Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcast, the podcast where we
discuss project management principles for your everyday
life. My name is Ann Campia, I'm a
certified project manager. I also have education and
project management. I am just so very much
passionate about this role and the space.
I've had the awesome opportunity to work in different industries
like tech, marketing, healthcare, you name it.
I just love being a project manager and I am super excited
to welcome our guest today, Evan Unger, who is the Managing
Partner at Schwartz and Associates.
He and I have had a chance to connect offline together to talk
about a lot of the exciting projects he's working on.
But I am happy to have him on as a guest host for today's episode
where we'll be talking about everything from virtual
coaching, leadership development, and all the amazing
things that he's doing as part of his business.
So Evan, welcome to the Everyday PM podcast.
I'm so excited to have you on. Well, thank you Ann for having
me on. I'm excited to be here too.
And for those who have not met you yet, can you please take a
brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience?
Yeah. I guess I'm looking at your
LinkedIn page. I think I go back a little
further than you do. And but I got out of Business
School 1989 and went to work for a big pharma company, Merck, and
they put me in a leadership development rotational
assignment, like what I was doing.
And then just invented this job called director of change
leadership and development, which honestly was a fancy title
for. I had no idea what I was doing.
I'm three years out of Business School, A new CEO comes on board
from outside of pharma, does an assessment of the organization,
is frustrated because it's siloed, bureaucratic, people
aren't collaborating. And somehow I got charged with
figuring out how to deal with collaboration, right.
And So what I've done for the last 30 years is work with small
to medium sized organizations on cultural transformation efforts.
And so that's what I do Now, truth be told, I'm going to
point in my life where work life balance is very important.
So I'm mostly training people how to do high stakes workshop
facilitation. I mean, you know, you don't have
the easiest job in the world. Let's let's consider that for a
second. Evan is in the business of
changing culture for organizations and for those that
are listening, and I know we have non PMS that are listening
and even PMS that are listening to this episode.
Changing anything #1 is really difficult.
Changing organizational culture and finding a means to do so
that is effective is so hard in my opinion.
I am in a role myself right now where we are consistently,
consistently experiencing change.
And sometimes change is hard because it's driven by the
culture in which you are trying to operate in.
And so Evan, I just, I know that we talked about this offline
when we were trying to come up with the topics for this
conversation. And I was just in awe about the
fact that you not only fell into your role, but then you figured
it out. And now kind of like you said,
being more at the tail end of your career and your journey and
wanting more of that work life balance, you found a way to kind
of infuse it by helping others do the same thing that you've
done. So all of that to say, I'm so
excited to have you on because of all of the accomplishments
that you're able to share with our audience.
Well, I mean, it's interesting because if you go back when I
was challenged to figure out how to get people to collaborate,
this is 93. I don't have e-mail till 94.
You don't go back that far, right?
But there's no there's no Zoom or Webex or Microsoft.
Teams. None of that stuff exists.
So what we were doing back then was teaching people how to
facilitate collaboration. Sitting in a room together, They
were sitting there and 12 people.
We're running workshops teaching people facilitation now.
Decades go by and clients start asking us to teach people how to
collaborate virtually on screens as tech came along.
And then the pandemic hit. And really all we're doing now
is teaching people high stakes workshop facilitation.
And we can get into how this is part of a cultural
transformation effort in a moment.
But that's really what we're doing, is working like we are
right now on screens, teaching people how to run these hybrid
teams, these virtual teams. Yeah, I think I love the history
there because I don't know that everybody is familiar with the
work environment pre Zoom, pre Microsoft Teams, pre all the
collaboration tools that are available now.
Obviously now your company has embraced virtual coaching,
virtual leadership development and that sort of thing.
Did that come organically or was that a conscious decision for
you to move to that type of model as your customers were
asking for it? I would say it was more organic.
