Why Leaders Should be Building Mindful Teams | Featuring Janet Fouts | Ep. #1

Our good friend Janet Fouts, CEO of Tatu Digital Media and a mindful social media coach, talked with Adam about the power of mindfulness in business. Janet shares how leaders can incorporate it into our management style and the impact it has on the team and the bottom line.

Interview Transcript:

Adam Helweh:

Happy, happy, afternoon, or morning, or maybe evening. Maybe it’s midnight. Maybe I’m talking to you while you’re sleeping, you’ve put me on your ears just before bed, and you have passed out, and I’m subliminally talking to you while you’re slumbering, I hope you’re dreaming of me there.

Adam Helweh:

My name is Adam, and I am talking to Janet Fouts, a great great friend. You guys can’t see, but she’s over there, cracking up.

Janet Fouts:

I was gonna snore but I decided not to.

Adam Helweh:

You were gonna snore, or snort?

Janet Fouts:

Snore.

Adam Helweh:

Snore. Yes, please don’t do that right now, while we’re in the middle of talking. Janet is one of my best friends in the world, and Janet is an incredible person and resource that I talk to quite often, not only about sort of marketing in general, because she’s just a great brain to bounce things off of.

Adam Helweh:

But she has been my muse towards mindfulness, back in the day, and I love talking with her about that, about conscious business, about mindfulness. And today’s topic is about mindful or conscious team building. Whatever term you wanna put around it, we’ll help peel back things a little bit more so you’ll understand it.

Adam Helweh:

But you know, Janet, I remember, it’s gotta be a couple years ago that you shared with me this book called Conscious Business, which I really, really loved. I got the audiobook, I listen to it through, one of the things I really enjoyed about it was, it … it was applicable.

Adam Helweh:

When you think of the words mindfulness and conscious, you feel like it’s a lot of fluffy talk, and again, it’s really like this soft skill that you know is nice to have, but that’s not what businesses need, they need sales and gumption and all that sort of stuff. Let’s sort of demystify that a little bit.

Adam Helweh:

Can you remind folks who don’t know, when we talk about mindfulness, and consciousness, or conscious business, that sort of thing, what are we really, in essence, talking about from a high level?

Janet Fouts:

Well, you know, a lot of these topics seem really fluffy, and what I say in air quotes is soft skills, but, and that’s something that some people maybe discount a little bit, but you know … both of the terms, mindfulness, and conscious, just mean that you’re actually paying attention. That’s really the key.

Janet Fouts:

And you know, that book that I gave you was written by Fred Kaufman who’s at LinkedIn, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was really really conscious about how engaged in a book, and how he ran his business, but the way the man talks is so amazing, because he really has a consciousness of how he communicates with people.

Janet Fouts:

And it’s really, in some ways, kind of old school. Having respect for the people that you work with, and he’s like, I don’t come late to meetings, I come early to meetings. Because it’s disrespectful to just show up whenever you feel like it. Very simple, very clean things, that he said in that book, just really resonated with me.

Janet Fouts:

It’s really because we’ve been so busy running on the treadmill, as business owners, and both of us are CEOs of our own companies, and we’re working really hard. And sometimes we get so busy working, and running on that treadmill, and moving everything forward, that we forget to stop and appreciate where we are.

Janet Fouts:

And the team around us, the people that we work with, our clients, and our team. So just doing that, just noticing, wow. This is pretty good. Not always, but most of the time.

Adam Helweh:

It’s interesting ’cause as you were talking, it sort of got my neurons firing about how … how much the team, this is really about a sort of leadership and team dynamic, how when Fred was talking about obviously, there was a lot that had to do with sort of understanding your own values, and your own distractions, and other things that matter to you to be paying attention to, and the benefits of doing those things.

Adam Helweh:

But for the sake of this conversation, we’re talking about team building. His book, and a lot of the work that you do, goes into going beyond obviously understanding how to tackle mindfulness and being conscious yourself in what you’re doing personally, and professionally, but also, the impact that it has on how that expands off to the rest of your team, how you engage with your team.

Adam Helweh:

I gotta say that I said to somebody recently, never have I felt more like the CEO of, more like a CEO, period, than I have this year, because of the, honestly, the sort of mindful and consciousness element that I’ve tried to intentionally interject into what we’re doing. And it’s not about me forcing my philosophy down my team’s throat, we really do have to work together and understand.

