Setting Boundaries with Marc Schoenen

Tony: Marc, thanks so much for being here. And welcome to the three points podcast.

Marc: Tony, delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tony: Yeah, great to have you. Well, the first question I want to ask you is what's been the most embarrassing moment of your professional career so far?

Marc: Goodness, I knew you were going to do this. And I hate telling these stories because I don't like sharing a lot about myself. But I'll, I'll go back in the Wayback Machine. So I can blame this on a younger version of me that no longer resembles who I am. So coming out of university, I took a consulting gig and I was working at this boutique consulting shop down in DC. And this was the late 1990s. That was kind of one of you, we were consultants, and our partners charged us tons of money per hour. So we had to look at the part which meant suit and tie and kind of the whole get up. And one thing about living in DC summers in Washington DC is like 95 degrees, humidities, like 90%. Of course, I was living out in the suburbs and commuting every day. So you step off the tube, and you're covered in sweat and whatnot. And having been there like two or three months, I was getting along with my co-workers, and we'd work kind of late nights and whatever. And one day my coworker showed up and they gave me a gift. And I said, What is this? I wasn't expecting anything. It was a gift wrap undershirt that had been signed by everyone on the team. And they're like, Dude, you stink, you got to start wearing undershirts. I just about died right there. And I couldn't believe that they did that. And I just felt so bad about myself. And I always think about what I wear from now on.

Tony: That is well a lesson way to lean into that uncomfortable question and tell us an absolute Zinger of a story. Listen, we can all relate, we can all relate. We've all been there. Not necessarily to the extent that you were there. That is brilliant. Do you still keep in touch with these old colleagues? Are they still friends as it was as a result of this gift?

Marc: It's interesting you say that Tony because one of the guys, the guy that I actually shared an office with and who I think was the architect of this, I just helped him out on a podcast. He's now a strategy professor at U Michigan's MBA program.

Tony: Oh, my goodness, well, very strategic gift-giving. Also, thanks for sharing that you're an absolute legend. Marc, the thing we're going to talk to us today about today is setting and respecting boundaries. Tell us a little bit about why this is important to you.

Marc: I think boundaries are always an important thing. I think, at work, employees are always trying to do more, they always want to impress their bosses and their co-workers. And I think managers and leaders, always want more out of their people. So if you don't set boundaries adequately, it leads to a place where you can really get burnt out quite easily and are quite unhappy. And I think, particularly in the past couple of years with COVID, and how people are working at different places at different times. I think it's just more important to be crystal clear, with your team with your management about how are you going to show up to work and like what is okay, and what is not okay, whether it's what hours you're working, how to contact you, because there's, there's email, there's a phone, there's slack, there's, 800 ways to get in touch. And I think it's important for you to bring your best self to work to just say, this is how it's best to interact with me. And this is how I'm going to meet my team on their levels.

Tony: I love that. Thanks, Marc. It really resonates with me, because about six months ago, we made our first hire David who runs our operations. And one of the things that I hadn't been used to is working with someone, obviously starting off people's playbook by myself. But I remember he came to me and he was like, we're going to need to figure out our communications, I gotta have some quiet time to be able to do the work, because I would be quite extroverted and kind of outgoing. So I love that you've said that certainly, even though David and I have known each other for over 20 years,  we needed to have that conversation. So I'm really excited to dive right in because this is going to be really relevant. It's gonna be super relevant for everyone listening. It sounds like right everyone either who has a manager has a leader they report to but probably also leaders who want to better support and manage their teams. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, point one I love it's saying no is okay. As long as you provide alternatives.

Marc: Yeah. So I think when someone's asking you for something, no is an appropriate response. Like it's always okay for the answer to be no. But you should think about what are they asking and why are they asking it and if they're saying, someone, let's start with something simple. Like, Hey, can you meet at seven o'clock tonight? There's an emergency and I need to get this thing sorted before the end of the day. Maybe you've got a dinner plan, maybe you've got a game with your family or going to the movies or something. If you say, No, I can't meet then but hey, could we meet at 945? instead? Or could we meet before work tomorrow, if you're providing them an out where they can say, Okay, this thing needs to get done by this time, then you can maybe find a common ground to understand what they're asking because what they're really starting with is I want this thing that's most convenient for me? But what you want to end up with is what works for whether it's your client group, whether it's your boss's boss, like how do we get for the thing that we need in a way that doesn't make me upset doesn't make them upset? And if you just say, flat out, no, I can't meet then that you don't allow the conversation to continue. But you can say, and sometimes some people don't like saying the word no, right? Like saying no to a manager, it's a really uncomfortable thing. But maybe you can frame it differently. And you can say, yes, and right, like, yes. And it would be better for me to meet a little later in the evening or early tomorrow, would that work better for you, because that's a way to not kind of start out in that combative mode, but still get to what your manager or what your coworker is really looking for. And I think if you frame things that way, it kind of helps you get to a good place and see and helps identify if there's a common ground. Now, of course, there's always going to be fire drills. And you can't always say no, but I think sometimes just practicing when and how you can say no and in a safe way. And whether that's a no or yes. And I think that helps people set up that kind of initial step for boundaries.