I would be honest. Truth was we were working,
running, you know, high stakes workshops face to face as part
of change initiatives. And as part of those
interventions we were always teaching people this
collaborative leadership skill set, right, high stakes
facilitation skill set. And you know, for so many years
that's what people were doing. They were meeting in rooms.
Now, I think Webex and live meeting Gotomeeting came in
early and clients started saying, well, wait a minute,
we're not flying people around the world anymore like we did in
93 to run these meetings. Can you start teaching us how to
do this virtually? And the honest truth was I
resisted. I did not think it was going to
be that interesting to sit on screens like this.
So we dabbled in it. And then when the pandemic hit,
as I said, really that's all we're doing because almost all
of our clients are in air quotes, working hybrid and I
think organization trying to figure out how do we run these
teams when people may never even meet each other face to face or
certainly it will be very infrequent.
And so it was more organic than conscious.
And I'm not trying to ask you to, you know, divulge the secret
ingredients to the recipe around how you train folks.
But in this move to a virtual environment, how has it changed?
If anything, the way that you you train folks on virtual
coaching, leadership development, how do you train
executives? Has it changed anything at all?
Well, it's interesting. The mental model of how we might
engage groups has not changed, right?
The platform has so where we would have taught people how to
work and we've all done things like simple storyboarding or
affinity diagramming and sticky dot voting.
So when we're working face to face, of course, we're working
on real whiteboards or real walls virtually.
Now most of our clients are in the pandemic started using
platforms like Mural or Mirror or Lucid Spark.
So the platforms have changed and working on the screen is,
you know, different. But the principles of
collaboration remain the same in many ways because we're still
human beings. And, you know, I always like to
say, you know, people don't hate meetings, right?
What they hate is wasting time. And as human beings, we're all
dysfunctional. There's politics, there's ego in
any group setting. But the principles of this type
of collaboration and remain the same, independent of the fact
we're working now on screens instead of sitting in the room
together. Well, you know, that I, I shared
with you that I am in a complete 100% remote environment and I
often think to myself, how much more effective can I be as a
leader if I could just, you know, be in person with my team.
Have you gotten anything from those that you've coached so far
around this element of the well, I guess where do you stand, you
know, in terms of art? Can you be an effective leader
in person virtually? Does it matter anymore?
Well, I, I think nothing replaces a face to face meeting.
I mean, that's the honest truth. How organizations, and I'm sure
McKinsey and Accenture and Bain and all these companies are
selling, you know, the how, how you run hybrid organizations.
But the truth is we've lost so much human connection sitting
here on the screen. And one of the things I think
organizations do need to figure out is how to leverage in person
events. Right now we just happen to be
teaching people how to collaborate virtually.
But the truth is, I don't think you'll ever replace the dynamic
of a face to face meeting because all the informal
networking that takes place even at a break, right, where you
find out about people's kids or you find out just the simple
things, those pieces are very hard to have happen virtually.
Even in our trainings, right, which is a four day training
when we were doing a face to face is a three day boot camp,
People would go to lunch together, they might have dinner
together, right? When we take a break on our
meetings, they're in their house or they're in their office and
there is no informal connection. And so I think it is very
different. And I think it is harder as a
leader to figure out how do I engage the people I am
responsible for getting results from.
And what about the benefits of moving to this virtual
environment? What have you seen come out of
your your coaching program in terms of the format?
Well, the honest truth is, as we're teaching people this, it
is a better program in many ways because I can, we can do things
virtually in terms of screen sharing and painting pictures.
That is much harder to do. And we used to run our workshop
using flip charts, which I'm sure you've been in that, but
they're not very dynamic. And so it is in many ways, I was
surprised when we switched over to teaching people virtual
collaboration that and as I said, I resisted it because I
didn't think it'd be very interesting or very powerful.
But what I quickly realized is it's, it's amazing how much
tighter the repetition in teaching is when you can paint
visuals and pictures for people over and over and connect the
auditory part of teaching people with the visual part of
teaching. And so I would say, and I
wouldn't say the program we're running now is a much better
program. We have stopped running the face
to face program except for clients who want, they're really
old clients we have who are like, I want to run the face to
face program and I have clients running the face to face program
who all their meetings are hybrid, right?
