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Episode

754: Five Steps to Solve a Problem, with Monica Chartier

Good decision-making starts with better input.
https://media.blubrry.com/coaching_for_leaders/content.blubrry.com/coaching_for_leaders/CFL754.mp3

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Monica Chartier: Coaching for Leaders Fellow

Monica Chartier is a group product manager in the technology industry. Her work has centered on supporting a global product experience, getting a million visitors a day. In addition to her e-commerce and technical experience, she indexes heavily on coach-like leadership with her team and also inside our community as one of our Coaching for Leaders Fellows.

In this conversation, Monica and I explore a need inside the Coaching for Leaders membership community and how we used the design thinking process to approach it. We outline the five key steps we followed and how you might do the same to address a problem inside your own organization.

Key Points

Five steps to solve a problem using design thinking:

  1. Empathy: Start with Intentional Listening and Observation.
  2. Define: Clarify the Real Problem to Solve.
  3. Ideate: Co-Create Ideas and Form Testable Hypotheses.
  4. Prototype: Start Small, Learn Fast.
  5. Test, Learn, and Adapt: Make Iteration a Leadership Habit.

Access Monica’s detailed guide (PDF download)

Resources Mentioned

  • Monica Chartier on LinkedIn

Related Episodes

  • The Way to Make Struggles More Productive, with Sarah Stein Greenberg (episode 569)
  • How to Prevent a Team From Repeating Mistakes, with Robert “Cujo” Teschner (episode 660)
  • How to Lead Engaging Meetings, with Jess Britt (episode 721)

Discover More

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Five Steps to Solve a Problem, with Monica Chartier

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Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
You’re trying to address a problem inside your organization and who among us isn’t? But you’re not sure where to start. In this Saturday cast, Monica Chartier, one of our fellows, and I turn the tables a bit to look inside the Coaching for Leaders membership community at how we addressed a problem, the five steps we took, and the opportunity that emerged. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 754. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of the things that we all face as leaders is how to solve a problem.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:57]:
How do we use a framework? How do we start to approach something that does emerge as a problem in our work within our teams, with an employee, with a stakeholder, whoever. And problem solving is one of the major tenants that we do need to address as leaders. And how to do it is a question that comes up a lot in our community. Where to begin, what process to follow. Today we’re going to outline a process, five steps, one way to solve a problem, at least to address it, and to begin to create some movement toward it. And I’m so glad to be able to welcome one of our fellows who is going to help us walk through this framework and more importantly, to actually provide an example that her and I have used over the last year or two together, intimately to solve a problem within our community. I’m pleased to introduce to you Monica Chartier.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:49]:
She is a group Product Manager in the technology industry. Her work is centered on supporting a global product experience, getting a million visitors a day. In addition to her E commerce and technical expertise. She indexes heavily on coach like leadership with her team and also inside our community as one of our Coaching for Leaders fellows. Monica, you and I talk all the time. This is the first time we’re recording a conversation, but it’s just like any other Monday for us, isn’t it? It’s so good to see you.

Monica Chartier [00:02:17]:
It really is great to talk to you again.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:19]:
Yeah. So. Well, I am so excited for this conversation to really look at not only a framework, but how we used in practice as you and I have been working together for the last year or two and thinking about this. But before we get into the what and the details of it, perhaps you could share a bit of how did you come across this framework Initially, where does it come from? And just the key components of it before we get into some of the details.

Monica Chartier [00:02:48]:
Absolutely. So the key tenants are tenants from design thinking or the study of design thinking. And they’re pretty well known and socialized in the product management, product development space. Space. They’re actually a lot of the key principles behind Agile methodology, which software teams use for developing products, digital products that customers use, and the key tenants behind it are really looking at what is the problem that we’re solving for our key customers and letting the customers and letting the people who we’re trying to affect really help lead and guide the idea. And I thought this would be a really great methodology to share with the leadership community as a, as a framework for how to think about problem solving. Because, you know, leadership tends to be lonely, right? That we tend to find ourselves in a position where you’re, you’re leading a group that may or may not have a weigh in or context necessarily behind decisions and how they’re being made. But when it comes to making change and solving problems for them, those are really the people that we’re trying to affect.

