Marja Fox:
If you want people to think differently about something, you can't possibly expect that sitting around in the room and having the conversation the same way you always do is gonna result in something different.
Kristiana Corona:
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out, and you're just making it up as you go.
I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside, but on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader. Then a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results.
Now I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel Worthy to Lead from the inside out.
Hello and welcome back to The Worthy To Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I'm so glad you decide to join us for today. I have with me Marja Fox. Hello Marja.
Marja Fox:
Hello.
Kristiana Corona:
She is a strategy expert who led McKinsey's global corporate strategy program and was a VP of marketing strategy and business development at Ecolab, where she was responsible for growth, strategy, innovation, and new product launches, as well as many other things for a billion dollar growth business.
She now has her own strategy consulting business, where she facilitates high stakes strategy and planning sessions with C-suite executives, helping them to gain alignment, improve their decision making, and lead through change. She is the one who you call when everyone is arguing, and nothing is getting done because she knows how to cut through the noise and actually drive results.
So thank you for coming on, Marja. We're so glad to have you here.
Marja Fox:
Thank you for having me.
Kristiana Corona:
So I invited you to this conversation because I know that a lot of our listeners are often in these situations where they have to manage up, they need to influence up, they might even be asked to facilitate a conversation like this.
And it can be kind of intimidating when this is not your full-time job to know how to handle those types of dynamics. And so I really wanted us to unpack that a little bit. So from your perspective of doing this for almost an entire career, kind of really understanding what it takes to both have influence in the room, but also how to manage when those common pitfalls occur.
Some of those problems that you might encounter, debates that never end, things that go into rabbit holes, high emotional, uh, situations, things like that and, and how you handle those gracefully. And I know that something that's important to you is doing it in a way that feels creative, that feels authentic.
I know you do a lot to get people off the PowerPoint slides, so we're gonna dive a little bit more into that and just really understanding what it takes to be effective to actually get the result you want from those types of meetings. So without further ado, let's dive in. So I wanna start off with a question just.
I hear this all the time. So when you think about corporate leaders, this group of leaders who are in the middle, maybe managers, directors, senior directors, VPs, they're often in this place where they need to influence upwards effectively. And a lot of times there are politics, there's things to navigate within these different situations.
And people disagree, like they just naturally don't agree with each other. And in those types of environments it can get pretty intense. So what would you say if I asked you just the general question, how does one influence upward effectively?
Marja Fox
First of all, I would say, let me validate what your audience feels here.
I think being a middle manager is perhaps the hardest job that there is because you are in the sandwich, right? And you need the skills of all the folks below you, and you need the start to have the skills of all the folks above you. And knowing when and how and where to deploy those, I think is really tricky.
And it really is at the center. Of what it takes to influence up and sideways, right. Influence in all the ways that don't involve positional authority.
Your middle managers are starting to be pretty effective at exercising positional, uh, authority, and they are starting to develop the skill of influence in ways that don't allow for or depend upon lines on an org chart.
I think one of the big principles to think about when it comes to influencing is about making the other person's life easier. Getting to a yes from someone else is a much easier task when it feels like the easy thing for them to do. And we can't always do that, but there's a step that I think people skip.
Right? You do all the work. You've got your team feeding you information, right? You arrive at what you think the answer is for the scope of your control. Now you need to get your bosses or their peers to agree, but you skip the step of actually thinking through what it means for them. And it's because we're kind of exhausted.
Like we, you know, it took us a long way, a long time, and a lot of work, so many reviews to get, yeah, right? Like to get, to get to this point of even knowing what the answer is. But that making space to think about it from that other person's seat is the thing that's gonna make all the difference. And so there's a lot of empathy in that.
It's sort you, you know, you can literally do some role-playing exercises even with your team to say, like, sort of manifest, I'm this person. What do I care about? What are the things that matter to me? What does, what's hard in my life? And then how does this recommendation help or hurt? What are the things of it that I care about or don't care about?
What are the things that I'm gonna feel really uncomfortable about? But that sort of role playing is gonna uncover a wealth of insights that you've just skipped over, and you are like, you are gonna get all those insights in the meeting, probably in lots of unhelpful in non-direct ways, right?
Kristiana Corona:
They're gonna come out's, no way they're gonna come to avoid them coming out, gonna come.
Marja Fox:
Yeah. So you might as well do the work before you get there to uncover those things. That's still not all the work though, right? So you do the work of uncovering the insights, and then you should think about what's the story? I actually need to tell that person? You probably have your deck, you have your power per like, right?
Like, here's the case I'm trying to make. Here's my whys. But those are your whys. They're the logic by which you arrived at whatever conclusion or recommendation you're coming to. They are not this person's wise. And so almost universally, if you are telling the story of your recommendation in the way that you arrived at it, it's probably the wrong story to tell.
You have to create some time and space to tell the story from that senior executive lens, kind of usually very top down. You know much more like you drill into the parts they care about. You create credibility and trust around the parts that they don't, so they just believe you. But if you do those two things, take the time to sort of empathetically.
View their world and view the recommendation through their world, and then recraft the story to address what they care about, everything is gonna be easier.
Kristiana Corona/;
So when you go through that process, do you typically do it in two phases? Do you do it in the, I'm going through it from my narrative perspective and that I'm taking that hat off and putting on the other hat, and then now I'm going through the other? Or is there a shortcut to that process?
Marja Fox:
There definitely is a shortcut. Once you've gotten good and facile and kind of knowing what you're doing, you might have even so, so a whole bunch of my life was in management consulting. Right? And management consultants love to talk about their hypothesis driven problem solving.
We tend to think of that as like, how in the world do we efficiently get to problem statements and problem solutions? But a huge element of that is actually this kind of both top down and bottoms up thinking concurrently. That ultimately is kind of the difference between the way most executives need to hear a conversation the way your, you know, your bosses need to hear it and the way your team has probably developed it.