They're still running them on Microsoft Teams.
But the reason they're running them face to face is for the
very point we started with, which is the connection piece,
the team building piece, the human sort of dynamic.
So they like running the program face to face for that reason,
even though the skill set is more relevant for running
meetings virtually. Yeah, I hear you.
I think that is one thing I just miss having as the opportunity
to, if I needed walk over to somebody or let's go grab a
coffee and have a chat about this project.
And that's definitely something that I continue to miss being in
100% remote environment. But I'm glad to hear that
there's so many benefits for your organization in terms of
moving to that type of virtual model.
I'm curious about, I know for a fact, but I would love for you
to explain to our audience about how the program is very high
touch. She talked about some of the
collaborative tools that you're using, but it's also just
there's a lot of elements that you've infused to your program
that even though you're virtual, feels like it's a very high
touch program. So how do you ensure that
you're, you know, stakeholders are feeling that they're getting
a very personalized training program when it comes to
coaching? Well, I mean, it's, it's very
personalized, right? We're running, you know, a four
day intensive, right? We're running this thing on
Zoom, eight to three, eight to three for the first two days,
eight to four, eight to four in the second two days.
And people are like, how are you doing this with Zoom fatigue?
And we say it's not hard because it's all practice, right?
Effectively, the program, the 2nd and the 4th module are
people, it's a boot camp being asked to practice.
They're going to get feedback, give feedback, they're going to
get videotape. So the bulk of the program is
practice. That's how adults learn.
I always have senior clients, right, who I say, you know,
they're, they're running a group of, you know, APMO or an agile
group. We're doing change and
transformation because these are very much just change agent
skills, process improvement skills.
And I'll say, you know, I'd ask them to take the program, but
VPS are like, I'm too busy. Four days, I don't have time for
that. Now, the truth is sometimes
they're modeling for people what fairly ineffectual leadership
looks like from a collaboration standpoint.
But they're not going to take the four days, but they'll come
in for three hours and watch the 4th day when people are
practicing and integrating things.
And they'll always say, this is tremendous, right?
This is awesome. I want all my agile people, all
my PMS to know how to do this. And I'll say, great, let's do
it. And then the less wise ones,
we'll then say, but I can't take my people offline for this much
time. And I'll ask people quite if you
ask. I mean, look, you work for what?
Hasbro, Apple. Amazon.
Right? So I.
For for 30 years, I've asked clients two questions.
How many meetings are going to take place in your organization
today, right. And I'm sure Amazon with 1.6
million people probably has a half a million meetings, maybe
more today. And I've asked exactly could be
a lot more. And I've asked clients what's
the average effectiveness of the meetings you attend.
I never asked them the ones they run because they'll think
they're better than they are. And in 30 years asking that
question, I've never had a client say our meetings are 80%
effectiveness. I would say the vast majority of
the time people tell me 50% or lower.
And I say to people, this is insane from just a cultural
performance issue. You're going to at, you know,
Amazon run half a million meetings today.
Even if we gave you the high bar of 70%, no one ever says that C
minus. This is just a cultural
performance issue that organizations don't address.
And So what the workshops trying to do is target the fundamental
building block of the culture of the organization, which is how
we engage people in meetings. Now we're focused on high stakes
meetings, workshop meetings. When we did culture change, one
of the first things we always did with an organization is
figure out how to stop so many meetings because there's so many
meetings that don't need to happen.
But we're really getting at the fundamental Bill and Brock
performance of an organization, which is meetings because that's
where people are going to spend time.
And when you do the math, most senior people spend at least 50%
of their time in meetings. Yeah.
And what that means is if you're spending 50% of your time in
meetings and only working 8 hour days, you will literally spend a
year's worth of your life in hours in meetings in under nine
years. I don't know how organizations
tolerate this, but they do. Oh my gosh.