Adam Helweh:

And I’ve gotta understand how to take responsibility for communicating a number of things, as well as listening to them. How does, what responsibility do leaders have, do business leaders, leaders of particular units of individuals, have to adopting or practicing some elements of being conscious and mindful with their teams?

Janet Fouts:

Well, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of training on this, and just the other day, I did a training on really getting employees engaged in the company. And that was really around the responsibility of leadership, to let people know what their role in the company is. You know, in the old days, I worked in a Motorola factory when I was putting myself through college.

Janet Fouts:

And my entire job, eight hours a day, was to bend two little wires on a transistor and stick it into a circuit board, and then pass it on to the next person. It was the most horrific job in the world, and in fact, I never used a Motorola phone, because I actually helped build them.

Adam Helweh:

It’s like working at a pizza joint, right? You’re like no, no pizza for me tonight, I see too much pizza.

Janet Fouts:

It’s also that, okay I was bending these resistors, and at the time, I was not into tech. I wasn’t interested in it at all, it was a job. And I didn’t even know what that transistor did.

Adam Helweh:

The meaning of what you were doing.

Janet Fouts:

Yeah, there was no end purpose. I felt like a cog in a wheel, and that was my only job. And it worked, ’cause I was in college, and I had lots of other things to do. But it was really important that as I got into bigger businesses, as I started working in other businesses, I wanted to feel like I was part of a mission, or part of something successful.

Janet Fouts:

And you know, I heard a story long ago about a candidate, that he went to NASA, and he was getting the grand tour around NASA, and he ran into a janitor, and he said to the janitor, what do you do here? And the janitor said, I help us get to the moon. Now that’s understanding your mission.

Janet Fouts:

Even though you’re cleaning halls, you have a very important mission on the success of the company, and without you, they could fail. So we wanna instill that in our employees, we want them to understand that there’s a real purpose in your role in this place. Does that make any sense?

Adam Helweh:

It does, so then how do you get there? How do you get to a point of … just how do you get there? How do you get to the point where that janitor knows that, and the other folks that might not, might be bending resistors understand the greater purpose, or even have any level of pride in any of that?

Janet Fouts:

Well, you know. I’ve been a geek for a long time. So if somebody had, not then, but ever since, if someone had explained to me what I was doing, and how it affected the overall end product, I might have been more careful. It might have mattered to me. But it didn’t. And so you know, if you’ve got somebody who’s coding your website, for example.

Janet Fouts:

Then talking to them about how the code that they just created has helped you to sell a better product, or it changed lives, now they have a purpose. Otherwise, they’re just coding, you know, html. It’s not important to them, they don’t get vested. And they don’t really put any passion into it, it’s just a job.

Janet Fouts:

Who do you wanna employ in your company? Someone who really cares, or someone who’s just putting in time and waiting to go home?

Adam Helweh:

So besides that end of the spectrum, right, where you’re really talking about, in a way, folks finding meaning within the company, or at least understanding their meaning, to the point where folks can be happier, more productive, take more pride in their work, do better quality work, whatever that … there’s a whole bunch of things that could happen from that perspective.

Adam Helweh:

But what about the other side of things when it comes to things like conflict resolution and things that aren’t day to day, hopefully, within your business, and instead are things that pop up and are really tough things to have to deal with, the dynamics between teammates and you know not somebody maybe on the line maybe doing something with the widgets on the line, but with a team of folks like, again most of the folks that listen to this are marketers, or marketing decision makers, folks dealing with sales and communications.

Adam Helweh:

What about those folks? How does this apply to the dynamics that they’re dealing with on a daily basis?

Janet Fouts:

That’s such a great question, because that’s one that a lot of people don’t think about very much. You know, I have been in companies where marketing had all of these really great ideas, and they were like, we’re gonna do this, and it’s gonna be really great. And then the engineers would come in and go, yeah, we can’t actually do that.

Janet Fouts:

And then sales would say, how come you keep trying to seel this stuff, and market it, when I gotta go in and tell people whether this thing works or not? There’s a lack of communication, there’s a siloed mindset, where we’re not thinking about the organization as a whole. We’re thinking about our little job, and our little silo.

