WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as ‘Team ET.’ Today, we’re visiting Indianapolis to chat with our guest, leadership and facilitation consultant Therese Miclot. For the past two decades, Therese has helped people and organizations succeed by developing individuals into competent and compassionate leaders, drawn to the intersection between business and psychology, Therese discovered her calling at 15 when she came across career pamphlets while working at a library. Her interest crystallized further when she witnessed her single parent mum work at jobs with bad supervisors. It affected not only her and those she loved, but it motivated Therese to break the cycle by committing to a career of developing effective, supportive bosses in service of those with less power. Flash forward to today, as a leadership development consultant, Therese is sharing her passions for leading and facilitating through one-to-one coaching, workshop development and delivery, keynote speaking, and a recently released book that she co-authored titled ‘The Facilitation Advantage: How to Drive Impact, Build Relationships, and Lead with Influence.’ In addition, Therese is the director of facilitation excellence at Proteus International, where she educates leaders across the world-renowned companies to increase their impact through everyday facilitation skills. With a master’s degree in industrial organizational psychology, Therese is endlessly fascinated with bringing purpose to leadership for improved workplaces. As Therese says, self-awareness and conscious behavioral change can often be the difference between careers that plateau and careers that skyrocket. During this conversation, Therese reveals 10 powerful facilitation contributions that will open your eyes and mind to a world of effective leadership. So, team, if you feel your leadership journey is becoming a little overwhelming, perhaps you’d benefit from understanding why facilitation is no longer just a nice-to-have skill, it’s a leadership imperative. Have a listen to our conversation today and decide for yourself, you may just be inclined to pursue some of the insights that Therese shares.

INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

WAYNE BROWN: Hello, team. Welcome to another week of the ET project. You may often think of leadership as vision or somebody who has got that ability to create that vision, that strategy, perhaps even decisiveness. But what if one of the most powerful tools a leader can have isn’t just about giving orders or delivering great speeches, but also asking the right question, creating space for dialogue, even guiding others toward clarity and action. Today, we’re going to be diving into why facilitation is no longer just a nice-to-have skill, it’s really a leadership imperative, and we’re exploring it under the title of why leaders need to be good facilitators. So, there’s no better person that I know of to guide us through this conversation than my guest, leadership coach, director of facilitation excellence at Proteus International, and the co-author of ‘The Facilitation Advantage,’ Therese Miclot. Therese, welcome to the ET project.

THERESE MICLOT: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

WAYNE BROWN: We’re going to have some interesting discussion, I’m sure, around the whole concept of facilitation.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: But before we get too deep into it, what was the driver or drivers that led you into leadership development, facilitation, et cetera?

THERESE MICLOT: Sure. Yeah. I think it answers my why, why I do what I do. And the short story, Wayne, is that I grew up in a family, and my father passed away quite unexpectedly, leaving my mother to find a job and support the family. And my mother did not have an advanced degree or a college degree at all, and so she had to take the jobs that she could find and was qualified for. And I was a young teen at the time, and I would watch her come home every day dejected, frustrated, disappointed, worn down. And the root of that was that she worked for some pretty bad leaders, some bad supervisors. Supervisors who didn’t know how to give clear direction or good feedback or help to make others’ jobs easier to do. And so that really inspired me to think about, all right, well, how do leaders become leaders in the first place?

WAYNE BROWN: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:00]

THERESE MICLOT: And that was really all it took. I had my undergraduate degree from university and graduate degree in industrial organizational psychology, and then that took me down a career path of being in HR roles.

WAYNE BROWN: How long have you been in this area? I read somewhere two and a half decades or something like that?

THERESE MICLOT: Yes, yes. For 25 years I’ve worked in the leadership development space. I was the global head of learning and development for a multibillion-dollar automation company. I worked for a leadership consulting firm that worked with all types of industries and all levels of leadership. And that’s where I really built my career, and that’s where I work today with leaders, helping them become even more effective at what they do so that their lives are better, but also the lives of the people they lead are better.