Tony: I love that approach, Marc, and I want to dive into a couple of things. So the first thing that I pick up is you need more information before you respond. You need to understand the level of priorities. Who's it for? What's it for? How quickly does this thing need to be done? Does it need to be done, as you say, at the time that is preferred by whoever is making the ask I love that you approach it with the database, And it sounds like Marc, there's really, and I've worked in managed teams where I've had different responses on the spectrum. One is, absolutely yes, I'll do that. And there's lots of yeses all of the time. On the other end, there's no and there's no context or any sort of justification or rationale. And then really that sweet spot is what you're saying is in the middle, right?

Marc: Yeah. And I think underlying a lot of this Tony's is just this idea of communication. I think, particularly when people are meeting more in video and less in person, you don't necessarily get some of the cues that you might be able to pick up if you were seeing someone face to face. And I think in those instances like providing the context, or the additional clues to help your listener understand, what are they saying? And why helps you get to the right resolution?

Tony: Is there any specific I'm thinking specifically, first of all about individuals who are listening who think, gosh, I can't possibly avoid saying yes to my manager or my boss, like what would you tell them? What would be your kind of single piece of advice as they start to try and shift their mindset and shift the approach?

Marc: I think just practice, I think, really, this is a tool and a skill that people need to have and should have. And you only get that by practicing and maybe identifying things that you feel this is important, but not urgent or need to be done. But it's neither important nor urgent. Like those are the areas where you can practice may be pivoting away from saying no to saying like, here's something I can do to get you that thing. I think before you need it, would that work? And I sometimes think again, it just goes back to this communication on how you communicate with your co-workers. And maybe is there an opportunity to talk to them about how you communicate like you were talking before about some of the people that you were working with, I have a very different lifestyle and communication style than a lot of people on my team and like when new people join my team, and I've been lucky I've had a couple of new joiners in the past two or three weeks, I basically started out and I say, here's how I like to communicate, but my job as a manager is to support you. So I'm inviting you to tell me what works best for you so I can try and meet you halfway. So I think having that conversation with your managers or coworkers is really important because if you assume good intent and 95 plus percent of the people you work with, you should be assuming good intent, like the bill want to meet you halfway but you need to allow them to understand what it is that will help you succeed.

Tony: I love that Marc. I love that you as a leader are taking responsibility and ownership Have leading your team and helping them and inviting them to tell you about their communication practices, I know how much of a difference that makes to everyone, you're going to win because you're gonna have greater insight, and you're gonna be able to get more things done and be more productive as well, your team members, right, they'll have the confidence to move forward, knowing that you're on the same page, I love that. One of the things that I've been working with some individuals on around, managing up, quote-unquote, right and supporting and working with your manager is if you're asked to do multiple things, sometimes, being able to clarify priorities, right, and say, Okay, we've got a, b, c, d, e to complete. And which would you like me to get done this week versus next week? And that really helps you align with your leader? What's the greater priority? Yeah, absolutely. So interestingly, I had just said, Well, I've experienced where people don't justify or give any explanation to the reason they're saying no. And your second point, which I'm really excited to get into is justifying why you're saying no, is actually unnecessary.

Marc: I think, if you're justifying why you're saying, No, it sort of puts you in this position of weakness, or it puts you in this position where, maybe from a manager or co-workers perspective, like you're making excuses. And that shouldn't be what the conversation is about like the conversation shouldn't be, hey, I need this thing by tonight at seven o'clock to use the same example. And if you pivot away to saying like, listen, I can get this done, can I get it to you by 9:45? Or can I get it to you by tomorrow morning? I think if you've tried to pivot, what are we trying to accomplish? And when and how can I help that? That should be the conversation, right? Because at a human level, every single employee and manager like, I'm not saying you need to be best mates, but like you should be able to get on, right? Like, you should be able to ask about your kids and sporting activities or whatever you're doing outside of work. But if a manager or a co-worker says, Hey, I need this thing by seven, and you say, Well, my son has a concert, or I gotta go to this, thing to support my wife like, that detail doesn't matter, right? Because it distracts from the topic, which is, hey, we got to get this thing done. And how are we going to get it done? And when are we going to get it done, and maybe it doesn't need to be done at that time. Maybe it can be done in different forms. Maybe there's like alternatives. And I think that's where you need to focus. And if you have a good relationship with your manager or your co-workers, they'll understand your communication styles, or they'll understand that you might have other things going on. And as long as you are delivering and delivering in a timely fashion in a reliable fashion. That should be where the focus is.

