Episode 297: Jen Marr - The Conversations You Avoid Are Shaping Your Culture
This is Episode 297 of The Limitless Podcast with Nick Jonsson, and I am pleased to welcome Jen Marr, Founder and CEO of Showing Up.
We are tackling a topic that is really important, and one that many of my clients around Asia are struggling with and want to learn more about. It is the conversations you are avoiding, and the ones shaping your culture.
Jen has spent the last decade diving deep into our human behaviors in times of disruption, uncertainty, upheaval, and massive change. She shares what her research and work have revealed, that in times like these, we are getting our human relational behaviors wrong more than we are getting them right.
This conversation goes straight into what Jen calls the awkward zone. That space where leaders do not feel trained, do not feel equipped, and in micro moments every day, they are unsure if they should talk about something, doubt whether they should get involved, deflect responsibility, try to fix things too fast, or avoid the conversation completely.
Jen also shares something I have seen again and again, that people often feel no one has any idea what they are dealing with, and yet they do not tell anyone, even though they wish they could, because they do not know how to address it.
We talk about why leadership does not only break down in board meetings or strategy meetings, but in the conversations leaders are having, and the conversations they are not having.
Jen breaks down what it takes to overcome this, starting with discovery and awareness, aligning on the organizational pain points, and then equipping leaders with concrete micro moment skills. She is clear that this is skill based training, not emotion based training, and that teaching the skill can cultivate the emotion, not the other way around.
She also shares a real example from a major program in Houston, Texas, in one of the largest hospitals, where leaders learned a methodology called the Supportive Conversation Method, including steps for the conversation, tools for support mapping, and follow up conversations until the issue is resolved.
One line that lands hard is this.
Every organizational pain point you have is going to boil down to needing to have the right conversations.
If you lead people, if you are building culture, or if you feel the cost of avoidance showing up as time crunch, stress, division, or disconnection, this episode is for you.
Contact Jen to collaborate with her LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenmarr/
Website: https://showing-up.com
Find more episodes on our website: nickjonsson.com/limitless-podcast