Chicago Booth Review Podcast How Can Technical Leaders Improve Their People Skills?

Christine Carpenter: And so if you can just not act on the reaction, the internal reaction, it gives you space to invite other information in either from the other person or from within yourself.

Hal Weitzman: The Peter principle observes that employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence. It's a sarcastic take on corporate culture, but many of us have seen technically brilliant people get promoted into non-technical roles where they struggle to manage people and teams. Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking insights in a clear and straightforward way.

I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Christine Carpenter on people skills and leadership. What are the key skills that can help to promote transparency, innovation, and effective communication within teams? Christine Carpenter, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Christine Carpenter: Thanks for having me back.

Hal Weitzman: Well, we had such fun with you last time talking about being vulnerable and saying, "I feel" and a feeling word. So I feel so happy that you are back with us. And this time to talk about technical leaders and how they can improve their people skills. And this is a problem or an issue, maybe I shouldn't say a problem, that we're familiar with, but people are often promoted to their level of incompetence where they're no longer competent at what they're doing.

They're very good at technical tasks typically, but they move into a bigger role where they're no longer able to use their technical skills. People often say things like, "Well, when I'm with my team, I'm fine. But when I have to speak to a bigger team, then I fail or I flail."

So what do you think, if we take about this specific example of when a technical expert suddenly has to lead a team, think of a CFO who gets promoted to be the CEO or some other tech leader who suddenly comes into a leadership role, there's often friction points. What are those friction points that hold that person back from performing at their best?

Christine Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. Tech is a great example because it's very logic-based and people. As much as we like to think that we're very logical, rational people we love, we have this love affair with our big smart frontal lobes, right? Our bodies and our emotions actually are the drivers of most of our choices. And then we put the reasoning right on top of it after the fact. But in a technical role, there's a lot more logic involved.

There's a lot more certainty involved. And when you're dealing with people, it's not super logical, it's more emotional. So that's a hard leap to make. And I hear that from my students all the time where they're just like, they're coming in and wanting there to be an answer and wanting there to be a resolution. And it's like, there doesn't have to be a resolution. We're just here building relationships and communicating.

Hal Weitzman: Mm-hmm. When you talk about technical leaders, so if decisions are made, which sounds right, you say decisions are made primarily through emotions and then people post-hoc shove on the reasoning afterwards or the data, which makes a lot of sense. But I'm just wondering, that means that this isn't just an issue for when a technical leader becomes a general leader. It's an issue for anybody leading a team regardless of how technical it is.

Christine Carpenter: True. So this is why self-awareness is so important because if you understand your emotional reactions to things, it gives you a bit of a pause to really bring the intellect back into play. If you have a reaction to something and you go into action on that, if you can just sit tight for a second and parse out what all fed into that reaction, maybe there's some encoding from history that comes in there. If you can peel that off, you have a much clearer view of what you're trying to solve. And then you can intentionally bring the logic back into it.

Hal Weitzman: Mm-hmm. But it's interesting, isn't it? Because we work in a world where we're told that we have more and more data all the time, and we have decision science where we're told that there is an optimal, a better decision. Maybe the implication is there's a right decision and there's a wrong decision and people get promoted or fired on the basis of having made one or the other.

And so the whole narrative around business is typically not just in tech, but in general, typically that there is a right answer, something that played out well, and there's a wrong answer, something that was a big mistake that got someone fired. So is that harming us? That narrative?

Christine Carpenter: I think so. I think I bristle at it. I think that there is a very wide range of right and a pretty small window of what's absolutely wrong. And I think those are pretty clear most of the time. But to stay in an all or nothing black and white right or wrong mindset is super limiting.

And it paralyzes people because it's like, "Well, it's one or the other. You have a 50% chance." That's pretty terrifying. And so it shuts you down. It threatens the perfection facade that we talked about last time. And so it makes people nervous and you're not going to lead at your best if that's the position you feel like you're in.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So you talked about self-awareness, and particularly when people are transitioning from one job to another, let's imagine from a very technical team, I'm leading the IT team, and now suddenly I'm in the C-suite or whatever, that's different. So my management has to be somewhat different. How do you advise new managers to start to identify their own reaction to thing, their own triggers when they're in challenging professional situations or changing situations?

Christine Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. It's crucial. I think that people coming into new situations like that, when they're changing over into a whole different skillset, look to outside clues about how am I supposed to be? What should I be saying here? What's the right answer? What's the right decision? Because I don't want to make the wrong one, and that's the only other one. But as soon as you're looking for guidance from outside of you, it's very unstabilizing because you leave all the information of what you actually know, which is inside of you.

You leave that as your compass. And everything that they are imagining from outside of them is also based on assumption. Unless they're actively checking it out, specifically asking, they're making up a story. And when we make up stories, we almost always make them up based in our biggest fears. So someone who's already nervous in a new position is imagining criticism, is imagining, "I'm doing it wrong." Is imagining, "I'm not going to get this right."

