hip hop and things like that, so you spin it and if you need an inspiration that day.

I don't code a ton but I do stay up on technology like what are the latest languages, what are the big things that are happening in technology and I work with a ton of technologists and so, I feel it helps my work because they can talk to me in a way and I understand it. We have a shared language because I understand things like what a pull request is and all those kinds of things. I stay up with it by reading and just being deeply involved in the tech community and now are my clients and I try to code a little bit.

JOHN: That's really interesting. How did you sort of come to the path where your interleaving this coaching work and the technical work?

SUZAN: Oh, my gosh. That's such a good question. I'm thinking, "How did I?" because I don't know that it was conscious. I started working in technology during Web 1.0 when we were trying to build shopping carts with really hard problems and million dollar problems to solve and I was working for an interactive agency and we built American Airlines first website and we were doing all those kinds of things. I ran a project management department and I discovered how much I love technology and my friends at the company were all software developers. Every single one of them. That was who I was closest with and a few designers. I thought I would be a project manager but I wasn't.

I think I just over the years, have noticed that when I kind of went away for a little bit and did some health care stuff and other consulting stuff. I kept coming back to technology and I think this is maybe not answering your question but I think it's an organic way of just blending things that I love together like I love people and human interaction and how we can be our best selves and how organizations can be their best and serve their people the best and I also love the power of technology and what it can do with its downsides of course and I love the creativity of developers. There are just some of the most creative people. It's our DNA, I guess. I don't know if I have a better answer. I'm sorry.

CORALINE: As you work with organizations and organizational effectiveness, are there common problems that you see in a relationship between technologists and the organizations that they work for.

SUZAN: I think what I can say -- I'm going to answer this maybe a little bit differently -- is I see as a pattern and the challenge is how do we blend technology and the power of technology and what it can do with humans in all of their irrationality and their own emotions, which I must but how do we blend those two and how do we make them work well together. I love the a lot of automation and using the power of technology in an organization but I think that we're always constantly looking at that edge around emotions.

For example, I think about things like asynchronous communication and Slack. Those are wonderful tools and yet, there's a lot of human aspects that are missing from them. That's pretty obvious and I find that most organizations are often struggling between those two. They're trying to figure out how to take advantage of that and how to maximize people's time and remote aspect of things, the distributed aspect of many technology teams these days with the human aspect and the human emotional side.

CORALINE: You also bring up an interesting point. With remote organizations, communication challenges are different, right? I think a lot of companies are afraid of being open to a remote workforce because they don't think those asynchronous communication tools are an effective replacement for wondering up to someone's desk and interrupting them and asking them a question, right?

SUZAN: It's true. There are lots of companies who are still, even today who are very nervous about that.

CORALINE: Slack itself is not a distributed company. You have to...

SUZAN: I know. That's interesting. I read that Rands in Repose, Michael Lopp who... I don't know if he's at Slack anymore, Head of Engineering of something and I was really surprised to learn because I was doing an article on remote, basically distributed teams and what people in other companies can learn about remote work from technologists and I was surprised that they are not remote. They're not a distributed team.

CORALINE: Yeah. My boyfriend is pretty early in his tech career. Well, someone early in his tech career and he works for a more traditional, he works for an insurer and they are a very sort of conservative organization and yesterday, he was telling me he had to get up for an 8AM all-day meeting, so every single engineer, every single member of the company got together for eight hours to discuss business strategy and customer retention and things along those lines and that is such a strange world to me, having worked remote for five years now. I can't imagine first of all how you would keep an entire company of people engaged for eight hours. How you could possibly make any decisions with a group that large and just the immense cost of bringing people together in that kind of way.

SUZAN: It's true. I thought that eight hours is a long amount of time. I'll be honest. When I went to work at Travis, I was a tiny bit nervous about doing my work completely distributed. I've done similar work before more in person and I've worked distributed for many years but the role I was in as COO, it was really focused on organizational effectiveness, organizational change, leadership development, management career development and in my old job, I used to go around and just do rounds in the morning and the afternoon and just kind of talk with people and see what they're up to and oftentimes, it rooted out interesting things that were going on for the person or the organization.

