Stephen Shedletzky —or “Shed” to his friends— helps leaders make it safe and worth it for people to speak up. He supports humble leaders—those who know they are both a part of the problems they experience and the solutions they can create— as they put their people and purpose first. After years on a corporate track, Shed was introduced to and inspired by the work of best-selling author and TED speaker Simon Sinek and, soon after meeting him, became the fourth person to join his team. For more than a decade, Shed contributed at Simon Sinek, where, as Chief of Staff and Head of Brand Experience, Training & Product Development, he led a global team of speakers and facilitators. Shed graduated from the Richard Ivey School of Business with a focus on leadership, communication, and strategy. He received his coaching certification from The Co-Active Training Institute.
In this episode, Stephen Shedletzky shares insights from his book "Speak Up Culture" on how leaders can create environments where employees feel safe and empowered to speak up.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- How to create a "Speak Up Culture"
- The importance of clearly defining values in creating a culture
- Why you should hire for trust not performance
- What the role of a good leader actually is.
- Balancing customer service with caring for employees first.
Join the conversation on today's episode on The Modern Hotelier LinkedIn page.
The Modern Hotelier is produced, edited, and published by Make More Media: https://makemore.media/
Episode Links
Stephen Shedletzky
Stephen' Book "Speak-Up Culture"
Stephen Shedletzky on LinkedIn
David Millili
Steve Carran
Steve on LinkedIn
The Modern Hotelier
Transcript
Automatic Transcription - please excuse any errors
Stephen Shedletzky: If you're a CEO or founder, or especially if you're new in a leadership role, you've been incentivized and rewarded for being the best, for being the most responsible, for being the most driven, for knowing all the things, right? But you come to a level where what's gotten you here won't get you there. And so what leaders need to do is they need to know that their role isn't to be in charge, but it's to lift others up.
David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier. I'm your host, David Millili.
Steve Carran: I'm your co-host, Steve Carran.
Jon Bumhoffer: I'm the producer, Jon Bumhoffer.
David Millili: Steve, who do we have on the program today?
Steve Carran: Yeah, David, today we have on Steven Shedletsky, or Shed as his friends like to call him. Shed is the author of "Speak Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up." A little background about Shed, he graduated from the Richard Ivey School of Business with a focus on leadership, communication, and strategy. He received his coaching certification from the CoActive Training Institute. And he currently lives in Toronto with his wife and two young children. Welcome to the show, Shed.
Stephen Shedletzky: Thank you so much for having me. You asked me if I got a bad haircut, and it's just, no, it's just a bad hair day. Just a bad hair day. Nursing a cold, so we're just powering through.
Steve Carran: Hey, you're all good. I'm usually a hat guy myself, so no shame in that game.
Stephen Shedletzky: Nice.
Steve Carran: Thank you for joining us, Shed. We're really happy to have you on. Happy to talk about your book, "Speak Up Culture." First question, it seems like this book has been a long time in the making. How did Simon Sinek's TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action almost start this journey years ago?
Stephen Shedletzky: Oh my, my first day on my first corporate job ever, I worked in the leadership development program at an oil and gas company. Not that I cared about that industry so much, but I cared deeply about leadership. On my first day on that job, a thousand people were let go post-merger. I walked in on my very first day as a thousand people were walking out, boxes in hand. I felt fortunate that this was my first job, not one where the cubicle next to me had Bryn, who had been there for 37 years and was freaked out that her pink slip was going to arrive next. I was grateful that I wasn't that deeply invested, and I had a front row seat to seeing the impact of a tumultuous time. The behaviors of leaders, for better or for worse, impacted not just people's productivity but also their health and well-being. I saw increased car crashes, increased incidences of cancer, and chronic illness because of a corporate culture that was less than thriving.
I came across Simon Sinek's work shortly thereafter. A friend of mine, I said to him, I'm afraid to do marketing because I was going to move into a marketing role for an organization where I don't believe what they sell or how they sell it. And he went, watch this TED Talk. I procrastinated for two months and then watched it. Watching Simon's TED Talk, my experience, and I've heard it similarly from others, is I kind of just puppy dog turned my face and went, huh, everything this guy says seems to be true.
