"Be aware of the intentions of the planned change. Have a vision. Communicate it to people. Find out how your people see it. Clearly define what you want the end state to look like. Communicate where we are in the journey. And most importantly.... control your ego."
You can't do anything without them. They are the lever for achieving your goals. But working with them is difficult. Exhausting. Frustrating. They're always waiting for you to tell them. What task you give them. They won't do one bit more. They don't think. They're like kindergarteners. You want them to think like a college student.
Your people.
At least in my experience, this is how a significant number of entrepreneurs think about them. They'd like to get some rest. But there is no one to hand over their powers and tasks to. Their people don't want the responsibility. Also because when they were hired, no one wanted them to be responsible. Why change now? If following orders is so convenient.
How do we get out of this? How do you make a power-driven company into the one you want it to be now? We discussed this with Šimon Steffal and Petra Sobotková from Mindset Mentors. What questions did we discuss?
🔸 What if I want my people to take responsibility?
🔸 How do I prepare my people to take over?
🔸 How to find out in advance who wants to change?
🔸 How to work with your own ego and let people grow?
🔸 How to turn an expert into a manager? And is that a good idea?
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today's Ignition will be primarily about communication in companies, why we usually fail and how to build a mindset for corporate change with Mindset Mentors. I'm here with Simon Steffal, hi.
Šimon Steffal
Hey, hey, hey.
Martin Hurych
Simon is the company's founder and chief vision officer. I also invited his right hand woman, co- founder and brand queen, Petra Sobotková. Hello.
Petra Sobotková
Hello.
What is it about each other that annoys them? And how do they resolve it?
Martin Hurych
Since today is about communication, I have prepared a nagging question for you. Communication breaks down most when something is wrong. What's the most annoying thing about each other and how do you resolve it?
Šimon Steffal
That's a nice question, such a put-down. I'll make it easy for you and kick it out. What annoys me about Petra is everything I'm good at. What she lacks is me, but if it were the same and she were exactly like me, she might, with apologies, annoy me even more. The fact that those things annoy me about it is actually right then, because we're each different enough that we work quite well together. We clean it up by having a sort of strategy meeting every fortnight, which always includes feedback at the beginning. It's completely honest because otherwise it couldn't work.
Petra Sobotková
Simon summed it up so nicely, I see it the same way. We are so different, different in personality, different in focus and everything, that we not only complement each other, but we also learn a lot from each other. I have to say that I have learned the most in the last year and a half that I have worked this closely with Simon. The things that annoyed me most about him in the first phase, I now appreciate the most about him and I want to learn the most. It's his approach to that enthusiastic pumping of information, that acquisition of new knowledge, exploring everything and knowing as much as possible about everything. I didn't have that mindset, but I'm learning to acquire it and I'm enjoying it immensely.
Who are Mindset Mentors and how did they come about?
Martin Hurych
Come tell me how you got the name Mindset Mentors and how you got into the company, what you do and from what position you two will be commenting on what we're going to discuss here.
Šimon Steffal
Mindset Mentors was founded in 2019, when I had been involved in adult education since the age of 21. I started in language teaching when I didn't understand my life's calling at all. When someone asks you at 15 what you're going to do, most of us have no idea what we want and where we want to go to school, which I didn't even know at 20. So I went to study psychology, it seemed like a good idea because it can be useful in general. When I asked myself what I was going to do in life, what I was going to do for a living, the answer was that I couldn't do anything. I told myself that I could teach English because it seemed good to me, plus I could be around these people and try out on them the psychological things I was learning at school. This is how I gradually grew into adult education in a large language school, where I then led a team, took care of an internal conference and mentored the language teachers. But at one point I thought that wasn't enough. At 33, mentoring, communication and psychology made sense to me, and the more I got into applied psychology, the more it made sense to go independent. So one day I said to myself, Mindset Mentors, this is it. But I came up with the name completely by accident, I sat and googled free domains. It was no enlightenment, I wanted to have mindset and mentors on there, I tried about 40 different combinations and this was the only one available.
Martin Hurych
Petra, how did you come to Mindset Mentors?