I thought I have to figure out how to do this in a different way and it ended up working out wonderfully. I actually enjoyed it much more. Now, I don't think I would go back to a traditional environment that wasn't distributed but I'll be honest, in the beginning, I was wondering how would I figure out how to do that.

CORALINE: Yeah. It's hard to manage when walking around in your home office, right?

SUZAN: Right. I can walk around but no one else would see me. It turned out it wasn't really that hard, to be frank. It was a much easier process than I thought it was. It was just reading Slack channels and getting the right configuration and watching things and getting the right routine. It soon became seamless and as I said, I actually preferred it and found that I did not miss one ounce of the old office way. It didn't bother and it didn't have any impact on the work I did.

CORALINE: Yeah. Do you find that companies that embrace a remote culture for their developers are hesitant to make their management -- the upper echelons -- to banish remote as well. I know that's the case at Stitch Fix where I work. If you want to be a director of hire, you pretty much have to have an office. You have to have a seat in headquarters because there's still this reluctance to make managers distributed as well.

SUZAN: Yeah. It's really interesting to me because I've noticed that trend too and I don't necessarily agree with it. When we're thinking about it that way -- I am going to make a bold statement -- I am not sure you're thinking about your culture of your organization in the right way because now you have developers who are off on their own but how are you bringing them in, how is the whole company communicating and working together because that just makes me wonder about how they are thinking about all of their team and how decision making happens.

If they're saying, "If you're this, you have to be in person," so then, are all of the decisions being made in person then and developers are not involved in those strategic decisions and they're just informed later? Well, if your product is all technology, that's concerning to me because they should be woven into the development of your product and the way that you set your organization has a lot of influence on that.

JOHN: Yeah. You said exactly what I was going to say about that, where you build that organizational divide between the remote and the in-person and I think that always leads to problems, whether it's the one person on the team that's remote and then, always gets left out of the discussions or if it's the whole one department or one layer of a department that's remote and gets left out of the discussions. I think until everyone's remote, you're not thinking in those terms about how to weave everyone into the discussion as they go on.

SUZAN: It's a really good point, John about organizational divides and how we unintentionally create that even if we don't mean to. Travis was a mostly distributed team, though there was a small office in Berlin and I do think that that style can work as long as you are clear about how decisions get made and you're basically make sure you don't create those organizational divides. My whole team was in Berlin except me, so they all saw each other all of the time and I never saw them except on the screen.

I think it helped that I was the leader of the team, though I never felt that divide between them but I also credit that I think Travis did a lot of great things about how they thought about making sure that we work very hard at not having organizational divides geographically. It's a challenging problem.

CORALINE: Out of curiosity from your experience, is there a difference between European and American companies in their approach to remote work?

SUZAN: I'm not sure if I have an answer because I flip flop. I was going to say one thing and I was going to say another. I don't know if I can answer that at the moment because I've seen examples of both, where many American companies are willing to adopt the distributive lifestyle and I've also seen European ones that are. I think that for me the real difference would be perhaps the size of the company. I think that might have a little bit more to do with it but now, I want to totally study this, Coraline. I am totally going to look into this because I do a terrible job in answering it but I love the question.

CORALINE: My ex-girlfriend was Swedish and she worked for Spotify and they had offices in San Francisco and New York and she decided she wanted to change. She wanted to experience more of the world, so she moved to San Francisco and was working out of that office and then later, she moved to Chicago where I am and the culture was not supportive at all of her remote work and at one point, they actually said, "You either have to move to New York or San Francisco or we're going to let you go."

SUZAN: Oh, no. So what happened? What did she do? I'm getting a cliffhanger. What happened?

CORALINE: They let her go.