Monica Chartier [00:03:50]:
And it can help improve the quality of our problem solving when we bring them into the solutioning and really help craft solutions that will directly solve the problem from their perspective.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:01]:
And shout out to the folks at Stanford Design, because I believe this originated there. And as you said, so many organizations have used this, although I have not myself, Monica, at least I thought I hadn’t. And then when you and I were talking through this model not long ago, I looked at it and said, oh, this is the model you and I have used over the last year or two, even though I didn’t know. I don’t know if you did, but we just sort of ended up following this model as part of our process, didn’t we?

Monica Chartier [00:04:28]:
We did. We did. And whether consciously or unconsciously, I find that I use this model in so many different aspects in work, in life, just to go about solving problems. It’s, it’s really a fantastic tool.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:40]:
So would it be. Should we start with like just kind of the core five steps and over those first, or do you think it’d be more helpful just to jump in on like, what’s step one? How did we use it? What do you think?

Monica Chartier [00:04:52]:
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can jump right in with step one.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:55]:
Okay, well, let’s go. So step one, empathy. What does step one look like sound like?

Monica Chartier [00:05:02]:
Yeah, so the step one being empathy is really building empathy or starting with the foundation of empathy for the people who you are solving a problem for. So talking directly to people who are impacted, their feelings, how did they get in that situation? What are they really looking for out of it really helps guide us and our own thinking along the lines of building something that comes from their perspective rather than our own perspective. It’s really easy to maybe we’ve been in their shoes before and we think, oh, I, you know, I’ve been here, I know what the problem is, I know how to go in and solve it. But we really aren’t the people who are in that situation today. We’re not exactly in their shoes. And so building empathy and starting with those conversations with the people that we’re impacting really brings them into the fold, A, for problem solving and B, shows that someone’s there listening, someone wants to hear from them and they feel more bought in on the problem and how it gets solved.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:00]:
And this is where we entered into, you and I, in thinking about using this framework of, as I mentioned, I don’t think either of us consciously knew we were using this framework, at least I certainly didn’t. But when we started talking about our own community and the coaching for Leaders Academy and follow up to that, and it started with you and I having a conversation, didn’t it?

Monica Chartier [00:06:22]:
It really did. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was wrapping up my academy year and you and I were just connecting and I may have asked along the lines of, so what’s next? You know, I finished my nine months in the academy, I’ve got this great leadership plan, I’ve done all these actions and I, I really had a lot of momentum built up and I was really looking forward to carrying that on beyond and had some thoughts on how to do that for myself. But I, I was curious if there were things within the community where I could carry that forward. And you shared that you had been thinking about that for some time, but hadn’t you built, built some structure around it? But you, you actually invited me as a fellow to start kind of figuring out what those steps could look like and how to build that value for our community members. And initially I think the direction that you were thinking was one way. But we, in building empathy, we ended up, I think getting information that led us in a different direction.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:20]:
We definitely did eventually. And what you said a moment ago, just thinking about empathy and listening and understanding where people are, I certainly try to do that. I’m sure I fail all the time with our members and our listeners of like really being present. And one of the things that had come up for me in prior conversations before you and I chatted that year or two ago when we had our conversation was folks coming out of our academy have always had the option to stay involved with our larger community through Coaching for Leaders Pro and attend community wide events and to do ask me anything events and just to be very much involved in a lot of the broader community aspects. But the one thing that was not available post Academy was group coaching, a small group cohort to continue to work with. And a lot of folks really love that in, as part of the academy, as do I. I think it’s like such a great experience to get in a community of, with other leaders, five or six other leaders and work together closely for a period of time. And that was not part of Coaching for Leaders Pro at the time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:29]:
We had many things, but we did not have a small cohort of the same people that would continue to meet as we had done with the academy. And you said something in that conversation that got me thinking. We should figure out a way to address that so people really continue to move forward and in their leadership visions post academy and also to do so in a really safe and supportive way as they experienced in the academy. And I remember thinking at the time, I don’t know if I said this out loud, like I don’t know what the answer to that is, but I know there’s an answer and that if you and I spent some time starting to experiment and try some things, that we would likely start to find our way. Which is of course what I’m always inviting academy members to do is to start small, test things out, try things. And so that was really where the empathy piece started for me is just that listening and observing and you saying something that made me think, okay, we need to answer this question better.

