The Transcript

Annie Hyman-Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

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Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone, and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I am a co-founder and chief content officer for Copyblogger Media.

I am also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

I am really delighted today. I have a friend with me, Annie Hyman-Pratt.

Annie, good talking with you today.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Great to be here.

Sonia Simone: Annie is in a business owner’s group with me, and she’s one of those people who has a lot of expertise and a lot of real-world experience without necessarily a big platform or a bestselling business book to share with you. I am doing my best to nag Annie to get those in place, but it may take a while.

She is the CEO of IMPAQ Entrepreneur. That’s IMPAQ Entrepreneur. They specialize in business execution and rapid culture change for fast-growing entrepreneurial companies. She offers something special because, unlike the run-of-the-mill business advice giver, she has been there. She has been in the trenches leading a company through amazing twists and turns.

In fact, I would love it, Annie, if you could talk a little bit about that, about your experience with Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, because it’s a pretty cool story.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Sure, I’d be happy to. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, my parents started it in the ’60s, and all during the ’60s, ’70s, and a lot of the ’80s, we sold mostly just pounds of coffee. The cups hadn’t kicked in. Then, during the ’90s, late ’80s, and early ’90s, the beverage revolution hit, and we were really well-positioned to take advantage of that.

At that time, I came back to my family business — I was in my early 20s — started to grow the business like crazy. When I came back, we had about seven stores and each doing pretty well volumes. Over seven years, we grew it to more than 70 stores worldwide with some overseas licensing, and each of those stores had grown so much in volume.

Then we got an offer from one of our overseas licensees, and we ended up selling the business at that time, which was a very opportunistic move. That growth period was so, so, so fun, but also fraught with all kinds of change, pain, and all kinds of things that we had to handle as we were going along.

Sonia Simone: I think that just gives you a perspective very few people have. You’ve been the leader of a little company, you’ve been the leader of a big company, and you’ve been the leader of a company in multiple kinds of transition. Navigating all those twists and turns is something you have given me some great advice on, given friends of ours some great advise on.

How to Coach Accountability in Your Team Members

Sonia Simone: I’m going to jump into a couple of questions, starting with, your thing — the way that I view your thing — is really about creating business cultures that work better because they’re more adaptable. They adapt to these stresses and pressures. Is there a key difference that you have seen between a company that can adapt to chaotic change or pressure and the ones that get stuck and start to sink?

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes. There’s a few things that I think make a really, really big difference. I’m glad you shared that I really like to work in the real world. One of the things about working in the real world is working with real human beings, like how human beings operate. That’s something to keep in mind as I share this next part.

It used to be that companies with super sharp leaders at the top, they could utilize a lot of authority and control and have what’s known as ‘cascading accountability’ — very much top down. People just take direction from whoever is above them and do what they’re told, and as long as you do that, it’ll work out. But today, change is so rapid. Like change in the external environment, things change so fast that a top-down approach, a controlling approach, is too slow. It’s just too, too, slow.

So we really need people at every level, not just leaders, but really everybody at every level to be able to know exactly what they’re going for and to be able to take action in direction of the result — basically, take actions consistent with results. We need to do that through an environment that’s all about alignment, agreement, and accountability, and developing collective behaviors that facilitate that culture.

Sonia Simone: There’s so much to unpack there. We’re going to unpack a little bit today, and we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about some of those things.

The Cornerstone Habits That Will Make You a Better Leader

Sonia Simone: Before we dive into specifics, it’s probably my own baggage — because anybody who listens to this podcast knows I have baggage about the corporate world — but it strikes me that a lot of leadership and a lot of business culture is pretty horrible. A lot of companies don’t work well.

Why do you think that is? Things like this very rigid, top-down structure that’s not flexible. It’s not fast. It’s not accountable, really, except in kind of a clumsy way. It’s so common.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yeah, it is. The cultures I see that are so awful, so to speak, are the ones where people get pretty entrenched in victim behaviors. That means where people within the company, they spend a lot of time in blame or in denial, judgement, or rationalization. They’re quick to finger point and criticize, but not so quick to step up and think about what they themselves could do differently to move towards the result.

Those victim behaviors, they’re something that, as humans, we do those. We fall into those loops. I know I do. Every day I have to think about when am I blaming something, when am I hiding from something, when I am denying that something is even happening to me, and pull myself back to a place where I can recognize really what’s happening and take action on it.

So the companies that don’t have an understanding of how their people are falling into these victim loops, then they can’t work with it to basically develop a culture that gets people out of that.

Sonia Simone: I think that a lot of leaders in companies, managers — whether high-level leaders or mid-level managers — they definitely see the culture. They definitely see the culture of everybody’s pointing a finger at everybody else and nobody will step up. I think they don’t always see the role they play in that, in creating that.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes, that’s right. Because in the moment, it’s a lot easier to just think, “This doesn’t really have to do with me. It’s not my fault. I don’t really have a part in it.” The thing that helps people get out of that the quickest is to really go back to, “What are we really going for here, and what can we all do together differently?”