SUZAN: Wow.

CORALINE: That kind of colored my impression of European companies [inaudible] in exception in a lot of ways and there probably are exceptions but it seems to me like the promise of the EU would be that you can be wherever you want within Europe and the notion of citizenship was a little bit different in European pattern. I think I would grant you a lot of flexibility but I hear these examples like Spotify and I'm like, "What is going on over there?"

SUZAN: Again, I go back to, also the size of the company. I think the way that the leaders are thinking about their company holistically -- I may sounds funny -- but holistically, what's your view on your culture and your people and your strategy but I'm really sorry to hear about that story.

CORALINE: Yeah. It was a struggle for a long time. It is a very difficult time for both of us actually. So what are the kinds of company cultures that lend themselves well to remote work versus companies that really are not going to be successful with that kind of approach?

SUZAN: I think one of the things is openness, being open to new approaches like if you're open you have more flexibility, so if one of their values is to be open, that is one of the qualities that really helps that to happen and because it's also open, it also talks to openness of culture because when you have a distributed company, oftentimes you're going to have folks from all over the world and even, if you're let's say you focus on the Americas and Europe, you still have many different cultures in there, really distinct cultures. I think that that's really important that we're open to other cultures and we were willing to shift.

For example, a funny thing that I learned to do is really work on my American slang and be very careful about that. Since my whole team, they weren't all Germany. They were Indian, Ecuadorian and Russian all living in Germany and what I learned to do was I would always say things like fingers cross and so then, we talked about what does that mean and then what does that mean in the German culture and so then, we end up with thumbs pressed and fingers cross. When we were like hoping something that would happen, we would say, "Fingers cross and thumbs pressed." It might be a silly example but it really bonded us as a team. We would all put our hands up with one finger crossed and one thumbed pressed in. I'm doing that right now for those of you listening who can't see me. It was just an example of like when you're more open to some of the cultural differences because it's not just about what thing you use, Slack versus different communication channels. It's about how open are you to adapting to someone else's reality.

CORALINE: Do you think there's also a matter of trusting your employees?
SUZAN: Yeah, absolutely. Trust is another one and there's lots of ways at getting at that culture-wise. You can build a culture that is super results-oriented and if you're getting results, then that trust factor goes up and people who might feel the need to micromanage may get over that but I do think that building a trusting culture and trusting your people is really, really huge for distributed cultures. But I'm also curious John, Coraline, what else do you think? You know, other things that might be good that you’ve seen?

JOHN: I was picking up on what you're talking about openness just now and something that struck me, at least about the way my team operates, which is that when we have this remote situation, you're seeing into other people's lives like maybe it's just their office but occasionally, it's not their office. Maybe they're on the couch or maybe, I'm on the couch and you get to see their cats walking across their desk, the children coming in to ask for lunch and you just get that much more open sense of these people and who they are, what their lives are like and I like getting that sense of people. I was like, "Oh, you've got three dogs. I get to see them hanging out in the background every time we're on a meeting and that's really cool," and so that's something that struck me about as what you were saying.

SUZAN: They are human. There's the human aspect. We're not just robot who are results-oriented and this is a company and don't bring your personal stuff. I love that, like being really human. I love that, John. It's really true.

CORALINE: I'm kind of reminded of and the theory of management that Douglas McGregor put together in the 50s. He was a contemporary of Maslow who is famous for the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. He kind of riffed on Maslow a bit and he came up with two styles of management: Theory X and Theory Y. In Theory X management, it tends to be very autocratic to use modern management language and it comes down to a distrust of your workers and thinking that you have to be very direct and decision making is centralized. You tell your workers what to do and they do it and if they don't, they get punished and if they do, they get rewarded.

As opposed to Theory Y, where it's more about not self-actualization exactly but more autonomy and that's not a loss at fair management style but almost paternal or maternal management style, very collaborative where there's more trust in the organization and you're empowering your employees to take part of the decision making process. I'm wondering if there are absolutes in terms of how an organization functions or if there's an evolutionary aspect to the way that management changes and reacts to the workforce.