Those are incredible statistics to share with people and it's
almost little bit sad for me to hear that probably a majority of
my life has been spent in those types of meetings.
But I, I do know what you mean by, you know, when you're
sitting in a meeting that is being run effectively and has
purpose and a goal and value for what you're trying to achieve.
And you know, the meetings that could have just been an e-mail
that could have just been a one-on-one or something like
that. So again, without giving folks
the secret ingredients to your recipe, you know, like what are
some of those interactions that you're having your the people
taking your program or your workshops go through is can you
give us one of the scenarios that you have the work through?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no, there's no
rocket science here. It's really about fundamentals.
The metaphor we often use for high stakes workshop or a task
force I'm leading or a project I'm leading, right is it's, it's
like a plane flight, right? There's three parts take off,
right, flying and landing. Now we all know, you know, last
time I was out, I'm in Denver and at DIA, the airport, it took
42 seconds from the time they hit The Jets to wheels up.
If that doesn't go well, we're all dead right from the get.
It's the same thing on a consulting engagement or a
project or a task force on leading or a workshop.
The first fundamental is taking off well.
Most meetings should never be allowed out of the hangar onto
the tarmac because the leader, they haven't thought through the
fundamental questions to take off.
Well, why are we having the meeting and what are we trying
to get done? And we teach a simple pop from
up which right, which just stands for purpose, objectives,
process roles and agreements. The purpose is why we're here
the the objectives for the meeting or workshop or what are
we trying to get done. If I can't answer those two
questions, the truth is I shouldn't be having a meeting
because I'm guaranteed to waste people's time if I don't know
why we're what we're doing. I'm going to be bouncing off
other people's objectives and agendas for my meeting if I
don't know what we're trying to get done, the destination,
right? If I were coming to visit you, I
don't know if I'm flying into LAX or where I'm flying into to
visit you. But if I don't know I'm going to
LAX, I'm going to end up up in SFO in San Francisco, which
means I can't. If I don't know that doesn't
design good process architecture for collaboration, the flight
plan, the agenda for the meeting.
If I don't know the why and what, I can't decide who really
needs to be there, who shouldn't be there, what roles I need them
to play. And so those fundamental
questions, the why, what, how, who and in what way do we need
to interact the in a personal group, That's the work I have to
do before I show up. And that's just one of the
simplest things that we work on in the workshop is good framing,
good take off. Because if I don't take off,
well, you know, any flight plan will do and I'm likely to have a
ton of turbulence when I haven't really thought through that.
I mean that's a lot of the problems in meetings have to do
with poor take off. I think that is so applicable
not just to the executives and the leaderships, you know,
groups that you coach, but to anyone that's in, in the world
of business that has to run a meeting.
I think for the PMS that are listening and even for the non
PMS that like to tune into this podcast, everything Evan just
said is something that you can certainly take away as something
you can practice on your own. Just taking a little bit of time
to think through all of those elements that Evan has just
presented and making sure that you're ready for those prior to
the plane getting on the tarmac, as I love that analogy so, so
much. I think everyone can take into
account all of those elements, go in and have some preparation.
And with that, you're going to have a lot of success in
facilitating your meetings, I would think.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've gone into
meetings where there's not even a purpose or an agenda attached
to them. And to me, that's very scary
because that tells me, signals to me that the person who has
organized the meeting may not have even thought through what
the travel plan is going to be for them.
Yeah, I mean, Patrick Lenciona, you may or may not have read his
book The Five Dysfunctions of Teens, right?
His his first book was Death by Meeting, right.
And what he one of his quotes, I won't get a perfect was, you
know, bad meetings lead to bad decisions, which is a recipe for
mediocrity. Now, it also leads to something
else. If I'm the one running all these
bad meetings, it leads to people seeing me as a bad leader
because again, I'm wasting their time, right.
