October 9, 2025 • 46 mins
Imagine walking into a locker room just moments after a crushing defeat. Players are angry, deflated, maybe even in tears — and then a sideline reporter steps up and asks the question nobody wants to hear.
That’s where Emmy Award-winning sports broadcaster and communications coach Jen Mueller thrives. With 25 years in Sports Journalism, covering high profile sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks and Mariners, and as founder of Talk Sporty to Me, Jen has mastered the art of having tough conversations under pressure.
In this episode of Sticky From The Inside, Jen reveals what leaders can learn from the sports world about facing into tough conversations with clarity, honesty, and respect. From avoiding false praise to creating psychological safety, she shares practical tools to help managers and teams tackle difficult moments without damaging trust.
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Key Takeaways- Avoidance erodes trust. Not having tough conversations leaves people guessing — and usually assuming the worst.
- Be honest with praise. Empty compliments damage credibility; accurate feedback builds respect.
- Clarity reduces fear. Preparation and specific goals make difficult conversations easier and more effective.
- Respect the person. Tough moments handled with care can strengthen relationships, not break them.
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Key MomentsThe key moments in this episode are:
0:01:10 – Why tough conversations matter more than ever in leadership 0:02:43 – Meet Jen Mueller: Emmy-winning sports journalist and communications coach 0:05:19 – From the side lines to the office: lessons from 25 years in sport 0:09:27 – Why leaders avoid tough conversations (and the cost of silence) 0:15:04 – The danger of false praise and how it kills credibility 0:21:14 – “If you’re not willing to have that conversation, you lose trust” 0:26:41 – Clarity, preparation, and why leaders shouldn’t “wing it” 0:32:38 – Respect, emotions, and reading the room under pressure 0:38:16 – Turning tough conversations into relationship-building moments 0:43:55 – Jen’s three Sticky Notes of advice
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Join The Conversation Find Andy Goram on LinkedIn here Listen to the Podcast on YouTube here Follow the Podcast on Instagram here Follow the Podcast on Twitter here Follow the Podcast on Facebook here Check out the Bizjuicer website here Get a free consultation with Andy here Check out the Bizjuicer blog here Download the podcast here ----more---- Useful Links Follow Jen Mueller on LinkedIn here Follow Jen Mueller on Instagram here Follow Jen Mueller on X here here Find the "Talk Sporty To Me" website here ----more---- Full Episode TranscriptGet the full transcript of the episode here
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Hello and welcome to Sticky from the Inside, the employee engagement podcast that looks at how to build stickier, competition smashing, consistently successful organisations from the inside out.
I'm your host Andy Goram and I'm on a mission to help more businesses turn the lights on behind the eyes of their employees, light the fires within them and create tonnes more success for everyone.
(00:39):
This podcast is for all those who believe that's something worth going after and would like a little help and guidance in achieving that.
Each episode we dive into the topics that can help create what I call stickier businesses, the sort of businesses where people thrive and love to work and where more customers stay with you and recommend you to others because they love what you do and why you do it.
(01:03):
So, if you want to take the tricky out of being sticky, listen on.
Okay then, imagine walking in to a professional sports team's locker room just moments after a crushing defeat.
Players are angry, deflated, sometimes even in tears.
(01:24):
I expect the last thing they want is a microphone shoved in their face and yet that's exactly where my guest Jen Mueller has to step up and do her thing.
As a sideline reporter for the Seattle Seahawks amongst other teams, she's made a career out of asking the toughest questions at the toughest moments.
(01:46):
When emotions are raw, answers could be unpredictable but avoidance simply isn't an option.
It's a world most of us would find intimidating but isn't there something familiar here?
In organizations, leaders and managers face their own high stakes moments, underperformance to address, feedback to give, expectations to set or reset.
(02:10):
Emotions may be different but the stakes I think are just as high and just like in sport, dodging the hard questions doesn't make the situation better and never gets to the heart of the matter.
Jen's unique perspective as an Emmy award-winning broadcaster, communications coach and founder of Talk Sporty to Me will shine a light on what it really takes to have those tough conversations we'd probably rather avoid and realize the benefits of So, how do you cut through emotion with clarity and respect?
(02:44):
How do you ask the question that no one wants to hear and yet still manage to strengthen the relationship during the process?
Well, today we'll step onto the sidelines with Jen to discover what the locker room can teach us about leadership, communication and mastering that art of tough conversations.
Welcome to the show, Jen.
(03:04):
.
Oh, well, thank you, Andy. I'm so excited for this conversation.
I've been waiting for this one.
It feels like flight forever.
It does.
The minute I saw your bio and my team is a little bit further down the coast.
I'm a Niners guy.
I have to apologize for that straight away.
That's fine.
I can see the face that you're making.
But I worked in the Bay Area for a little bit.
(03:26):
So, you know, I think I'm allowed.
I still have the ice hockey.
So, come on, that balances it out.
I'm fascinated to sort of get into this conversation today and think about the parallels between that sports focused stuff, but also the communication and coaching stuff that you do now.
(03:47):
I mean, I think that's fascinating.
But before I yap on, I gave a very, very brief introduction to you at the start.
Tell us a little bit about you.
Tell us a little bit about your journey and what you're up to today.
Well, I have been in sports broadcasting for 25 years now, thanks to a nudge from a high school guidance counselor who kind of suggested that I try broadcasting.
(04:10):
And I was always an athlete through high school and college.
I am an ultra competitive person, so I became a high school football official.
And that part fueled the sports side, the broadcasting.
Well, I come by the communication skills somewhat naturally, but I have spent years behind the scenes creating content, producing shows.
(04:31):
I have done 19 years of television broadcasting for the Seattle Mariners, and I am in year 17 on the Seahawks sidelines as part of the radio broadcast.
Wow.
That's some resume.
And this transition from the world of sports into the world of, I guess, business and organizations, has that transition for you felt seamless or has it felt kind of jarring?
(04:58):
What's it felt like?
Every week, I sit in press conferences and I am taking notes for a broadcast of some sort, right?
And I'm looking for the best soundbite from the athlete or the coach who is talking at the podium.
And if you were to ever see the notepad, because I do take these notes by hand, I'll turn the page to the side and start jotting down all of these notes that actually cross over to business.
(05:23):
When you start having these conversations, the topic is very different, right?
When you talk about the outcome of the game between the Seahawks and Niners, we are talking about a sports score, but everything that happens in sports happens in business.
And so for me, the fun is we know that we need to have the conversations.
Let's just put a few more tools in the toolkit and a few more examples that hopefully resonate with your team in a different way.
(05:51):
That phrase, know we have to have the conversations, is already kind of like sparked in my head because
my next rather obvious question, I suspect, was going to be the parallels between the
definitive job of reporting, where you're there specifically to ask questions, collect all those
things you've just talked about, soundbites, attract audiences, capture the minds of listeners
(06:14):
or watchers, and yet we're going to today talk about the lessons we can learn from that gig
for leaders.
And I'm going, well, yeah, we know we have to have some conversations, right?
And so that must be the big link, even though we're coming at it from slightly different perspectives maybe.
Well, we want high performers, we want successful teams, we want teams that work together and actually demonstrate teamwork, right?
(06:41):
That's the obvious parallel.
I will say this, here's what sports does to make all of these conversations so much easier.
Every single person who was watching the game or in the building knows what the objective is.
It is painfully obvious when you are a sports fan or an athlete or a coach what the outcome of the game should be.
(07:06):
You want your team to win and everybody knows that you win by scoring more points.
If you have agreed on that objective, all the other conversations that come after that are easier and quite honestly expected based on how you measured up to the outcome of that game.
And I'm listening to you in a little bit of awe.