Never thought about it that way, but it made such sense. Some months later, I went to a conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the same place you and I met, Steve, and went to hear Malcolm Gladwell speak, the author of "Outliers," "David and Goliath," a great, prolific author, and Simon spoke just before him. The passion and connection I felt on a computer screen were amplified when I got to hear him speak in person. I felt as though I found my orator. Simon preaches and speaks to a vision of a world in which more of us feel inspired, safe, and fulfilled. I spent close to 12 years helping Simon build his organization. Never thought I'd write a book of my own, but I found a way to help advance this movement of creating more places of work and more places in society where we feel inspired, safe, and fulfilled.
Steve Carran: Yeah, absolutely. And you talk about it right away in the book. You hit on what "speak up culture" is. Can you talk a little bit more about that for those readers who haven't read it yet?
Stephen Shedletzky: Yeah, absolutely. When I wrote the book, I thought at first that I was simply rebranding psychological safety. We've heard this term a lot, psychological safety. Amy Edmondson has helped put that on the map very prominently. Amy is a scholar, a great researcher and writer out of Harvard.
She endorsed the book. I have such respect for Amy. But I didn't love the term psychological safety; it feels like we put an academic lab coat on a very human experience and emotion. So, I did good old Zig Ziglar—people don't buy drills; they buy holes. If the drill is psychological safety, then the hole of what you get as a result is a "speak up culture." I wanted to market and advertise the end outcome, which is the thing we all want. I define a "speak up culture" as an environment in which we feel both psychologically safe and, here's the key one, worth it to speak up. To share our ideas, our feedback, our concerns, even disagree with someone at our level, more junior to us, or more senior to us, and even admit mistakes. In doing all of that, we think it'll actually lead to improvement, not being repeatedly ignored or, worse, punished.
A good friend of mine, I shared the first three chapters with her. She's a scholar at U of T and wrote a great book called "Power for All," Tiziana Caciaro. She said to me, "Shed, are you writing different things, or are you writing things differently?" And I went, "Ooh, that's a great question." I think because of this distinction and the two-by-two framework that's formed the thesis of this book, that leaders make it safe and worth it for people to speak up, I actually think maybe, and you know, it's really up to the eye of the reader, but perhaps I've written both different things and things differently in a really engaging, story-based way. Rich story-based, but research-based way.
David Millili: So, you spoke about what makes a good leader. You listed Devanese attributes that make a good leader. Can you expand on that and give us a little more?
Stephen Shedletzky: So Rich DeVinney is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, and if there's anyone who needs to understand leadership, it's a SEAL, because if things don't go well, the cost is life and death and the fate of foreign affairs, right? Stakes are high, and I like studying those types of industries—life and death industries—because successes and errors are so visible and so direct. Rich has, I think, my, at present, my favorite quote on leadership.
I'm really looking for another one because I don't like saying that my friend has my favorite quote on leadership. But Rich says, "Leaders aren't born, leaders aren't even made, leaders are chosen based upon the way that they behave."
In the chapter on leadership defined in the book, I attempt to craft a standard definition of what it could mean to lead. I think we need nuances based on context, but there are a few behavioral attributes that Rich outlines in his book, "The Attributes." It's a fantastic book. Rich identifies—this isn't necessarily all-inclusive or comprehensive, but it's a pretty good start—empathy, authenticity, which means we experience you consistently, and what you say and what you do, there's a small gap there. Just to build on that one, David and Steve, warmth and vision are not requisites of leadership.
Neither is charisma or "riz," as the kids say. I know some leaders who are consistently grumpy and cold, who are not charismatic, who are introverted, who don't necessarily have a vision, but they believe in something bigger than themselves. You need to identify with a vision, but you don't need to be a visionary. In fact, I know visionaries who aren't leaders. They have vision, but that's about it, which is valuable still. But what you do need is a care for people. That is a requisite. The fact that we have the term "servant leadership" means to me that the definition of leadership is broken.
To lead is to have a service orientation. So yeah, those attributes, just to be quick and clear on it, empathy, authenticity, service orientation, decisiveness, the ability to make a decision with limited information and quickly, and then accountability. When things go well, you give credit, and when things don't go well, you take disproportionate responsibility. Those are some of the key leadership attributes.
Steve Carran: And kind of on that, you mentioned dealing with people who have high risk, high reward. One thing I really liked was your performance trust matrix that you did with the SEALs. Kind of a side question here, but can you talk about that more? That's just something I thought was really, really cool.
