Ingrid: [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Infinite Shelf, the human-centric retail podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Ingrid Milman Cordy, and I am here with {drumroll} Orchid. You guys should hopefully know her very, very well by now. If not, you have a lot of catching up to do on Season 3 because it's been an incredibly fun, enlightening and entertaining, frankly, journey with you. So thanks for coming on for Season 3.

Orchid: [00:00:47] Well, thank you. This is what happens when you have an only child. We can pretty much entertain ourselves, especially when I have such a great partner like you. Like if no one else is entertained by this, I mean, I guess it's okay. It's slightly disappointing, but you and I are entertained.

Ingrid: [00:01:02] We're having a blast. {laughter}

Orchid: [00:01:02] We're having a great time. {laughter}

Ingrid: [00:01:07] That's kind of just the benchmark, really. That's where we're at these days. Well, this is a strange segue into what today's topic is, but I still think it's actually the polar opposite of what today's topic is, frankly. Today we are going to talk about internal hurdles, and I think this is really closely tied to probably everyone's life whether you're in corporate America or working in something more very creative or in a factory. Anywhere that you work, there are going to be internal hurdles, right? And I think that in particular, at least from our corporate experience and where we've been in our careers, which is mostly desk jobs, we run into a lot of hurdles while we are trying to get people to think about things differently. Like to me, I think that's been the closest struggle for anyone who is in digital or DTC in particular. And so it sort of marries itself really nicely into the season's theme of The Evolution of DTC. In the DTC space, we inevitably run into, I would say, I would argue, more hurdles than usual just because you're doing a lot of education, evangelization of a way of thinking and a way of going to market and needing to change some muscle memory for people. And so there's a lot of emotion and maybe even ego on both sides that you kind of run into that just creates some hurdles. So wanted to have a little bit of a therapy session with you about it today, Orchid.

Orchid: [00:02:57] This is great. My insurance does not cover this kind of therapy session, but I will say that when I have conversations with other operators, with clients, with colleagues, and former colleagues, a lot of it does turn into therapy hour in a way. And we joke about that because what it is, is finding someone who understands the challenges that you're facing internally, whether it's selling through an idea, whether it's education, whether it's collaboration in this remote world, and finding that moment where you connect and have similar issues so that you know it's not just you, it's something that everybody faces. And there's comfort in that. And I think that, again, we joke about therapy, but it's actually really helpful to have someone who is external to your organization to have these conversations with because, candidly, it's a little safer. Sometimes inside organizations you really don't know what's going to get back to different people or what is going to be perceived as constructive criticism versus frustrations and just complaining. And so having someone separated from your workplace, but maybe in a similar role, then that also puts the context as "Oh, it's not that my organization is that messed up or disorganized," or whatever it is, it's that, "Oh, this is a common issue that crops up in various companies."

Ingrid: [00:04:32] Totally. Yeah. And I think a lot of it is just human nature. We're all just these beings that do most of the time perform better when we know what we know. And we can expand on that. And certainly professionally, when everyone's trying to get ahead and have their name associated with positive things, people's risk tolerance is different, and people's communication styles are different. It's kind of like... We should write the book that's like The Work Love Languages.

Orchid: [00:05:08] Oh, okay. Okay. Should we just workshop it right now?

Ingrid: [00:05:12] I think so. Okay, that's actually good. So let's start with you. If you had to... We don't even know what all of the love languages are at work and there may not even be just five. But what is your love language at work? Assume a really difficult situation, like a conversation where someone that works for you is coming to you with where they maybe are coming to you with an idea that they're concerned you may not agree with or that you will not buy into. What's your love language? How would you advise them to come to you and pitch this idea that's maybe a little bit cheeky?

Orchid: [00:05:52] Hahaha. Okay, this is great. So my non-work love language is actually I think it might be all of them. It's gifts, love gifts. It is acts of service. Words of affirmation is interesting because although I like that in my personal life, I don't necessarily need it in my professional life or I need less of it. I don't need zero of it. And to your point about how should someone come to me that I would really appreciate it, and where I think would be really productive and would demonstrate that they are prepared and in control, so I've taken multiple business astrology things, your DISC assessment or, you know, whatever it is.

Ingrid: [00:06:36] Astrology?

Orchid: [00:06:36] I call them work astrology. Well, I think they're work astrology.

Ingrid: [00:06:41] Like personality?