If they can be inside themselves, they got to that role for a reason and they brought something to some table that let them sit at the bigger table. So if they can stay in touch with, here's what I do offer in terms of value, here's how I did get where I am, then it can feel grounding again like, "Oh yeah, I do know this. This didn't just leave me. So how can I build on that in this new role?"

Hal Weitzman: Okay. But self-awareness is also the ability to know, to take that criticism or to seek it out even.

Christine Carpenter: Definitely, definitely.

Hal Weitzman: Right?

Christine Carpenter: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So talk about that. On the one hand, I understand you deserve to be where you are most of the time.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Most people are not incompetent, so they deserve to be where they are, but self-awareness also requires us to solicit and learn from the feedback that we get.

Christine Carpenter: Absolutely. So getting feedback is really important. Imagining feedback, not so helpful. So being able to, and one of the biggest things and interpersonal dynamics is actually teaching them how to ask for feedback and how to give feedback in a way that keeps defenses low.

Hal Weitzman: You're talking about the class that you teach here at Chicago Booth?

Christine Carpenter: The class, yes. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So tell us how do you advise people to do that?

Christine Carpenter: So it's about staying with what you know inside of you instead of talking about what is going on for the other person. So it's like you don't care about me. So even in your body, like right now, when I say that sentence to you in an imaginary scenario, what do you feel?

Hal Weitzman: I feel a bit sad.

Christine Carpenter: Uh-huh. Okay. I love the feeling word. When I say, when you look away from me in our interview, I feel like you don't care about me. Is that better, worse, the same?

Hal Weitzman: I'm enjoying this game. It's like going to the optician. Is it better, worse, the same? When you look away, I feel like it's a bit of professional feedback. So to me that's more of a, it doesn't invoke much feeling in me. I want to learn from that.

Christine Carpenter: Okay. Okay. I'm making this up by the way, because that's not how I feel. But if I say, I notice when you look away and how it makes me feel is like maybe you're not interested, but I don't know if that's what's going on for you. So what is happening for you in those moments when you're looking away? How does that-

Hal Weitzman: How does that feel? I would think, well, I need to offer some words of comfort.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah, or correcting the record?

Hal Weitzman: Assurance. Yeah.

Christine Carpenter: Right? Yeah. So I'm making up a story that you don't care about this, you're not interested because I'm just interest-

Hal Weitzman: But your point is we rarely actually articulate those.

Christine Carpenter: Nobody ever asks that. So what I would do with-

Hal Weitzman: So it's incumbent on me to say, tell me more or to.

Christine Carpenter: It would be great if you did.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah. So I'm making an assumption about your behavior. And when I check it out with you, I'm giving you the opportunity to correct the record and say, "Oh no, when I look away, I'm just glancing at my notes so I can stay, keep the conversation going, whatever it is." And then I'm like, "Oh, so it isn't that you're disinterested in me, and so now I'm fine." But the feedback method, I started by just saying a blatant statement, "You don't care about this. You don't care about me." Right?

Hal Weitzman: I see. Okay. So the first is more accusatory versus you saying, "When you do that, it makes me feel ..."

Christine Carpenter: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: I see.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So this is kind of like a form. It's almost like a compliment to active listening where you are putting yourself into it and taking it on yourself saying, "I feel this. Your behavior makes me do this."

Christine Carpenter: Yeah, but notice also that's vulnerable because I'm revealing a feeling, an experience, and I'm inviting information in.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah. You know what's funny about this is it makes me think about how we speak to children, that we say to children, don't blame them. We tell them all the things you're doing, but then when we grow up, it's very hard to practice that ourselves. We're hypocrites.

Christine Carpenter: We are. I sometimes tell people, my clinical clients, that children have emotions exactly right because they will feel something and they will feel it at a hundred percent and they will express it at a hundred percent and then it goes and then they're fine. So they'll be having the worst day of their life in one moment, and then half hour later they're playing happily because they're done with it. It came, they expressed it, and now it's done, and adults don't do that.

Hal Weitzman: No, we don't. Well, it depends on the circumstance, I suppose. But I was asking you about how managers can sort of, I'm just thinking, I used to work in a daily newspaper, and my feeling about that was always that there was a lot of emotion, shouting, screaming, swearing, accusations.

But then in the evening we would all go to the pub together and everything would be forgotten until the next day when we went through the same cycle, emotional, drainingly cycle again. So in a way, it was a very positive environment. But I was asking you about how the managers who in these difficult professional moments, and there's sort of a trigger when I know that I'm being set off. How do you recognize those?