And so yes, you can do those things concurrently. Thinking sort of ahead. This will probably seem impossible at first, but now when I'm entering or trying to solve a new problem, I will literally write down the answer before I even know anything about it. I write out the whole story. It's completely wrong.
Like it. Like the only thing I know for sure is it's completely wrong, but it is top down. It's very like, here are the big points I think I need to make. Then we're doing the work and of course proving all the things that are wrong as we go. Yes, but it is both a vastly more efficient way to reach a recommendation and solve a problem.
But it also is concurrently doing the thing we're talking about, telling the story from that kind of top-down executive-level mindset. At the same time that you're doing the bottom-up work that actually proves or disproves that your story is correct in the first place.
Kristiana Corona:
I love that because from a standpoint of not only just showing up great for that meeting, but knowing what matters, knowing that you're going after the work that matters, writing that story ahead of time saying, this is the story I wanna be able to tell now what needs to be true in order to make that happen.
It's a very different way of thinking about it than you might otherwise do. And it, it kind of reminds me a little bit of how when I was at Amazon we would do FAQs, which are like postcards from the future. So you write this postcard of the vision of the change that you are creating in people's lives and how it is changing their lives.
And then you go back in the questions and you respond to, well, how did you do that? And so it's kind of fun like that exercise of this is a story I really wanna be telling people. This is the impact I really wanna be having. Now how do we make that happen?
Marja Fox:
Absolutely. It could be a totally joyful process.
Let me give you one other sneaky tip. Because even if you do that perfectly, say you do right? Like you have absolutely manifested this person. You have told them exactly the story that they want. You all have been in rooms with senior executives. When have you ever had somebody be like, that's great, go do it.
Kristiana Corona: No changes.
Marja Fox: Like never, never, ever, ever. And look, it's because everybody wants to add value. You are sitting there doubting your own capabilities. Guess what? Your boss is too, right? Like they also don't feel comfortable with just rubber-stamping. They have to do something like it's an imperative. So your boss or whoever it is you're trying to influence has a need to add value to your recommendation.
You often experience that addition of value as not very valuable, but that's what's happening, right? Yeah. And so again, if you're clever and thinking a little bit ahead, you can ask yourself the question of, first of all, where can this person authentically add value to my recommendation? What's something I really want to engage them in?
Or what's a part of my recommendation that feels a little gray, or I want to evolve? Or if that, like ideally you, you find something like that, or if you don't have something like that, where do I actually maybe even omit some detail about a thing that I have already figured out, but I let them fill it in.
So everybody that you wanna influence needs to put their fingerprints on what you have done. You will never walk away with a Yep, go do it. So steering. Where people are going to have an opportunity to do so is another great way to get the go ahead in a way that makes everybody leave the room feeling really good about their contributions.
Kristiana Corona
And I don't think anyone ever wants to be in a room where they feel like they're forced to pick a certain option. Like anytime you feel that way, the more pressure you're getting to make that decision. You kind of naturally as a human pull back and you're like, but do I really, is that really what I want?
Is this my free will, or are you telling me the way it is? And so I love that idea of just leaning into, we know that everyone is going to add value whether we need it or not. And how do you make that feel like natural instead of going against that energy? Right. Absolutely. So, okay, you are a professional facilitator.
You do a lot of things, but you do a, most of your work these days is in the boardroom, in these high stakes meetings, like facilitating the most difficult of executive meetings where it's like, we have a very important goal we need to accomplish or else, and oh, by the way, we probably have tried this multiple times with other people and it's failed, or we just haven't gotten the result.
So how do you handle the pressure of these situations where every single time the meeting is like the most important meeting?
Marja Fox
I wanna say something flippant like, you know, I don't know, lots of sugar, caffeine, or some other drug, you know? Well, so look, first of all, I'm nervous every single time. Every single time.
And it's actually part of why I do the work. The moment I stop being nervous beforehand will be the moment I decide I need to go do something else. So there's some amount. For weirdos like me and maybe for people to like to figure out how to, how do you embrace, how do you embrace some of the nerves and anxiety?
Because that is where you're learning. That is where you are being stretched. So I love what I do because I both do get to help people, right? Like I see good results, but I get results for myself personally and professionally in the ways that I am stretched by the surprises that come my way. So there's a little bit of a mindset I think, in dealing with high-pressure situations for me, in that this is where I learn.
So I choose, I opt in to be in those situations. On the other hand, look like this is something that one of my mentors said to me. I don't know. Way back in the beginning of my career, I was a first-time engagement manager at McKinsey. I was feeling the pressure, right? Like now I'm just one of the team.
I've got all these people looking at me, I'm scared, and I was pretty wound up. We are doing a project on K through 12 education in the state of Minnesota. To me, it felt like the future of all these tiny humans is in my hands. Like, right? Like, but he, he came around and sat me down, and he was like, Marja, nobody dies on our watch.
Nobody dies on our watch. Like it, the work we do is important and it's big. And I'm not trying to invalidate what anybody feels at any given moment, but for the most part, we're not emergency surgeons. We're not, you know, labor and delivery nurses. Like, we're like, nobody dies on our watch. So this big meeting can feel really scary.
Feels like kind of a, you know, all these things culminating into this thing. But the worst that happens is we have a shitty meeting. Yeah. And we are right where we started. Like, you don't go backwards. You don't like, nobody dies on this watch. So I think there's just a certain amount of perspective with, yeah, I like the work I do, I like the high stakes, but they're also not the highest stakes. And it's all gonna be fine.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. I mean, that's a very different perspective to go into a room with than, oh my gosh, what am I gonna say? Like, just focusing on the performance element of it or the aspect, I mean, in a way you are on display, you are speaking in front of a very high-powered group, but what you're saying is there's a lot of other things that are scarier and more life-threatening perhaps.