Janet Fouts:

And if we don’t, as marketers, talk to the engineers, and find out, you know, what is the real benefit to this? You know, when you sit down, and we’ve done this with engineers in the past, where, okay, maybe they’re not gonna blog. Maybe they’re not gonna get on Twitter and talk about the product.

Janet Fouts:

But when you sit down as a marketer, with an engineer and say, where does your passion for this project come from? What gets you excited? What’s new that I don’t really know about, that’s really gonna get people jazzed about this? And then you take that language from that engineer, and you use that to market the product? Wow.

Janet Fouts:

Suddenly you’re the voice of the product. And you’re not just pushing out your own messaging, you’re taking the passion from the person who created it, or worked on it, and using that. It just comes across better, because there’s realness there. But sometimes there isn’t so much in marketing, although we all deny it, it’s patient much true.

Adam Helweh:

I had a … I was actually sitting down at the table with our client, one of our clients, today, and the discussion was really about marketing and sales alignment, even though the intention was not to be about that, the conversation, somebody flew in from out of the country to be there, for the big meeting.

Adam Helweh:

So all the top people were there, talking about marketing, and it immediately went into how do we get these guys to do what we need them to do? Or how do we get through to them to find out what it is that they need? Or whatever the case, just, there was a plethora of little things that most, I hear quite often, from people between their sales and marketing teams.

Adam Helweh:

And most of it boils down to a bit of communication, a lot of communication in fact. But communication in the sense of, on the side of listening, because a lot of times they’re wanting to sort of talk about what’s important to them, or how things are, or the way they should be, or whatever the case may be from their perspective.

Adam Helweh:

But don’t pause for a second and say like, it’s great that you’re telling me all this, but we need to pause for a second, and maybe instead of telling me how you think things should be, listen, to those other departments, and try to be more conscious about how to figure out what really is the subtext behind what’s going on, because they’re hustling and bustling.

Adam Helweh:

They’re on the same team as you, but people can oftentimes have a hard time communicating the right thing, and when two parties are just simply only communicating towards each other, and not one of them, or both of them, are trying to actively listen at that moment, it could be really, really hard to inject any empathy beyond your situation, in your department.

Adam Helweh:

And so it was really interesting to see the conversation expand beyond why can’t these folks understand this, that, and the other, to a path of somebody’s got to give. Somebody’s got to be willing to be quiet for a little bit, and hold an active role in paying attention, being mindful and paying attention, to that other party, without the intention of, with the intention of listening, and not the intention of responding.

Adam Helweh:

And I believe that after that sort of was accepted as a way of moving forward, or at least to continue the conversation from there, it was interesting to hear all the options open up, because now, it wasn’t about trying to impart their philosophy on this other department, but instead, it was about trying to understand the position or the needs of that other department, and how they could be of service to each other, or at least communicate better where that disconnect was, and alleviate that a bit.

Adam Helweh:

Does that seem to be familiar? It’s familiar to us in regards to sales and marketing, does it seem to be familiar in what you’ve been seeing as well in your work?

Janet Fouts:

Yeah, I see it all the time. It’s really, something that we don’t really put out there very much, but it’s really a cognitive bias. It’s that, and there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive bias. An example might be planning bias, you know, the planning, they call it planning fallacy bias.

Janet Fouts:

Where literally, I’m, as a salesperson, underestimating the amount of time that you as an engineer are going to take to finish this product, and I’m already telling sales, you gotta sell it, and sales is going, hey, you haven’t talked to engineering. That communication gap is something that is really critical, that leaders take charge of that.

Janet Fouts:

And help people recognize those biases, and be able to manage that appropriately. And you can’t see it, you can’t manage those kinds of biases if you don’t know that they exist. And so there need to be conversations had about okay, what’s reality here? And how can we look at that? It’s like 20/20 hindsight, right? We always realize later that oh, yeah, we should have seen that. Well, let’s try to realize it a little earlier next time.

Adam Helweh:

And a lot of it had to do with this particular scenario, and again, I don’t think it’s unlike a lot of other ones, where the folks are running and gunning and running and gunning, and so you don’t have … you probably experienced this early on with your business, you know, but you’ve been doing this for a long time, so it’s been a while.