Adding more blame or self-blame tends to perpetuate the problem while the problem still goes on. One of the habits of cultures that are so strong and good is for everybody to be staying out of a place of blame and judgement and going very quickly to, “What part of this can I own? What part is my part, and how can I be part of a solution here instead of ignoring or denying that I’m part of it at all.”

Sonia Simone: Right.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: It’s really about stepping up to, “What’s my part, and how can I contribute to getting a better result here?”

Sonia Simone: Yeah. A word that I know comes up a lot in what you teach in your workshops is ‘safety.’

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes.

Sonia Simone: From my experience in working with a little bit larger organization, that’s something that is maybe in short supply in a lot of organizations. A sense of, for example, safety to speak up and say, “I think we’re making an expensive mistake here.”

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes, exactly. That’s basically safe to risk, right?

Sonia Simone: Right.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Safe to go ahead and speak up when you see something that doesn’t seem like it’s working well or should be happening. It’s safe to go ahead and suggest new ways of doing things or solutions that might be better. One of the things about safety is that it’s not the same as comfort.

What ‘safety’ really means is safe to be uncomfortable and to risk and try something different. That could mean risk being more transparent. It could mean risk trying a new behavior that maybe you aren’t sure if it’s going to work out or not. Safe to take a political risk and speak up in a situation that might, in the past, have been a little bit less safe. That’s what we mean when we say ‘safety.’

Sonia Simone: Yeah, it’s such a key idea. I read a lot of business books, and I don’t see that spoken to as often as I think it should be.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: I agree. Unfortunately, I sometimes also see it spoken about when it’s framed in a way where safety is providing comfort, actually, not about providing an environment where people are safe to try something different.

In fact, I actually love Simon Sinek’s work, but he has a video out now that’s all about safety. He talks a lot about having people be very safe in their jobs, like safe that they have a job. The thing about that is that the external environment keeps changing, and people really know when things are going on that is going to put their job at risk, when things have to be organized in a way that is very uncertain about the outcome.

The kind of safety that we can provide, it can’t be a false safety. It can’t be a safety that ignores reality. What it is, is a safety to confront the truth and be able to risk in it — to be able to try something different and risk in a way where people are safe from blame, criticism, judgement, all those kinds of things that tend to put people right back down into the victim loop instead of trying to do something a lot more productive.

How to Make Yourself a Leader Among Equals (No Matter What Official Role You Play)

Sonia Simone: I don’t know if you are familiar with a book called Billion Dollar Lessons by Paul B. Carroll.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: I’m not.

Sonia Simone: It’s a little volume of schadenfreude, basically of terrible things that companies have done. It’s amazing how often it comes down to there were people in the organization who absolutely saw the oncoming train, and they had no way to get that communicated. They either tried to communicate it and they were hurt, or they didn’t try to communicate it because they know it was politically not astute.

Any of us in any kind of a leadership role, you could take a leadership role as a peer among equals any time we can step forward and just own our own insecurity enough that we can say, “It’s OK to tell me the truth even if I’m not thrilled about it.”

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes, right.

Sonia Simone: Because that’s hard.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Oh, yes. It is. And, “It’s OK to tell me the truth, and even if my first reaction is denial or blame or what not, I’m going to be working on getting myself to a good place with it.” Starting with good self-awareness for what’s even is at risk here, what people are likely going through.

How to Manage Those Difficult Workplace Conversations

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Frankly, the best way out of that lower loop, out of those victim behaviors is to start with a lot of compassion for what is happening. When somebody comes to me and tells me the truth of a situation that’s a tough one, like they just lost a major account — I’ve certainly had lots of people tell me that before — that has a very large impact on how we’re going to do for the quarter of the year, there are times when my first reaction is wanting to blame that person, going right to an interrogation, “What did you do? How did you lose it?” As in, it’s your fault.

I’ve had to learn how to hit a pause button. I really want leaders to cultivate this, getting a pause button and starting with sharing what’s happening inside you. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is a big piece of news. This is a big deal.” Give me a minute to process it and think about, so I can interact with you in a way where we can both think together where to go from here.

Sonia Simone: I like that pause button. I think everybody needs a pause button. We are an emotional kind of critter.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes.

Sonia Simone: We do react. Our first reaction is often not maybe constructive. Mine, often, is not constructive. Just being able to take that pause, take a breath, I like that. Just acknowledging, “OK, I’ve just taken in a big piece of news, so I need a sec.” Just let people know. I think if you’re just silent, that’s probably very intimidating, or creepy, or worrisome.

Annie Hyman-Pratt: Yes. When you’re silent, the other person is assuming the worst.

Sonia Simone: Right,...