And I love that you've reframed the nerves as excitement to be putting yourself in a place of learning and growth. Like I today, I know that when I go in this room, I'm gonna be stretched. And if I wasn't feeling this way, maybe I wouldn't even wanna be here. Yep. That's awesome. Okay, so there are probably any number of different problems that you face when you're in these high-stakes strategy meetings, but I'm curious what some of the most common problems are and how you start overcoming them.
Marja Fox:
Gosh, we could, we could make a long list. Maybe let's start with, uh, we can think about, you know, there's, there's some problems in the room that are about the problem. They're about solving the problem, right? They're about advancing the thinking. There are some problems that are very much kind of human dynamics and interactions, and even the loveliest teams have human interaction challenges.
So it's our, on the problem side, you know, strategic conversations, whether it's kind of true, like I'm formulating a strategy, or it's those challenging business decisions that you're making in the face of uncertainty, such that no one. Could actually know the answer. Right? It's not that with infinite time we'd be able to crack it, right?
It's like there is just judgment inherent in this problem. Solving is difficult, just, it just is. And so you will see that manifest itself as a general sense of confusion, sort of a lack of direction in the conversation. It, it sort of feels like maybe it's meandering or people kind of repeating some of the same points over and over again.
They must feel like they're not quite landing or not being incorporated. So, so you often don't, it's often not that somebody's, oh, this, we're not solving the problem properly. Right? It, it sort of manifests itself in what feels like much more kind of human discomfort. But those things trigger to me that like.
We need more direction, or we need more granularity in how we're solving this problem. So usually when that happens, it's one of two things. Either the question that we are currently trying to wrestle with is actually too big for us to handle well, or we haven't actually thought through or sort of have a unified view on the decision logic, right?
Sort of the way in which we want to make a decision. So when I start, sometimes I design those things into a conversation from the beginning because I like I, I know they're gonna come up. But even in the middle of it, when I start to feel those things, it's sort of a step back, and it's like trying to diagnose between one of the two things.
Which, which one is it? And if it's the question you wanna think about, how do I break? Like we know what the big question is. How do I think about breaking a big question down into a couple smaller ones. Your audience might have heard of the concept of issue trees, right? Like it's a very classic kind of problem-solving technique of taking the big problem and breaking it into smaller ones.
And we call it a tree. 'cause you can continue to break it into smaller and smaller ones if you are already familiar with that as a tool. You can use it directly in conversations and conversation design as well. If you're not familiar with that as a tool, you should be because as your work gets bigger, as your, as the problems that land on your plate get bigger, you need this tool in order to make it manageable.
It's actually not that any of us, as we advance, just get better at solving bigger problems. We just get really deliberate about making big problems, smaller problems in a very logical way that adds back up. So that same problem-solving mentality is applicable to discussions that seem to have gotten out of control.
So if I'm struggling to have this conversation, how can I actually have these three conversations instead? They will probably be tidier, and if I keep track of the results of those three, then I can go back and kind of. Almost add them up to the bigger question. So that's a problem we run into all the time.
That's the technique, right? Break it apart, make it smaller. The second one I alluded to is just this, like we don't really have a shared logic around how we wanna make the decision, and this is, this one happens all the time because we all sort of, I, most of the time we don't lay out our decision logic, negotiating where to go out to eat at night with your significant other.
Like you don't actually talk about, well, what is it that we're looking for in a restaurant tonight? Or you don't actually lay out the criteria by which you make a decision. You just start discussing, and you've, I'm sure you've had. In your personal life, the experience of just like absolutely missing each other, but I want pizza.
Kristiana Corona:
No, we're not having pizza
Marja Fox:
And it's because of that. So when a conversation feels like it's missing each other rather than it's something too big and we're wrestling, we're just sort of missing each other, I step back and say like, like, well, what would good look like? Right? Like, what would a good restaurant look like?
Now you're actually starting to just, you're less worried about answering the question and really kind of thinking about the pathway by which you would answer the question. And you will very often feel that, find that people have differences in what they have assumed everyone else's decision pathway is.
Just by talking about that, you can sort of piece that apart and then come back to the bigger question and now everybody's more kind of aligned on what we're looking for.
Kristiana Corona:
I love that specific point because I think for a lot of folks who are in, you know, roles where they're looking at something that is like design, where it's like everyone just has an opinion on design from any possible realm of their experience or, or whatever.
And I feel like the people who do the best job are the ones who, who lay out the mental model for how they got to where they are. What was important in these decisions, what is it that you're looking at? Let me share what you're looking at before I ask you to critique the exact method or the exact way that it ended up.
But it was sort of the decisions that were made in order to get to this place. And that creates a totally different conversation. And most of the times the arguments aren't so much with the pixels, the arguments are with. I don't think we are even including the right data on this page. Well, let's go back to that decision then.
Marja Fox:
Yes. That is such a great illustration, right, of of how this manifests itself. Because you might be arguing about the color of the design, but you're not arguing about the color of the design. You're arguing about something foundational, about what is important or not important. So you better actually just go talk about that.
And frankly, even if you come out of that meeting with this group, not agreeing with your recommendation, right? You failed to influence up in the way you thought you were. You know, you went like you had an idea of what victory looked like and you didn't get it. But if you walk out of that room with clarity around the decision logic or the mental model as you called it, of the people that you do need to influence, that is a huge victory.
You have learned so much. With a clear, shared mental model that you're gonna go back and be very successful next time. Frankly, some of it might actually make your answer better. You know, it might. Yeah, it might. It just might. So those are some of the like, kind of like problem solving challenges that manifested in the room.