(07:29):
I've already got a kind of like job crush going on here.
I'm thinking that when you start, you make it sound like dead easy and I'm sure that's tons of experience.
What was that first interaction like for you on the sidelines, right?
First gig, first game, a set of questions.
What on earth did that feel like and how did it go?
(07:52):
I remember early in my career trying to prove to people that I should be there.
Now part of that is there weren't a lot of women doing sports when I came into the industry, but the other part is I just wanted you to know that I knew what I was talking about.
And so I spent far more time in conversation in the relationship building stage trying to prove to people that my resume showed that I should be there.
(08:18):
Athletes don't care.
They don't care what you've done.
They care about how you make them feel in the moment and how that interaction goes, right?
The second thing I did, because I truly am a people person and I care deeply about people, anytime I was faced with the tough question and the tough conversation, I tried to sidestep it.
(08:39):
I tried to make it easier.
I gave this preamble.
I tried to give them the easy out.
I know that didn't go the way you wanted to.
I've seen you make that play so many times.
I know that it's a disappointing outcome.
And the athlete is just standing there and you can see the frustration on their face because all they want you to do is ask the question you came there to ask.
(09:02):
And so it was a lot of uncomfortable conversations because I couldn't get out of the way of myself and how I kept thinking about myself in those conversations, not the person I was talking to.
That's really interesting because I think maybe one of the differences is in the expectation.
(09:22):
So if the sports person is expecting the conversation and you're almost excusing the conversation, there's conflict and tension there, right?
And they're going, just get on with it, Jen.
Will you just ask?
I know what's coming.
Whereas maybe it's a poor experience, but I think the other side of it in organisations can be that, well, people don't want to hear the question actually.
(09:46):
And so their expectation may be different.
Well, that's true.
But I also think that comes back to, is everybody clear on the objective?
You know, most people would like to be a high performer, right?
If they're working on your team, they want to do good work.
They want to do something that is meaningful, that is valuable.
They need that feedback.
(10:07):
You know, most people would love to know how to get better.
We avoid the conversation about feedback because it sounds like it's icky and sticky and it sounds like something that I don't want to be a part of.
But if everybody is in agreement that this is what a win looks like, and I don't just mean for the company, I mean for your specific team or your part of the business.
(10:29):
If you don't measure up, but you come close or you get halfway or you get 75%, right?
I do think people want to know how to close that gap.
High performers do, people who want to be successful.
And even if they're only thinking about themselves, closing that gap could make the difference between their next promotion or their next rates.
(10:49):
And they want that information.
Which I guess is you and me, you talk about, or I phrased it as excusing the question.
You talked about sort of skirting around it and being nice and trying to excuse it.
That false praise, I guess, maybe to give it some sort of label, probably really affects what you get back as well, right?
(11:12):
So if you're kind of buttering up this player, you're not really going to get the hard facts, the soundbite, the information that you're really looking for.
So there's two things when it comes to false praise.
I have seen people do this to athletes on the way into a locker room.
They try, after a loss, right?
They'll try to tell him, Hey, good job.
You played hard.
(11:33):
Hey, you'll get them next time.
A professional athlete does not want to hear that.
That is not met with enthusiasm, right?
It's different than when you talk to a little league team who needs the encouragement to get back out onto the field, right?
They know that they screwed up.
They know they dropped the pass.
They made the error.
They missed the free throw.
They know what they did wrong.
(11:55):
What they need is for you to accurately name that and ask the question.
But false praise gets us in trouble a lot in a business setting, and in sports, we're pretty good at avoiding it.
A coach will never say that a player did a great job when what they actually did was the job they were supposed to do.
(12:16):
We often back ourselves into a corner when we hand out praise that sounds like, Hey, great job.
Great job.
Thanks for doing a great job.
Boy, you did a great job.
We need to pull back and say, Wait a minute.
Should I be praising them for doing a great job, or should I be acknowledging that they did their job?
And I realize that doesn't sound very sexy, but the compliment sounds like this.
(12:41):
I knew I could count on you to get that job done.
Thanks for coming through.
Or you did exactly what we needed in that moment.
Well done.
And here's why this matters.
Number one, you were acknowledging an accomplishment, a success, an effort.
And number two, when it comes time to actually giving feedback, there is an expectation and there's an acknowledgement of where we can get better.
(13:08):
If the only thing I ever hear is great job, and you come to me and you say, Yeah, but Jen, we're going to need you to work on X, Y, and Z.
I'm going to say, Hold on, Andy.
You've been telling me I'm doing a great job.
Yeah.
Well, where is this coming from?
And when you get very specific and you choose your words carefully on the front side of that conversation, meaning praising somebody, that feedback isn't so unexpected.
(13:34):
And in fact, they want to know how to get that praise next time.
And consistency is a massive part in that, right?
So people do, maybe they don't like it the first time, but then they come to expect it, come to trust you, come to respect you for it.
There's a lot of parallels here with the sort of radical candor approach, right?
And instead of living in that ruinous empathy box, trying to sweeten everything, you're being direct, but showing that you're there for them.
(14:00):
Well, and it's being accurate.
So when I speak to corporate audiences, I will put an exercise on the board.
I'll put all sorts of words on the board or on the PowerPoint that could describe a performance, right?
So outstanding, superb, excellent, clutch, all of these things.
And I will have them rank those words in order of what resonates with them.
(14:23):
The answers are across the board, which goes to show, right, the radical candor right there.
It's not necessarily tough to tell somebody that you came through in the clutch.
But when you make that distinction, it hits their heart in a different way.
And now you have all the things that you were hoping to get from your team member, from your employee, right?
(14:46):
You've got trust, rapport, buy-in, they feel value.
And it's fascinating to watch what changing one word and one compliment and one interaction does for morale of a team.
Yeah.
And I interpret what you're talking about, about fostering that genuine connection, right?
And you talk about trust and respect and credibility.
(15:07):
And interestingly, you talked earlier about trying to prove your credibility with other things.
But actually, the way you're questioning, the way you show up, the fact that you ask the tough questions, the fact that you don't let someone off the hook, that's the credibility, right?
And I think that's where the parallel I see in effective management or leadership of people comes from that credibility, reliability, sense of intimacy, that, you know, someone is there for you and doing the right thing by you.
(15:34):
And I'm also talking to these guys at other times.
I don't just show up to do the post-game interview.
They don't just see me once a week.
That's another thing.
Leaders and managers, you are around your team all the time.
When you consistently show up and show up for something more than just work.
And maybe that's the small talk that you don't think matters.
(15:56):
But a single word or a 15-second exchange, which is all I get most of the time with these guys in the locker room, it goes a long way in building that consistency and trust.
And so now, if you know that I'm going to show up, and I do care about you, whether you win or lose, whether you catch the touchdown pass, whether you had four drops in the game, I still am going to come and talk to you because you matter to me regardless of the result.
(16:24):
That's the other part of being able to go in and have these conversations.
It's much easier to have a conversation, a decent conversation, an honest conversation with someone you have some sort of relationship with on an ongoing basis than the occasional stranger who turns up and asks you a tough question.
It's much easier to bail out of that on both sides, to be fair.
(16:45):
Yes, absolutely.
I love this stuff.
I read somewhere, it probably was in your bio or something, which really stuck in my mind, around storytelling.
And I think you said something along the lines that losses create better stories.
And actually, you also add that to actually build stronger teams as well.
(17:09):
Can you just unpack that little concept for me?
I love the whole idea of storytelling.
Obviously, we want to have high-performing, strong teams, and just how the facing into losses piece all comes together.
I'm fascinated by that.
So let me start on the other side of that conversation.
Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Rowley is having a historic year.