WAYNE BROWN: I can imagine you’ve seen quite a lot of change within the whole leadership space.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: Is there a period, maybe even post-pandemic, but is there a period that you’ve seen more movement than other periods in leadership?

THERESE MICLOT: I think it’s gotten much more complex in the last five or six years. I think that people I coach and work with are at more burnout levels than they’ve ever been. The demands of what’s put upon them with the complexity of change, things are happening so fast with change that it has been really hard for leaders to navigate, I think, particularly in the last five years. At the same time, they need to keep their teams motivated, they need to accomplish a lot with those teams. They need to delegate, and if they don’t feel like they have people capable of taking on that work, they carry it themselves. So yeah, I think it’s a very tricky time. I think it can be an incredibly rewarding time, but you have to have the skills.

WAYNE BROWN: You’ve led or you’ve worked with, at least, leaders from across multiple industries.

THERESE MICLOT: Yes.

WAYNE BROWN: I can imagine you’ve seen many different styles. What are some of the pitfalls that come to mind when you think about some of the leaders that don’t facilitate well?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. I think the first one, the biggest one that… and I observe a lot of leaders because I coach them on this, is that they’re not great listeners. And that might be counterintuitive because we often think, oh, if we’re the leader, we have to be running the meeting or we have to be giving direction, and certainly, that’s true. But you also have to be really exceptional at listening, and I think that most of us have never really learned how to be good listeners. It’s a skill, like water skiing or cooking. I never was taught listening in school. Were you?

WAYNE BROWN: No, I definitely wasn’t.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. And then, back to the complexity that we’re facing right now, our demands, the demands on our attention are so great, and we’re in back-to-back meetings all the time, that it’s really, really hard when you’re in a meeting thinking, okay, I got to get these five things across and then I got to get my next one. The danger is that when you aren’t a good listener, one, you end up trying to solve the same problem over and over because you haven’t gotten to the root of the issue, and two, people aren’t going to tell you what you really need to hear. And in my career, I’ve been in many, many situations where we’ve had a meeting, and then the meeting ends, and then there’s the meeting after the meeting, where everybody comes back together or starts to text each other, like, “Can you believe that? Are we really going to do that? They think that’s possible in that timeframe?” Well, the problem is that if the person in that meeting was a good listener, they might have been able to read the room a little better, and then known to say, “okay, hold on, what are people really thinking about this?” And I think of listening as something that helps accelerate and speed things up, but it’s counterintuitive because most people think, “ugh, listening is like a speed bump. It slows me down.”

WAYNE BROWN: That’s a great segue into the book, right?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: So, the book is called ‘Facilitation Advantage?’

THERESE MICLOT: ‘The Facilitation Advantage,’ yes.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. And you’ve positioned facilitation as more than just running meetings, you call it a ‘leadership superpower,’ what exactly does that mean?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. Well, I’ll break it down because we think of it like skills, and there’s three components. There’s mindset, and that is that most of us talk to ourselves.

[00:10:00]

THERESE MICLOT: We talk to ourselves on our way to work or right before a meeting that we might be frustrated about or anxious about or a call that we have to have that we’re dreading. And so, the first element is how you manage yourself because before you can manage other people in a situation, you have to really be able to support your mindset. So, for instance, if you think to yourself, this is going to be a bad conversation, I know they’re not going to agree to this, this isn’t going to go well. That thought drives your emotions, now you’re probably a little irritated, frustrated maybe, maybe a little angry. Well, that’s going to show up in your behavior. So, when you’ve been in meetings, Wayne, and you can tell someone is angry or frustrated, what do you notice them doing?