The people side of things can be, you know, extraordinarily complex, but you have an advantage of probably knowing these people, working with them. That's also a disadvantage, right? Sometimes there's some value in me coming in as the stranger who like, what are you gonna do? Hate me. Good luck. You know, I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say.
Yeah. Right. Fire me. I don't care. Yeah. So, so there's, there's both sides, but the ways that people, stuff manifests itself can sometimes look like problem-solving challenges, but it's usually more. Disengagement or a feeling that somebody's talking about something that's irrelevant, well, it's important to them, that means I'm, I'm missing something.
Or people that you know, who are smart saying things that feel really illogical, like they just feel incoherent. They frankly feel kind of dumb, but you know, they're smart. So like something else is going on and like, that's the zone you're getting yourself into. I'm like, I like something's happening with, Sarah's got something, something's happening with Sarah.
Sarah isn't actually saying what's happening? 'cause she might not know what's happening. She might be embarrassed about what's happening. Right? Like, so those ones are trickier to diagnose. A little bit harder for me to tell you what to do about it. Sometimes calling it out is really useful. There's a lot of judgment in it, but I think particularly when you have a sense that.
Multiple people might be experiencing the same thing, then it can be really useful. Right? Like, gosh, does this idea just seem really scary? Yeah. Like I think we too often ignore the potential emotional impacts. Like we assume that as leaders we're all supposed to walk around being robots and therefore we just pretend.
But the relief in the room when somebody, whether it's, you know, me as a facilitator or somebody who has the boldness to just be like, I could not be more afraid of this right now. Like, it's so powerful and you usually don't need to solve it. It just needs to be named, and then people can move on.
Kristiana Corona:
Let's say something is scary and, and you say it's scary, that one feels socially acceptable to say, but what if it's something like, this person is really biased, or This thing Yes. Is like really old thinking and we need to get up to speed.
Marja Fox:
Yes. Is there a more graceful way to say things like that? So those are great examples of what you probably aren't gonna just like call out in the room. That's where your techniques are gonna get a little more subtle. Probably. You know these things beforehand for really, really big important meetings.
You really should, and this is, we kind of joked about it earlier, all the pre-meetings for the meetings. Don't think about that as like extra bureaucratic steps, but learning, it's just, it's information gathering about where people are and. A good stakeholder analysis, which is sort of part of that empathy exercise of where people stand, where are they stuck, why are they stuck?
And then how do we design a conversation that is gonna preempt? Some of that is, is very helpful. And so things like putting people in small groups or asking them to role-play from a perspective that you know that they are really lacking, right? Like some of those kind of design tools are really helpful now.
Okay. But less helpful when you're like in the moment and okay, here it is. Like this is happening right now. So I think in those situations kind of knowing who your allies are is really useful. And calling on folks who can articulate what you think is the kind of correct or balancing perspective is much more valuable than like.
Sarah, you're full of shit, right? Like, so just making sure that the kind of counterpoint is also in the room is a really good tactic.
Kristiana Corona:
Interesting. So as you're scanning the, let's say someone says something that's just so off the wall, you're like, this needs to be, this needs to be countered. Like this can't be the standing situation.
You would look in the room, you would look for people who, you know, represent a different point of view and you would offer, Hey, do you have a point of view on this? Would you like to speak about your perspective? Or whatever. Just to just even, even out the conversation a little bit, creating airspace.
Marja Fox: And I might first just be, you know, like a sort of, okay, like restate, we're picking on Sarah today.
Poor Sarah. Restate Sarah's position, right? She needs to be heard, so don't ignore, that's a guaranteed way to like, have something keep coming back. So like I hear you're saying this, does anybody have a counterpoint to that? They'd, you know, like to share. And if nobody's forthcoming, you know, then maybe it's, you know, Hey Tom, you and I were talking the other day about this, right?
Like, you can kind of get a little more pointed and if log the statement and then create space for additional statements to be added to it, I think is a, is is useful. Let me offer another alternative. If somebody says something truly crazy off the wall, like that's the technique I would use, but most of the time people will say something that is sensible in line, right?
Productive, helpful, even if it's five or 10%. So a technique I use all the time is Sarah says something, whether it's because of her biases or she's just not getting it or who knows what, like it's 90% off, but the 10% that is good. When I'm like, Sarah, what I hear you saying is blah, blah, blah. I will amplify the 10% and ignore, or like give short shrift to some of the stuff that I think is, you know, maybe not, not that helpful.
And here's the beauty of this. Okay, so now you don't have to fight with her at all. You've picked up on the good parts. Unless she really is like carrying some sort of baggage with her, she actually might feel really good. Like you made her feel pretty, like she made her look good. You made her feel smart.
Like this thing that you said, I love this part. Right? And so you could build a lot of momentum by actually just pulling out the nuggets of the good things that people have said. Rather than kind of getting fixated on fighting the parts that don't make sense.
Kristiana Corona:
I feel like that is so wise, whether it's in a boardroom or in life, like how often do we pick up on all the things that we think are wrong and then over-amplify those rather than, oh, let's extract that one good thing.
Let's make that the highlight. And as the facilitator, it sounds like you're kind of the storyteller of the room, and so what you hear things get filtered through you and you get to then project a narrative about what is happening in the room, and it's your choice. You could choose to pick up that 10% of what that person said and say, how can I build on that 10%?
Now let's move forward. Move over here.
Marja Fox:
Yeah. This is my deep, deep, dark secret that nobody knows. Love it because everybody thinks about a facilitator as a very neutral party. I am not a neutral party. I have constant judgment going on, on, on what is useful, what is helpful, what is really off, what is kind of just dumb and in both my words, but I, I write and I would encourage, like, I know it's not, it's just not a common tool in our boardrooms, but it should be like, get up at the whiteboard, get up the, at the flip chart.