Petra Sobotková
Simon and I have known each other for a number of years, we worked together. I'm a marketeer, originally a branding guy, and Simon contacted me after he decided to start a company and asked if I had any space. I was fresh off maternity leave and he needed to make some logos, create visuals and communications. So we went ahead and worked together. Then when it came time for me to go back to work after my parental leave, the conditions weren't right for me, plus I was already immersed in Mindset Mentors. So I came to Simon and said I wanted to continue working with him and buy a piece of the business. That's how it came about.
What if I want my people to take responsibility?
Martin Hurych
That's how you got this far. I'm gonna turn the page and stake out the field for today's discussion. I have been meeting with several types of entrepreneurs and businesses lately and, amateurishly compared to you, I am concerned that the basics of what I am going to say here are just what you are doing and that you can help them. The first type of entrepreneur is a former enthusiast who has kicked a company from zero to the level of hundreds of millions of crowns. Somehow he managed to pick professional management, managed to leave the company and is now finding out that it wasn't as great as when he left. So after a year, two, three, he goes back to that company and builds it up again because the company is not prospering and the owner is coming back to make it a 2.0 company. The other part of the business people I talk to say they have people there, they would like them to take responsibility and they are not taking that responsibility. They would like to leave the company, but they can't do it at all and they don't know what to do. That's the field I would like to be in today. Tell me the first thing that these stories bring out in you, where are the first mistakes and what to do about them.
Šimon Steffal
I'm going to kick it out of the side of the question where I want my people to take it on. The first thought is that it's not going to happen on its own, that's one thing. If I wish for it and go to bed with it and fall asleep with it and always pray for 5 minutes before bed for it to happen, it very likely won't happen. It's some internalized wish, or maybe the version of reality I want it to be is in that mindset of mine, but it's not verbalized. It's not out there, I'm not talking about it. The second thing is what it even means. I often talk to leaders, team leaders, business owners about something I call the shared vocabulary. That is, when I say I want you to be more accountable, what does more accountable even mean. The homework that you have to do at the beginning is you have to name what it even means for people to be accountable. How do we define accountability, why should they want it, why does the person want it, what does the person want to accomplish, what is the intent, does it mean maybe working less, worrying less. Typically owners are completely overwhelmed, struggle a lot with long-term stress, health, and it's not exactly an ideal lifestyle. The first step is that definition. The second step is to open it up to those people and start talking to them about it. The third thing is, do I even have people in the company who are capable of doing that? If I'm building a company all the time with the mindset that I'm not doing it, I've pulled people into that company who don't have that mindset, they have a low level of accountability, I'm not going to achieve that. Because they're comfortable with the owner being somebody who takes care of everything and makes all the decisions and all the big decisions go to him, and therefore my accountability goes to him. So then if I ask them to be more responsible, that's not really possible because their space for change doesn't extend to where I want it to go. It's a scale and I would like them to change on that scale by 40 and it only goes by 5, but that 5 is not enough for me.
Martin Hurych
Does that mean that the way I was at the stage of building the company where I was recruiting those people, I'm not automatically going to get where I want to go with those people now?
Šimon Steffal
It's quite possible. I'm not saying it's 100%, but I'm sure some portion of them won't be able to do it because I'm recruiting them with intent, I'm filling a position, I'm not filling a role, or I'm not filling a value setting. If my value setting is a high level of accountability, but it's not recorded anywhere in the hiring process, then I can't be surprised that it doesn't happen overnight. We don't measure it, we don't talk about it with those people, I don't talk about it out loud, I don't show the transfer of responsibility within that company, I don't show the stories, the successes and the failures. Then that's terribly difficult.
Petra Sobotková
These people are unprepared for it, I think that's the key. They've come into something and they're totally unprepared and if I want to start doing it, it's probably not going to be this fast, but it takes a process, it takes preparing yourself and preparing the team, the people.