Tony: Yeah. And we're gonna get into that in a second Marc, let's stay on this point. I'm really curious. Have you ever had an experience? Where you have been expected to share a reason why you said no, or why you couldn't do a thing? And how did you go about handling that? This sounds like I'm interviewing for a job in a people playbook. But I'm not. I'm just super curious because I certainly have had that experience of expecting to share a rationale or justification.

Marc: I think it's a great question, Tony. And I think, I think there are two paths here. And then this will get into work-life trade-offs, which we can talk about a little bit later. But if there's a personal trainer, if you're talking about kind of a personal commitment, you sometimes might want to go down that path. But a lot of times when people are pushing back and saying no, they're pushing back because of internal prioritization, like, No, I can't get this to you by seven o'clock, because I have these three other things that I'm doing. And maybe that invites the conversation on, how does this new shiny thing, this new fire drill? How does that stack up against these other things that I'm doing? Because maybe it makes sense to reprioritize? Or maybe I can assign one of the other workstreams to someone else on the team? So you can focus on this one thing that you're good at? And if you're saying no, because of internal prioritization, that should be part of your communication, right? There should be almost weekly one-to-one with your manager, or maybe quarterly one-on-one with your broader team on what are we focused on? What are our top priorities, and you need to really be ruthless with that, right? Because businesses are always changing. There's always new stuff coming in and there are always unanticipated workstreams coming in, and you can't manage that without getting burned out unless you're spending the same amount of time-shifting stuff off. And that can be leveraging another team, hiring contingent workforce, like hiring, like temp work, or just not doing something and I think you need to spend as much time in both and not just, Hey, how am I going to do this new shiny thing with everything else I've got on my plate.

Tony : Yeah, I love that you described me as being ruthless because that is what it takes, right? This is It's countercultural in many ways, right. So I love that you've been ruthless. And the other point that you've made Marc will help us pivot into your third and final point, which is around a little bit of the relationship, and the trust in some positive intent. So point three for setting and respecting boundaries is the importance of consistently delivering and over-communicating.

Marc : Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the way that you can serve your career the best is if you're consistent if you deliver quality results, and if you over-communicate. And let me focus on that third point, Tony, like, think about this from a career perspective. Everyone should be having regular conversations with their managers, everyone should be getting performance reviews, we can do a whole separate podcast on our performance reviews flawed, and are timely? And are you getting real-time feedback? But let me ask you a question. Have you ever known a single person who has gotten developmental feedback that they communicated too much?

Tony : I'm digging into what feels like a lifetime at this stage of experience? No, I don't think so. No, I haven't.

Marc : Yeah. And like, I don't think most people have and I think to be a successful leader, because like, or individual contributor, like whatever you're doing, like, you're so much of your time should actually be spent on communicating with your immediate team communicating with your cross-functional partners. Because if you think about a framework of almost like a four-part story, I'm going to tell you what the story is about. Here's the agenda for the story. Now, I'm going to tell you the actual story. And now let me recap the story to you, if you're communicating with people in that way, it sounds kind of boring and repetitive. But if you're communicating that way, there's not going to be any sort of clarity on Hey, what is that person focused on? Whereas if you think of the antithesis of my question to you, there's a lot of times like managers are like, Hey, I didn't know that you're spending 30 hours on this thing, I thought it was a 15-minute task. And now you're telling me is 30 hours like that's not a process failure, that's a communication failure, right, like what is happening, that is leading people to not understand what others are working on and how much effort it takes. And that's why I think the communication aspect is super, super important.