And so, and that proper model, those five questions, they don't
just apply to meetings. That's what we're doing when
we're launching a project. That's what project chartering
is, is getting clear why we having the project, What's in
scope, what's out of scope? What's our vision for this
project? What's the mission for the
project, right? The objectives, right?
Are the deliverables for the project.
The process is the project plan, right?
At the highest level, we've got roles.
This is why we do racy charting to get rolled alignment, which
also helps with decision making alignment.
And then we have to have interpersonal agreements for,
you know, when we meet, who gets to attend, how do we deal with
people who didn't show up and all the communication and
decision making. And so that's really, there's a
popper, if you will, for the meeting, but there's a bigger
popper for the project charter. And that's why it's so important
to take off well when I'm launching a brand new project.
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
I'm curious around and yes, absolutely.
I mean there's substance and everything that you've shared
with us so far, Evan. But I think in particular what
you just said around just making sure you've got all your ducks
in a row before you walk into that meeting or you log into
that meeting. But I'm curious around if you
had any challenges presented to you during your coaching
experience or during any of your workshops that were challenges
for yourself to try to resolve or kind of provide guidance to
as part of your coaching, as part of your collaborative
sessions that you've done. Has anything kind of popped up
or you're like, oh, I've never encountered that before?
Well, I've been doing this for 30 years, right?
And every time you bring a group of 12 people together, it's
different. And it's the same, right?
Different in the sense you have new people, right?
They're from different organizations, different
cultures, right? But the same in the sense that
we're all working organizations and they're just some
fundamentals we have to bring to bear, regardless of whether
we're an IT person, an engineer, a biologist, doctors, lawyers.
I've trained them, all, right? Because when we're being put in
leadership positions, what we are asked to do is to get other
leaders to collaborate to help them make the best decisions and
get them to buy in and implement.
So have I ever come up with challenges and workshop?
Sure, right. They're difficult, challenging
participants, which is great because the second of the five
core things we're trying to teach people and we practice
over and over is the art of handling challenging, disruptive
people. And there is an art to it.
And a lot it's, there's different ways of course, we
could think about leadership, right?
The simplest way we might think about our leadership is to think
about it on a continuum where I could run a project team or a
meeting and I'm the expert, right?
I have all the expertise and I run it where I'm the expert.
The other way, and this is where we're working, is even though I
have expertise to bring a bear on the project, I remain
completely neutral on what the ultimate outcome is.
So if we were trying to decide how to roll something out, even
though I have strong opinions, I remain neutral and I am an
expert in getting the group to collaborate the right roll out
strategy. And that's where we're working.
And that's what pure collaborative leadership is, is
the art of knowing how to tap the expertise of the group and
help them work through things right.
And so you can think of expert leadership is telling people the
decision right, what the roll out and collaborative leadership
is asking them to figure it out. Now there are advantages to
deciding for the team and telling them, of course, it's
quicker. I, I don't need to listen to
them and I get my way now. It's not very artful because you
had eight other people who were engaged who had expertise.
You've tapped none of the diversity of the group.
You have A1 pointed decision. That's my point of view.
And you're not going to get any buy in.
So if you're artful in this type of facilitative collaboration,
you're going to help groups make better decisions that are going
to get the right roll out strategy.
You're going to get a ton more buy in and ownership.
Now, people say when there's a disadvantage to asking the group
to figure it out for themselves. And I say, what's the
disadvantage? And they say it takes longer.
And I laugh and I say yes, of course, again, to get eight
people to agree on anything's a minor leadership miracle.
We're all, as I said earlier, dysfunctional human beings.
There is politics, there is ego, right?
So it is not easy to get a group to reach consensus and agree on
things, but it doesn't take longer, right?
Because what you've done is help the group solve the root cause,
not the symptoms. It's a better decision from the
get go. So it sticks.
There's not all these rework cycles and the group owns it, so
it gets implemented. So that's the real art of
collaborative leadership. And again, in the real world,
we're in the middle of the continuum.
Is it OK to make decisions for the team?