Šimon Steffal
I might throw in a quick story. It's similar to when you have a good job, good income, nice place to live, educate yourself, travel, develop, explore the world and have this open mindset that it's all up to me, that I can change the world around me. We call it in psychology a place of control, that you have a very internalized place of control, you believe that you can change the world and no matter what happens, you have some power to do something about it. Now you see a person who lives in an excluded area, they don't have a good job, they're in debt, they're not fully educated and you think why don't they change that, go and do something, there's so much you can do. But if you put yourself in that person's head, you'll find that the idea outside that concept is unimaginable to them. He just doesn't have it in his head, he doesn't have the background for it, he doesn't have the resources for it, and he doesn't even think of the idea. That's the problem, you're asking people to do something that is unimaginable to them.
How to prepare people to take responsibility?
Martin Hurych
Now, you reminded me of a poll that said this is how the United States versus Europe, for example, is different, because historically Europe is just the more closed, state, take care, and America has never had that. It occurred to me that even the business owner is actually coming to that epiphany that he can't handle everything, that he could use a break, so it's a process for him as well. So how do you prepare the people that I've been recruiting because most of them have built a family in some way, they've been there for years and now you're finding out that you can't go on with them. What then?
Šimon Steffal
That's a great question. You could try a transformation program. That is to say, make that plan, why we're going to do it, where we're going, what are the milestones, the incremental steps that we're going to know that we're going in the right direction, that we're succeeding. You involve those people, maybe you involve some outsiders in the form of psychometrics, coaches, mentors, somebody to help you set that up and make that space, carve out that space for that change. It's called non-violent communication, that you hold the space for the other side, you create some conditions for them, but you can't take those people and drag them there. Because then you have the responsibility to keep them there and to keep them there, and again you don't put that responsibility in those people. So you can create the space, the conditions, the time, the resources, but whether something happens or not is then up to them. If nothing happens, you give them feedback, again nothing happens, you give them feedback, again nothing happens, then two things can happen. Either you find another role for them in that organization that doesn't require that responsibility, you keep their know-how, you keep their skill set, but there's no more room for them in that particular position, or you have to part ways.
How to find out in advance who wants to change?
Martin Hurych
Is there any way to know ahead of time?
Šimon Steffal
You can measure these people, you can measure some talent. For example, we are now working with Talent Compass, so you can do some talent diagnostics, some psychometrics, you can measure some scales that people are on. You can measure that place of control, whether they believe they can change the world or not, you can do some diagnostics on how they have a high level of accountability or not. But then reality comes in, everyday life comes in, and you might find that there are some people who can be great at talking about things, but then when it comes to breaking bread, they're not so great. Maybe that can only be verified by practice. I was talking to a team leader or a business owner and he said that with juniors you can tell in about 3 to 6 months if they are worth it and with seniors in about 9 to 10 months. For them, the work often doesn't show up until later.
Petra Sobotková
I'll come back to the fact that when I'm the owner and I want to make that change, at that moment I'm not only thinking about the people, about their change of mindset, but also about my change of mindset. I'm thinking about whether or not I'm open to those people then changing those roles a little bit, or adjusting somehow, and going in the direction that I want. It's important that I don't then slam the door right at the beginning and say, you're just going out of the company. It can be that I set it up in advance, communicate it well of course, and then there's room for some kind of agreement and communication in addition to the measurements and some analysis.
Šimon Steffal
Maybe I'll just tack on a thought, and that is that the path to that change is not necessarily mine. This is a bit of an ego thing, which is more of a guy problem than a woman problem. If I label myself that I want these people to have a greater level of responsibility and I label in my head the path to exactly how that's going to be, it's not necessarily going to work out well. Then when they come up with other ideas, but I knock them down, I'm actually suppressing the original idea of making them more responsible. We're back to the fact that that's not quite the way to go if I want to have responsible, free and thinking people around me.
How to work with your own ego and let people grow?
Martin Hurych
That's good because we're getting to the mindset setting. How do you actually work with that from the owner's position? You've been building a business for 5, 10 years, you know every screw in there, and to leave it, even if you mean well, is awfully hard. So how do you work with yourself and not bring down the activities of others? Because that's another thing I see around me, even if I look in the mirror sometimes.