Tony : So your Impossible Foods now you've got experience working with the likes of Uber and Google, what's worked well for you and your team? So if there are leaders or people listening, hear on teams, and there's again, bought into the idea of over-communication? How have you codified that into your team? How have you made it a ritual,

Marc: I think there are a couple of things that I like to do. I have a love-hate relationship with meetings, perhaps every single employee on the planet does. But so I run team meetings Tony and I have in every role that I've had, where I've been a manager, and I do a couple of things with the meetings. One is, that sometimes people want to hear from me. So I keep like a slice of it as a report out. But the first thing that I've done is I want to have a consistent meeting, I want to have an agenda for the meeting. And I hate hearing myself talk, I really, really do. So I pitched this as a development opportunity for the people on the team, I'm like, we're going to rotate where every single person on the team for one month is going to host the team meetings, I expect you to run the agenda, I expect you to run the action items and the follow up with them, I will help you in the background and set you up for success. But this is not my meeting, I'm coming to this meeting for you all. So I want you to run it. And one of the things that's super important is like I want you to kick off the meeting with something fun, right? Like, it can be an icebreaker, it can be a game, we have people working remotely, we have people working on different kinds of slices of the team. So people don't actually know what they're doing. But we need to kick off with something fun. We need to have kind of the report out from the top, if you will, but then I expect them to kind of bring the agenda. So they can talk about things that are workstreams that are top of mind for them, which a lot of times the richness of that conversation, either by presenting to the rest of the team, they're learning something about what they were doing that they didn't anticipate, or even better kind of meeting Nirvana if you will, someone's presenting on like, Hey, I'm doing this thing. I'm doing a benefits rollout for this new country that, we just hired employees and someone from another team says, Hey, have you thought about this thing? And have you checked that box? And how are you thinking about integrating kind of this downstream work stream and when that kind of conversation happens I'm like, This is exactly why meetings worked in how they should thrive.

Tony : How they should thrive. And that's the magic, isn't it? I mean, it was effective. I love that I love the approach to bringing fun at the start. That'll help folks establish and sorry, the sun is shining. By the way in Belfast, I know if you're, if you're watching this on tape, if you're listening, you won't understand. But it's a lovely, beautiful day here in Belfast, the effective kind of meeting structure of fun, I love that you empower your team because it creates, it's like you said it's about practice. And they, therefore, have to also practice empathy, because they have to understand what it's like to facilitate a meeting host a meeting to be responsible for that agenda. So the final question for you Marc is, how would the world change if we all implemented these three points you shared with us today?

Marc: I think what people really need to realize is that The single biggest determinant in your work success is you right?, and if you think about boundaries, and what they mean, we have been inundated over this past generation with this idea of work-life balance, and I will tell you, this is a fool's errand, right, there is no such thing as work-life balance, it does not exist. I think it's important to call it work-life trade-offs, because that is what it is if you are good at what you do, and I assume that most people show up at work trying to do their best if you're good at what you do, your coworkers are going to want more out of you, your management team is going to want more out of you, your company's going to want more out of you, right? Like if you're great at what you do, why wouldn't they want more. And then at the same time, in your life, whether you're a parent with kids, or whether you're on a sporting team, or whether you participate in a comedy club, like whatever it is, like if you're good in your social stuff, they want more of your time too, right? And the one confining factor is there's only so much time. So you can't work more unless you have less life. And you can't have a more social life unless you have less work. And you can say, well, maybe I just sleep less than that. That's a really bad app. And I'm not going to go down there. But it's really a trade-off on how you show up and choose to spend your time. And I think if you think of it in that construct, it really imparts this importance of setting the boundaries, right? I think, with COVID, I think with kind of the Gen Z and a new generation of employees, I think we've moved away from this construct of like, you need to be in the office from nine to five and that sort of thing. We live in an always-on culture where people have their smartphones with them all the time. Like, bosses could email or slack or call or whatever it is, and you need to consciously choose how am I going to show up for work. And from my perspective, I'm old, I'm married, I've got kids, and I want to see them do their thing. So I'm pretty clear with my team, like, Listen, I'm going to peace out at five or six o'clock every day, and I'm going to not be checking my phone unless someone calls me if there's an emergency, you can call me but otherwise, I'm not going to be checking anything. And I spend some quality time with my family and maybe 9:30 - 10 pm I'll go back online and I can get some more work in. Whereas there are other people on the team that are like, I'm young, I'm Social, I'm just going to power through until seven or eight o'clock at night. And then I'm gonna go hit the pub and maybe play a game of footy, like, whatever and that like, that's their reality. And I want to support that too. So you need to show up for like, what makes sense for you be clear with your boundaries and communicate them, and really always be revisiting on how's it working out this week? Or what has gone well, and where can I maybe pivot or take a little nudge to do something a little differently.

Tony : Ah, thanks so much gold in that Marc. I love the concept and shift from work-life balance to work-life trade-offs. And on that note, I'm so grateful that you were able to spend some time with us today and to make time for having this conversation I find incredibly valuable, and I'm sure others have. And I know it's your son's graduation from high school today. So I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Marc: Thank you, Tony. I really appreciate the time