WAYNE BROWN: Well, they’re disconnected from the discussion typically, or the alternative is that they’re interjecting all the time, they’re trying to be constructive, they’re trying to be seen and heard, may not be meaningful.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah, exactly. They just might be talking at people, for instance, like, “I told you that this timeline wasn’t doable,” or things like that. Well, then the people that we interact with, that we have to get things done with and through, they’re going to react to that behavior. So, they might shut down. They might just stop talking like, “okay, fine, fine, meeting over” or they may now start debating with you. And it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, you leave that meeting saying, “see, I knew it, I knew this wasn’t going to go well.” And so back to the book, we think the first place to start is inside. And I have coached a lot of leaders at all levels globally and I will tell you, it’s one of the places that we always start, is what are you saying to yourself about the situation, about yourself? From there there’s subject matter content, skills, meaning that most of us have expertise in a particular area, it might be engineering or finance or sales. And oftentimes we over-index on our subject matter knowledge, and we’re not really thinking how to convey information to our audience, to our receivers. I was working with one very, very brilliant engineer who was getting promoted very fast. And the problem was he is now in rooms and situations where he had to sell his decisions or sell his proposals to the board of directors or senior leaders. And the problem was he would stay too technical, too in the details when the people he was speaking to and he was trying to influence, they didn’t want all that detail, they wanted something different from his answers. So, we worked on how do you take your message and first of all, think about what your receiver needs first and then craft your message. So, content. And then the last grouping is process, process contributions, as we call them, those are things like listening, as we talked about, or a story. And I think if we took a poll of your listeners and asked them, “how many meetings are you in in a single day?” Whenever I ask people that, you know, “sometimes it’s double digits, sometimes it’s five, seven, 12.” That’s a lot of time that you’re in conversation or meetings. And if you think about you’re in the eighth meeting of the day and you’re exhausted, everybody is exhausted, and you want to make your points stick, well, you could give more facts, you could show more slides, or you could tell a story. And story is one of the facilitation skills because it’s sticky. People remember story more than they would remember information on a slide deck, for instance. There’s other things like how do you adapt for impact, how do you adapt your approach, knowing that people have different preferences about how you’re going to interact with them. And so, those are the highlights.

WAYNE BROWN: Right. You’ve created a framework with those three broad clusters, if you like, and 10 contributions. What I really enjoyed about the book is that you break it down very succinctly, and then you go through each one of those contributions and you dissect it so people truly understand what it is you’re talking about, and there is so much involved with facilitation, I like at the very beginning, you highlight that even the BIAF doesn’t define facilitation.

[00:15:00]

WAYNE BROWN: What’s your hope from producing the book? What are you looking as an outcome?

THERESE MICLOT: Well, I think it really is a book written for leaders. It’s not written for professional trainers or professional facilitators, although I think they can get something out of it. My hope for the book is that, in a way, just as the definition is to make things easier, that’s what the book brings to everyone, that work is hard, and working with people is complex, and especially when it’s virtual or there’s just new dynamics at play. And I think if the book can offer a couple of practical things that people can immediately use that would make their day easier, not just for them, but for the people that they have to lead or direct. And the book is really written as a kind of quick diagnostic, and then you go to the place where you’re getting some frustration or you have a gap. So, it’s really meant for a busy leader who is looking for ways to really increase their impact.

WAYNE BROWN: Right. You’ve created almost like a checklist or a test, if you like, an assessment for your facilitation. What is it that we can learn by taking that? A self-assessment, right?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah, it’s a self-assessment, and it’s meant to be really quick, and again, knowing your listeners are busy and have a lot on their plate, it’s written so that you can quickly look at and understand, well, what is facilitation, and then where do I need to have some more insight? So, for instance, I was working with a leader not too long ago, and his struggle was, he’s like, “Therese, I can’t get people to speak up in meetings, I wanted to be interactive, but some people have their cameras off. I’ll get short answers, yes, no, but I can tell no one’s bought in, and I don’t know how to get people talking.” And so, for him, the self-assessment would help him understand, oh, it’s listening, because there’s a whole series of how do you draw people out? How do you get engagement? So, for him, you’d go to that chapter, and he would get very specific things he could do to now create the conditions where people are going to actually speak up as opposed to stay silent.