Šimon Steffal
We have the same thing, I used to be very impulsive, I would say I was choleric. Nowadays it's not so much and the main reason for that is that I really work with myself continuously for a long time. That's the answer, long-term continuous work with yourself and if I would recommend something to anyone who runs a company or has a team, it's to practice restraint. It's the basis of stoicism, just not reacting, not being impulsive, not being reactive. You say something, I don't like it, I'm sorry, the idea is stupid, I have four better ideas. Instead, I should take a few seconds to think about it before I let something out of my mouth and then I can possibly turn it into a question. I learn restraint, I learn curiosity, and in doing so I also teach those around me to be restrained and curious.
What is the state of communication in small and medium-sized companies?
Martin Hurych
We've highlighted a few things that I see around me over the last few days or weeks. You're in this business a lot more often. What is the state of communication in, say, small and medium-sized companies in the Czech Republic, specifically in engineering and technology?
Petra Sobotková
It's hard to generalize.
Šimon Steffal
I can give some specific examples of what I encounter most often. One of them that we encounter most often is the lack of clarity in the communication channels and their rules and their setup. There was a terribly interesting discussion about this on LinkedIn yesterday, somebody complained there that they sent an email and didn't get a response for three days. But my question is not whether it's good or bad, but how the communication culture is set up there. Maybe we know that emails are used for this and that and there's a response time that we've agreed on, 48 hours, or we have Slack for that, where the response time is 12 hours. We have some rules set up for that. That's one thing, the absence of a communication culture, there's no defined channels, there's no defined purpose for using them, there's no defined speed. That agreement is important, plus the cultural differences, that's another big chapter. The second thing that I often see is presumptionology. I think that Martin thinks and based on that I make some decision or start moving the thing in some direction without going to Martin and asking what he thinks. We are getting to what I call open or transparent communication. That communication is not done with the intention to hurt, but with the intention to cooperate, to move things forward. What I am getting at here is that when we work with larger companies, there is always some internal politics at play, some power structures, who is baking against whom and for what purpose. There we struggle a little bit with the fact that I can't tell him because it's not safe for me, for my department, for my budget and so on. Here in these companies we try not to work with that too much because it usually does more harm than good. That's the other thing, open transparent communication and that goes mainly to leadership. The third thing is the talk kitchen, or those gossip rooms by the photocopier, in the toilets, in the elevator, what's being gossiped about and why it's being gossiped about. That's very much related to the first things. The channels of communication, whether there are any rules for them, so that they don't create unnecessary twists in communication, or some unnecessary injustice. The second thing is transparency, so as not to create gossip, unsubstantiated information, which then tends to destroy trust in that organization. Those are the three key things for me that would be good to underpin and that I perceive and see. The fourth goes to specific leaders, and that is that when we communicate between the people around us, we can't operate in the sense of, I get it and I'll tell the other person and it's perfectly clear. It can't, that's actually part of the presumption, but it's downright the impact of being with myself when I communicate instead of being with the other person and asking. You see it typically in delegation, for example, where you hand over a job, the person does it, and you're unhappy with the job and say you thought the person would do it differently without telling them.
Petra Sobotková
The quality of the work done corresponds to the quality of its assignment. It's really about the people who are in some kind of leadership, the leaders, that's where it starts, that's where it stands and falls. The moment they can communicate well and lead well in some way, it starts to reflect in those people. Often we find that people who are in those decision-making positions who are aware and somehow already erudite in that, they're much better at finding ways to develop people there and have higher level communication. So I wouldn't generalize it to how medium and smaller companies are doing, but how people in those leadership roles are doing overall in terms of even their development, which is where it starts.
Šimon Steffal
I'll add one more thought to this, which is that the bigger the organization is, the higher the chances are that the information will get twisted. Again, that's not necessarily anyone's fault, it's just some default setting of how human communication works, and especially in those big companies, most communication is written. So there is a lack of tone and non-verbal communication. As I always say, you want to tell someone an important message, so call them or ideally meet them in person. Because if you send it via email or even Slack, you don't affect the two crucial things, the tone of voice they use and the mood they read it in. You can spend two hours writing the perfect email and still the other party may not even get it the way you wrote it.
How to use smoking corners in communication?
Martin Hurych
How do smoking corners fit into the description of communication channels and their rules? I had my design guy back in corporate and he said he learned to smoke to get a lot of things done.