Of course, especially if they're about to make a decision, you
know, the CEO is going to come unglued or, but really the art
is knowing how to ask them to figure it out and only move into
the middle of that continue when the group doesn't have the
expertise to do it themselves or they're about to do something
that you know, is not going to be either politically supported
or is a good decision in the 1st place.
So that's really what we're doing is the art of how to get
the group to engage and make the right decision and.
Would you say once you have gotten a group to the point
where you feel like there's true collaboration happening at the
leadership level, is that in the argument of like chicken before
the egg sort of thing? Is that what needs to come
together in order for the organizational culture to start
shifting into a certain thing? Or are they?
Are those two completely separate concepts in your mind?
Well, the, the way I, I would think about this is meetings are
the building blocks of the culture of the organization.
So if you look at the, and we're talking about high stakes
workshop, right, there are a lot of meetings that shouldn't be
happening. And so if our leadership of
those meetings is modeling, engaging people, right, working
on the right side of the continuum, it begins to change
the culture of the organization because that's where the culture
is forming. So it really we're not this,
what we're doing is not a course in meetings, right?
It's going to, it'll help meetings, but it's a style of
leadership that we have to have when we're leading project
teams, when we're leading consulting engagements, when
we're leading transformation. So we're really trying to
transform the culture of an organization by intervening at
the level where we're going to spend all this time, which is in
meetings itself. Let's talk about, you know,
after the program kind of just around out this conversation.
I'm curious to hear is there any follow up from your organization
with the folks who have taken it?
Is there any success stories? You know, you don't obviously
have to divulge any specific people, but anything that you
would want to share in terms of the results that you're seeing?
Well, I mean, there's a big difference between training
people and using this as a cultural intervention.
Now, for a long time, this was a piece of cultural
transformation. We would train the C team in
this style of leadership and then roll it down.
When you're training people, it's very hard to change the
culture if you don't have support from the C team level.
So in terms of follow up, when we were running it as a cultural
intervention, it was built into people's performance appraisal.
You know, it was, you know, people would meet with their
managers who were already trained in this.
They were, they would then come out and they and then meet again
and talk about how they're going to do it.
The honest truth is right now we're training people.
And so that's why we like to work with an intact PMO or an
intact change in transformation group because you're not going
to transform a giant company like Merck or Apple or Amazon
training even 1000 people, right?
But you can transform APMO, right?
Or a process improvement group, you know, doing lean by training
all those people so that they are now in a position where they
can hold one another accountable.
And the leader of the group has to go through that because she,
he or they obviously are the ones that that are the key to
building the capability, holding people accountable.
So generally when we run the program, what we want to do is
run it for 12 people in an intact organization, train
everyone in this set of skills. So we begin transforming the
culture of that part of the organization who are then change
agents because they're all in change roles.
You can then start modeling that for others.
But I wouldn't want to sit here and say any training program is
going to transform an organization.
There's so many other systems that have to happen.
How we select people, our communication systems, you know,
how our succession plan. I mean, there's a lot that goes
into transformation, and this is one piece of that, but at a very
practical level. Absolutely, absolutely.
And I think that's how we intro you is that I don't even know
how you even began to master this concept because it's just
been so such a complex and not an easy thing to have to do for
an organization. So for that, I am so gracious
and honored that you were able to join us today for this
conversation because I think there's a lot of folks who may
be in that bubble of, you know, considering something like this
for their organization. And hopefully through this
conversation, they've been able to figure that out or get some
insights as to whether or not they would want to move forward
with that. So why don't we round out the
conversation, Evan, with kind of sharing the details around like
how this program works, so you know, where can they access more
information, that sort of thing. Well, they probably the easiest
thing is to just find me on LinkedIn, right?
Evan Unger. I think the last time I looked
there, 5 Evan Ungers, but I'll be the one who's pictures.
I've got a blue shirt and a goofy grin and you can access my
website there. It's a mouthful.
That's probably the easiest way now with new clients, right?