Stephen Shedletzky: Yeah, so in my work with Simon Sinek, I met Rich, and Rich and the teams at the SEALs, we asked them, how do you select and how do you promote on SEAL teams? They said, "Well, we have a matrix." They call it the performance versus trust matrix. So it's nine quadrants, or maybe not quadrants, boxes. In the upper right, it's high trust and high performance. In the lower left, it's low trust and low performance. Then you have high performance, low trust, and low performance, high trust. What Rich and the teams point out is that they put trust on a pedestal over performance. Performance measures something right now, whereas trust is more indicative of potential. Of course, we all want the high performer of high trust. Of course, no one wants the low performer of low trust, of course, but who do we pick between the high performer of low trust and the low performer of high trust?
The SEALs would say 10 times out of 10, you pick the low performer of high trust because that indicates potential as opposed to high performing but unethical and toxic. It's very easy to find out who's the toxic high performer—go to any room and say, "Where's the jerk?" They all point to the same person. But similarly, say, "Hey, who's the best team player? Who's got your back when all the cards are down on the table?" It's a different person and the same person. So yes, the SEALs put trust over performance. The best example of this is there is a skill required to be a good SEAL. It's called swimming, but swimming you can learn. So I put this in the book. There's a story that's apparently a true story in the early 1990s. One sailor who was trying out to be a SEAL. The first thing you do is you hop into an Olympic-sized swimming pool in Coronado Beach. I visited it. It's a very impressive large pool. You jump in and do pool comp—like, what's your pool competency?
This one sailor sinks like a stone, walks across the bottom of the pool, touches the other end, gasps for air, walks back to the other end, is yanked out, nearly drowning. The drill instructor, once the guy comes back to, says, "What the heck were you doing?" The young sailor says, "Sir, I don't know how to swim." The instructor says, "We can teach you how to swim." What they just exuded were all of the attributes needed to be an effective SEAL: courage, perseverance, cunning, like breaking rules. All SEALs kind of have a bit of a rebel, criminal mindset within reason, so that SEAL, though they didn't yet have the skill of swimming, they could teach that to that individual with the right motivation very quickly. They exuded the appropriate attributes to fit the role and fit the teams.
Steve Carran: So, this analogy I absolutely loved, and you mentioned it a few times throughout the book, but it was cucumbers, pickle brine, and pickles. Can you talk a little bit more about, A, you should start a pickle company, and B, how that correlates to culture?
Stephen Shedletzky: Yeah, I never thought my pickles would be popular, and I haven't even made them yet. It's fantastic. I liken culture to pickle brine. I liken culture to a pickle jar. This is the perfect analogy, kind of, because what's different between pickles and human beings is you can actually put a human being in a new brine and they can change. Once you pickle a pickle, it's done, right? But we can take a world-class cucumber, that highly ethical, talented, hardworking, trustworthy, there is such a thing, put them in bad pickle brine, and that turns into a bad pickle.
And it's no fault to the cucumber. We have to examine the brine that that cucumber is in. Too often in our cultures, we label poor performers as the problem without looking at, are they in the right role? Do they have an appropriate leader? What's the culture? What's the level of trust? Because if any one of us is not in a healthy brine, a healthy culture, all of our performance suffers. Really, culture and environment either turn us into fabulous, delicious, crispy, to whatever your taste, pickles, or can turn us sour. But it's not all our responsibility. We need to look at leadership systems and culture as well.
David Millili: Great. Yeah, and since we're in the middle of football season, there was a famous Philadelphia Eagles-Cowboys game in Dallas where it was like 120 degrees on the field, and the Eagles used pickle juice to stay hydrated and actually won the game. But anyway...
Stephen Shedletzky: Bet that's better than Gatorade. Probably more electrolytes per million or whatever.
David Millili: Exactly. So, you talk about encouragement and reward and how they play a part in the speak-up culture. Can you elaborate a little bit more on those two items?
Stephen Shedletzky: Yeah, so there are a few key behaviors that leaders do to create a speak-up culture. They make it safe, and they make it worth it for people to speak up. A great way to help do that is to encourage folks to speak up, and when they do, reward them. Encourage means set the stage, ask open-ended questions, leave room for silence, don't be the first to speak or the first to share ideas, poll and ask people in different ways, use chat, have different types of meetings, not just large meetings because certain folks feel comfortable speaking up in those large meetings and some folks don't.