SUZAN: I like that. I don't know that theories but I’m going to look it up and scribbling notes down here things that I want to look up later. I love that idea of autocratic versus autonomy and I think in autonomy, you're really getting at something there, Coraline in terms of distributed teams. Autonomy can really help build trust and allow a team to function under those conditions.

I guess what I might say about how that transition happens or whether it does, for me my experience, it is largely been based on a leaders of a company and what those leader's philosophy was and the way that they saw their people. I think that the leadership has a lot to do with whether autonomy is really more held or becomes more autocratic. That sort of what my experiences then. What I mean by then is I think a company can move back and forth across that continuum and it's not linear that can sort of jump around based upon the leadership that's in place at the time and then of course, related heavily to the conditions that the companies is working under, like the market and those kinds of things.

JOHN: Going back to the question about how you sort of charted your path, because I feel like I have had a similar path in technology where I've been straight up developer for a long time but over the last decade, have been broadening into a lot more non-technical skills and started doing a talk recently called Hacking Your Emotional API, where I used the API metaphor to describe how feelings work and as a request response thing. That also happened very organically. It wasn't like I decided that I was just going to start fusing these two sides of what my interests into one thing but that's what I did and so, I'm sort of curious as when did you decide that you were going to go to CTI and get your coaching certification and how that was going to fit into your career.

SUZAN: I sort of move along in the very early parts of my career and my degrees are in psychology, sociology and all that kind of world. I've always been really fascinated with human behavior and then of course, I fell into technology and then thought, "I'm fascinated with this too." When I became the head of the project management department. I had 12, 13, 14 people and I begin to think a lot about managing people and leadership at that time in really heavy and deep ways and noticing the difference in people and have people responded and how I needed to respond differently to different people. As a manager or a leader, I couldn't be one way. I had to shift according to them or at least, I didn't have to but I found I got more results so we had a better relationship and they were happier too.

I don't honestly remember how I found coaching. To be frank with you, showing my age a long time ago when coaching was thought of as like little league. If you would say coaching, people had no idea what it was and I somehow found it and then I got a coach for some reason. I don't even remember why and then one day I said, "I think I want to become a coach." My coach said, "Finally. I've been wondering when you are going to come to that conclusion because you have all of the right things for it," and I thought, "Oh. Okay, cool," and so, I just started taking courses in it.

I don't know that I intended to become a coach but I wanted what coaching offered. I wanted skill that coaching brought and I think I'm this huge advocate of people learning coaching skills because it can help in so many different parts of your life. You still want to be a coder and work in technology, it doesn't matter. Those skills can help you no matter what. That was how I found it and how I got involved in it and becoming a coach was almost like an accident or an afterthought. I just kept getting deeper and deeper in and I thought, "There's so much I want to learn. I want to become better at this."

JOHN: So basically, you're following the threads of the things that interest you and making the most of what you learn there.

SUZAN: Story of my life, you know? I like to joke that I think in circles, squirrels and stars when it comes to my career. Obviously, I manage project management department and I can think linearly but when it comes to managing my life, I tend to do it more intuitively and listening to what feels good. As my dad always says -- my dad is an engineer, by the way. My dad is a mechanical engineer and he worked for GM. He had this piece of wisdom. What he used to say was, "Good decisions get better and bad decisions get worse," and I've always followed that.

Project management, I enjoyed it. I mean I was good at it but I didn't enjoy it, so project management as a career path wasn't getting better for me. I was just working a ton and feeling revved up and stressed out but becoming a manager and learning coaching skills, it got better and better and not only I was good at it, I actually enjoyed it. I think that my dad's wisdom of "Good decisions get better and bad decisions get worse," and along that he taught us how to use our intuition, he always taught us how to listen to ourselves. That, I think how I crafted my career.