Four days is a big commitment and in this day and age, what a
lot of people want are like a master class or a LinkedIn
learning video series where we can watch it self-paced
learning. And I have clients who ask for
that all the time. And I and I always say I'm not
interested, go find someone else going to waste your time and
money. And some clients find that a
little off putting. They're like the clients always
right. I say, you're not right.
And they'll say, what do you mean?
I'll say, did you have kids who learned to drive?
And they'll say, of course, I'll say, would you ever let your
kids watch 10 videos on how to drive and hand them the car keys
for 10 videos on how to swim and hand them a car key?
So how the program works, it's practice, right?
It's two consecutive days and two consecutive weeks, right?
So we will run a program, for example, on a Monday, Tuesday in
the first week and finish it the Monday, Tuesday of the second
week. It could be Wednesday, Thursday,
Wednesday, Thursday. But as I said earlier, it's all
practice. There's two hours of lecture in
the program. No one learns through lecture.
No one learns through watching videos.
They learn through doing. And it's action learning based.
And the reason it is powerful working in an intact PMO, right,
is because just having to give each other as participants
coaching and feedback in and of itself, there's a major team
building piece and skill building piece and relation
piece of having to give feedback.
So it's chock full of practice. It's a four day program.
I always with new clients say, hey, send me your two best
people. I'm going to deeply discount
that for you, right? Because I know people need to
stress test something and I know they're going to come out of
there and say, amazing, all the people in the PMO have to be
trained in this or are people doing agile or lean or whatever
it is. Because those are the type of
people doing high stakes workshop facilitation
organizations. And so people going to reach out
me on my website and they can set up a meeting there.
And that's, you know, the best way to reach me.
Amazing. I will make sure that I drop all
the links to your LinkedIn as well as to your website around
the program so that everybody listening to this episode can
access it. And more importantly, have a
conversation with you about whether their organization or if
they've got a team that they want to go through this program
and and learn a lot more about how to facilitate team
collaboration in this high stakes environment.
And then let's not forget virtually as well.
So, Evan, any other thoughts to leave with our audience before I
let you go for the day? We are closing right, so they're
staying with this plane metaphor, right.
The five things we're trying to teach people is that take off
piece then how to handle challenging people, right,
especially senior people. And then the third thing we do
in the program is the art of holding space.
The tools and techniques to hear from all voices from diverse
include. But the fourth thing is landing,
right? And so people do a fairly
mediocre job of landing the plane.
And so we got to help him with that.
And then the fifth thing we're going to help him with is what
you do before you show up. Because in a high stakes
workshop meeting, the work is not the meeting itself.
The work is everything you did as a change agent to set it up
for success. And so those are the five
fundamentals we're working on. And we'd love to have your
listeners reach out. I'm glad to always Zoom with
people, show them the specifics and, you know, send us one or
two people to check it out. I'm confident it'll be the best
program they take in their career because I hear that
decades later from people. We've been doing it for 30
years. Amazing.
I, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing all
the wisdom that you could without giving us the full
entire workshop as part of this episode.
I'm so excited for our listeners in terms of those who will reach
out to you and be able to go through the program themselves.
If you do work through Evan, please let us know, drop a
comment with this episode and let us know how that goes for
you. Evan.
Well, thank you so much for your time today.
Like I said, I'll make sure all your links, associated links are
a part of this episode so that people can reach out to you.
And for the folks that are listening who are maybe new to
the everyday PM, give us a follow, give us a like all those
things to show your love for and support for the everyday PM.
If you can leave us a review on any of the podcasting platforms
you are listening to this on, please do so with love Five Star
Review. Great comments.
Feedback as always appreciated as well.
You can follow me on LinkedIn as well.
And if I need to connect you in some way to Evan because you
can't reach them, I'm happy to try to do that too.
Thank you so much, everybody. On behalf of Evan, myself and
everybody else that is associated with the everyday PM
in terms of the production pieces of this, thank you so
much for tuning in and we will see you on the next episode.
Take care.