Adam Helweh:

And even same for me, where it just feels a bit sometimes like the train is moving, and if you wanna stop off and get a drink of water, you’re literally trying to jump off a moving train, go grab the water at the water fountain or whatever, and then jump back on, which means you either gotta hustle back to the same car you were on, or you’ve gotta just grab it wherever it is at that moment. And that feeling can really really suck.

Adam Helweh:

And that is not a requirement. That is, there’s a conscious way of tackling that, and getting the train to work in a way, or getting the business to work at a pace that gives you not only the peace of mind to not have to hustle that much, in the sense of overburden yourself, and be always frantic like that.

Adam Helweh:

But also, give yourself enough margin that you can think more deeply about things that you need to tackle, or create systems, or solve bigger problems that you may end up having. Because you now have the brain power, and the time, and the margin, and attention, to spend on those things that ultimately probably have a ripple effect elsewhere in your business.

Janet Fouts:

They definitely have a ripple effect elsewhere in your business.

Adam Helweh:

You’ve written a couple books, and one of the books is, When Life Hits The Fan. There’s an interesting, it’s very much about caregivers, understanding how to take care of themselves as well, they deserve it, they’re putting so much of their energy into those that they’re taking care of.

Adam Helweh:

One of the things you were telling me before the show is that 30% of the workforce, you know, 30% of any given workforce on average are caregivers themselves. They’re at home, just, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Janet Fouts:

Sure, sure. So there’s a really great study that came out in January, by Harvard, and they really did a lot of research. And what they found was, it’s about 30% of the workforce is actively a family caregiver. And as our workforce, as our population ages, we may be, being a family caregiver to an aging parent, someone who has Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Janet Fouts:

We may have a child at home with special needs. That 30% doesn’t even cover those who have children at home. So you know, it’s a patient big number. And of that number, 80% said that their job had been significantly impacted by being a caregiver, and they also said that they felt they weren’t supported, and most of them were hiding the fact that they were caregivers.

Janet Fouts:

Which leads to the second big result there, was that only 20% of employers say that caregiving has affected their workforce. So they’re mostly completely ignorant of the fact that a large percentage of their workforce is dealing with this issue. And the reason for that is because we hide it.

Janet Fouts:

We don’t tell people every day, that we’re actively caregiving. We may lose promotions, we may be not able to do specific tasks, because we have other things that are more important, and in our society, in the US, we haven’t really got that balance between the value of our family and our home, and our work.

Janet Fouts:

And finding a way to get those two things to merge, and to be able to do both of them together. But we’re gonna have to, because employers are gonna have to figure out how they can give support to caregivers. So I have a really big bandwagon on that one, but I’m not gonna get on it right now.

Adam Helweh:

Well, and obviously, caregivers are dealing with something very, there’s a lot of different categories that folks can fall under for caregivers. Generally speaking, we’re really talking about challenges, everybody’s got their own challenges, everybody’s, they’re human being, we all know that things happen in our lives that are both temporary and somewhat permanent, or even long-term like health issues, and that sort of thing.

Adam Helweh:

And sort of, humans have a multitude of things outside of business, and possibly even internally, within business, of course, that they’re dealing with. So how does a leader, where does a leader start to try to be more conscious of this with their team? To try to really, I think the result that we’re talking about, right, is bridging these communication gaps.

Adam Helweh:

It’s about people taking pride in their work a bit, possibly staying around longer at their place of work, being more productive, there’s a lot of these things that you can’t always measure with metrics, but studies have shown, research has shown that they’ve had an impact on business, let alone the feeling of going to work, and doing good work for your employer.How does a team, how does a leader start with making some action on this?

Janet Fouts:

Well, you know, we’ve been hearing a lot more, lately, about CEOs who are having lunch with the employees, in the lunch room. We’re hearing more about leaders who are making a habit of every day sitting down with one employee for a few minutes, just to find out how they are. What’s going on in your world? How is your job, but also, how are you?

Janet Fouts:

And allowing employees to have a little bit more ownership in the company by giving feedback, by not doing 360s where, you know, they do a survey, and then somebody sticks it in a drawer, but actual one on one 360s, where somebody comes in, and sits down with a particular manager’s team and goes, okay, how do you really think things are going? And how can we move that forward?