CORALINE: That's really interesting to me -- the idea of listening to yourself. I did not used to be a very intuitive person. I think all of us have that inner voice that is telling us what's best in the moment or what will be best for our future but I found over time that as a skill, you can actually develop and that, by opening yourself up to listening to that inner voice, the inner voice gets louder and more accurate and can really provide some sort of innate wisdom that we don't really have access to on a conscious level.

JOHN: I have been developing that myself. It seems like we're a useful source of data, so just trying those in a little bit harder and try and see what non-conscious information is coming in.

SUZAN: It's such a useful skill and I think there's a little bit of a misnomer. Maybe, it's changed over the years. I think of the old perception of people like software developers was like, "Oh, they're super rational and analytical and they can't listen to emotions and they don't understand that," and I was thought that was wrong, mostly because I grew up in a household with a father who was a serious engineer but was also the one who taught me how to use my emotions and how to listen and sort them out and how to listen to my instincts.

My mom didn't do that. That was my dad and I think that's changing and I love that you both are leaning into that because listening to your self’s intuition is really just inner knowledge. Everybody can grow in that. It is not just for the limited few. It's not like you got it when you were younger and if you miss it, well that ship sails. You can do it today. You can continue to grow all the time in your self-knowledge.

JOHN: It's interesting the parallels that I'm actually seeing between our sort of career have is because I have been doing this thing that I've been doing for a while, with these talks I've been giving and getting more and more interested in the psychological side of things and just recently, got promoted to manager and now, I've started a team to manage and now, I have to really, really level up my skills in that area. I'm excited to do that because there are skills I'm interested in having.

SUZAN: As a manager or a leader, it's really interesting. I have taught a lot of new managers and leaders. I think the instinct is often to reach for a book about management and that's great and what I would also say is reach truer introspection, really go inside, just what you're saying, John like, "I need you go inside and think about me. I want to understand myself better," and think about things that are maybe seen intangible: emotions, feelings, the subtleties of communication. I think that that's such a great way to get started on a management journey.

CORALINE: I want to call one thing out. You mentioned management and leadership and for me personally, I do consider myself a leader but I'm not interested in management. I went to management track during the first half of my career and work up to C-level. At first I thought I was happiest writing code and so, I shifted back to an individual contributor role but because of my seniority -- I've been doing software development professionally for 25 years now -- I have found leadership opportunities that are not technical, that are about helping people level up and helping people be their best selves and that's really a big focus for me. I try to balance that with technical leadership which is a hard balance to achieve honestly but you can be a leader without being a manager. I've really firmly believe that.

SUZAN: Coraline, I'm so happy you brought that up. I think we talked about it before because I 100% agree and it's a really important distinction. I mentioned it because I think managers and leaders both need to do that but I do think that they're distinct. It's part of a little bit what you talked about in my bio. I do think a lot of times, we think all people would like the idea of confer, that you have to manage people in order to be a leader. That's so not true. They are distinct and separate things. I love that you brought that up.

JOHN: It's definitely important to keep that distinction in line because there are ways to do it without having to stop coding or switch your tracks.

SUZAN: Well, you can lead even without having some conferred title. You know what I mean? You can be a leader and there are lots of people who are leaders, who lead from the back of the room or the side of them or the middle of the room. When they speak up, leadership is not just something about having a certain title or being at the 'top' of an organization. Leadership is about who you are and a lot goes to what you were talking about so deftly, Coraline. Just such so well said.

JOHN: That actually brings up an interesting question. For people that may only be just realizing that there are ways they can lead without having the mantle of management thrust upon them, how do they get started in understanding what they're capable of and what they can do? What the next steps are and how they can develop that leadership skill?
SUZAN: It's a really good question. It's funny I have a lot of people come to me who are asking like, "How do I step into my leadership? I don't want to manage people but I want to step into management," and also like, "Am I a leader? Am I a leadership material?" and I think a lot of the reasons why it's hard is because of the way that we see leadership in our culture right now oftentimes and we have a fairly narrow definition of it often. I might like a broken record but it really starts with, in my opinion, introspection -- who am I? What impact do I want in the world? What matters to me?