(17:30):
He is doing things that nobody in the history of baseball has ever done.
I have interviewed Cal Rowley more times than I can count.
And I love the conversations.
There are only so many questions you can ask about a home run.
And trust me, I have asked them all.
I have asked them on back-to-back nights.
I have asked them about historic home runs.
(17:51):
The conversation, there's only so much you can talk about.
It's fun.
It's celebratory.
But on the other side of this, when you start digging into where we fell short, and where I can get better, and how this didn't translate from practice to the game like we thought when we installed the game plan, how we know this is the area that we need to work on next week.
(18:16):
When you start identifying that, both as a team and an individual, now, first of all, we've got some vulnerability.
And these questions, by the way, I am not an interrogator.
I'm not trying to get you to confess to what you did wrong.
And the cookie that you stole from the cookie jar, like I'm not trying to do that.
I'm giving you a platform to tell your side of the story.
(18:39):
So if we think about that as the story, now I've identified where we need to have some heroic acts next week, or we need to see the improvement over here.
When you start talking about where you can improve, number one, you admit you don't know everything.
Now your teammates rally around you.
(18:59):
That's what happens in a locker room.
The guy who makes the mistake, or the gal who makes the mistake, or doesn't come through, they might sit at their locker by themselves for a while to process.
And then you watch everybody come over and say, Hey, you're going to get it next time.
No problem.
We know that you're that you're going to come through.
We trust you.
(19:20):
Now you've actually got people that are coming through to help you.
And when you do succeed, you get to be the hero of your own story.
And every good story, the lessons learned came through the valleys, not the peaks, right?
Like, it's all kind of part of it.
And the way that I think about a postgame interview, we're just talking about your day at work.
(19:44):
That's all we're doing.
And so if you can talk about your day at work, honestly, now we know like where that story is going to get better and better and better as you build.
And I'm, I'm assuming it's the same for sports guys.
God, I wish I was a sports guy, but I'm assuming it's the same for sports guys in that growth really comes from struggle and being uncomfortable.
(20:12):
You know, when things are kind of ticking, you don't want to change anything, particularly maybe sports guys superstitious that they can be, Hey, I ain't changing a thing.
And this is as good as it's going to get.
Is that a truism do you think?
Yes.
They don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to jinx it.
Now, some are more superstitious, but more often than not, it is like pulling teeth to get those guys to talk about their success, right?
(20:36):
They're not going to tell you that they weren't successful because you just saw them hit the game winning home run.
They don't want to talk about how they got there because I mean, partly it was the practice and the routine, right?
You put a good swing on the ball because you'd practice and it was routine.
It's not because it was an extra, extra extraordinary, extraordinary effort from you.
(20:56):
There's, there's no real story to tell on that one.
After they do something, well, they actually want to shine the spotlight on their teammate has been my experience in those interviews more often than not, when they come up short, they can detail exactly what happened, what happened on the air, what, what they should have been doing instead, when they took their eye off the ball.
Now, those answers are going to be much shorter, most of the time.
(21:23):
But there is a lot of honesty and introspection that happens.
And again, it's because they know what the objective is.
Everybody agreed on the objective ahead of time.
And they expect that if they don't meet that objective, there is going to be a conversation about it.
Yeah, I could dig into this forever, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna maybe ask one weird, weird, I don't know.
(21:43):
It's a, it's a question, Jen.
If you think back to your first experience, and how you handled yourself in those first conversations to the slick Emmy award winning individual that I'm speaking to now, what's been the biggest change in your approach?
Do you think that actually that's a knock on for facing into feedback and conversations going forward?
(22:08):
It is being very specific and direct in how I ask the question.
It's getting that question that you think is the hardest one out of the way first.
What happened on the air in the seventh inning?
That is it.
We're not going to sidestep it.
What happened there?
I'm not instead of saying things like, well, tell me what happened on that play.
(22:30):
There's a lot of different ways I could take that.
There's only going to be one answer to the question that I asked.
And that is actually being very kind in the moment.
Right.
And I think we lean on open ended questions, and the assumption that people are going to respond to us, which they do.
(22:50):
But trust in those moments, particularly the tough moments is removing all doubt, so that I can truly know I'm not going to look stupid when I answer this question.
And that I am giving you exactly what it is that you are looking for in this conversation.
That, to me, is creating a safe space.
(23:10):
It is not comfortable all the time for me to be very direct and ask you about the mistake that, oh, by the way, could cost you your job tomorrow.
These guys might not be there when I walk into the locker room the next day, right?
But I know that that is the best way for them to receive the information and for them to succeed in the conversation.
(23:31):
.
Yeah, I was just listening to you.
And just as you uttered the words about safe space, I'd written down psychological safety here.
This is about creating that environment, right, where these things can happen.
I don't know what you think about this.
Maybe it's the sort of rooms I end up going into.
But I find in organizations, groups, when I'm working with a group, groups find it far easier to talk about their problems and the issues inside businesses than they talk about the successes.
(24:00):
It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get the success stuff out, right?
But in a group, hey, we can talk about all the shit that's gone on and the problems that we've got and how bad this has been or how bad that department is.
And yet, and this is what I find the interesting transition.
When it comes to the one on one stuff, where we need to address some of these issues.
(24:22):
This is where too many people avoid stepping in at this point and having having those tougher conversations.
What do you think is lying behind that?
I'm going to say reluctance or silence or even confidence in having that sort of conversation.
(24:44):
In your experience, and you're inside organizations now helping people deal with this sort of stuff.
What do you see?
Do you see similar things or different things?
I do see similar things.
And I think it comes down to we are always afraid of what that answer could be.
We're playing that conversation out in our head, but it's only through our lens.
(25:04):
We're not necessarily thinking about how it could go on the other side.
And we're psyching ourselves out before we even get there.
I was typing an email the other day, and I was asking for a very specific piece of feedback.
And I found myself erasing and deleting and typing and retyping because I was trying to control the outcome.
And I was trying to control the response I was going to get back.
(25:28):
The response is what the response was always going to be.
I can't add any more language to this email to force somebody to make a decision that they weren't already going to make, right?
And that's, part of it is giving up control.
And just knowing that you have to have the conversation.
(25:49):
And are you equipped with the skills to handle what happens next?
Right?
Can you deal with, yeah, OK, I need to do some, some self-reflection and some person, you know, some, some, we call it self-scouting in sports.
Right?
I need to do some self-scouting.
You're right.
That is exactly right.
Or understanding how you are going to deal with any sort of conflict.
(26:11):
But you can't be afraid of what the outcome is before you even get started with that conversation.
I just think that's such a great point.
That often, I think you're right.
I think people have already decided what they believe the issue and the solution and the problem all are and how the person is going to react.
There's, there's a lack of curiosity.
(26:32):
I think sometimes going into those conversations and then we have leapt to our normal defensive position of, Oh, this is going to be bad.
They're going to react badly.
They're going to stab me or something along those lines.
There's something that's going to go wrong.
Right?
And we, we leave all the curiosity behind and then we're trying to react rather than respond to what's going on in the conversation.
(26:54):
Do you think that's true?
Yes.
And I think oftentimes we're preparing for a fight instead of preparing for a conversation.
I mean, confrontation and conversation are spelt differently.
I mean, they sound very similar, but they are spelt differently for reasons.
They are.
And, you know, I would also say this, I keep saying it is about do, are people clear on the objective?
(27:17):
There is a formula that I use on this and it helps when you get into the situation of needing the accountability in the conversation.
So when I am talking to somebody, sending an email, having an interaction, I'm always going to include ETA.
ETA normally stands for estimated time of arrival, but I did this on purpose so that every time you get into your car, you will think about this.