WAYNE BROWN: I did take the test myself, for many years I could say, you can tell by my gray hair, and I learned a lot from doing the self-assessment. There’s always areas for improvement is my takeaway, and certainly I’m no exception to that rule. So, what are some of the challenges that you do encounter when you’re working with your clients? Do you find resistance or do you find a lack of understanding? What’s one of the biggest challenges?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. I don’t think it’s… it hasn’t been resistance, because I think when people now understand how this shows up in their day-to-day, they’re much more curious and bought in. And I think, though, you have to turn into or tap into what part of my day is the most frustrating for me? Is it having a difficult conversation with someone? Because you’re facilitating that interaction. Is it that I don’t know how to speak up in meetings and get my point across? Is it that? Is it, I was working with a group of experts in a certain domain, and for them, the problem was they weren’t great at how to handle unexpected questions in meetings. The ones that catch you off guard, and what do you do in a moment where spotlight feels like it’s on your face, and you have to be able to communicate something, but may have to thread the needle, so to speak, in how you do that. So, I think that that’s why we started with the self-assessment is, let’s start with your pain point. This isn’t a theoretical book. This is meant to be a very practical user guide, and it should start first with where do you experience some frustration in your day if you are in a role where you have to interact with people.

[00:20:00]

WAYNE BROWN: Excuse me, I was just reflecting on some of the more challenging events that I’ve facilitated. One of the most challenging that I’ve heard from people that I work with is the starting momentum. How can we successfully get the, whether it’s a meeting, whether it’s a workshop, whether it’s a full-blown event, how do we get that starting momentum so that people are engaged from the start?

THERESE MICLOT: Sure, yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: Any tips or any suggestions?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. I do, and actually it starts before you walk in the room. So, it starts with your self-talk, because I think a lot of times you can have a little anxiety going into a meeting or in a room with people you don’t know, and you don’t know if it’s going to be a friendly audience or a neutral audience. And so, the first thing is, even beyond your slides or your information that you’re going to share, you have to be able to have the voice in your head support your goal. And if your goal is to create a great experience or to show up as confident, it’s going to start mentally. So that’s the first preparation, is if you’re saying to yourself, “oh, I’m so nervous, oh, I’m so nervous, oh, I’m so nervous,” well guess how you’re going to show up, you’re going to show up nervous. Or, “what if I don’t have the right answers?” or “don’t screw up,” or “what if I don’t like this?” All those voices have this impact on our behavior. So that would be my first tip. My second tip would be, this is what works for me, especially when I’m with a group that I don’t know, I get there a little early and I try to meet people. Because once I start to meet people, I realize, oh, they’re just humans, they’re not out to get me. And if I can make a few connections with people, that makes a big difference. I think the third thing is then how do you open up the meeting or the event or things like that. And my preference is often to get the group talking, not just giving my typical, “hi, I’m Therese Miclot, I’m a leadership consultant,” and blah, blah, blah, that doesn’t wake up the room. And so, I would often start with a question and it might have the participants turn to each other and say, “okay, we are talking about change today, and I want you to turn to your partner and talk about what are the most challenging parts of leading through change.” Now I’ve got the room buzzing, and then when I bring them back, then I can start to listen and build from their points of view. So those are a couple of things I would say to put you on a path where you can be in rooms and feel more confident and ready.

WAYNE BROWN: You said that your goal is to create compassionate workplaces, I read somewhere. And I’m wondering, how does strong facilitation support that particular vision and that goal?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. I think it does because one, and I guess I’ll go back to listening, I think when people feel heard and understood, and I don’t mean necessarily agreed with, but when people feel heard and understood, there’s this level of connection we have with people that goes far beyond the transactional workplace relationships that we have. And I just think we spend too much time at work to not be able to be in an environment where we feel like we can connect with people and that we can understand and we can communicate with each other. And so even on the hard stuff, even on, you know, when you have to have a difficult conversation with someone, you can still do it in a way where you’re respectful, where that person feels heard. And again, I’m not saying you have to agree with them, but there is something true and human about all of us that we want to be heard and seen and respected that way. And I think those are the non-negotiables in cultures that will thrive and attract the best talent and keep the best talent.