Because once you understand those things, then you can understand where to apply your energy and where your best because our leaders are not the same. I know you both know this but all leaders are not the same. People are extremely different and I really think that the beginning places, again what matters to me, what do I value, what kind of impact do I have. For example, I'm somebody who don't like bootcamp style leadership. I don't need. I don't need you to come yell at me like, "Come on. Give me 10," or whatever that might look like even.

I push myself so hard. I like leadership and my kind of leadership is obviously like coaching and it's really collaborative. I know environments where I do best. If there's an environment where I'm supposed to just be really hard with people and pushed forward and someone wants to be super confrontational, it's just not going to work for me. That's not an environment where I will excel as a leader. It's not that I can do conflict. No problem with conflict but there's a certain style.

I think it really begins with understanding who we are as human beings and really gets back to that question that you asked in the beginning which is like, "What's your superpower," right? What is my superpower and then how do I apply it and then understanding all of those things? Where am I most effective? What do I value? Where do I want to have impact?

CORALINE: I'm not a very goal-oriented person. I do have personal goals for myself but my goals are more informed by my values and I found it to be a really good exercise. I've done it twice in my life now, where I actually write down what my values are and I look for ways that I can live those values and ways that I can express those values in a way that is influential. That comes down to what my leadership style is and that does fall in line with what you said about introspection, just being very deliberate though, about just writing them down can help so much and what I did was not only did I write down my values but I also wrote down a list of questions that I can ask myself in a sort of personal retrospective: how will did I do? Where I fall down? Can I own my successes? Can I learn from my failures? And I'm very deliberate about that through the process.

SUZAN: Coraline, I love it. That's exactly it. Being really deliberate and then the key is writing it down. That's wonderful because I think we think about values is this squishy things or we think we understand them. It's funny. I do morning pages and I was just writing about my values this morning. I've never written about my values in my morning pages again but I was like, "This situation will work for me because it doesn't honor my value with X but I have this value," and so I think, writing it down and being really deliberate, I love about what you say that you do it frequently, like you ask yourself questions.

CORALINE: Yeah, retrospective. I do it in retrospective, at least once a week.

SUZAN: Once a week is great. I do mine a little bit less frequently but I think retrospectives are really helpful, especially because you write it down. When you do your retrospectives, do you write things down or are you more asking, more like a conversation with yourself?

CORALINE: It depends on how I'm feeling about the retrospective that day. Sometimes, I'm just asking questions of myself and sometimes, I am writing it down because in some ways, I would like to see that evolve over time and I would like to see improvement over time. It's a mix. It depends on how serious I am about it on a given day but I'm trying to make a habit of it. I think that's the important thing for me. I'm very structured in my life and I'm very compartmentalized to my life and it's really valuable to me the set time aside for that and that means for me, doing it every Sunday when I get up, when I'm having my coffee, when I am not yet sodding myself into some kind of activity and just making time for that introspection.

SUZAN: It so big -- making time is so important. You know, to be introspective, I think it's easy to let the days slip by and all of a sudden, we're off course.

CORALINE: Yeah. If we're not checking with ourselves, it's really easy to get caught up in whatever the emergency of the day is or whatever is the work, trying to get a project finished. It is important, I think to make that time just to be with yourself and make it quite enough to think.

JOHN: Yeah, I agree, totally. I'm struggling with that right now, in fact.

SUZAN: Can I hear more about that? I'm sorry. Do you mind if I ask? Curiously, you're struggling. The code to me can't help asking.

JOHN: The phase of my life right now is that there are 15 different projects both within and without my various jobs and they're all just sort of firing off together in different orders and with different priorities and different emergencies and so, just being pulled in so many different directions that setting aside time to do that has been hard, even though I know the value of it.