(27:42):
It is expectation, timeline, and action item.
All three of these elements need to be in every single one of your interactions for a number of reasons.
We need to be very clear on what it is that we're doing.
We need to get buy-in.
And it gives us a way to build trust while also a mechanism for accountability.
(28:09):
So here's what it sounds like.
If I am asking for an interview, I could just ask the question, do you have time for an interview today?
Yeah.
You're probably going to say yes.
You may or may not realize that I need to have this interview done in the next 20 minutes.
It's only going to take two questions.
And I promise this is a topic you can talk about because it is on the quarterback matchup for Sunday.
(28:36):
OK.
If I were to say to you, do you have time to answer two questions about the quarterback matchup on Sunday?
I can find you before practice.
I just level set the conversation.
Everybody knows exactly what's going to happen.
When I ask two questions about the quarterback matchup and I find you, I just built trust because I did what I said I was going to do.
(28:59):
If you will agree to all of those elements, and you don't show up for that interview, I have a much easier way to circle back around and say, did we get our wires crossed?
I thought I was going to find you before practice.
Transfer this over to a business situation, and we'll just pick a very general topic, right?
(29:20):
Could you get me the Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on Thursday?
Now, you're either going to say yes or no.
You could come back and you could say, actually, I'm going to be out of town.
Could I get it to you Monday at 10 a.m.? Great.
Now, this is where a negotiation takes place, by the way.
(29:41):
We're going to negotiate the terms up front of what the objective is going to be.
I say, no, I really need it to be by 4 o'clock on Thursday.
You say, OK, fine.
I will get you the Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on Thursday.
We are in agreement.
You get a chance to build trust with me because you get a chance to give me Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on If you don't, I, as your manager, can go back to you and say, Andy, we agreed that you were going to have this done by this time on this date.
(30:13):
I can be very curious and compassionate and say, is everything OK?
Number two, what got in the way of you completing this assignment?
Number three, what do you need to complete this assignment?
Right?
And now, because we've already agreed, that conversation is expected.
I don't have to guess.
(30:35):
When should I go back to Andy and ask, is he going to send me that email?
Does he realize I can't go pick up my kids until he sends me this email?
Now I'm just irritated at you for what you think is no real reason.
Yeah.
I also, that's a less binary conversation.
There's still the personal integrity piece within there.
Right.
And the relationship is still being maintained within that conversation.
(30:57):
It could still be edgy, but I tell you what, I'm also, I mean, ETA, I've got it.
I'm in it.
I will take that forward.
You mentioned the word accountability.
I'm interested in your thoughts and observations on this, how this is related to the topic.
I'm not entirely sure, but, um, from your interaction with lots and lots of athletes and in the sort of conversations you've been talking about, they are having to face into accountability as individuals and teams every day, maybe because come back to the objective being incredibly clear or the game plan being incredibly clear.
(31:33):
And we either hit it or we didn't individually or collectively.
What can we learn in organizations about accountability and facing into it and dealing with it and not being necessarily derailed by it?
Because I think accountability, responsibility, however you cut it, is still a funny old topic inside organizations.
(31:55):
People talk about it a lot.
They don't really want it.
They'll avoid it if they can.
Yep.
So in sports in general, your accountability is tied to culture and messaging.
It is also expected that it will take place immediately.
So if you think about an NFL season, that game gets over, you get about 10 or 15 minutes to gather your thoughts.
(32:20):
Then the media gets let into the locker room.
Your position coach will have sent some sort of a message group text.
You know what time meetings are going to start on Monday morning.
You were expected to have gone through that game by Monday morning because you were going to sit down in a large group and then in smaller groups and dissect what happened, good or bad.
(32:40):
That is built into the schedule.
Pete Carroll, the Seahawks head coach, used to call it tell the truth Monday.
And it was an every Monday thing, whether it was good or bad.
And I think that's the other part.
Accountability can't just be when you do something wrong.
It also has to be when you do something right.
And if I can tie it back to the company culture or the motto of the defensive line room or the motto of the wide receiver room.
(33:09):
And I say, you know, look, our job, you know, we were trying to do this.
Our motto is to strip the ball out, get the ball out, right?
Get the ball on the ground, right?
Our motto for the defensive line, get the ball on the ground.
Okay?
Not only did we not get the ball on the ground, but here's a couple of ways, guys, that we need to step up our game to make that possible.
(33:33):
And so you're always bringing accountability back to the team, the culture, the room.
It's not a personal, it's not personal with me, the leader, right?
Like, because my standards might change based on how I'm dealing from day to day, right?
Again, we've already set up the framework.
We're measuring against the framework.
I love the cultural point because I think, well, two or three points in there.
(33:58):
I really resonate with, I think accountability becoming a regular conversation, I think is absolutely critical when it's out of the blue or only comes out of the woodwork when something has hit the fan, then it has a sort of smell and a tinge to it that people are going to want to avoid it.
Whereas ownership for problems that have happened as a team, as an individual on a regular basis, it becomes normal, but also taking accountability for the good stuff that's happened because I see too many people not want to talk about the good stuff because it's braggy or they feel awkward about it because it's not a normal conversation.
(34:34):
So I think that regularity thing is great and coupled with the good and bad elements.
I think that is fantastic.
And I think whether it's psychological safety, whether it's culture, I think they all kind of merge because it is the environment that I think a leader creates where those conversations are regular, are about good, are about bad, are about team, are about individual, aren't personalized unnecessarily.
(34:58):
So don't come with stigma attached to them.
That's the environment we want to try and create because that's what stimulates, your words, great high performance on a sustainable basis.
I think that's a great example, Jen.
I absolutely love that.
Gosh, maybe there's something in this clarity and prep that I'm picking up from you as well, because you just said, I don't just pitch up, Andy, and ask questions on the day.
(35:28):
There's prep.
And explain to me your process on clarity and preparation, because I suspect whilst you might have to have reactive questions, things have happened, I bet you probably bloody thought about that before things happened.
So in this scenario, what would I do?
Talk to me about that.
(35:49):
So I do go into locker rooms and every single interview I do with questions that are already written out.
Each question only has one objective.
I am very clear as to what I am trying to get out of that question, because when I am clear on what I need, I can ask it in a way that makes it clear for the athlete that I'm talking to.
(36:09):
I will start writing down questions in the first quarter of a football game, in the first inning of a baseball game, because if we expect to show up, authentically, and to be present in these high stakes moments, your brain will be so overloaded and so panicked and freaked out, you're not going to achieve your actual goal or your outcome.
(36:32):
And you're not going to be able to hear and be reactive.
I spend a lot of time just watching these guys, you know, I might have an hour to be in the locker room, the guy that I need to talk to might show up with five minutes left, right of that hour.
And so the first 55 minutes of it looks like it's a waste of time.
There's a lot of time spent just watching people, watching them interact.
(36:56):
You know their personalities.
Not all questions are equal.
I don't ask a defensive lineman the same question that I ask a quarterback or a wide receiver just based on personality types, right?
It's understanding what they're capable of in the moment.
But when it comes to the actual questions, I need to know how I would answer that question.
And I say that not because I know what it feels like to catch the game winning touchdown pass or to drop it.
(37:24):
I do know what it feels like to experience an embarrassing failure where I feel like I let my team down.
So I'm going to choose my words very carefully and how I do that.
And I'm not going to assume that I knew what that outcome was supposed to be.
I mean, every sports fan does that.
It's like, oh man, he blew the play.
He should have gone there.
(37:44):
You know, that guy, he wasn't in the right coverage.
You actually don't know that until you get into the locker room.
And so it's taking my assumption out of it and simply asking what happened on that play, what went wrong on that play, what was supposed to happen on that play.