WAYNE BROWN: When I go to a meeting, I’m always looking at how the other person’s facilitating, so, I’m a participant. Is there a meeting or an event that comes to mind over your career that really stood out to you in the way that that facilitator conducted themselves or got the workshop underway?

THERESE MICLOT: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think I often don’t tend… you know, when I’m a participant in something, wear the hat of the assessor or, you know, the observer, although I’ve observed hundreds and hundreds of leaders to be able to help them get better at these skills.

[00:25:00]

THERESE MICLOT: I usually don’t try to show up that way, but the ones that have really stood out that I admire that… and I, by the way, I think of all these skills like yoga or any kind of practice, like there’s never a perfect, you never get to perfection because you’re always going to be in different situations. So, I’m always a student of this as much as I am a coach of it. I think the ones that I always lend towards are people who show up very authentically.

WAYNE BROWN: Mm-hmm

THERESE MICLOT: And that doesn’t mean being perfect with your slides or how you convey something, I think we… I was just coaching a leader of this… earlier today and getting her ready for a big keynote that she’s going to give. And she’s pretty senior. And I said, “you know, above all, what people want is just to know that you’re a real human,” you know, because she’s like, ‘ah, well, you know, my road hasn’t been perfect.” And I said, “exactly, and that’s what draws people to you, is your imperfection.” And so, I don’t sit there with a grading sheet and say, “ugh, they use too much filler words,” right? Like, I tend not to value that as a way to kind of correct people’s behavior. I will say one more thing, and that is that you can facilitate from any seat. And by that, I mean, sometimes we sit back and we expect whoever is presenting or talking, like they should be running this conversation or they should be running this meeting. But I think that we’re selling ourselves short and we could be doing more. So, for instance, in a meeting that I was in, someone who didn’t have the best facilitation skills, they were overlooking some of the issues that were below the surface. And so, they kind of asked a question, took the quick answer, like, “oh, okay, I think we’re all in agreement, yes?” But there wasn’t real agreement. And so, what I did was say, “oh, wait, I don’t know if everybody really does think this is the right thing to do. Wayne, say more about what you were thinking earlier.” And so, what I just did was want to invite you in and I helped that facilitator, because otherwise they would have passed that point and missed it. And so, I think those of us that are emerging leaders or also trying to show up as ready for more leadership, you could start there and you don’t have to wait for the title or the formal role to start demonstrating your readiness to take on more.

WAYNE BROWN: How do you approach technology? I mean, it’s such a key element of everything we’re involved in today.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: How do you see technology entering the facilitation space? And do you use it yourself?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah. One of the places I tend to coach a lot of people, especially around executive presence, is how concise they speak. And that’s particularly true with people who speak a different native language than the one they’re using at work, because when you’re working with more senior audiences, they want things much more condensed and quick. And I think obviously what AI has done is allow you to immediately do that if you put down your notes or thoughts and said, “make this more concise,” it can absolutely do that. So, I think in written form, an immediate game changer. Until AI is implanted in our heads though, and maybe we’re not far off, who knows, I don’t know, you will still have to have the skill to be able to do it on the spot, assuming you’re not going to be reading from your notes. And so, I wouldn’t advise that because people want to have a real interaction, not just you reading pages or notes. And so, I think that’s where technology hasn’t solved for it yet, maybe it will. But I do think that it’s a huge asset to us all in written form, in helping us craft our message and think of who are we speaking to and how would I position this in a way that will resonate more with my audience. And I use it all the time. Do you find it useful in like contexts like this?

[00:30:00]

WAYNE BROWN: I do. I have to say that I probably leverage it too heavily now for the sake of convenience and extracting what I really need and then still using my own skills. So, I can see value and I can see that the challenges it can create.

THERESE MICLOT: Right.

