In this episode Cindy Tonkin (that’s me!) is interviewed by Helen Lawson-Williams. Helen has a lovely mind, and she asks good questions…
This time I get to answer the questions, and it’s fun.
References
I refer to a few leaders I interviewed in podcasts so far:
Some of the other references
- The 70:20:10 formula: Exposure, Experience, Education,
- My “scrapbook” blog on the topic of Get what you want at consultantsconsultant.com.au
- Links on motivating and managing others
Curated newsletters I love:
- Dan Pink’s newsletter
- Eric Barker’s Barking up the Wrong Tree
- Shane Parrish Farnam Street Blog
Books
Dan Pink’s books: Drive, When, To Sell is Human, A Whole New Mind, Free Agent Nation
Podcasts
Podcasts I mention
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Seth Godin
- Tim Ferris
- How I built this
- Shane Parrish’s Knowledge Project
- The Good Place
- West Wing Weekly
- And of course mine: listen to Liz Moore
Cindy Tonkin Transcript
Cindy Tonkin: This is Cindy Tonkin, the Consultants’ Consultant. I work with data science teams, helping them work even smarter, faster, and nicer. If you’re brilliant and you want to be even better, this is the podcast for you.
In this episode, you get to hear me answer the questions I’ve been asking other people. Helen Lawson Williams has taken the time to be my interviewer, and we talk about what makes a good data person, where we find the best information, and lots of other topics. Listen in.
Hello everybody. I’m here with Helen Lawson Williams. Helen and I worked together at Telstra in the RIA (Research, Insights and Analytics) team. Today, Helen is going to ask me the questions that I’ve been asking everyone else. It’s a case of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Helen is going to ask me some of those questions today.
Helen L-W: One of the things I’m really interested in hearing about is your unique perspective across teams and leaders of analysts. Tell me, in your observation, what works? What are the things that people do differently that make them really effective in this space?
Cindy Tonkin: Part of it has to do with what succeeds in the individual culture. What would work at Telstra isn’t going to work at CBA necessarily. It also depends on who the leader is. When people are working with a strategic leader like Liz Moore, who continues to be an inspiring leader, the ability to think strategically and bring her shiny objects that will inspire her to create new things is important. If the leader is more pragmatic, like David Scott from RMS, his focus is on what makes a difference to the end-user. His team is agile, so for him, it’s about what makes the team more collaborative. If I can show David how I do that, he will find me more useful as a leader.
I’ve asked this question of everyone I’ve interviewed, and they all filter their answers through their own personalities and beliefs. So part of it is matching what your leader needs. I interviewed Shailendra Kumar last week, and he was talking about how he interviewed 250 different people for a job. His message was that you can’t tell from a CV what makes a good analyst. I can’t say what makes the best analyst or team, but what I can say is that the team will be shaped by its leader.
I prefer to work with people who think strategically, who have a little bit of quirk, and who prize the things that I believe are important. I’ve seen these traits be useful over and over again: an ability to read people and to frame arguments or changes in a way that is appealing and enticing for the person or group you’re dealing with. It’s not just about what you should do, but about giving them a reason why this is a good idea in their world.
Helen L-W: In a sense, that’s what you said earlier. It’s about understanding your stakeholder—the ultimate decision-maker and allocator of priorities or resources—and knowing what will really excite them or move the needle for them.
Cindy Tonkin: Yes, absolutely. Everyone wants something. If you can figure out what that is, you can frame your arguments in a way that aligns with their goals. People ultimately are the center of all decision-making, and you have to please those people.
Helen L-W: That’s a hard message for people who love numbers.
Cindy Tonkin: It’s a terribly hard message. The beautiful thing is that when you start to reveal the frameworks that make people predictable to the people who love numbers, they start to see that there are patterns to this. It’s shameful that our school education, certainly my school education, didn’t give me the keys to people. It gave me the keys to numbers. It gave me three-unit mathematics, graphing parabolas, and all that kind of stuff. It gave me science and music. I’m hoping it’s changing, but my education didn’t give me the keys to people.
When I was in my late twenties, I went into an NLP classroom, and at the end of the day, I thought, “Why didn’t someone tell me this before?” I was already predisposed to the idea that there must be some way this works. If you’re a data person, you need to get some frameworks around how people work.
Helen L-W: So, thinking about that, you’ve framed it as though you happened upon this framework.
Cindy Tonkin: Yes. I was advised to get into the room, not because I was doing badly, but because people said, “You will love this stuff.”
Helen L-W: That’s my follow-up question. What are the most successful journeys you’ve seen for people who started with that academic background where the message was, “Just get the numbers right, and you will be successful”? There’s a journey from there to being really effective in organizations. Tell me about those good journeys.
Cindy Tonkin: My very first job was at what was then called Anderson Consulting, now Accenture. I was an arts graduate. I have a degree in French and a master’s in linguistics, which I got after Anderson’s. At the time, I had a French degree, and Anderson Consulting had a recruitment policy—I think they still do—where they hire people who have been successful at university but aren’t just IT people. I had to learn how to program in Cobol.