Christine Carpenter: So most people recognize when they're having a big reaction to something. And so part of the trick, again, is to just not go into action on what you're feeling in that moment. There's a quote that I use in class from Viktor Frankl, who is an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like between stimulus and response, there is a pause, and in that pause lies our choice and freedom.

And so if you can just not act on the reaction, the internal reaction, it gives you space to invite other information in either from the other person or from within yourself. It's reasonable to say, "I actually need to put a pin in this and come back to it. I need to think about this a little bit and come back with a clearer mind." But if something happens and suddenly we're activated around something, hurt, scared, angry, whatever it is, we don't have to do anything with that in that moment.

Hal Weitzman: Have you ever wondered what goes on inside a black hole or why time only moves in one direction? Or what is really so weird about quantum mechanics? You should listen to Why This Universe? On this podcast, you'll hear about the strangest and most interesting ideas in physics broken down by physicists Dan Hooper and Shalma Wegsman.

If you want to learn about our universe from the quantum to the cosmic, you won't want to miss Why This Universe? Part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. Christine, in the first half, we talked about the work that you do on self-awareness and self-awareness is a management skill and how technical leaders particularly struggle with people's skills and being aware of their reactions, and we talked about emotions.

So all of this is messy. Everything you've talked about is kind of messy. There aren't clear dividing lines. So I'm just wondering, what do you advise people, technical leaders or others who struggle with this sort of messiness? And on the one hand, they want to keep their defenses low. You talked about the advantage of saying, "Take your pause, go for a walk. You need to answer the question now." Or you could throw it back to the person and say, "Tell me more. I want to understand your position."

And then at some point, either you can hold all that in and be resentful and never come back to the conversation or you can come back, but you come back in a way that's professional, you set clear boundaries, you communicate your perspective effectively. What do you advise people in those sorts of situations? How do they think about keeping their defenses low, but also being very clear about their expectations and that sort of thing?

Christine Carpenter: So when you recognize that you're feeling defensive, you can internally try to set it to the side and then keep trying to engage. But sometimes the defenses don't want to go away and it gets in the way of the message. If you're truly invested in the relationship and the feedback dynamic, I would say to name the defensiveness, which again goes against a lot of what my students come in believing or the leaders that I coach aren't supposed to show that kind of vulnerability.

Hal Weitzman: So what does that sound like?

Christine Carpenter: What does it sound like to name the defensive? So if I say, okay, so I'm feeling a little defensive or on my heels, or you can, again, code the language however you want. I'm feeling a little taken aback by this, but your message is important to me. I want to be able to hear what you're saying.

So I'm going to try to set that aside for the moment. So I'm communicating value and interest in the relationship and the feedback, but authentically naming what's happening for me. In the therapy world, we have a saying that says name it, to tame it. Sometimes just putting words to something kind of dissipates it.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So I've got a 17-year-old daughter who always says, "I feel attacked."

Christine Carpenter: Oh yeah. Oh, there's a big debate about words like attacked and interpersonal dynamics because it's not really an emotion. And it's sort of adjacent to an accusation. It sort of implies that there's an intention on the other side.

Hal Weitzman: Definitely.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah. And so that's not allowed.

Hal Weitzman: Oh, okay. I'll tell her that.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: She has to say, "I feel on my heels."

Christine Carpenter: So she's telling herself a story, "You're attacking me." So when you tell yourself the story that you're being attacked, what emotion comes up for you? "I feel angry. I feel scared. I feel sad." Whatever it is.

Hal Weitzman: You just make it entirely about you and your feeling and not about the other person.

Christine Carpenter: I can't speak to the other person because I don't know. That would all be based on assumption. I can only name what's true for me.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. I know that you and I have talked about accountability. Accountability is big and sort of saying, admitting I made a mistake or whatever, that wasn't the best decision. Maybe mistakes is too strong. That wasn't the strongest, the optimal decision. There's a lot of talk in the business world about how failure is great, and yet there's hardly any real backup to that.

People don't reward failure or experiments, even though they say they do. It's kind of a mismatch, isn't there, between what people say? Failure is great, and then how they actually behave, which is no one must. If you lose a dollar, then you're fired. But how do you advise people to foster a culture where people really take ownership of mistakes? Because otherwise what happens is they overclaim the good stuff and they underclaim the bad stuff. They try and shift blame onto somebody else.

Christine Carpenter: Right. Well, when you start throwing your words around failure, failure is a big word. So making a mistake is hardly failure. And again, it gets very absolute. So are you a failure or are you a good leader? And there's a vast middle ground. So there was an error in judgment in this piece of this decision-making process. It doesn't make me a failure as a leader.

Hal Weitzman: But is it important in that case to claim it rather than saying things didn't work out? We tried something, it didn't work.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah, or blaming someone else, or yeah.

Hal Weitzman: So it's better to say, "I tried something and didn't work out as well as I thought it was going to work."