SUZAN: I feel like that's so common. A lot of folks, what happens is they get busier and busier and then they get overwhelmed and they can't think possibly how they can just sit down. They know they need to do it. I feel like that's really common but I have no idea where you're at with it and no predictions. I think for some folks, it can get really hard, really challenging and to the point where they can get to burn out if they're not careful at it. Again, I'm saying nothing about you and your ability but that's really typical and sometimes you might say, "Well, focus and prioritize," and sometimes we just can't. There's a lot coming at us and we can't always control what's coming at us and certainly as a manager, things come at us sometimes that we don't have control over. It's like, "My schedule is going over here." That's just what it is when we are working with people and organizations which are dynamic.

I would say for anyone in that situation and I don't know if you've tried this John, but kind of what Coraline is talking about like finding a tiny window -- any regular window and even making it small. I love the idea of microhabits for even 15 minutes because I think what happens a lot of the time, I got to sit down and it's got to be in an hour and they're feeling overwhelming. I know for me, one of the things I do that helps me stay grounded is I just write my morning pages. Does everybody know what morning pages are?

CORALINE: No. I actually going to ask you about that.

SUZAN: I'm so sorry, I'm saying that. It's a really cool concept by Julia Cameron. Apparently a lot of pretty effective, really successful people do them, I just learned. What you do is basically you sit down with a piece of paper -- I know we were in tech but paper and pencil -- and you write three pages in the morning, first thing. There's no purpose of it. You're not trying to get anywhere and it's handwritten. It is not typed either. It is a time to really go in and figure out what's going on inside your brain and to get things out of you.

Usually, it takes me 15 or 20 minutes and so for me, it's one way to pull things out of my head and actually, I've written several tweet threads because of that. I wasn't trying to but it actually become really super productive. I also noticed that it lowers my stress and anxiety because I've had a chance to write out what's going on inside my head. I think that's a tiny microhabit that I do. That's 15 or 20 minutes a day that I take in the morning to do, that really helps me just think and peer inside my head and see what's going on.

JOHN: I like that that it's so unfocused. It's not like writing down goals and to do Zen planning. It's just, "Let's just dump it all out," and not focus on exactly what it is that's coming out. I like that.

SUZAN: Yeah. For me, I'm a super goal-oriented person like I had a goal or I die trying and I'm still here. That's always my joke. For me, it's wonderful because it forces me to be really introspective and like today, I came up with values. I'm talking about my values and I uncovered something because I had made a decision and I was like, "But why am I making that decision," and I was a little uneasy about it but by writing, I was able to find something and then I would be able to communicate to other people even better. I would say for anyone who's facing them, maybe just as tiny fit like Coraline does, maybe once a week or a small thing in the mornings. I think it can help to calm the overwhelming and it can help you focus a little bit and just give you time to be introspective.

JOHN: Yeah. I actually have a calendar item to do that sort of retro work on Sundays but so far, there have been too many other things that need to get done in that time frame and I haven't done it. I know it's the complete paradox of that situation like if I actually set aside the time to do it, other things would get done faster and more in better order and it would be easier to keep track of them.

SUZAN: But it's so hard, right? I know what you're saying. I have so much compassion because I feel the same way. I work for myself again now but I'm honest, when I had a job, things like that were easier for me to slip. I stayed pretty good with it but it's really hard. I think also, I don't know about both of you but there can be times, maybe when we were a little bit scared to go inside our head and see what's going on in introspective time. Or like, "Oopsie. That happen. I'm a little bit off track," so I think there's actually can be some real fear there.

CORALINE: I think I might be constitutionally well-suited for that kind of work. I have a complicated relationship with sleep. I had a lot of sleep which is kind of unusual for someone with bipolar, with manic tendencies but I'm very slow to wake up in the morning. I hit snooze a lot and then when I do get out, I'm not really keep well of working in time until my third cup of coffee, so I take my mornings very slowly. I'm definitely more productive later in the day.