WAYNE BROWN: What about the engagement side as facilitators? Like, I know there’s a lot of question apps out there, I like those in particular, where the audience can send forward their questions onto the screen, type of thing. Are there specific tools that you like to use during the facilitation?

THERESE MICLOT: I don’t use many, but that’s in part because what I typically am facilitating doesn’t require a lot of technology, it’s more of practicing real time skills. But I know there’s a lot out and particularly virtual with ways you can pull and ways you can use some software to, you know, whiteboard things together that are way easier than they were two or three years ago. So, I don’t have any that come to mind in part because it hasn’t suited what I needed so far.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, there are so many, it’s such a broad question.

THERESE MICLOT: I know. I think the problem is it’s coming out every single day, how do you keep on track and on top of it?

WAYNE BROWN: What do you see is the future for facilitation? Do you see any major shift or change that people should be savvy about or should be thinking about?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah, I think like every industry, like everything, right? That we have to be ready and agile at changing how we use things. And again, you ought to ask me, Wayne, in a year it might change, but I think the fundamental thing about facilitation is how we interact as humans, is how we engage with one another. And I mean, AI can solve for it, but when it’s time to talk to humans, like real humans, and lead them, I think these skills are just going to still be universal and human. And not to say AI won’t supplement and make it 10 times better, but I think that it’s too connected to kind of the human experience that how we communicate and collaborate will come down to the things that technology can’t solve, which is how we live together. I mean, I’ve been listening to some futurists, and it might be my bias, but what I often hear, and I’m watching to see if this is a trend or if it’s not kind of what futurists see, but that the leaders who are going to be very successful in the future, it won’t just be about your technical capability, because AI will do that, right? It’s in some ways the great leveler. So, what will make a difference, and it’s like how you lead your emotional intelligence, the ability for people to want to work for you, to follow you, not just take direction from you, is what will make the difference between people who want to stay fully engaged and be part of a high-performing team or those that won’t. So, I want this to be true. I want that the skill of being emotionally intelligent and the skills that facilitation enable you to have in some ways will help future-proof you.

WAYNE BROWN: And that’s almost full circle back to starting with self-awareness, right?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: So, we need to be emotionally intelligent we need to have that self-awareness.

THERESE MICLOT: Exactly.

WAYNE BROWN: I often like to do a lightning round of questions, and if you’re up for them, I think it’ll be interesting.

THERESE MICLOT: Sure. Of course.

WAYNE BROWN: They won’t be many, but if you could pick one book that changed how you approach facilitation, is there one that comes to mind?

THERESE MICLOT: Wow. There’s one that comes to mind. Yeah, so I’m affiliated with a firm called Proteus International, and the founder of that company, her name is Erika Anderson. And her first book, she has written many books, but her first book was ‘Growing Great Employees.’

[00:35:00]

THERESE MICLOT: And it’s the best manual that I have ever read that practically is the way to start to be able to lead people. It’s very, very practical, and it’s always going to be one of my favorites because no other book has kind of all of that wrapped up in a way that she does. And that really inspired me because it’s very much aligned with this idea of listening as a skill to then be able to give feedback and delegate and get clear agreements and self-talk. In fact, ‘Facilitation Advantage’ is very much inspired by Erika and Proteus. And so that book really solidified for me why facilitation is so important and why I wanted to dedicate my career to it.

WAYNE BROWN: I’ve added it to my list.

THERESE MICLOT: Oh, good, good.

WAYNE BROWN: If you could facilitate a conversation with any leader, be they alive or dead, who would it be and why?

THERESE MICLOT: Oh, wow. Oh, my goodness. Who would it be if I wanted to? Well, I think I’ve been… maybe it’s the times, I’ve been focusing a lot more on the history of my country and I actually think I would want to interview George Washington and talk about a leader who had an impact that created the nation. That’s my answer today, Wayne. Ask me tomorrow, it’ll be Michelangelo or I don’t know.