There was a guy there, an IT graduate, who I believe might have made partner in three years. He had the “people thing” down. He was a strong influencer. Let’s call him “Snicker.” Snicker managed to climb the ladder very quickly. He alienated all of his colleagues. He kissed up and kicked down, or kicked around, in fact. All the people above him thought, “Snicker got this done, and he’s really thought this out.” It was what we Australians might call an “American approach,” which was to be seen as the smartest kid in the room. In retrospect, I learned a lot from him because what he was doing, while I found it objectionable, actually got him the results he wanted. I wouldn’t do it that way now, but it’s a cautionary tale.
Helen L-W: That sounds like how not to do it.
Cindy Tonkin: But he got the success he wanted, and the principles were the same. He was still reading what people wanted and providing it to them before they even thought about it. He just wasn’t doing that for his colleagues; he was trampling on them to get to the top.
In terms of good things, I prefer not to use people’s names. One of my clients at the bank was a senior analyst, and his boss said to me, “Can you just play with him for a little while? We need to work out what’s happening. He’s great, except I don’t think he gets people.” We sat in a room for an hour, and he just asked me random questions. He said, “People tell me I haven’t said enough in meetings, but I didn’t have anything to say. What am I supposed to do?” We talked through his options. Then it was, “How do I tell my boss he’s wrong? How do I tell a client I can’t do this?” He just fired all these questions at me. Two days later, I got a call from his boss saying, “What did you do?” I just answered his questions. He went on to become a GM, looked after his people, and solved some really interesting problems. It was almost like he hadn’t had the opportunity to ask those questions before. So part of it is, you’ve got to ask the questions and then look for the answers.
Helen L-W: And in that example, he was given support and permission in the context of his work.
Cindy Tonkin: Yes. Your boss has to value this. If your boss doesn’t value this, you end up with that iterative loop: If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. This is why Liz Moore is so prized within the industry, I believe, because she gives people that opportunity. She looks for the things that are greater. If we’re talking about the best success I know of in analytics, it’s Liz, because she’s not just thinking about the numbers.
She’s thinking about how those numbers will be received, how the change will be perceived, and how that change needs to be palatable. She thinks about the meeting before the meeting. She thinks about the personalities and the opportunities involved. And she knows about shiny objects. “Bring me a shiny object so I can take it to someone else.” There are so many un-shiny objects in organizations that attract our attention. To have a shiny object that really works—and I’m using the word “shiny object” as a placeholder for something that is an interesting problem or a problem that will make an enormous difference to our stakeholders—is a valuable thing.
Helen L-W: Tragically, not everyone can work with Liz.
Cindy Tonkin: And honestly, I would do it for free.
Helen L-W: And I know you do. So if you are listening, the way to get Cindy for free is to be awesome. Since there aren’t so many people in the world who can be or aspire to be like Liz, how do we, as operators within organizations, create more people like her?
Cindy Tonkin: Part of it is the 70-20-10 learning model, or what Morgan McCall calls the 3 Es: Exposure, Experience, and Education. Your training doesn’t just come from sitting in a classroom. It also comes from being given exposure and experience. As managers, one of the most valuable things you can do is allow people to go to a meeting with you. But you can’t just go to a meeting; you have to debrief it afterward. They need a chance to ask questions, like in the example I gave: “Why did you stop arguing?” or “You continued to argue—what was the thinking behind that?”
The first time they go to a meeting, they won’t even know to ask those questions. We are trying to get people to think outside the box and think three-dimensionally about the box. The meta-skill of managing upwards and outwards is a crucial one. I’ve been in meetings with people who came out saying, “That was a boring meeting.” But they didn’t see the body language when a certain topic was mentioned. Part of the responsibility falls to the leader to say beforehand, “There is a power struggle going on between X and Y; just watch their body language.” It’s like giving them an assignment beforehand. “If you’re going to shadow me in this meeting, you need to know that X and Y have something going on. Tell me at the end three signs you saw in their body language that that was true.” It’s about setting up assignments that allow people to see in a way they didn’t before.
When I run a training program, for example, I give people assignments to look at things they never thought of looking at before. If motivation is about moving away from a problem or moving toward a solution, then, based on the meeting you’re about to go into, which one is each person using? Are they afraid of what’s going to happen? It’s about giving them good briefs so they see the different things happening in the meeting and then a good debrief so they can ask questions.
Helen L-W: So, would it be fair to describe that as a structured coaching session?
Cindy Tonkin: I would call it a structured coaching session. Yes. I’ve designed those kinds of interventions so that as a leader, you just have to say, “Read this, now go into the meeting. After the meeting, ask these three questions,” and then give them the chance to do that. It’s not something that leaders are necessarily good at. We were talking before about outsourcing the podcast. I outsource the production of this podcast to someone else because it’s not what I’m good at. I think as leaders, people need to be aware of the need to outsource to people whose job it is. My entire existence is essentially about how people work and how I can communicate that more effectively to help people with it.