(38:05):
Those are not emotionally charged questions.
Those are fact-finding questions.
They're coaching questions from a management leadership perspective.
They are perfect coaching questions.
Just suspending assumption and personal belief in what happened in that situation and coming with that, coming with the C word we talked about before, curiosity, right?
(38:29):
What happened?
Was that supposed to happen?
What made that happen?
What would we do differently next time?
Those are the questions that elicit thought and response rather than, I think, questions that come loaded with assumption.
You really screwed that up, didn't you?
But bang, I'm into reaction, not response, right?
(38:53):
I think that's really, really interesting.
But how easy is it to dispel that assumption?
(39:34):
I think that stance is great, putting the ego aside.
Really, really important, because you are, I guess, having to read and adapt to the emotional landscape that's in front of you, right?
And that takes practice and experience.
It's not just a God-given right to get that right, is it?
(39:56):
No.
And I will tell you, though, I will tell you, after a loss, and the most crushing loss that I have ever had to cover was the Seahawks' Super Bowl loss against the Patriots.
There was an interception on the one-yard line with 30 seconds to play, and it was crushing.
When you see grown men crying, throwing things, yelling, first of all, that is an emotionally charged environment.
(40:19):
You do not need any more of my emotion.
You do not need me to show up with anything more than just a sense that I am here to do my job, and I'm not going to step in the middle of this.
Sometimes it's easy to read that emotion.
Sometimes it is just understanding, I don't know what happened in the seconds before I walked in.
I have no idea if the coach just chewed him out.
(40:40):
I have no idea if they just got a phone call from their partner at home.
The kids are sick, and now they're dealing with something else that actually had nothing to do with the game, right?
You're taking yourself out of that and letting that emotion be.
Sometimes it's easier to see than you might think.
Well, I think that's really cool because this whole emotionally mirroring thing, I think, can get conflated sometimes.
(41:07):
I mean, if we really do take a breath, we probably know that if someone is shouting and screaming at us, it's probably not a good idea to shout and scream back because that's only going to escalate.
Yeah, it's also why I give guys options, right?
And so I think we should use this in business when we can.
These guys do not have to talk to me.
If they don't want to talk to me after a loss, I'm not going to press them because, again, I don't know what's going on on the other side of it.
(41:33):
And I will say, totally understand.
I will talk to you next week.
Or sometimes they will say, I can talk to you, but I can't do it right now.
I will wait until after, you know, you showered, you met with the trainer, you know, you've done whatever.
In business, anytime we can give somebody an option, it gives them more agency.
(41:53):
Now, I'm not saying you push this conversation off for weeks, but if you say, I know that we're going to need to have 20 minutes to talk about, fill in the blank on whatever that is, I am available between 1 o'clock and 6 p.m. today.
It doesn't change the conversation.
But when I get a chance to choose my time with you, now I am less defensive because my brain isn't attacked.
(42:20):
I got a little bit of a say in how I was going to approach that conversation.
And I can see your ETA thing in there.
I'm just minded to ask you, how do clients react to that position of, hang on, I need to find out now.
I'm going now.
He's going to tell me, she's going to tell me now.
You know what?
(42:41):
It doesn't do any good to force somebody to have a conversation if they're not ready.
It can ruin the relationship.
You're not going to get the answer.
This, again, is about understanding personality types, the energy in the room, the person that you're talking to.
It's just, I've tried to do that in my younger days.
It does not work.
I think your line of, be the human in the room, is just classic.
(43:04):
I think that is a little memory jog for most of us when we're in the moment, facing a tough situation.
Someone needs to be the adult.
Someone needs to be the voice of reason and calm.
Still getting to the point, not avoiding, but playing on the emotions, I don't think, is the right approach.
(43:26):
So being the human in the room is great.
Jen, this is a ridiculous conversation because it has flown by.
I can't believe I'm sitting with a sports journalist and I'm not getting to dig into some of the geeky stuff I would like to dig into.
What an opportunity.
I have loved this conversation, but somehow we've got to try and pull this together in a summary for today.
(43:48):
And you, my goodness me, you have left little helpful bombs throughout this conversation today.
But if I was to use my little segment called sticky notes, I'm going to ask you to give me three little pieces of advice that we could stick on some sticky notes and we'll whack them on the Instagram channel.
Some practical takeaways for having tough conversations, but I guess illustrating your point that giving feedback or having these tougher conversations does not need to end up or feel confrontational.
(44:19):
What would your three bits of advice be, my friend?
I would say be very clear on the objective and make sure everyone knows the objective and is in agreement.
Number two, give accurate praise so that there's leeway to give actionable feedback.
(44:41):
And number three, recognize the human in front of you and know that it won't always go the way that you had hoped, but that you have tools to make things better on the other side.
I love those.
(45:02):
They are three great sticky notes.
And for me, this has been a great conversation.
Before I let you go, Jen, if people want to track you down and find out more about you, a bit more about all of the things that you've got going on, where should they find you?
Where should they look?
Well, my website is probably the best place.
(45:23):
It is all-encompassing, TalkSportyToMe.com.
You can find me on just about every social platform that way, and on LinkedIn as well, Jen Mueller, TalkSportyToMe.
Brilliant.
Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting you.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I look forward to the next conversation and seeing what you get up to next.
(45:44):
Thanks so much for coming on.
Oh, fantastic.
Thanks, Andy.
I've enjoyed it.
Okay, brilliant.
Well, okay, everyone, that was Jen Mueller.
And if you'd like to find out a bit more about her or any of the things that we've talked about in today's episode, please check out the show notes.
So, that concludes today's episode.
(46:04):
I hope you've enjoyed it, found it interesting, and heard something maybe that will help you become a stickier, more successful business from the inside going forward.
If you have, please like, comment, and subscribe.
It really helps.
I'm Andy Goram, and you've been listening to the Sticky from the Inside podcast.
(46:25):
Until next time, thanks for listening.
Hello and welcome to Sticky from the Inside, the employee engagement podcast that looks at how to build stickier, competition smashing, consistently successful organisations from the inside out.
I'm your host Andy Goram and I'm on a mission to help more businesses turn the lights on behind the eyes of their employees, light the fires within them and create tonnes more success for everyone.
(00:39):
This podcast is for all those who believe that's something worth going after and would like a little help and guidance in achieving that.
Each episode we dive into the topics that can help create what I call stickier businesses, the sort of businesses where people thrive and love to work and where more customers stay with you and recommend you to others because they love what you do and why you do it.
(01:03):
So, if you want to take the tricky out of being sticky, listen on.
Okay then, imagine walking in to a professional sports team's locker room just moments after a crushing defeat.
Players are angry, deflated, sometimes even in tears.
(01:24):
I expect the last thing they want is a microphone shoved in their face and yet that's exactly where my guest Jen Mueller has to step up and do her thing.
As a sideline reporter for the Seattle Seahawks amongst other teams, she's made a career out of asking the toughest questions at the toughest moments.
(01:46):
When emotions are raw, answers could be unpredictable but avoidance simply isn't an option.
It's a world most of us would find intimidating but isn't there something familiar here?
In organizations, leaders and managers face their own high stakes moments, underperformance to address, feedback to give, expectations to set or reset.
(02:10):
Emotions may be different but the stakes I think are just as high and just like in sport, dodging the hard questions doesn't make the situation better and never gets to the heart of the matter.
Jen's unique perspective as an Emmy award-winning broadcaster, communications coach and founder of Talk Sporty to Me will shine a light on what it really takes to have those tough conversations we'd probably rather avoid and realize the benefits of So, how do you cut through emotion with clarity and respect?
(02:44):
How do you ask the question that no one wants to hear and yet still manage to strengthen the relationship during the process?