You choosing what to write down is potentially the most powerful thing that can be done in that room. We do not think about note takers as powerful people, but we are wrong, and the perception that the note taker is neutral is to your advantage. So the same principle of whether you're repeating it verbally or you're choosing what to write down as you construct this story, is you very much steering in a way that people just don't tend to recognize as steering and don't feel manipulated by.
Kristiana Corona:
I have had a similar experience where I remember being a co-facilitator for some meetings with someone who really wanted to drive a certain outcome and they were trying to imagine how they would make that happen in this room. And I did tell them, one of the things I said, you should be the one with the marker.
Do not give the marker to anybody else. You get to control what goes over here on the action list and what goes in the parking lot, because some stuff needs to just go in the parking lot. It does. And if you're the one writing, you get to say where it goes. You do. And it's so, it's so, so true. And also, which words get picked up on and built off of.
So. I think that's a brilliant one where it is so much more than just repeating back what you hear. You are, you are crafting every step of the way. You're crafting a path. You really are. Okay. So speaking of that, I mean, I feel like storytelling is a creative art, but you do a lot of other things that are creative, that play an important role in facilitating productivity in the room versus just noise.
So I'm curious if, if you can talk about some of the creative techniques that you like to use that help people get really engaged and have meaningful conversation.
Marja Fox:
In some ways, we are gifted with this being kind of incredibly easy because every meeting you've ever been to is the same. You come into a big room with a big, long table, and people sit around it and they all talk, and nobody ever moves.
Nothing different ever happens. You probably have a presentation that you're supposed to listen to, and then you're supposed to talk about it. Then somebody at the end says, here are the next steps. And then you leave the room. Like every meeting is the same. So it's really not hard to interject something that is going to feel quite a bit different.
And I think people's initial reaction to that is actually sort of fear, right? That it's like, well, like this is the way it's done. It's like tried and tested and true, and like doing anything that deviates from that feels scary. But two things I would say. First of all, do you really wanna sit in that meeting again yourself?
Like do you think anybody else does either or are they gonna be kind of excited to try something new and different even if it doesn't work? Like mostly people just think it's kind of fun to break the monotony of every single meeting they've ever been in. So, you know, like, I get it, you're nervous 'cause it's not the way we do it, but like, let that one go.
The second thing is that. If you want people to think differently about something you can't possibly expect that sitting around in the room and having this conversation the same way you always do is gonna result in something different. It's just not, it doesn't make sense. So if you want a different outcome, you have to have the conversation in a different way, period.
And this might be like the most important thing I bring to my clients. So, like saying it feels so high stakes, they've been having this conversation over and over again. They're not getting anywhere like, oh, that seems so scary. But the truth is they've been having this conversation the same darn way. So I'm gonna come in and have it a different way.
Like there's a decent chance that that's gonna result in something different. Okay. That's my pep talk. Now, ways to make a difference, keep going. There are like infinite ways to make a difference. Think about it as a numbers game, just as a kind of way to orient. Maybe your meeting has 10 people in it. Um, a a, a very kind of simple filter on how to think about your creative options is taking that 10 person meeting and making it to five people meetings or, uh, math 3, 3, 4, or 2 2, 2, right?
So you can change the dynamic fundamentally by playing with the size of the meeting. And it can be things as simple as asking people to write down their own answer to a specific question before they start sharing, right? It doesn't take any equipment, pieces of information. Nobody had to move like. It will fundamentally change the way the subsequent conversation goes.
You can break the room in two and say, I want you guys to argue the positive side of this question. I want you guys to ar you, I want you, you, it's basically like a red team, blue team, right? You can make sure, sure. Sarah is on the side of the room. That is against the way she tends to think, right? Like so there's just a whole host of things you can do.
If you think about breaking the room, you have down into smaller components of throughout the meeting, that alone is gonna just absolutely change the dynamics and you are gonna get more creativity out of people. None of these things sound terribly creative. None of them are like..
Kristiana Corona:
Well it doesn't sound like they have to become a, an actor or do something super embarrassing or anything like that.
Yeah. It's just positioning.
Marja Fox:
Those things are fun too, but you'll have automatically unlocked different ways of thinking, 'cause you've. Broken the pattern, you've put a pattern interrupt into place, and the pattern of how these meetings go is so deeply ingrained in us that by the time you do any of these things different, your brain is just gonna go and it's gonna come out with different things.
Um, you may not like some of those things, but it's like, you know, if the topic is creativity, you're gonna get it just from doing things like this then depending on how much time you have, right? So if you're in like an hour long meeting, which is probably what most people are like, this is about the limit of what I would try to do.
Because as soon as you do try to get people up and moving and orchestrated, like you actually burn a lot of time, and it's hard to make those things come to fruition. Once you're more in a workshop, now I've got two or three hours, a half day a day, then you start doing those things that you know, that you were more immediately thinking of, right?
How do I construct an activity where. I don't know, like maybe we're having a supply chain conversation and I'm actually gonna bring in some building blocks and have people make diorama of our supply chain and what it could look like in the future. So you can start doing more of those kinds of things that I know you tend to think about as quirky facilitators doing.
And I have never had one of them fail, because even the Dost oldest executive wants to play everybody. Everybody wants to play. Okay, great figure. And you're just giving them permission to do it. You're just giving them permission. That's all they, what they really need is to be able to be like, Marja told me to do this.
I would never, I would never do this on my own, but Marja made me do it, you know?
Kristiana Corona: And they're like,
Marja Fox: Let me in. Gimme the..
Kristiana Corona: gimme the toy cars. Let's go.
Marja Fox: That's right, that's right. My caution, and it's not even a caution, my like singular rule is that. The activity ties directly to the business problem that I'm trying to solve.