Monica Chartier [00:09:29]:
Exactly, exactly. And you know, so many of us, like the intention is there, right? We think we’re doing the best thing, we’re using our best judgment, right. To go in the right direction. But the distinction is that we fundamentally are not the folks in those shoes. And in a lot of times we’re just so close to the problem or to, you know, the offering, let’s say in the product space or even in Coaching for Leaders. We’re so close to it and what we’ve been doing for a while, it takes a little bit of different thinking to adjust that, particularly when we get new information from users on what direction would be most helpful for them at that Point in time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:02]:
Yeah. And I think this were you being involved. And one of the reasons that I think we both concluded pretty quickly, like you being involved in a leadership capacity as a fellow would really help because I’m too close to what I’ve been doing, how it’s been going for all these years. And it was easier to get out of that thinking if someone else was asking me questions, challenging me, doing debriefs, as we’ll talk about in a bit, to kind of get out of that framework a bit at the thinking that I have. I fall into that just like everyone else.

Monica Chartier [00:10:33]:
Exactly, exactly. I think that’s a nice lead in to step two here, which is defining the problem to solve. So maybe to use the example of us with the Academy and the pro experience, the pro member community, we had a lot of potential different directions on, on where it could have gone. But what we started with was data collection. So data collection, you had spoken with me, you’d spoken with a number of other members in the community to talk about our own experiences. And we ended up looking for additional information from a broader group of people. And one of the other fellows crafted a survey and that survey, I think had a phenomenal response rate, if I recall right, and ended up really gathering the data and helping give us some guidance on what were the best opportunity areas where we could focus our efforts to really make a difference for folks in the community. So gathering that data and really looking into it, looking at the topmost opportunities and what outcomes we wanted to drive, helped us hone in on the problem statement that we ended up going with, which was really having a good kind of landing experience, continuation experience for members either who were graduates of the Academy or members of the pro community on their own.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:48]:
Yeah, indeed. And shout out to Jesper at one of our other fellows who’s been on the podcast before. She put together this incredible survey and we had a 75% response rate, which is very common in our community. And I just. We have the best community in the world of folks jump in, want to add in perspective. And it was great. We got lots of data on what did folks like that we were already doing as part of the pro community after the Academy. But what did they want in addition to that, along with other aspects? And it did not for me, at least, I don’t know for you, but it didn’t immediately answer the question of okay, how do we do it? And in fact, as we’ll get to in step three, we ended up going down a different path that we ultimately landed on, but it really got us thinking.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:37]:
And I think the thing that ended up being most helpful, at least for me, and I’m curious, your experience, Monica, was it just started conversation about it and we got initial ideas from the survey. You and I and the other fellows started talking about and having conversations about it and thinking about it, and that just surfaced. Okay, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to actually solve for? And then like, let’s start thinking about how we might do that.

Monica Chartier [00:13:06]:
Exactly, exactly. And I think the iterative nature that you mentioned too, that we started with one direction and we ended up going in a different direction later, just, just speaks to kind of this, this model as applicable over time. Right. We’re gathering learnings, gathering ideas, and if you are considering going another direction with a new problem statement, it’s just a matter of iteration. So the third step is ideate, informing ideas to form testable hypotheses. So with, with you and I, we had some hypotheses on initially on how to help members get additional value out of the community. I ended up kind of co facilitating some sessions with you for last year, some of last year’s Academy sessions. And we had that hypothesis that would help embellish the, the experience.

Monica Chartier [00:13:54]:
And it was. But I think it didn’t end up having the outcomes that we were hoping for. And that was a great test, right. To, to, to put it to work and validate whether this is the right direction.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:07]:
And it was certainly colored from my experience at Dale Carnegie as an instructor, that as an instructor, we would often have graduate coaches in our courses who had experienced the course before and were coming back in a leadership capacity to support participants. And at some point during this testing hypothesis, thinking about ideas, I had the thought, oh, we should do the same thing for the Academy. Rather than just me facilitating, we should also have a past academy graduate, one of our fellows, come back and co facilitate a bit with me, as you did for one of our cohorts. And we actually did a couple of cohorts doing that. And it worked great. Like it really worked great. It was so fun having you involved with it. I think our members benefited from a ton.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:51]:
I loved being involved with it because I got feedback from you in and you and I did debriefs after each of those sessions, which you led. And you gave me feedback on the things that you were seeing that were showing up, that I was doing well, not doing well, and I gave you feedback and it was really powerful. We leaned into Kujo Teschner’s debrief model that we had talked about on the show previously. And it was, it was great. And one of the things that came out of that is I realized, oh, this is all good, but we’re missing a huge opportunity. And the opportunity I realized as I watched you and some of our other fellows to step in this leadership role is how much I felt like I was underutilizing your talents and the talents of some of our other fellows and thinking, oh, I don’t need to be leading every conversation within the Academy, yes, but outside of the Academy I don’t need to be involved in leading every conversation. Our fellows could actually lead some of these conversations and it didn’t, it sort of seems obvious now like in retrospect, but at the time that was like a big insight that we and I would not have gotten to if we hadn’t gone down the path first of trying in a different way. And it did like once we started surfacing that and talking about that, it did surface an entirely different direction from where we were originally planning.