Orchid: [00:06:41] Yeah. They're like work personality tests. I call it astrology, but it's really not. And I'm mostly joking, but sort of. So I've taken those assessments before and multiple assessments have said that the best way to engage with me is to be bright, be brief, and be gone. For me, it means that if you have an issue, I want you to give me the context quickly, a summary. I also want you to not only stop at, "Hey, here's this problem." When people just come to me and say, "Here's this problem," I don't know what to do with that. What do you want me to do with that? Do you want me to solve it? Now I'm going to have to ask you 40 questions to truly understand the nature of the problem. So in order to best engage with me, come to me with context of the situation that happened, why it happened, what your thoughts are on what the potential solutions can be, and what you need from me. So do you need me to pick one of the options or do you want me to give you feedback on the options? And it's like, okay, well we'll align on a way forward. I'll say yes or no or give them some perspective. And then what I want is for someone to close the loop. So closing the loop is one of my love languages. If there's an outstanding issue, a project or whatever, that before I ask you for a status update you are letting me know that it's been taken care of or giving me a progress update if it hasn't been done yet and I have not had to ask for it.

Ingrid: [00:08:10] Okay. So what I'm hearing you say is your work love language is direct and solution-oriented.

Orchid: [00:08:19] Yes. Oh, that's really good. You're good at this. Yeah.

Ingrid: [00:08:23] Give it to me. Okay. So how often are you getting that? And how are we building that into the way that we work with our teams and inform people above us, below us across the aisle? How do we make more of that now that we've identified that we need that?

Orchid: [00:08:45] It's a work in progress, so it's happening more than it used to. So we have an Asana board called Hyper Care where every one of our clients has a tile associated with them. So if there's something that needs executive overview or leadership to jump in and give perspective on or just say like, "Hey, this thing happened," maybe there was an overspend situation, which happens rarely, but it does happen. Then everybody is updated on that. So what we started with was someone say like, "Hey, here's an issue," and it would end at that and you only get to a place of speaking a common language in getting to preparedness by giving them candid feedback. So I would use every opportunity as a learning opportunity to say, "All right, cool." So you've identified the problem. Why did this happen? Who was involved? What is the impact? Who has this been communicated to? And so if you are consistent as a leader, as a manager, to give that feedback of like, "Hey, these are the things that I am going to continue to look for," then people start to pick up that behavior. So now I can go in the Asana board and one of my pet peeves is if there's a Hyper Care situation and that task has not been updated in more than three days, there's no update from anyone for more than three days, you will expect to hear from me. Sometimes even two days, depending on the severity of it. What I love to see is if I'm going through that board and people are already having conversations and they'll say, "Hey, I did this thing." Great and then add the next steps. It's like, okay, I did this thing and this is closing the loop. Now I'm going to hand it off to this person or whatever it is. So it is clearly stating the thing that you did, but then also communicating like, "Hey, I've solved this part of it. This is the next thing forward." Or even saying like, "Okay, I've done this thing and I believe these three other things need to happen in order for us to close this out and mark this as resolved."

Ingrid: [00:11:31] I feel like that covers really clearly, thank you, how you look at being at the level that you're at is pretty senior, and so most of the people that you're interacting with are people who either report directly to you or report to people who report to you. And so you're kind of like higher up in the echelon. But let's think back and we can do this together when we were at the point where we had a lot of people above us, say 4 or 5 different levels above us, whatever. We've all been there. How do we work to give feedback? Ultimately it's a partnership. You need your leaders to also speak your love language so that you can understand what they want from you, or you can communicate what you want to do for them. And it becomes just a symbiotic relationship. How do we get to communicating more effectively up now? What's the advice there?

Orchid: [00:12:29] So two things. One is to see around corners. I list this as a superpower, but [00:12:35] beyond seeing immediately what's in front of you, anticipate what are some other things that are going to happen or try to put yourself in the receiver's shoes and say, "Okay, if I were in their position..." It's [00:12:45] hard to do because you don't have that experience yet, but you can do a little bit of role playing. So it's like, what kind of information would I want, right? Or beyond seeing the first or the next step, you see two, three steps ahead. And I think asking for feedback is really important, but it has to be really balanced, meaning you have to be really specific about the feedback you're looking for. So a successful way to ask for feedback is, "This situation just happened," or "I just sent this email. What kind of feedback do you have for me that could improve the clarity of this email next time?" It has to be a very pointed question.

Ingrid: [00:13:25] A boundary.