So I personally will never bring in a random icebreaker. I don't do trust falls. I don't do like those kind of like, I looked up 32 icebreakers on the internet and I picked number 17. I never do That. Doesn't mean that they're gonna fail, right? But I think a surefire way to make sure that something good happens is to just, everything is tied to a business objective.
There's like, there's some part of the business problem that we're exploring with the blocks. There's some part of, um, I don't know, our psyches that we are exploring with this icebreaker like that it all is connected. Some way to results, and even if those results don't materialize in the way that you imagined that they would, the fact that the connection exists is going to protect you from people who are like, I felt uncomfortable, and therefore I think this thing is woo woo and right.
Like that is my advice. As you think about incorporating some of those things, just make sure there's a connection in your mind as to how it fits with the problem you're trying to advance.
Kristiana Corona:
I feel like that's a really great statement because there's probably been an experience that everyone has had where they've done something and then later found out it was completely superfluous to what you're trying to do.
And then there's this narrative in the back of your head about like, what a waste of time. Why am I even here? Does this person know what they're doing? How do I know we're gonna get a, get a good outcome from this? So I love the, I love the intention and the structure behind each one, and knowing I'm not doing a creative activity just for the sake of making them feel weird or uncomfortable, I'm actually doing it because I think that their brain needs to be opened up in a certain way, and therefore we're gonna get different answers.
Yeah. Okay. So I feel like one thing that would be really helpful in this case is for you to just. Maybe give us a glimpse into what it is actually like. Like do you have a story of a specific company that you came in and you did sort of a high-stakes thing and maybe, maybe it was challenging, maybe it wasn't going well before, but like what did that actually look like in practice?
And then how did, how did that actually help drive better results for their business?
Marja Fox:
The question is hard 'cause I feel like I have 117 stories. Like I could basically, like we, we could pick one on a hat and I could tell you zero things that I do ever go the way that I thought they would go. Great.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. So it's always a surprise.
Marja Fox:
Yeah. There's always a little bit of surprise. There's always a little bit of improvisation. That is the core of why I feel nervous at the beginning of it, that the work is both in. Preparation. I don't even like to call it planning anymore because planning implies that I'm gonna do the thing that I thought I was gonna do.
It's preparation and real time adjustment to get you to where you wanna go. Lemme pick one. So, uh, manufacturing client, and they are coming out of an entire restatement of their financials. They had been founder led for the entirety of their existence. That founder was 85 stodgy, right? Like, knew all the things.
The culture in that place was not good. Nobody had ever been allowed to speak more or less, right? And sort of do do what the boss says. But had this guy had made a number of bets that flopped and the bank had to come save the company, and as a result, he was removed as c. So we have a new CEO for the first time really in anybody who's worked their memory, right?
And it's a turnaround situation. The bank saved them temporarily, but now they had a great big all loan that they needed to pay back in addition to right-sizing this business. So they needed a strategy, but they also needed an entire transformation of the way this leadership team thought together and worked together.
Because they did it. There was no precedent for any such thing. So these are all things that I worked with the CEO in advance to understand, just we talk about So good. I'm, I'm living up to my own advice here. We talk about the problem part of it, we talk about the strategy part of it and what's really happening in this, in this company and the market and Right.
All the kind of like hard stuff. We spent equal time talking about the soft stuff. Who are the people? Why are they feeling the way they're feeling? What do we expect is gonna happen in this room? So we actually designed two separate sessions in this case. This is, this is a i, I wasn't thinking of this, this through as I picked this example, but you know what, sometimes you might not be able to accomplish all that you wanna accomplish in one meeting and being realistic about that, that like, this is gonna, we need to get to a certain point and then we need to give some people some space to just kind of like sit with it because they won't be able to go all the way.
But we're asking too much, right? So we did a day and a half session, we waited a couple months and then we came back and did another day. That first day and a half session, you know, it was all planned out. There's an agenda, there's pre-reads, but getting people to talk is your first big challenge. And the CEO can't start it, 'cause then we will just reinforce. All the same habits that have always existed in this organization. And he and I talked about that in advance. And he was gonna sit there silence until somebody came up with some things. We also prompted a few people in advance, the people that he, he had already identified as some of the biggest leaders, some of the people who are maybe even newer.
Um, and the people that he knew would be uncomfortable that, but that also everyone would really look to. So we gave some folks a little bit of heads up about some of what was coming, what the first question would be so they could think about it. So it took a probably the first 90 minutes for people to really like start engaging and it was awkward and we just knew that we had to, like, we had to sit through the awkward.
We did it. I didn't like it, but we did it. So we sit through the awkward. Then once we like, okay, we have now set the tone enough, then we started breaking into smaller groups. Because if we had broken into smaller groups right away, I think we would've kind of continued that sort of silence. Right? But we needed, like the culture shift needed to happen.
Sort of the, the expectations of this CEO for this group needed to happen in a big group, but then we needed, we needed to let them stretch their legs. In smaller groups, when you're in smaller groups, just math, everybody gets to slash has to speak more. So putting them in a smaller group to really discuss, in this case, they were discussing what it was that really made their organization special.
We're kind of trying to get at core capabilities, right? Something they should all know something about. So. Nobody can hide behind the, I'm not the expert, this isn't my functional area, but also in smaller spaces where they all had a task and they all needed to contribute. And then you have the challenge of bringing them back and getting every now.
Now people are like, it's starting to unfold right now. Now I'm managing a hundred. I wasn't a hundred voices, it was like 40 voices who are more into it. So now we're starting to like people talking over each other and trying to pull out all the good ideas that are coming at me too fast. We stopped at one point, and actually then did I, I know classic facilitator, sticky dot exercise, but to try and synthesize, right now we've got 40 people engaged, made a map of some capability dichotomies, right?