I feel like my dreams are very vivid and I try to keep a dream journal but I feel more connected to my subconscious in the morning because I'm slowly making that transition from really focusing on the subconscious or really becoming conscious in preparing for my day. That kind of transition for me, which is very slow, I think opens up opportunities for me to be introspective and for me to be intuitive.

JOHN: Yeah, I like that. That reminds me, there's an old... I don't know if it's a koan or just a saying in meditation circles which is you should meditate an hour a day unless you're too busy to do that in which case, you should meditate two hours a day.

CORALINE: I love that.

SUZAN: I love that. Should you meditate? Yes.

JOHN: Yes.

SUZAN: It is hard. I think this is what I enjoy. I love the idea of personal effectiveness and how do we go about it. I love that we're having an open conversation about it because I think a lot of times, there's a lot that's put out there in our social media, always perfect Instagram articles, five ways I changed my life culture that we just think like we should always be perfect all the time and it should look like X. I think that the reality is that we're always searching for balance and personal efficacy in our lives. Sometimes, we're in it and sometimes, we fall out of it. I love this conversation. It reminds me that I'm just human.

CORALINE: Suzan, at the end of every episode, we take a moment to reflect and we talk about the things that really resonated with us and maybe things that we want to change in our lives or start doing.

I was really struck by what you said about powerful questions and coaching by asking questions. I actually wrote down -- I'm a note taker, I do it all digitally though. I don't work on paper. In my weekly tracking, I have a personal document in the work document and both of those documents have a reminder section, things that I want to keep in mind as I move through my day. I wrote down actually, "Mentoring, figure out how to ask powerful questions." That's something I want to be better at. It's really easy for someone in my position to be the advice giver, to let those maternal instincts kick in and try and really guide people toward a decision that makes sense to me. I want to shift that power balance back to the person that I'm trying to help and help them reveal the answers that they haven't tried them. That's definitely something that I'm going to try and be better at.

SUZAN: I love that because that reminds me of the word that you brought in there about Douglas McGregor that contemporizes Maslow, the idea of autonomy. You reminded me of that word and I love it because that's what I'm always striving for and what I think where we can be most powerful is we help other people be autonomous. I think that's one of the things I'm actually taking away, just even that word which is big because I use the word 'empower' a lot but I feel like it get overused. You know what I mean? It's like, "Oh, empower," but I love that word of autonomy so I'm taking that away as something a word that I really want to dig into and live with because I do a theme of every year. I'm really into words, so this year my theme is 'invest.' Then I'll do words of the week and I think my word of the week is going to be autonomy and I'm going to dig into what does that look like for me and how do we give that to people. I'm taking that away. Thank you.

CORALINE: Awesome. Thank you. John, what are your thoughts?

JOHN: The first thing was that there's a book called 'Ask Powerful Questions' by Will Wise that I have. I've only gotten one or two chapters in but I feel like there's probably a really good meat in that book. I'm also sort of fascinated by this concept of asking questions that I've always valued the question as the way of eliciting insight and movement and motivation but again I don't feel like I'm particularly good at using that as a tool in the times I'm leading and when I'm mentoring. I think for me also, that's going to be something to focus more on and pay some more attention to, so I can develop that skill.

SUZAN: That makes me so happy because it is the thing that I talk about all the time and if I wanted one more thing in the world, it would be that, is that we all ask, learn how to ask more questions to root out what's inside with other people and help them find their answers or help to get results. I love that you are both saying that. That makes me so happy and tears in my eyes.

CORALINE: Suzan, I really want to thank you. This has been a great discussion and I think this has been really useful to our audience in a lot of ways, no matter where they are in their career development and whether no matter how they express their leaderships. I've definitely learned a lot and thank you so much for being our guest today.