Encourage is really setting the stage. There's a great story of a very senior commercial airline pilot who's a safety specialist, a guy by the name of Ben Berman. Every time he flies, every single time, he says to his crew—and the likelihood that you have a new crew when you work at a large airline is very high; you fly with someone new almost every time—he says to his crew, "I've never flown a perfect flight; today is no exception. I need to know what you see." Every time, just to set the condition, right? Now, on the other side is reward. When people do step into that speak-up spotlight, because it is never without fear speaking up, there's more benefit to the team and the organization to speak up than there is potential benefit to the individual. It's hard work, right? And anyone who says, "The goal is fearlessness," or "Here's our fearless leader," B.S. No such thing. If you come across a fearless leader, they're dangerous, right? Fear is important. Fear is a risk modulator. It's biological.
So, leaders don't eradicate fear. They simply create less fear. When people feel that it's safe and worth it to speak up, and they share ideas, concerns, feedback, bad news, disagreements, mistakes, we reward folks for doing so. Reward doesn't mean extrinsic reward. It means intrinsic rewards. "Hey, Steve, thank you for bringing that up. I know it was hard." "Wow, David, that must have taken courage. I appreciate it." "Hey, Steve, I don't really see everything that you see yet. Can you share a bit more of your perspective? I think you're on to something." "Hey, David, we didn't implement your idea, but here's why. Keep it coming." These are all forms of reward such that people feel that it's worth it to speak up again.
Steve Carran: And you brought up a good example of encouraging people to speak up. You brought up a CEO, how he's always the last one to speak up in all the meetings. I just love that because that encourages everybody else to give their thoughts before he does. So, awesome so far. So, at the end of the book, you got pretty personal and talked about when you were younger, how you had a stutter and things like that. I really appreciated that as someone who enjoys getting to know people. Can you tell us how that almost was the backbone of this whole book?
Stephen Shedletzky: Yeah, thank you, Steve. There's a great quote by a Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, that says, I'm going to paraphrase, but it's something to the effect of, "Life makes sense looking backwards, but it must be lived forwards." I'm a really big believer that the things we've overcome or are overcoming in our lives are often where our purpose lives. It's so meaningful for us to help other folks move through things that we've had to move through.
For me, growing up with a stutter, I went on to marry a speech therapist. Very good choice, more so for my kids and my nephews. But I knew intimately the feeling of voicelessness as a young kid, as an 8, 9, 13-year-old kid. Even later in life, I was still terrified of speaking at 19, 20 years old. I just got help. I got support. I took a series of modest, reasonable tests to build confidence, build some tools, because I still have a stutter and it still happens, but I've learned to work with it. I know intimately that feeling of voicelessness. It's no mistake that that experience growing up.
I think, has helped inform much of my passion, which is helping people communicate their ideas in ways that they can connect and be understood, and their feelings as well. Also helping leaders create environments where people feel that it's safe and worth it to speak up. There's no coincidence, playing it backwards.
David Millili: Yeah, that's great. So I was fortunate when I started my first company, I went from running a hotel as a general manager to a tech company. I think that general manager background helped me, and I get asked the question, "What's the biggest mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make, founders?" And when I say the first one is they assume that they should be the CEO and they should be the leader because just because it's your company doesn't necessarily mean you're the right person to run it because it's your idea. How would you evaluate that or talk to founders about how they really make sense of the management of that company and being a CEO or a founder?
Stephen Shedletzky: I mean, for a CEO or a founder to have the arrogance or naivety to think that they're a Swiss Army knife is really silly. This is the value of having a team. It's really hard because especially if you're a CEO or founder, or especially if you're new in a leadership role, you've been incentivized and rewarded for being the best, for being the most responsible, for being the most driven, for knowing all the things, right? But you come to a level where what's gotten you here won't get you there. And so what leaders need to do is they need to know that their role isn't to be in charge, but it's to lift others up. There's no mistake, David, that every single leadership development program I've ever seen, participated in, facilitated in, witnessed, whatever it might be, they all have a module itself.
Every single one of them. The work of leadership is to understand your own instrument, your strengths, amplify them, your limitations and weaknesses, build strategies around them, be vulnerable with the team around you so you can better team, and then it's around helping others build relationships with their instrument, and then harmonizing together so that one plus one equals infinity. That's the work of leadership.
To have the belief that leading is always in front is a misnomer. Sometimes you are leading in front. And Steve, sometimes it actually does make sense to be vulnerable and for a leader to speak first if it's appropriate. Other times leaders lead from the side, and other times leaders lead from the back. It's dynamic. It's constantly evolving based upon what the situation and context call for.