Orchid: [00:13:27] Exactly. Because if you just said, "Can you please give me feedback on how I can be better?" then you're asking that person to spend half an hour to an hour thinking about all the ways that you are not up to standard or not up to the bar, and you don't want someone to go down that track. No, no.

Ingrid: [00:13:48] That's really funny. Yeah, no, that's totally fair. I would say for me, one of the big things that I want to make sure that we infuse kind of at all levels, so up, down, left, right is thinking more holistically. I think that we all tend to, in a lot of conflicts, come from this very myopic or very specific point of reference, which is necessary because we all have to be, to some extent, subject matter experts. And we all know things. We over index in some areas that we know more about. But [00:14:26] as you go up, and whether you're the most junior person or the most senior person, I think it is always really beneficial to think about things more holistically. And I think that a quality that that really requires in a human being is empathy. [00:14:44] So before you go into any conversation, whether it's with a superior or someone more junior trying to figure out, to your point earlier, and anticipate where that person is going to be in that conversation and do I need to get them up to speed? How much do I need to get them up to speed? How much of that time do I need to spend making sure they have all the context in order to understand the problem? And so I think a lot of the stem of all of that is empathy. And so I think I'm answering the first question from today for myself, which is for me, my love language professionally is empathy and holistic thinking.

Orchid: [00:15:29] How does that come to life? What's a specific example of how someone can demonstrate that for you?

Ingrid: [00:15:35] Yeah, it's such a good question. I mean, I think that so a lot of times we'll have a strategy for, let's say a campaign or a new product launch or something like that, and the person who manages a particular channel, let's say this is the paid search channel or something like that, they'll come and I'm just getting really specific here, and this isn't like a recent example or anything like that. I'm just making it up, but bear with me. So let's say they come in and they have like a very specific search question and they're like, "What about this particular search term?" Or something like that, and they bring it up as an idea and then they try to figure out how to bring that to life. I want them in their own questioning of themselves to come in and say, "Here are the pros and cons of this search term and the risk assessment. And if we do go into this search term, here are the other channels and how they would have to activate in order to make this possible. And here's what the landing experience needs to be." And so I realize that it's asking a lot of a particular subject matter expert, but I just want them to think about what steps two and three and four look like. And it's not necessarily like the next steps, but it's creating the full experience that is grounded in that particular subject.

Orchid: [00:17:05] So I have a follow up question. I think it's difficult to understand which altitude to fly at sometimes when you are a subject matter expert because I've met a lot of them that will go down into the nitty gritty, technical details that are lost on their audience. So how do you determine the altitude at which you fly?

Ingrid: [00:17:31] I mean, it's a really good question. I would say that for the most part, I can probably count on one hand how many times it was necessary to go down to like the technical details. Unless you're needing to convince someone of how impossible something is and all the other routes to getting there just aren't landing. And you need to get that technical, but for the most part, I think especially in digital marketing, things get so incredibly technical so quickly that I would almost... If the instinct is to get really technical in your answer, pause and reconsider how you're answering or even understanding the question because usually, that's not where we want you to go. And that's an empathic moment.

Orchid: [00:18:25] I agree. And I think sometimes, more often than not, when someone gets really technical or into the nitty gritty, what I've seen it's because they're really excited and passionate about that subject.

Ingrid: [00:18:37] Yeah. True.

Orchid: [00:18:37] So it's almost not like, "Oh, in order for you to get buy in, I need to go down to this level of detail." It's like, "Oh my gosh, I'm so interested in this. You should also be interested in this." And you're like, "No, no, no. I'm really happy that you're excited about this and you're passionate about it." But to your point about empathy is like, okay, well, if I'm talking to someone who doesn't have as deep of knowledge as I do, [00:19:03] based on my previous experiences and interactions with this person, what kind of decision are they trying to make and what kind of information can I provide them to best inform that decision? [00:19:16]

Ingrid: [00:19:16] Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think it's like there is a bit of self-awareness and stopping yourself from that, for lack of a better term, mental masturbation kind of thing.

Orchid: [00:19:35] It's hard, though. I mean, it is. It's, I absolutely agree that this is a critical skill to have. And the only reason I'm calling out that this is hard is that, hey, this is going to be refined over time. And you don't really build that self-awareness and that understanding of what type of information to provide the other person until you ask for feedback. And I think a lot of people are very nervous about doing that in the heat of the moment. But I try to create pauses and you specifically ask that person, say, "Do you have any questions? Is there anything I can expand on? Is that the information you were looking for?" Because what you really want to have and I think a critical piece of building empathy is to have a conversation. And I've seen a lot of folks early on in their careers where they want to talk at the other person because they're a little nervous about not being able to answer the question if they start to engage. And so they just talk at that person for a long time, not leave any pauses, and then they leave. And okay, well, you're not going to learn anything from that experience.