Petra Sobotková
They are important, they play a big role.
Šimon Steffal
You know what's so interesting about smoking corners? That they're inclusive. You get to meet people from across the organization. When you have a group that you work with, typically in corporate management where there are a lot of layers, the chances of you having a meeting or a joint project with the CEO are slim. But chances are you'll meet him for a cigarette. It's terribly interesting that that's one of the few platforms in that company where people can meet across that layer and exchange information.
Martin Hurych
Plus, it connects them because they're outcasts at that moment, thrown outside the confines of that house.
Šimon Steffal
This is also important for leadership, that I can take the temperature of the organization, of the team. When you've got 1,500 people under you, you're really only meeting with the board or the directors. Sometimes you have some offsides that you meet somebody, maybe you have some all hands or something like that, but realistically you don't have much time to talk to those people because you have more than enough of your operational stuff. But when you go amongst those people and you chat with someone in production, on the belt, with the cleaning lady, with the people in accounting, you might find that you're so disconnected from reality that you miss the little things that are important to those people. It's good for you to know that.
Martin Hurych
So instead of a factory tour, having a meeting with a smoking corner is not a bad idea.
Petra Sobotková
I don't think it is. I've even worked in a company that had management and officy associated with warehouse and production. That management really purposely went to that corner to smoke and ask questions of the people in both the warehouse and the production. As Simon says, they took the temperature in there, found out how it was working, how it wasn't working, and had direct clear feedback on whatever they needed. So even purposefully, you can use smoking corners subtly.
How to turn an expert into a manager? And is it a good idea?
Martin Hurych
Now, I would go back a little bit when we were talking about what an owner or the head of a team has to do to make that team more productive, somehow get them to take responsibility. That also means in many companies that the rank and file employee will grow into a junior or middle management position, and that's where I personally see another big pitfall. These people are mostly specialists, they are enthusiasts, they have never managed any people in their lives and now they are entrusted with a team. We even used to joke in corporate that you're promoted until you're not good enough anymore. A lot of these people get there at some point because there's no one else left. So how do you work with that from a position of not being manipulated by those superiors, and the other thing is, if I want to try it, how do I work with it from the position of the person who has struggled the most in that position?
Šimon Steffal
I guess I'd open it this way. Not every expert in their field is also a great educator. You can be a forged neuropsychologist, but then when you have to bring neuropsychology to people in their freshman year, you can bore them to death because you can't do it and it's not your passion. You're just doing it because you want to do research and you have to teach a little bit. The fact that you're leading people, or you've gotten to lead people, should also be some of your passion, you should enjoy it, it should be a talent, and if it's not a talent, it's earned and you have to learn a lot of things and try and fail. You should have the conditions. If I already have a company that's bigger, it makes sense that the leadership that runs the company, the owner, the CEO, should have some kind of talent program where we know about people, what they enjoy, what they don't enjoy, where they have some potential, how we're going to develop it and have the tools to do that. When you make someone new a team leader, they need support because they're in a lot of uncertainty. He's constantly going to be asking himself if he's doing it right. We tend to grade or evaluate ourselves all the time, and it's good to offer those best practices, good ways of leading in that case. This worked for me, this didn't really work for me, but that's my experience. So it's important to have that support there, some support in t e r m s of how to lead those people and of course to have the tools there for some open communication within that team. Going back to the person who resisted the least, it's totally okay that I may find that after a while I'm not good at leading or I'm not enjoying it. I haven't found myself in it, I haven't found what I enjoy, I actually enjoy writing the code more, I enjoy digging into some research more. So it's good to think about whether it's good and profitable for the company in the long run and a good investment to keep that person in a role that's not their own.
Martin Hurych
But then there is this social expectation and ego game on all sides, because in my experience these people often take it as a failure. Plus, to get back to a place in the team and leaving the command to someone else is hard. It's hard for me, but it's also often perceived as a disappointment by all the people around me, and in the vast majority of the companies I see it in, it's the first sign of a subsequent departure outside the company. You don't want that.