Well, today we'll step onto the sidelines with Jen to discover what the locker room can teach us about leadership, communication and mastering that art of tough conversations.
Welcome to the show, Jen.
(03:04):
.
Oh, well, thank you, Andy. I'm so excited for this conversation.
I've been waiting for this one.
It feels like flight forever.
It does.
The minute I saw your bio and my team is a little bit further down the coast.
I'm a Niners guy.
I have to apologize for that straight away.
That's fine.
I can see the face that you're making.
But I worked in the Bay Area for a little bit.
(03:26):
So, you know, I think I'm allowed.
I still have the ice hockey.
So, come on, that balances it out.
I'm fascinated to sort of get into this conversation today and think about the parallels between that sports focused stuff, but also the communication and coaching stuff that you do now.
(03:47):
I mean, I think that's fascinating.
But before I yap on, I gave a very, very brief introduction to you at the start.
Tell us a little bit about you.
Tell us a little bit about your journey and what you're up to today.
Well, I have been in sports broadcasting for 25 years now, thanks to a nudge from a high school guidance counselor who kind of suggested that I try broadcasting.
(04:10):
And I was always an athlete through high school and college.
I am an ultra competitive person, so I became a high school football official.
And that part fueled the sports side, the broadcasting.
Well, I come by the communication skills somewhat naturally, but I have spent years behind the scenes creating content, producing shows.
(04:31):
I have done 19 years of television broadcasting for the Seattle Mariners, and I am in year 17 on the Seahawks sidelines as part of the radio broadcast.
Wow.
That's some resume.
And this transition from the world of sports into the world of, I guess, business and organizations, has that transition for you felt seamless or has it felt kind of jarring?
(04:58):
What's it felt like?
Every week, I sit in press conferences and I am taking notes for a broadcast of some sort, right?
And I'm looking for the best soundbite from the athlete or the coach who is talking at the podium.
And if you were to ever see the notepad, because I do take these notes by hand, I'll turn the page to the side and start jotting down all of these notes that actually cross over to business.
(05:23):
When you start having these conversations, the topic is very different, right?
When you talk about the outcome of the game between the Seahawks and Niners, we are talking about a sports score, but everything that happens in sports happens in business.
And so for me, the fun is we know that we need to have the conversations.
Let's just put a few more tools in the toolkit and a few more examples that hopefully resonate with your team in a different way.
(05:51):
That phrase, know we have to have the conversations, is already kind of like sparked in my head because
my next rather obvious question, I suspect, was going to be the parallels between the
definitive job of reporting, where you're there specifically to ask questions, collect all those
things you've just talked about, soundbites, attract audiences, capture the minds of listeners
(06:14):
or watchers, and yet we're going to today talk about the lessons we can learn from that gig
for leaders.
And I'm going, well, yeah, we know we have to have some conversations, right?
And so that must be the big link, even though we're coming at it from slightly different perspectives maybe.
Well, we want high performers, we want successful teams, we want teams that work together and actually demonstrate teamwork, right?
(06:41):
That's the obvious parallel.
I will say this, here's what sports does to make all of these conversations so much easier.
Every single person who was watching the game or in the building knows what the objective is.
It is painfully obvious when you are a sports fan or an athlete or a coach what the outcome of the game should be.
(07:06):
You want your team to win and everybody knows that you win by scoring more points.
If you have agreed on that objective, all the other conversations that come after that are easier and quite honestly expected based on how you measured up to the outcome of that game.
And I'm listening to you in a little bit of awe.
(07:29):
I've already got a kind of like job crush going on here.
I'm thinking that when you start, you make it sound like dead easy and I'm sure that's tons of experience.
What was that first interaction like for you on the sidelines, right?
First gig, first game, a set of questions.
What on earth did that feel like and how did it go?
(07:52):
I remember early in my career trying to prove to people that I should be there.
Now part of that is there weren't a lot of women doing sports when I came into the industry, but the other part is I just wanted you to know that I knew what I was talking about.
And so I spent far more time in conversation in the relationship building stage trying to prove to people that my resume showed that I should be there.
(08:18):
Athletes don't care.
They don't care what you've done.
They care about how you make them feel in the moment and how that interaction goes, right?
The second thing I did, because I truly am a people person and I care deeply about people, anytime I was faced with the tough question and the tough conversation, I tried to sidestep it.
(08:39):
I tried to make it easier.
I gave this preamble.
I tried to give them the easy out.
I know that didn't go the way you wanted to.
I've seen you make that play so many times.
I know that it's a disappointing outcome.
And the athlete is just standing there and you can see the frustration on their face because all they want you to do is ask the question you came there to ask.
(09:02):
And so it was a lot of uncomfortable conversations because I couldn't get out of the way of myself and how I kept thinking about myself in those conversations, not the person I was talking to.
That's really interesting because I think maybe one of the differences is in the expectation.
(09:22):
So if the sports person is expecting the conversation and you're almost excusing the conversation, there's conflict and tension there, right?
And they're going, just get on with it, Jen.
Will you just ask?
I know what's coming.
Whereas maybe it's a poor experience, but I think the other side of it in organisations can be that, well, people don't want to hear the question actually.
(09:46):
And so their expectation may be different.
Well, that's true.
But I also think that comes back to, is everybody clear on the objective?
You know, most people would like to be a high performer, right?
If they're working on your team, they want to do good work.
They want to do something that is meaningful, that is valuable.
They need that feedback.
(10:07):
You know, most people would love to know how to get better.
We avoid the conversation about feedback because it sounds like it's icky and sticky and it sounds like something that I don't want to be a part of.
But if everybody is in agreement that this is what a win looks like, and I don't just mean for the company, I mean for your specific team or your part of the business.
(10:29):
If you don't measure up, but you come close or you get halfway or you get 75%, right?
I do think people want to know how to close that gap.
High performers do, people who want to be successful.
And even if they're only thinking about themselves, closing that gap could make the difference between their next promotion or their next rates.
(10:49):
And they want that information.
Which I guess is you and me, you talk about, or I phrased it as excusing the question.
You talked about sort of skirting around it and being nice and trying to excuse it.
That false praise, I guess, maybe to give it some sort of label, probably really affects what you get back as well, right?
(11:12):
So if you're kind of buttering up this player, you're not really going to get the hard facts, the soundbite, the information that you're really looking for.
So there's two things when it comes to false praise.
I have seen people do this to athletes on the way into a locker room.
They try, after a loss, right?
They'll try to tell him, Hey, good job.
You played hard.
(11:33):
Hey, you'll get them next time.
A professional athlete does not want to hear that.
That is not met with enthusiasm, right?
It's different than when you talk to a little league team who needs the encouragement to get back out onto the field, right?
They know that they screwed up.
They know they dropped the pass.
They made the error.
They missed the free throw.
They know what they did wrong.
(11:55):
What they need is for you to accurately name that and ask the question.
But false praise gets us in trouble a lot in a business setting, and in sports, we're pretty good at avoiding it.
A coach will never say that a player did a great job when what they actually did was the job they were supposed to do.
(12:16):
We often back ourselves into a corner when we hand out praise that sounds like, Hey, great job.
Great job.
Thanks for doing a great job.
Boy, you did a great job.
We need to pull back and say, Wait a minute.
Should I be praising them for doing a great job, or should I be acknowledging that they did their job?
And I realize that doesn't sound very sexy, but the compliment sounds like this.
(12:41):
I knew I could count on you to get that job done.
Thanks for coming through.
Or you did exactly what we needed in that moment.
Well done.
And here's why this matters.
Number one, you were acknowledging an accomplishment, a success, an effort.
And number two, when it comes time to actually giving feedback, there is an expectation and there's an acknowledgement of where we can get better.