Monica Chartier [00:16:21]:
That’s right, it did. And these are all great examples of step four prototyping is creating these experiments to gather that data. So when I was co facilitating with you for the initial session, that was one of our first experiments, right. We had the debrief sessions. We were able to review and gather data and feedback to your point. And that data and information ended up guiding us in another direction. And we went into another prototype which was the creation of the peer momentum groups which are actually fellow led available for members of the pro community where we have a kind of a- I’d like to think of it as a brain trust.

Monica Chartier [00:16:57]:
Right. Of other leaders where you get to the opportunity to. One member just mentioned this to me this week. It’s like not being alone in your leadership role. You have this great group of people who are there to champion you and help you work through tough problems at work, who aren’t directly involved in the problem but can give you kind of a third perspective. And it’s really just an excellent environment for helping build that, that community and build that encouragement and problem solving I’d say among group of other leaders. But that was, that was the second iteration.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:28]:
It was. And, and it, it hit on the thing that we’ve been doing for years in the academy but didn’t do post academy as well, which was okay. Coming out of the academy, folks would have this amazing experience of working with a community of other leaders and getting support and they didn’t have as Much of that small group experience coming out unless they themselves led it. And which in reality didn’t happen a lot because everyone’s busy and you know, the time and logistics and all that. But by having our fellows step into that leadership role and beginning to facilitate some of those conversations, all of a sudden we were able to continue the community aspect of what we do, which I, the, the older I get and maybe it’s AI and all the things, but I think like the, the importance of being in community with other people, especially other leaders, in the context of what we’re doing is so, so important and so critical and, and just having someone else to listen and jump in and, and that ended up being a really useful experiment to us. And again, I think it sort of seems to me now, looking back, I think, oh well that that should have been obvious to me two or three years ago, but for whatever reason it wasn’t and it wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t gone through steps one, two and three. It would have never landed on the prototype that we started with step four in the peer momentum groups and then we’ve iterated from there too since. So it’s an ongoing process.

Monica Chartier [00:19:01]:
Exactly, exactly. And that is step five, testing, learning and adapting, making iteration a habit. So repeating this process really brings us back to the foundations of what problem are we trying to solve and who are we solving it for. And starting with the people we’re most closely impacting helps us get out of the weeds, us get out of the details or the patterns that we’ve gotten accustomed to in our leadership styles or in a program like this one to hone in on those outcomes that we want to drive and co create new solutions together that’ll actually go about achieving those outcomes. And I think we’ve done that very successfully so far.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:38]:
Yeah, indeed we did the first round of peer momentum groups and the feedback was really good. By and large, almost everyone involved wanted to continue. Those that didn’t, it was a logistical reason of not continuing into a group in this next season. And we also found some things that didn’t work. We did another survey and again got great feedback from everyone. And this is something I’ve definitely had to unlearn, Monica, in the years of all my academic training and everything over the years of I’ve had to learn to lean in on the concept from the lean startup Eric Grease of minimum viable product. I’ll start small, start with the first draft, do a very, do a good job of doing the minimum you need to do to make sure, it’s thought through well and put together well. And also to leave space for knowing you’re going to be shifting as you go.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:36]:
And I heard the, I heard this phrase on a, it was a podcast or in a book recently of if you’re not occasionally disappointing people, you’re probably not pushing the envelope enough. And that is something I just, I hate to do. I hate to ever disappoint anyone. And yet I also recognize that sometimes you just have to try stuff and sometimes things aren’t going to work. And we found a couple things that didn’t work from the survey feedback. One is people were a bit confused about the overall framework of the pure momentum groups and, like, what was going to happen at each session. And no surprise, it’s because we didn’t know what was going to happen at the later sessions when we started because we were building a little bit as we went. And I think that was the right decision.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:19]:
I’m glad we did it that way. And it sort of like, pains me a little bit to know that we left people with a little bit of fuzziness of like, okay, where are we going? What’s the next step? So it’s a bit of a catch 22. It’s like, either way, you’re going to run into that. So. But folks were gracious. They knew we were doing it as a first, as a first step, we fixed that. Now, like, now we have a framework for the next version where we know exactly where we’re heading. The other thing I found it was really interesting is I’m always so, so conscious of people’s time and not wanting to take any more time than necessary for us to get to our goals of supporting people to make movement toward where they want to go and helping them to be supported in a really safe, confidential community.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:05]:
And we ended up under indexing on the amount of time, like, we were meeting monthly for the peer momentum groups. And by and large, people said, actually we’d like to meet more often than that. And that was really interesting to me too, that again, if we hadn’t started, if we’d started with something else and hadn’t taken the experimental framework for it, I don’t think we would have landed on the feedback of people saying, oh, actually we’d like a little bit more often to get together. And that was really interesting feedback too. And we also changed that.