Are we a private label manufacturer? Are we a branded player? Are we low cost or are we high service? Right? And made a visual exercise for, for everyone to, to come do these things. We could talk through more of the, just like the agenda, the flow, right? There's things that you're doing designed to kind of address both the problem, advance, the problem solving and the people, some of which is anticipated, and some of which is you're sitting there live in the room.
So here's a, an example trying to bring this to life for you guys. An example would be this one fellow who was quite sure that we shouldn't do strategy at all if we haven't talked about mission and values and just kept coming back to mission and values, right? It's just like, this is now what we're here for.
It's not a totally crazy point. If you don't have a mission or values and you don't know what those are, then it is hard to do a strategy. But, so you've got, sometimes you'll have voices where you're just like. Derailing. Derailing. Derailing. And so we took it, and ultimately that did become a, a takeaway that they would go revisit their mission and values in order to keep the problem-solving moving.
So things like that where you're like addressing in the moment, deciding what is true parking lot. You know what, that is a good idea. It's not what we're here for, but like here's a next step or a plan for how do you do it. And then sometimes adjustments where you're like, we, well we do need to talk about that more.
For example, this client had a heavy North American footprint, but also a European footprint. And we ended up basically creating a session talking about the differences between those two markets and really like laying those out wasn't part of the agenda, but like kept coming up enough that we're like, we need to insert this.
And so we put it into the mix. Is this helping Christina? It's this combination of things in advance designed and making it up as you go with the overall objectives in mind. As long as you're keeping track of what the North Star is. What I need to attend to or get to at the end of this. You can make really smart adjustments along the way 'cause you're just, you just need to keep pointing in that direction.
Let go of the agenda if you need to, and just keep pointing in the direction of those objectives.
Kristiana Corona:
I feel like the mistake that I see people making the most often is over architecting the time and getting so locked in that we have to cut these discussions short because we only have a time block of this amount.
We must move on to the next thing, even though it's totally not the right thing to do. So how much of that time do you actually plan blocks? And then how much do you just have? Like here's a general outline and I'm gonna let this flow in whatever timeframe it flows.
Marja Fox:
I do both. You are totally right.
People cut things like the, the times on an agenda are somewhat arbitrary. The most important thing you do is. Design the flow of the conversation and that takes real thought, like what's the logical, sensible way of having a flow and what is the way I want to have this conversation, which is where you get into some of those possible creative techniques, right?
This one should be a small group. This one should be a voting exercise. That's something people skip. As soon as you, you write down the agenda topic, but you don't actually think about how do I want to have that conversation? Those two are the most important. I still always put a time on things and I would encourage people to do that as well.
Two reasons. One of which is people really are used to it, so like they won't even call it an agenda if you haven't put times on it. Okay? Okay, fine. I would ignore that if not for rule number two or reason number two. It is still tremendously helpful to have that. It's a tool to help you control a conversation that is going in places it shouldn't go.
So having your audience. Audience, you can tell, you can see, you can see how I feel. I think about this. Having your meeting participants feel a little bit of pressure on, we don't have forever for this conversation. We must be efficient, focused on the things that really matter. Discard things that don't is a pressure you want them to have.
So the timing helps you with that. But then what you need to do as the boss of the meeting, whether you're formally of the facilitator or the host of it, is to be comfortable saying, we were gonna end this at nine 30, but the conversation we're having is so important. Let's extend it 20 minutes. And uh, I don't actually always ex say extend it 20 minutes, but I would encourage your listeners to do so because.
I have the benefit of having my facilitator hat, like people are gonna listen to me differently. But I think more effective for people who are facilitating as participants would be like, let's extend it 20 minutes and do it even if it means you are not going to get to other parts of your meeting, schedule another meeting.
But if you believe in the, the flow of the discussion, the sequence of the conversation, if you've done that well and you believe in it, you should stick to it and not try to short change parts of it. Because the subsequent parts will be meaningless.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. And I feel like oftentimes the stuff at the end is almost always punted to another meeting anyway if things run over, which they often do.
So people are, are usually pretty used to that. But I was, I was curious because, you know, some people have a philosophy of I am not, I am not putting timestamps on things. They will take the time they take and I want this full day to be dedicated to, you know, whatever that conversation is. But that makes total sense.
Uh, I am curious, like the end of that previous story, what was the shift in that group after you finally got them talking, you finally got people to open up the new CEO was not stepping in in the same way as the old CEO. Like what was the outcome of that articular meeting?
Marja Fox:
It was so fun to see them.
I mean, even in that first day and a half, they were still coming up to me and thank you for this meeting. I'm, I'm sorry I didn't, I, there were parts I couldn't contribute to. I, you know, I've just never thought strategically before. Like people were pretty apologetic. They were engaged by the end of that and they, they knew it was expected of them, but they were not yet expecting it of themselves.
By the second meeting we had people jumping in on all sorts of places, offering their opinions. It became a different kind of facilitation challenge for me, but the right one. Right. And the company itself has done incredibly, they actually now have merged with another company. All of their executives are rich and, and doing their next thing.
They have totally paid off the bank and the founder is still on the board, but you know, in a much reduced. Position of influence, especially now that they've merged so that CEO is now out shopping for his next opportunity. So if anyone is looking for a great CEOI know, I know one. Love it.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah, let's just put that plug in too.
Awesome. Well thank you for sharing that story. I feel like it really helps illustrate a lot of the concepts and like how it feels throughout. And I think what's really reassuring is just it isn't that you start going into these meetings and knowing all the answers and knowing exactly how it's gonna go and you know, you repeat it so many times that it's just automatic in your sleep.
There's always things that are coming up that are new or unexpected or you know, different challenges and so good or bad, that is the territory that you're in.
Marja Fox:
That's right. That's right. And you can look at at it as well, I don't know how to do this, so I'm not, or you can look at it as nobody knows how to do this.