(13:08):
If the only thing I ever hear is great job, and you come to me and you say, Yeah, but Jen, we're going to need you to work on X, Y, and Z.
I'm going to say, Hold on, Andy.
You've been telling me I'm doing a great job.
Yeah.
Well, where is this coming from?
And when you get very specific and you choose your words carefully on the front side of that conversation, meaning praising somebody, that feedback isn't so unexpected.
(13:34):
And in fact, they want to know how to get that praise next time.
And consistency is a massive part in that, right?
So people do, maybe they don't like it the first time, but then they come to expect it, come to trust you, come to respect you for it.
There's a lot of parallels here with the sort of radical candor approach, right?
And instead of living in that ruinous empathy box, trying to sweeten everything, you're being direct, but showing that you're there for them.
(14:00):
Well, and it's being accurate.
So when I speak to corporate audiences, I will put an exercise on the board.
I'll put all sorts of words on the board or on the PowerPoint that could describe a performance, right?
So outstanding, superb, excellent, clutch, all of these things.
And I will have them rank those words in order of what resonates with them.
(14:23):
The answers are across the board, which goes to show, right, the radical candor right there.
It's not necessarily tough to tell somebody that you came through in the clutch.
But when you make that distinction, it hits their heart in a different way.
And now you have all the things that you were hoping to get from your team member, from your employee, right?
(14:46):
You've got trust, rapport, buy-in, they feel value.
And it's fascinating to watch what changing one word and one compliment and one interaction does for morale of a team.
Yeah.
And I interpret what you're talking about, about fostering that genuine connection, right?
And you talk about trust and respect and credibility.
(15:07):
And interestingly, you talked earlier about trying to prove your credibility with other things.
But actually, the way you're questioning, the way you show up, the fact that you ask the tough questions, the fact that you don't let someone off the hook, that's the credibility, right?
And I think that's where the parallel I see in effective management or leadership of people comes from that credibility, reliability, sense of intimacy, that, you know, someone is there for you and doing the right thing by you.
(15:34):
And I'm also talking to these guys at other times.
I don't just show up to do the post-game interview.
They don't just see me once a week.
That's another thing.
Leaders and managers, you are around your team all the time.
When you consistently show up and show up for something more than just work.
And maybe that's the small talk that you don't think matters.
(15:56):
But a single word or a 15-second exchange, which is all I get most of the time with these guys in the locker room, it goes a long way in building that consistency and trust.
And so now, if you know that I'm going to show up, and I do care about you, whether you win or lose, whether you catch the touchdown pass, whether you had four drops in the game, I still am going to come and talk to you because you matter to me regardless of the result.
(16:24):
That's the other part of being able to go in and have these conversations.
It's much easier to have a conversation, a decent conversation, an honest conversation with someone you have some sort of relationship with on an ongoing basis than the occasional stranger who turns up and asks you a tough question.
It's much easier to bail out of that on both sides, to be fair.
(16:45):
Yes, absolutely.
I love this stuff.
I read somewhere, it probably was in your bio or something, which really stuck in my mind, around storytelling.
And I think you said something along the lines that losses create better stories.
And actually, you also add that to actually build stronger teams as well.
(17:09):
Can you just unpack that little concept for me?
I love the whole idea of storytelling.
Obviously, we want to have high-performing, strong teams, and just how the facing into losses piece all comes together.
I'm fascinated by that.
So let me start on the other side of that conversation.
Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Rowley is having a historic year.
(17:30):
He is doing things that nobody in the history of baseball has ever done.
I have interviewed Cal Rowley more times than I can count.
And I love the conversations.
There are only so many questions you can ask about a home run.
And trust me, I have asked them all.
I have asked them on back-to-back nights.
I have asked them about historic home runs.
(17:51):
The conversation, there's only so much you can talk about.
It's fun.
It's celebratory.
But on the other side of this, when you start digging into where we fell short, and where I can get better, and how this didn't translate from practice to the game like we thought when we installed the game plan, how we know this is the area that we need to work on next week.
(18:16):
When you start identifying that, both as a team and an individual, now, first of all, we've got some vulnerability.
And these questions, by the way, I am not an interrogator.
I'm not trying to get you to confess to what you did wrong.
And the cookie that you stole from the cookie jar, like I'm not trying to do that.
I'm giving you a platform to tell your side of the story.
(18:39):
So if we think about that as the story, now I've identified where we need to have some heroic acts next week, or we need to see the improvement over here.
When you start talking about where you can improve, number one, you admit you don't know everything.
Now your teammates rally around you.
(18:59):
That's what happens in a locker room.
The guy who makes the mistake, or the gal who makes the mistake, or doesn't come through, they might sit at their locker by themselves for a while to process.
And then you watch everybody come over and say, Hey, you're going to get it next time.
No problem.
We know that you're that you're going to come through.
We trust you.
(19:20):
Now you've actually got people that are coming through to help you.
And when you do succeed, you get to be the hero of your own story.
And every good story, the lessons learned came through the valleys, not the peaks, right?
Like, it's all kind of part of it.
And the way that I think about a postgame interview, we're just talking about your day at work.
(19:44):
That's all we're doing.
And so if you can talk about your day at work, honestly, now we know like where that story is going to get better and better and better as you build.
And I'm, I'm assuming it's the same for sports guys.
God, I wish I was a sports guy, but I'm assuming it's the same for sports guys in that growth really comes from struggle and being uncomfortable.
(20:12):
You know, when things are kind of ticking, you don't want to change anything, particularly maybe sports guys superstitious that they can be, Hey, I ain't changing a thing.
And this is as good as it's going to get.
Is that a truism do you think?
Yes.
They don't want to talk about it.
They don't want to jinx it.
Now, some are more superstitious, but more often than not, it is like pulling teeth to get those guys to talk about their success, right?
(20:36):
They're not going to tell you that they weren't successful because you just saw them hit the game winning home run.
They don't want to talk about how they got there because I mean, partly it was the practice and the routine, right?
You put a good swing on the ball because you'd practice and it was routine.
It's not because it was an extra, extra extraordinary, extraordinary effort from you.
(20:56):
There's, there's no real story to tell on that one.
After they do something, well, they actually want to shine the spotlight on their teammate has been my experience in those interviews more often than not, when they come up short, they can detail exactly what happened, what happened on the air, what, what they should have been doing instead, when they took their eye off the ball.
Now, those answers are going to be much shorter, most of the time.
(21:23):
But there is a lot of honesty and introspection that happens.
And again, it's because they know what the objective is.
Everybody agreed on the objective ahead of time.
And they expect that if they don't meet that objective, there is going to be a conversation about it.
Yeah, I could dig into this forever, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna maybe ask one weird, weird, I don't know.
(21:43):
It's a, it's a question, Jen.
If you think back to your first experience, and how you handled yourself in those first conversations to the slick Emmy award winning individual that I'm speaking to now, what's been the biggest change in your approach?
Do you think that actually that's a knock on for facing into feedback and conversations going forward?
(22:08):
It is being very specific and direct in how I ask the question.
It's getting that question that you think is the hardest one out of the way first.
What happened on the air in the seventh inning?
That is it.
We're not going to sidestep it.
What happened there?
I'm not instead of saying things like, well, tell me what happened on that play.
(22:30):
There's a lot of different ways I could take that.
There's only going to be one answer to the question that I asked.
And that is actually being very kind in the moment.
Right.
And I think we lean on open ended questions, and the assumption that people are going to respond to us, which they do.
(22:50):
But trust in those moments, particularly the tough moments is removing all doubt, so that I can truly know I'm not going to look stupid when I answer this question.