Monica Chartier [00:22:34]:
That’s right. That’s right, we did. And I’d add that we still meet with the fellows. We’re doing that monthly, too. And we get to debrief the most recent sessions together and share those learnings and continue to take a call on. Okay, is this still working? Is there anything that we want to change or adapt going forward? So really, it’s a great testament of. Of just building that habit in ourselves.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:55]:
And I don’t know if this is the intention of this framework when thinking about design, thinking of it being almost like a circle, but I sort of see it that way because we’re at maybe step five now, probably on what we’ve been doing with this. And yet in some ways it’s coming right back to step one, because as recently as a few days ago, we got together, had a conversation, we’re still making changes. We’re already making updates for what eventually will be the third version of this next year, and tweaking things and making it adjustments. They’re smaller changes than they were between versions one and two, but it still comes back to the empathy. So it’s very much a cycle.

Monica Chartier [00:23:34]:
Very much so, yes. And it is intended to be used cyclically. Whether we’re making iterative changes on something that’s already been established, or creating something for the first time, coming back to the user and coming back to the people that we’re solving the problem for and how best to do it really just gives us the right data and the right information to head in a direction that’s going to move the needle.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:55]:
So, five steps that we covered. Empathy. First, one, empathy, starting with intentional listening and observation. Second, define, clarify the real problem to solve. Third, ideate, co create ideas and form testable hypotheses. That’s what we did when we started with our initial version of the Fellowship Fourth prototype. Start small, learn fast. We did that with our first round of the peer momentum groups.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:21]:
And then five, Test, learn, adapt. Make iteration a leadership habit, as you point out. And by the way, you have been extremely gracious to put together a guide of this process that folks could access. And could you say a bit about just what’s on that? So that way, if folks grab it, they’ll know what’s there.

Monica Chartier [00:24:42]:
Absolutely. So it’s quite literally a guide of the five steps that we just reviewed, along with some examples in leadership context for ways to not not just build empathy, but gather data from your team, gather insights, bring them into the problem solving and turning this into a habit, something that you could do over time for different challenges that you and the team are facing to really, you know, not just build the cohesiveness of the team, but the effectiveness as well. And I will gladly share that here after the fact so everyone can access it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:10]:
Great. We’re going to make it really simple. We’re going to link it up on the episode notes. It’s completely free. You don’t need to log in anything like that to grab it. We’re also going to put it behind this link. So it’s at coachingforleaders.com/Monica. So if you go there on any device, you can download the guide.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:24]:
It’ll be a PDF, it’ll have all this on there links, ability to connect with Monica and all of that. So make it really easy for folks to be able to grab. So again, it’s coachingforleaders.com/Monica. You know, I’m going to ask you the last question, Monica, which is what you’ve changed your mind on. We’ve been going through this whole process over the last year or two of learning together, working with each other, giving each other feedback, going through this process, using the design thinking process in this. I’m curious what, if anything, you’ve changed your mind on throughout this journey.