So. Why don't I take a stab at it? Like we have all sat through crappy meetings. Most of the meetings are crappy, which is why everybody's so excited to cancel all the meetings. So again, like kind of what's the worst that can happen? You're not gonna make it worse. The worst that happens is you don't fix it, but there's a pretty good chance you're gonna make it better.
So try.
Kristiana Corona:
I love that. Okay, so since most of the folks on this call are probably informal facilitators, but probably not strategically trained facilitators and executive boardrooms, what would be your advice for them? Just thinking about stepping into this role more often or more confidently and how they can start doing this a little bit more each day?
Marja Fox:
First thing I'd say is I'm not formally trained either. Nobody ever once gave me a class on facilitation. In fact, the word was never mentioned while I was at McKinsey. There do exist some facilitator trainings that I have now encountered, but like, let's be real, most people are not trained, so that is not an excuse.
On the other hand, let's say it, you know, another version of this, I've never been formally trained, but as I looked back, as I started kind of recognizing the need for guidance on how to have productive conversations in my clients that I was serving in kind of a more traditional strategy formulation capacity, I also looked back at my life and was like, in a lot of ways, I've been doing this forever.
And you know what your listeners here have too. If they actually just think about it, how many times have they had to guide a conversation at home, at work, in their hobbies, in like. You all have skills around facilitation that nobody has ever named. That's the real gap, is that we haven't named them, not that we're not using them.
So the only transition that needs to happen is that you need to start using them more deliberately, and every single meeting is an opportunity to do so. Maybe one, one practical answer to that question besides my rah rah answer is don't wait to practice deliberately for the hard meeting. Practice at your next team meeting.
Practice at your next one-on-one practice at the check-in with your, you know, colleague in r and d if you're sales right, like every interaction is an opportunity to think about the things that we talked about today. Who is this person that I'm about, or people that I'm about to meet? Where do they actually stand?
You can do it. You can do it. As you're walking to the meeting or firing up Zoom, what story would they need to hear? What makes their life hard? How am what I'm about to tell them gonna gonna impact them? We're gonna talk about the big question. What are the smaller questions? So don't wait until it's hard.
Don't wait until it's an emergency. To get deliberate about practicing the practicing and expanding the skills that you actually already have. And
Kristiana Corona:
I think the advice you gave earlier about role playing, what you think the other person would say is such a good tip, whether you wanna do that with your boss, whether you wanna do that with your peers.
I just haven't seen a lot of people take it to that level. But I think that's a really, really great thing to do because it allows you to put that human spin on it versus maybe just writing down. Things or chatting with ChatGPT about, like how do we make this better? That's brilliant. So I feel like we could talk about this topic all day and I could keep asking you about 117 or 116 more of your stories.
But I know that you also offer a lot of really amazing content out there, especially on LinkedIn. And I just really appreciate your articles, 'cause every single time you write, you talk about these things, you go deep on how do you help people when they are entrenched in their thinking. How do you help break up this particular problem cycle that we see over and over and over again?
And I feel like your advice is very, very practical. So with all of that preamble, where can people connect with you to learn more?
Marja Fox:
So LinkedIn is a great one. Happy to accept any connection request. The other thing that people might be interested in is a newsletter that is a little bit nascent, but I am now every two weeks kind of putting into a little bit more long form.
Some of these tips, some of these observations and some of these stories around what this really looks like. Right? I appreciate you calling out that it's practical and tactical. 'Cause this is not about sitting in academia as a professor, and it is not even about being at McKinsey and serving Fortune 500 clients anymore, right?
This is about rolling up your sleeves, getting the fingernails dirty around. Meetings, good meetings and good decisions on your hardest problems. And so I write about that every two weeks is probably the second place I would go direct people to.
Kristiana Corona:
Perfect. We will make sure and include that in the links with the show notes so people can go sign up because I'm sure they're gonna, this is just scratching the surface.
I'm sure they're gonna have so many more questions for you. So just a warning in advance, this was really, really great. Thank you so much for making time. I really appreciate how you think about these opportunities and really framing them up for yourself as challenges and growth opportunities to learn, but also not enough people challenge the status quo.
And so what do you have to lose? Just go start doing more of it. Let's say someone is maybe an. Okay. There, there might be situations where they're like in over their head, they don't Yeah. They know they're not the right person to facilitate it. Mm. They need a professional facilitator. What does that look like?
How do they get hold of you? Or something like that.
Marja Fox:
You know, you would think that maybe my parents gave me my name knowing I would start a business, marjafox.com. It's very easy to find because I'm truly the only one. But that's my website that will describe both my facilitation, you know, services and there's a contact form on there.
So that is the, that is the way that, uh, that I get, I get folks coming in to say, well, we could, we could use some professional help here.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah. That might be after they've tried a few times and they're like, well, decision's a little bigger than I thought.
Marja Fox:
It is hard. And, and look, I will, I will, you know here, now that you're gonna let me get commercial for a second.
It is harder for you as a part of the organization to do the things I just talked about than it is for me as a strange third party. It just is. So it's not even just that I've been doing it longer and I have more reps, right? Like, there are irreplicable, that's a word. Advantages that I have, uh, as a, as a third party just is, just, is.
Kristiana Corona:
Yeah, and I think you brought, in fact, just to quote one of your own posts back to you. I'm pretty sure you talked about that because one of the things that makes teams really great at execution is being able to align and come together and rally around a common goal. And one of the things that you bring to the table is playing the relentless challenger or the devil's advocate or the red team and being able to say, it's okay, I got no political stake here.
I can come in and I can challenge the status quo. I can push back. And so sometimes that's a really, really helpful exercise when people are just too stuck and they, they can't get past that. Okay, beautiful. Thanks again, and I'm sure we'll be talking to you again sometime soon. And thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