David Millili: Yeah, that's great. There's nothing more, I would say, in my career. There's been nothing more eye-opening than having a long career of being a CEO or founder of a company and getting positioned where I became a chief commercial officer. I wasn't the true leader, and it was amazing to be on the sidelines looking in and seeing what that was like. So yeah, that's great stuff. You were at high tech. What would you say to people who are in hospitality and why they should read your book and how it can really affect them and have a positive impact on their career?
Stephen Shedletzky: For folks specifically in hospitality, we hear so often, who comes first, employee or customer? Employer or patient, employer or student, teacher or student? The list goes on. My perspective on this is neither. What I think should come first is values. Values dictate who your people are because if you have values and standards of how we behave at our best in a healthy, thriving way in this culture, it then determines who are your people and who aren't. If people behave as employees or clients outside of that value set, you're allowed to fire both or coach both.
I would say coach first, right? For folks who work in hospitality and the hotel industry, it is an industry that is reinforced with customer service—serve the customer, serve the customer, serve the customer. I think for those who are leading in the hotel space, we need to know that the purpose of an organization or a hotel is to serve end-users so that there's money and the thing exists. But in order for that to happen, leaders must care for their people. When people feel cared for, when people care for each other, that extends to the paying customer, and that takes care of the results. So I think first and foremost, get clear on what your values are, how we treat each other, inclusive of how freaking empowering it is to say to someone at a front desk, "We don't talk to each other that way here, and if that's not okay with you, you're welcome to go down the street and take your business elsewhere." That's empowering, and that's important. And then as well, culture and trust live from the inside out. We cannot expect someone to extend care if they themselves do not feel cared for.
Steve Carran: That's awesome. So that's the end of our questions. Our producer, Jon, has been listening in the background this whole time. I'm going to kick it off to him for the final question here.
Jon Bumhoffer: A lot of what you talked about seemed to me like, me paraphrasing it, hiring for character, not necessarily skills or performance, right? What would you say if you're a small company or you're an entrepreneur making a first hire? A lot of times with a labor shortage, and just, you're trying to get things off your plate. And you're hiring for character, not skill, but you have to train the skill. That takes time, and you're trying to get things off your plate. What would you say to help figure out that situation?
Stephen Shedletzky: It's a great question, Jon, and I'm glad that we're both wearing hats here. Makes me feel safe and that it's worth it. Thank you. It's a brilliant question. I'm going through it right now, myself. I have a small fledgling team. I have one employee other than me, another contractor, and then some vendors. There are vendors that we worked with that have been fantastic and vendors that we no longer work with because there is a values mismatch, and we learned that quickly. But when it came to hiring my first hire, first of all, he was exceptionally open by saying, "Thank you for sharing the list of things that you need for someone to do." He actually challenged me and said, "You don't need an EA; you need a COO." And I was like, "Ooh, keep it coming." He said, "Now I admit these things on your list, I'm going to have a hard time with. It's 20 percent of my job, and it's going to take 80 percent of my energy.
But I'm willing to make that sacrifice because I believe in you. I believe in the work, I believe in the vision." So I willingly made a bit of a sacrifice on skills and some competency areas to prioritize compassion and character. It's been a pain point; we talk about it very openly that there's some stuff that's on his plate that shouldn't be, but we don't have anyone else. But we prioritize those attributes and that character over it. He's not a high performer who I don't trust with the keys to the house; I trust him with the keys to the house, even if there are some mistakes here and there, and we're solving for those skill gaps. So yeah, work needs to get done, but that first hire is so important, and if you make a wrong hire, that could sink an entire company. I would rather hire for character because skills can be developed, and you can solve for skills in creative ways. It's a great question.
David Millili: Great, thanks, Jon. So that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is the time where we allow you to plug away, let people know how they can get the book, and let them know how they can get in touch with you.
Stephen Shedletzky: Thank you so much, David, Steve, and Jon. This was a treat to join you. I know it was packed and quick, but I really appreciate it. You can get the book wherever you like to get your books, and even places you don't like to get your books, it's probably available there as well. You can learn more at speakupculture.com, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only Steven Shedletsky in the world at present.
So all you handfuls of Shedletskys, please name your kids wisely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm most active there.
David Millili: Well, once again, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. We hope to see everyone again soon, and we really enjoyed it. Thank you for being our guest.
Stephen Shedletzky: Thank you for having me.
Steve Carran: Thank you, Shed.