I was doing a session with someone, and his team said, “Some of our work is pretty boring.” I said, “Okay, how are you motivating them?” They looked at me like that wasn’t even in their world. When I asked, “What things might you be able to do?” they answered, “I don’t know.” The blinding flash of the obvious for me was, I read at least seven articles a week on how to motivate people, how to influence, how to persuade, and how to be happy. I’m blogging three or four times a week because I’m finding stuff and putting it in my blog. My blog isn’t just for everybody else; the reason it’s there is so I can remember when somebody sends me something. It’s my scrapbook, my Pinterest, my Evernote, but it’s public so I can just go, “Here’s the link.” As an example, when we did that session on asking great questions, four weeks beforehand, I was just collecting anything that had to do with questions. It’s all there. On the day, I could say, “Here’s the one blog post that links to 12 of those.”
It dawned on me when they said, “It’s boring,” that you don’t have to make the work not boring. You have to make them okay with doing boring work. We don’t just come to work to work. We come to work to be part of a team, to do something greater than we can do by ourselves, and to solve problems that we would never be given as individuals. I know how to help you make that part fun.
Helen L-W: Is that the difference between a supervisor and a leader?
Cindy Tonkin: It is. Absolutely. There’s so much potential, and it’s simpler than we think. So, to circle back to the question, one of the easiest things leaders can do is give people exposure, but it needs to be structured. This helps them rather than proves to them that they don’t want to be a leader. I think a lot of times, it ends up being a cautionary tale where someone says, “I followed my boss to a meeting and realized I don’t want that job.” But actually, you might enjoy it. It’s about having a structured experience.
Helen L-W: And being supported to address some things that might feel uncomfortable.
Cindy Tonkin: Exactly. Sometimes it might involve getting them some professional help.
Helen L-W: Speaking of professional development, you put a lot of time and effort into making sure you’re at the forefront of what you do, which is largely coaching people to get better at the “people side” of their work—working smarter, faster, and nicer. Let’s move into the kinds of things that you find most useful. We can see the output of your blog, but what really lights you up? What do you get excited about?
Cindy Tonkin: I’ve just gotten into listening to podcasts. I started listening to them regularly in December of last year. Before then, I couldn’t figure out where I would fit it into my day.
To be even more strategic, I like new things.
I started with a podcast by someone like Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell and got sucked into the podcast vortex. I started listening to improv, musical theater, and business podcasts, as well as the whole Tim Ferriss collection. Then I moved into a WeWork office, so anything to do with WeWork came up, and that was really interesting. It just exploded from there.
Now, I’m sucked into the vortex of The West Wing Weekly podcast, with a side order of The Good Place podcast. With The West Wing Weekly, you watch the show, and then they do a podcast on it where they talk about what happens. For example, if it’s an episode about tax reform, they’ll bring someone on 20 years later to talk about how relevant the content is and what the new issues in tax reform are.
One time, they had clips on polling from The West Wing, and they put three economists in a room to talk about how valid the assumptions and things said in the show were in terms of stats and economics. How happy would Aaron Sorkin be that the content is still relevant enough for that?
Cindy Tonkin: What inspires me? I’m inspired by everything, but especially by things that are new. This week, for example, I have a couple of newsletters that I subscribe to. Shane Parrish of the Farnam Street blog and The Knowledge Project podcast has a weekly roundup of insights from books on how to be happy. I like that he’s curating content for me. Farnam Street is one, and the other is Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree. They’re both people who say, “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I want to find the best of what everybody has already learned, and then I’ll bring you the best of the best.”
That came from Dan Pink. I love Dan Pink’s work. He wrote A Whole New Mind and his recent book, To Sell is Human. He’s a journalist, but a very smart one, so he finds and synthesizes all the research. He also wrote Drive, the book on motivation. I’m on his newsletter, and he’s the one who recommended those two newsletters I love. What excites me is something new. Next year, it will be something else.
Helen L-W: They say that curation is the skill of the 21st century.
Cindy Tonkin: I’m good at curation.
Helen L-W: You’re curating the curators.
Cindy Tonkin: I’m curating the curators who are curating the curators. Sometimes, you don’t even know you have a problem until you’ve read a blog about it.
This is Cindy Tonkin. I’m the consultants consultant and you’ve been listening to smarter data people. This is part of what I do to understand how it is that data sciences can be more effective in the workplace, smarter, faster, and nicer. And if you have a team and you’re finding them harder to manage than they could be, if you’re constantly trying to squeeze more out of your budget and out of their time, and if you’ve got stakeholders or they’ve got stakeholders who are less than happy, sometimes maybe a lot more than some times, it can be really annoying and it can make you feel incompetent. I can help you help them get to the important problems faster, target the waste in time, and save you time and money, and ultimately delight stakeholders so that you can feel competent again. It’s such a good feeling. Talk to me