Monica Chartier [00:25:54]:
Yeah. With this, I’d say I am constantly amazed by the number of use cases that I see this framework being applicable for. You know, we’re making decisions all day, every day, Right. Sometimes we do that on very little information or information that we historically have built up in our knowledge banks that sometimes we’ll make those decisions very quickly. But the more that I look at, you know, decisions that affect groups of people, whether that it’s at work or other applications in life, the more valuable I see this being. And it is just so iterative and so applicable to two different scenarios to just make better decisions with better data. So I use it all the time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:34]:
I’m so glad you did and I’m so glad that you’ve brought it to us in our community and helping now our broader community to benefit from it as well. And I just want to say thank you so much for your leadership and your questions and your feedback. If it had not been for you and you emerging as one of our first fellows, this would never have come together in the way it has. And so thank you so much for being a great leader for me and our community and bringing this together and helping us all to continue to move forward and to do it in a way where we’re finding lots of community and safety and support in the work that we do. I’m so grateful for.

Monica Chartier [00:27:10]:
Oh, it is my pleasure.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:18]:
I mentioned right at the beginning this was the first time that Monica and I had recorded together and Nope, I was wrong. Monica reminded me that we in fact had recorded a conversation together about the Coaching for Leaders Academy, which aired about a year ago. So if her voice sounds familiar, that’s why I’m so sorry for the error and. And we did talk about the Academy a bit during this conversation. So much of my work and our community’s work is helping leaders to thrive through inflection points. And if you find yourself at an inflection point right now and the support of us and our community might be helpful to you, go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy. You can find out more about our Academy and also find a place there to register to receive an early invitation the next time that we open up applications to the Academy. Thanks again, Monica, for being such a great contributor to our community.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:09]:
And speaking of community, so much of what we do inside our community is helping to support each other and engage in conversation and to keep those connections going. And one of the things I think would be really lovely is if you found this model helpful today and especially if you grab the guide at coachingforleaders.com/Monica. Monica’s link to her LinkedIn will be inside that guide. We’re also putting in the episode notes if you found this conversation helpful and and if you take one or more of these steps and put it into practice, we’d love to know what happened for you. Take a moment to reach out to Monica on LinkedIn. Send her a note. She would love to know. I would love to know what was useful from this conversation for you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:51]:
Thanks in advance if you decide to do that. All the links again in the episode notes, along with three recommended episodes that I’m also suggesting if this conversation was helpful to you today. One of them is episode 569, the Way to Make Struggles More Productive. Sarah Stein Greenberg was my guest on that episode. She’s up at the Stanford Design School. It’s one of the reasons I’m thinking about her because this model, of course based on so much of their work and in that conversation we talked about the reality of struggles that we experience anytime we’re going through a process like this and actually how those struggles can be made to work for us as we talked a bit about that in this conversation. Episode 569 for more on that also recommended episode episode 660, how to prevent a team from repeating mistakes. Cujo Teschner was my guest on that episode.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:41]:
Monica and I have used a bunch of inspiration from his teaching on debriefs in organizations to go through this process of learning and growth and leadership and our own work. Episode 660 Cujo walks us through step by step how to get better at developing a practice in your organization of doing the debrief, something so few organizations do. And it’s such a powerful, powerful tactic to utilize. And then finally, I’m also thinking about Jess Britt, one of our other fellows. We mentioned the survey process a bit in this conversation. Jess has brought her expertise into our community in survey and so much more. She’s really been a leader in helping us to move forward on so many of these things as well. And we recorded a conversation earlier this year on how to lead engaging meetings.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:28]:
It’s episode 721. Many of you reached out to us and to Jess and told us how helpful that conversation was. Jess is really experienced at leading meetings, how to engage people and we walk through step by step on how to do some of that in that episode. Again, that’s episode 721. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. If you haven’t set up your free membership, go over to coachingforleaders.com it’ll give you access to everything, including all of our Saturday casts like this one, plus all the resources, not notes and episodes that we air every single week. Again, all of that at coachingforleaders.com. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided today as always by Sierra Priest.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:15]:
On Monday, just two days from now, our next episode’s airing. I am glad to welcome David Hutchins back to the show. We are going to be talking about how to lead a meaningful cultural shift. Join me for that conversation with David. Have a great weekend and see you back on Monday.

Topic Areas:Decision-MakingSaturdayCastStrategy
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Coaching for Leaders Podcast

This Monday show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Independently produced weekly since 2011, Dave Stachowiak brings perspective from a thriving, global leadership academy of managers, executives, and business owners, plus more than 15 years of leadership at Dale Carnegie.

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