Christine Carpenter: And what did I learn from that? What did we get? How can we use it going forward? It feeds innovation. It feeds that environment where people feel comfortable also naming their own mistakes, and then they are points of learning.

Hal Weitzman: Mm-hmm. Okay. So your response basically is to model that sort of-

Christine Carpenter: Absolutely.

Hal Weitzman: How do you make sure that a team has that culture of we experiment, we break things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Christine Carpenter: So as a parent, you know the do as I say, not as I do doesn't work. Children will do what you do, model your behavior. Same thing with leaders. So if you only present a confident facade, never talk about mistakes, then you're communicating to other people that there's no room for mistakes in this team, in this conversation. But if I can say, "Yeah, oh, yep, kind of missed the ball on that one." Then other people will be more comfortable to bring that to me too.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Now we started talking about technical leaders, and we've gone a little bit away from that, but I want to come back to that idea that there's very often that an organization will call in someone like you because they want to promote or they have already promoted a technical leader, someone who's brilliant in her or his personal area of professional expertise, but frankly isn't very strong when it comes to managing people.

So that begs the question of, apart from all these things that you've talked about, like the self-awareness and accountability, all of these are important, but there's an organizational thing, isn't it, that the organization hasn't thought, "Oh, this is someone who we should teach these skills to or encourage these skills from right to the beginning." What do you advise organizations to do who find themselves repeatedly having technical people who are technically brilliant, very smart, but just not very good with people?

Christine Carpenter: In an ideal world, they'd be tracking that all along. Every step up the ladder, it's like, "Okay, well, what's different? What different skill sets do they need to learn? Where are the gaps that this new role is going to create for them in terms of good leadership?" I don't think that that happens. I think that people call me in when something is on fire and they've burned down some important relationships or the client will never work with this person again. And then they're coming in and saying, "Okay, how can you help us?"

Hal Weitzman: It's a crisis situation.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah. I think it's just taken for granted that if you are that good technically and you rise up the ladder, that the interpersonal skills are just going to follow, and they almost never do. The leadership center has programming for alumnis. Yeah. Yeah. 20, 30 years into their careers coming back here for the skills that students are getting now, the soft skills, the people skills.

Hal Weitzman: So that's presumably because there's a sense that you don't need them before then. You only need them, as you say, when it's a crisis and suddenly you realize you have no idea how to talk to people who don't know all the technical information that you know.

Christine Carpenter: Right, right. Partly. And also I think the culture is changing a little bit where I think that there is more value placed on interpersonal mastery and not just the technical stuff.

Hal Weitzman: Do you think that with AI making a lot of technical skills obsolete probably in the coming decades, that these sorts of interpersonal skills will be. Well, I assume you're going to say yes, but tell me why.

Christine Carpenter: I'm already nodding. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Will they be more highly valued?

Christine Carpenter: I think they already are. Even before AI was hot on the scene, I think they're already becoming more valued because the idea of what leadership is shifting. It's less command and control and much more collaboration and coaching. So yeah, I think AI is probably only going to magnify that.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So organizations should pay attention to not just start to train people when the house is on fire.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: What about individuals who would perhaps, because many of our MBAs get hired into very technical roles in their first couple of jobs, and then over time, they become less and less technical. And as I say, maybe those skills that they developed might be obsolete, but these other skills come into play. So if somebody recognizes that now and they're young enough to be at the beginning of that cycle, what sort of things should they be doing now to practice their people skills so that when the time comes, they get tapped on the shoulder, they're comfortable leading teams?

Christine Carpenter: Yeah. Well, taking interpersonal dynamics is a great start.

Hal Weitzman: Of course, if you're a Booth student.

Christine Carpenter: Booth student, but there are ways to get these kinds of experiences. I think one of the best ways to learn is by doing. And this kind of stuff where we have such strong mental models build up around what you can do, can't do, can say, can't say, should, shouldn't, to test it out-

Hal Weitzman: Play with those a little bit.

Christine Carpenter: ... behaviorally is really where the shift is going to happen. So seek those opportunities wherever you can. Practice with family members, with inner circle people.

Hal Weitzman: You need to change your behavior a little bit and see what happened.

Christine Carpenter: Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And so some quick ways that you could change your behavior would be the things we talked about, take accountability.

Christine Carpenter: Take accountability, reveal things about yourself that you wouldn't normally reveal, ask for feedback and listen to it. All of those kinds of things. It's across the board because relationships are relationships, and so the skills apply everywhere.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Excellent. Excellent advice. Okay. So was I looking away too much?

Christine Carpenter: Not at all.

Hal Weitzman: Okay.

Christine Carpenter: I feel very welcomed.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Thank you very much, Christine, for coming back on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Christine Carpenter: Thanks, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.