Janet Fouts:

So it takes a little bit more work to actually have communication and conversations with your team, but when you do that, they’re more bonded to you, and you have a much clearer idea of what’s going on in their lives. And what’s going on with them at work. And we really can’t separate those two.

Janet Fouts:

People think that we can, but it’s not really true. We may be having crisis calls over our lunch break, or running out to the outside, you know, saying we’re having a cigarette break, when we’re actually dealing with a major issue in our lives. If we allow that to happen, and then ignore it, then that puts a wall up.

Janet Fouts:

And it starts to kinda drive a shim between the company and the employee, whether that’s intentional or not.

Adam Helweh:

Yeah, and again, we’ve identified how often cases is not intentional, it’s just a way of doing business, or people just trying to keep up with that train. Again, it sorta goes back to, I’ve never felt that we’ve been as aligned and productive towards the broader goal that we’re going after, and all of the things that we’re doing from a sort of more local account management perspective, and all the other projects we’ve got going on internally at the company.

Adam Helweh:

And that really was because of a intention of, it’s my responsibility not to tell my team what to do, it’s my responsibility to communicate to them, but additionally, in that communication exercise, it’s my responsibility to listen to what they’ve got going on, because we’ve got teammates that have just had babies, we have, you know, teammates that are dealing with caregiving, and cars going kaput, and things like that.

Adam Helweh:

Those aren’t just things that as a leader, or an employer even, we can just look at and go, well tough luck, you’ve gotta deal with that. They’re all factors that play into things. And that doesn’t even play into us utilizing that as a way to produce better services for our clients and do things at work in a better way.

Adam Helweh:

And I’m really feeling that impact, especially this year, because of being more aware and attentive, and again, listening.

Janet Fouts:

And I think that’s an excellent example. You know, the way that you have really brought the whole team in so that they have an idea of what the goals are. When you were, and I kind of didn’t address your earlier issue of how am I gonna jump back on this train, you don’t have to jump back on the train, because if you’ve done your job correctly as a leader, your team’s got your back.

Janet Fouts:

And they’re gonna reach down, they’re gonna pick you up, and they’re gonna drag you back on the train, because they realize that everyone needs, every once in a while, to step out. And if you’re so critical for your business that you can’t step out for a minute, that business is gonna fail, because at some point, you’re gonna have to step out, and something’s gonna fall through the cracks.

Janet Fouts:

But if you’ve communicated with your team, and everybody knows, that we’re all moving towards this goal, and that person’s gonna have to go fix their car right now, everyone else will come together and keep the boat moving. But if you split them all up into things where they really aren’t connected to each other, they’re not as likely to support each other.

Janet Fouts:

So it’s really about creating a tribe, that knows where they’re going.

Adam Helweh:

It’s funny, because we talked about this before. But it still just boils down to some really simple concepts of listening, and paying attention, and responding after having done those two things I just said previously, and the impact that those things have on the relationships with those that you’re connected to.

Adam Helweh:

And you’ve got the same effect obviously for your customers, you have the same effect for the people, you know, your spouse, your kids, all that sort of stuff, and how can you call the folks that you work with, teammates, let alone, you know, co-workers, especially if you’re the leader of that team, if you’re not in fact creating the bond that that word implies for moving forward and making good things happen.

Adam Helweh:

So how do … okay, tell me some juicy stuff that you’re doing right now that help businesses with this stuff.

Janet Fouts:

Well, some of the interesting things have been, you know, working with teams that have people in-house, and they also have remote teams. And it can often happen that the remote teams will be struggling a little bit more to be part of corporate culture, to have a better idea of how they’re incorporated. And part of that is because, and I have worked from home now for almost twenty years.

Janet Fouts:

I made my company virtually a long time ago, and we all distributed, and we all still kinda work together. But we all have our own businesses, and we still get together periodically if it’s not face to face, it’s over Zoom. So that there is a way for us to connect with each other. We stay connected on social media as humans.

Janet Fouts:

That kind of creates that idea of a tribe, I was working with a company the other day where they had a person that they brought on board to do graphic design. And he had come on as an intern, he did a great job as an intern, they made him an employee, but he was working remotely.