Šimon Steffal
You don't want to. It goes back to what's part of that corporate culture and how much we work with vulnerability and how much we work with failure, if it's okay to fail sometimes. We may have mechanisms in that company for that, that we try something, we experiment, we fail, and that can happen too. Or it can be seen as a failure, the company had high hopes for that person, he didn't live up to them and now he can't go back because he can't bear it internally. The team might give him a hard time, the management doesn't trust him anymore and we're destroying that person's talent a little bit and it's a shame.
What are the specifics of engineering and technology companies?
Martin Hurych
You guys do primarily technical and a lot of Atian business, and you're definitely more cross- segment than I am. Are the tech and IT firms any different in that regard?
Šimon Steffal
To some extent, I guess so, because they're all pretty smart people. We're talking now purely about intelligence and some analytical thinking and things like that. It doesn't mean they're better or worse, it's a specific way of thinking. What I encounter is that the tendency is to look at communication as something unimportant. When you're the expert and you're coding, you don't need it as much, but then teamwork and team leadership comes into play and that's where that communication is absolutely key. If you don't say who's working on what, who's failed on what, what's gone well, what's gone wrong, if you don't say expectations and goals, then it starts to fall apart over time. So you want to emphasize that here too, you want to make people better at it. I would like to say that communication is a hard skill, you can't do without it. Even in that sense it makes sense in technical or IT companies to train communication, or at least to have communication as a competence within the team and to see what it means to be able to communicate well. Here we had a project and it failed because we didn't exchange information. It's good to build on these stories, to internalize that communication is a normal everyday thing and we want to have it and the bigger and more successful we get and the more we are, the more important that communication becomes.
Martin Hurych
That's almost enough to make communication one of the graduation subjects.
Petra Sobotková
That would be perfect. It would give me more than my maths final, I feel.
How to change from a silo company to a company with proactive leaders?
Martin Hurych
Let's get some closure together. We've discussed here the shift from a more silo-driven company to a company where people have some sense of responsibility and have carved out some of their own spaces in which to move. If we were to summarize that in a couple of points, how do you make that
somersault, what would it be that you would suggest here and then also put in the bonus of this episode?
Šimon Steffal
The first thing is to know my intention, why I am doing all this, what is the goal of the change, the transition, the introduction of something new, to have the vision there. That's a terribly misused word, but it's important, knowing why I'm doing this. The second thing is to communicate it with people, ask them if they see it the same way I do and take the temperature of the team. The third is to carve out a space and define some framework within which we will move. Linked to that is the output of what is the success, how do we know we've succeeded, that's what we want to promote clarity in that organization. Because it's the worst when you give somebody the space to do something but you don't tell them how they know they're doing it well. Four, to continuously communicate how we're doing, have some regular stand-ups, meet ups, talk about where we are and how far we have to go. Number 5, control my ego, practice restraint and work on asking questions and passing the initiative to other people. I ask myself if I'm creating the space for that responsibility to exist or not.
Martin Hurych
The very last question, to set some expectations, this doesn't look like an exercise for the quarter. So if I want to take that three month family vacation soon, when do I start so I can actually leave the company?
Šimon Steffal
Two such thoughts, it's never too late and the sooner the better. We may have read in magazines that it takes 21 days to change a habit. That's bullshit, it will be months, maybe years, definitely months. If I want to get used to something new, typically I'll get up at 5 and go to the gym every day, so baby steps are needed. Changing it slowly, having a good plan and thinking about the fact that it's going to take on the order of months, 6, 9, 12, maybe 15 to catch on.
Martin Hurych
And don't forget to make money and keep the company afloat. Thank you for the visit and for the nice chat, it was great.
Petra Sobotková
Thank you.
Šimon Steffal
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
So you see, this is a simple way to handle communication in a company. Stumbles are possible, although they may take longer than many of you think, but it is worth it. I have had the privilege of seeing a few companies that have succeeded and believe me, it is something to strive for. If you're intrigued and if you're currently thinking about what to do with your own business and where to shift it, or where to shift your mindset, we've done our job well. In that case, be sure to like, share, subscribe. We'd love it if you'd tell your friends, colleagues, fellow entrepreneurs about us too, so we can spread the awareness as far and wide as possible. All I can do is thank you and keep my fingers crossed, thanks.