WAYNE BROWN: There’s no right or wrong anyway.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: What’s your technique when meetings start to go a little bit off track? How do you get things straight?

THERESE MICLOT: Oh, well, this happened last week. I was with a client and the person that was working with me to structure this meeting felt that everybody was on board with what we were talking about. We’re going to be starting a pilot. And we get into the room and in the first five minutes, I can immediately tell this is going off track because people are not bought in. I could see it in the body language, the crossed arms, the looks around the room. And then someone even said, “if you’re thinking I’m going to do this with all my employees, I’m out. I’m not doing it.” Okay, well, that’s a moment that’s unexpected, off track. And I think that what I often see and I think what facilitation skills gives you is it helps you have more choice for what to do in any moment. Because I had a choice, I could have said, “well, we still got agreement from senior leaders that we’re going to do this. So, let’s keep going and then we’ll work through your problems.” Right? I could have just pushed through. I didn’t do that, though. The other option I took was, “Okay, so then let’s stop. Let’s stop here and let’s get all of your concerns out first.” That was not my plan, now we are 30 minutes behind. But I think when you keep on track and this is what the book describes, there’s two kinds of keeping on track, there’s keeping on your track, your agenda, and then there’s the group’s agenda, and you don’t always know the agenda until you get in and interact with them. So, I will always make that trade off that if it’s in service of the group and the work that needs to be done, then I’ll throw out my agenda. And so that’s what I did. So, we said, “okay, we’re not…” I could push through, but I would get what I call ‘malicious compliance,’ they wouldn’t have really bought into it, so sometimes you have to… the short answer or my long answer to your question is sometimes you have to name it and call it out like, “okay, let’s time-out. I can see that not everybody is on the same page with what we’re trying to do. Let’s get that out now.”

WAYNE BROWN: As you said earlier, the risk of not doing that is the second meeting that happens after that meeting and all the negative talk that then festers and builds up.

THERESE MICLOT: Oh, yes, yes.

WAYNE BROWN: Very good. What’s one piece of career advice that you received that has really stood the test of time for you and helped guide you?

THERESE MICLOT: I think it’s progress not perfection for me. I have a tendency to, I think if I don’t put guardrails on myself, work to try to get something perfect, and I’ve had really wonderful mentors that have helped me see where it is needed to put that effort in and where it’s not.

[00:40:00]

THERESE MICLOT: And then another piece of advice or just guidance was the universe rewards a clear intention. Meaning that I think all of us have to have a capability to be strategic to some degree about what are we trying to accomplish short term, what are we trying to accomplish long term so that we’re going through our days with more intention than just trying to get through a date on the calendar.

WAYNE BROWN: What’s next for you? The book came out last year, are you working or thinking of… What are you thinking about at the moment?

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah, there’s a few exciting things. So, speaking of technology, we’re about a week away from a custom GPT is very much aligned with the book and will be available as a diagnostic and also just as a useful tool. For instance, it’ll be… you could drop in your transcript from a meeting and the GPT will give you three things you could do better the next time you have that meeting, and it’ll be based on the content from the book. But the diagnostic pieces, where might you have had some missed opportunities in that meeting and we’ll try to catch it in the GPT. So, that’s the first thing I’m very excited about. The other thing that I’m really excited about is the coaching, I’m doing much more around executive coaching and high potential coaching, using some of… certainly a lot of these skills that apply towards leaders that are at a critical injunction point in their careers, so, that’s exciting as well.

WAYNE BROWN: I can imagine. Where do we get access to the app once it’s released?

THERESE MICLOT: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s for all, it’ll be for all. I’ll make sure that you have a link as soon as it comes out, it was a little premature for today’s conversation, but soon.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, I look forward to it, I’ll definitely be one of the people playing with it, so.

THERESE MICLOT: Yeah, I think it’ll have to go through some… you know, it’s going to be a beta and keep getting better, so, I’d love for you to test it and then tell me how it works.

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, Therese, a great conversation. Thank you for being on the ET Project.

THERESE MICLOT: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’

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