Janet Fouts:

And the problem that they ran into with him is that he wasn’t really spot on with his deadlines. He was missing deadlines, he was not getting things done as quickly as he needed to, and that went on a lot longer than they wanted it to, than the office wanted it to. But they didn’t know how to communicate to him, because there really wasn’t a connection.

Janet Fouts:

They couldn’t just say, hey, this is what’s going on, this is what we’re seeing. It got away from them, because he was remote, and they weren’t checking in with him often enough. And when we changed that, we helped them have more regular communication, had them sit down and go over the deadlines, and the realistic things that they had to deal with, it was much easier for them to communicate with him.

Janet Fouts:

But they had just kind of left him off in his silo, and forgot about him most of the time, til they didn’t get what they needed. That is not a good way to work with a remote team.

Adam Helweh:

I think you told me that story recently, do you have, it was a blog post or something like that, it was … anyways, there was a little deja vu, I feel like I’ve heard that one before, and it’s a very good example.

Janet Fouts:

It’s possible I did tell it to you, long ago.

Adam Helweh:

So what are you doing right now to help folks? Because you’ve made, I don’t wanna say a pivot, because it’s really been gradual and natural evolution from what you were doing as a marketer, and a leader of a team, and an agency, to helping companies both understand and implement mindful practices and conscious practices within their business.

Adam Helweh:

What could somebody who’s listening to this do, if they were talking with Janet Fouts about this stuff? What problems could they solve?

Janet Fouts:

Oh, everything. It’ll be all better. All they have to do is talk to me.

Janet Fouts:

Yeah, realistically, I have always done coaching with my clients. Whether it was around social media, around how they run their business, and eventually, that kind of evolved into we’re having some issues with this, and they would ask me for advice. And that really kind of naturally evolved into me being an executive coach, and really finding ways to help people reach their goals, to have better communication, to see those cognitive biases, and figure out how they could deal with those things.

Janet Fouts:

It’s helped with employee engagement, it’s helped with the way they communicate with their customers, and it’s been really great for team building, and especially for conflict management, because you know, when we create these silos, we get lot of conflict. When we get people who don’t recognize that they have biases, whether that’s an optimism bias, or a sunk cost bias, you know, they’ve already decided what things are gonna be, and that’s what it is, and that’s all there is to it.

Janet Fouts:

And what we kind of do is help them break out of that mold, and recognize those things, which you can’t fix it til you know it’s there.

Adam Helweh:

Very cool, it reminds me of some of what you were talking about how it’s related to this, and it’s related to that, and how there’s such a big focus these days on customer experience, and one of the most often overlooked elements in your business, to impact customer experience, is actually employee experience.

Adam Helweh:

And so, when you improve, the employees tend to be the connective tissue to a lot of other things, to the products that are being developed as we talked about earlier, to the marketing and the messaging going out there, to sales and customer experience itself, with the folks that are dealing with customer success.

Adam Helweh:

And trying to sell your product, and communicate to them. And when you improve the experience internally for those folks, this has a lot to do with then that has a halo effect to all of the other elements of customer experience as well.

Janet Fouts:

Absolutely.

Adam Helweh:

So Janet, I know where to find you. I can track you down, and follow you, and everything, how do other folks find you if they wanna ask you questions and talk to you, and get your book, and all that cool stuff?

Janet Fouts:

You can find patient much everything at janetfouts, F-O-U-T-S, dot com.

Adam Helweh:

Who would have thunk? Who would have thunk?

Janet Fouts:

I know, right?

Adam Helweh:

Make it easy.

Janet Fouts:

You can also find me on Twitter, @jfounts, Twitter is my favorite platform, so if you like Twitter, then that’ll be a good thing. And I also just launched a new website called nearlymindful.com, which is where I’m gonna be offering a lot of trainings, as well as on my main site.

Adam Helweh:

That’s cool, actually, you’ve got, coming up, and by the time this podcast is out, it may be over, but there may be the next one coming up, you’ve got a retreat for folks, you’ve done a number of workshops, just like you said, amongst many, many other things, and so … who knows what will be there when the podcast comes up, but go check it and see what there is that’s available.

Adam Helweh:

Could be something big, could be something small, but in either case, it’s gonna be something that’s gonna be really helpful, so thanks again, Janet, for joining me, I super appreciate your time.

Janet Fouts:

Thank you so much, it was fun. It always is.

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