Ingrid: [00:20:45] Well, very valid. And who hasn't had that experience, right? Either you're the person that's committing that crime or witnessing it. We've all been on some version of that. I do think that as leaders now that we have this responsibility, right, of leading teams, it is so much up to us to create an environment in which people not only feel comfortable asking for feedback but understand how valuable it is to us as leaders and everyone across their teams to want to get the feedback. It's one thing to like ask for the feedback. It's another thing to like want the actual true feedback good, bad, or ugly. And one of the ways that we can be doing that as leaders is to demonstrate that ourselves, and to ask our own teams for feedback and talk to our own teams about some of the recent, not even past in our past careers or whatever, recent failures or misjudgments or just being really vulnerable about what's going on with us and just humanizing our own experience. Because then I think that we open up the doors and give them permission to be vulnerable and open with themselves. And I think that that's just not something that the corporate world has done a very good job of in history. And so I think this conversation we originally were going to talk about hurdles and I think we're now in a really cool place, which is talking more about communication styles and how do we get things done? Which is more the problem solving part of hurdles, right? So we'll have to record the bitching session after this. Because we need to get that out. Clearly. But really, [00:22:52] we're at this place where we need to create an environment organizationally, and we are now in the place of leadership that we can do that. And our generation is at that place of leadership that we can do that that I think will stop some of these previous stoic, unemotional, perfectionist, egotistical ways of working that I really do think is at the core of a lot of our hurdles. [00:23:20]

Orchid: [00:23:20] I couldn't agree more. I think this goes back to our episode about millennials and Gen Z is about this new world order. And I will say that I do think a big hurdle in the workplace is proper communication, and that is exceptionally true in a remote and distributed world. During Covid, there were so many new employees that started who started on a Zoom screen. They didn't have the ability to watch and observe how people acted or build those relationships around the floor kitchen or whatever it is. So I think that [00:23:57] a huge hurdle in the workplace today is about building relationships, is about properly communicating, and showing up prepared. [00:24:06] So I love the direction that this conversation has gone in the way of work love languages. And I think we might need to trademark that.

Ingrid: [00:24:15] I'm into it. I really also am kind of dying to know what our audience's work love languages are. So just to reiterate, Orchids is direct and problem solving. And mine is empathy and holistic thinking. And so, yeah, think about that, you guys. What is your work love language? How would you love a person who works for you, a person that you work for, to communicate with you in the most effective way? And let's get this conversation going.

Orchid: [00:24:49] To be clear, my love language is still gifts. I don't want that to be lost in all of this.

Ingrid: [00:24:57] So make sure if you're about to walk into a difficult conversation with Orchid, make sure you have some, what? Candy and...

Orchid: [00:25:07] Yes. Candy. It could be it honestly could be a meme. A meme that you thought I would like.

Ingrid: [00:25:13] Oh, I love that.

Orchid: [00:25:13] So gift-giving is not about actually buying something. It's like this thing that you give to the other person because you were thinking about them, and so it's actually more similar to penguins have this... {laughter} Penguins do this activity called pebbling where they give each other rocks because, I don't know, to build goodwill or something, so don't give me a rock. But memes are kind of a form of pebbling. So just some clarity.

Ingrid: [00:25:41] Well, my two year old must be a penguin because I get a lot of rock gifts.

Orchid: [00:25:48] Same. My daughter picks up pieces of asphalt and pretends like they're rocks. I was like, "This is just a piece of the road. This is not a rock." So we're working on it. We're working on it.

Ingrid: [00:25:57] Are you rock shaming your daughter?

Orchid: [00:25:59] A little bit. It's fine. She won't listen to this. But, Ingrid, a pleasure, as always. And yes, to echo your request, we would love to hear from you all on what your love languages are, we will promise to give you some residuals once we trademark this and wrap it up in a book and sell it.

Ingrid: [00:26:21] Done. Done.

Orchid: [00:26:22] Is this legally binding? I think this might be legally binding.

Ingrid: [00:26:25] All right. I don't know. I have to get my lawyer. Oh, well, thanks you guys so much. And we'll see you next week.

Orchid: [00:26:31] Bye.