And that I am giving you exactly what it is that you are looking for in this conversation.
That, to me, is creating a safe space.
(23:10):
It is not comfortable all the time for me to be very direct and ask you about the mistake that, oh, by the way, could cost you your job tomorrow.
These guys might not be there when I walk into the locker room the next day, right?
But I know that that is the best way for them to receive the information and for them to succeed in the conversation.
(23:31):
.
Yeah, I was just listening to you.
And just as you uttered the words about safe space, I'd written down psychological safety here.
This is about creating that environment, right, where these things can happen.
I don't know what you think about this.
Maybe it's the sort of rooms I end up going into.
But I find in organizations, groups, when I'm working with a group, groups find it far easier to talk about their problems and the issues inside businesses than they talk about the successes.
(24:00):
It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get the success stuff out, right?
But in a group, hey, we can talk about all the shit that's gone on and the problems that we've got and how bad this has been or how bad that department is.
And yet, and this is what I find the interesting transition.
When it comes to the one on one stuff, where we need to address some of these issues.
(24:22):
This is where too many people avoid stepping in at this point and having having those tougher conversations.
What do you think is lying behind that?
I'm going to say reluctance or silence or even confidence in having that sort of conversation.
(24:44):
In your experience, and you're inside organizations now helping people deal with this sort of stuff.
What do you see?
Do you see similar things or different things?
I do see similar things.
And I think it comes down to we are always afraid of what that answer could be.
We're playing that conversation out in our head, but it's only through our lens.
(25:04):
We're not necessarily thinking about how it could go on the other side.
And we're psyching ourselves out before we even get there.
I was typing an email the other day, and I was asking for a very specific piece of feedback.
And I found myself erasing and deleting and typing and retyping because I was trying to control the outcome.
And I was trying to control the response I was going to get back.
(25:28):
The response is what the response was always going to be.
I can't add any more language to this email to force somebody to make a decision that they weren't already going to make, right?
And that's, part of it is giving up control.
And just knowing that you have to have the conversation.
(25:49):
And are you equipped with the skills to handle what happens next?
Right?
Can you deal with, yeah, OK, I need to do some, some self-reflection and some person, you know, some, some, we call it self-scouting in sports.
Right?
I need to do some self-scouting.
You're right.
That is exactly right.
Or understanding how you are going to deal with any sort of conflict.
(26:11):
But you can't be afraid of what the outcome is before you even get started with that conversation.
I just think that's such a great point.
That often, I think you're right.
I think people have already decided what they believe the issue and the solution and the problem all are and how the person is going to react.
There's, there's a lack of curiosity.
(26:32):
I think sometimes going into those conversations and then we have leapt to our normal defensive position of, Oh, this is going to be bad.
They're going to react badly.
They're going to stab me or something along those lines.
There's something that's going to go wrong.
Right?
And we, we leave all the curiosity behind and then we're trying to react rather than respond to what's going on in the conversation.
(26:54):
Do you think that's true?
Yes.
And I think oftentimes we're preparing for a fight instead of preparing for a conversation.
I mean, confrontation and conversation are spelt differently.
I mean, they sound very similar, but they are spelt differently for reasons.
They are.
And, you know, I would also say this, I keep saying it is about do, are people clear on the objective?
(27:17):
There is a formula that I use on this and it helps when you get into the situation of needing the accountability in the conversation.
So when I am talking to somebody, sending an email, having an interaction, I'm always going to include ETA.
ETA normally stands for estimated time of arrival, but I did this on purpose so that every time you get into your car, you will think about this.
(27:42):
It is expectation, timeline, and action item.
All three of these elements need to be in every single one of your interactions for a number of reasons.
We need to be very clear on what it is that we're doing.
We need to get buy-in.
And it gives us a way to build trust while also a mechanism for accountability.
(28:09):
So here's what it sounds like.
If I am asking for an interview, I could just ask the question, do you have time for an interview today?
Yeah.
You're probably going to say yes.
You may or may not realize that I need to have this interview done in the next 20 minutes.
It's only going to take two questions.
And I promise this is a topic you can talk about because it is on the quarterback matchup for Sunday.
(28:36):
OK.
If I were to say to you, do you have time to answer two questions about the quarterback matchup on Sunday?
I can find you before practice.
I just level set the conversation.
Everybody knows exactly what's going to happen.
When I ask two questions about the quarterback matchup and I find you, I just built trust because I did what I said I was going to do.
(28:59):
If you will agree to all of those elements, and you don't show up for that interview, I have a much easier way to circle back around and say, did we get our wires crossed?
I thought I was going to find you before practice.
Transfer this over to a business situation, and we'll just pick a very general topic, right?
(29:20):
Could you get me the Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on Thursday?
Now, you're either going to say yes or no.
You could come back and you could say, actually, I'm going to be out of town.
Could I get it to you Monday at 10 a.m.? Great.
Now, this is where a negotiation takes place, by the way.
(29:41):
We're going to negotiate the terms up front of what the objective is going to be.
I say, no, I really need it to be by 4 o'clock on Thursday.
You say, OK, fine.
I will get you the Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on Thursday.
We are in agreement.
You get a chance to build trust with me because you get a chance to give me Q4 numbers by 4 o'clock on If you don't, I, as your manager, can go back to you and say, Andy, we agreed that you were going to have this done by this time on this date.
(30:13):
I can be very curious and compassionate and say, is everything OK?
Number two, what got in the way of you completing this assignment?
Number three, what do you need to complete this assignment?
Right?
And now, because we've already agreed, that conversation is expected.
I don't have to guess.
(30:35):
When should I go back to Andy and ask, is he going to send me that email?
Does he realize I can't go pick up my kids until he sends me this email?
Now I'm just irritated at you for what you think is no real reason.
Yeah.
I also, that's a less binary conversation.
There's still the personal integrity piece within there.
Right.
And the relationship is still being maintained within that conversation.
(30:57):
It could still be edgy, but I tell you what, I'm also, I mean, ETA, I've got it.
I'm in it.
I will take that forward.
You mentioned the word accountability.
I'm interested in your thoughts and observations on this, how this is related to the topic.
I'm not entirely sure, but, um, from your interaction with lots and lots of athletes and in the sort of conversations you've been talking about, they are having to face into accountability as individuals and teams every day, maybe because come back to the objective being incredibly clear or the game plan being incredibly clear.
(31:33):
And we either hit it or we didn't individually or collectively.
What can we learn in organizations about accountability and facing into it and dealing with it and not being necessarily derailed by it?
Because I think accountability, responsibility, however you cut it, is still a funny old topic inside organizations.
(31:55):
People talk about it a lot.
They don't really want it.
They'll avoid it if they can.
Yep.
So in sports in general, your accountability is tied to culture and messaging.
It is also expected that it will take place immediately.
So if you think about an NFL season, that game gets over, you get about 10 or 15 minutes to gather your thoughts.
(32:20):
Then the media gets let into the locker room.
Your position coach will have sent some sort of a message group text.
You know what time meetings are going to start on Monday morning.
You were expected to have gone through that game by Monday morning because you were going to sit down in a large group and then in smaller groups and dissect what happened, good or bad.
(32:40):
That is built into the schedule.
Pete Carroll, the Seahawks head coach, used to call it tell the truth Monday.
And it was an every Monday thing, whether it was good or bad.
And I think that's the other part.
Accountability can't just be when you do something wrong.
It also has to be when you do something right.
And if I can tie it back to the company culture or the motto of the defensive line room or the motto of the wide receiver room.
(33:09):
And I say, you know, look, our job, you know, we were trying to do this.
Our motto is to strip the ball out, get the ball out, right?
Get the ball on the ground, right?
Our motto for the defensive line, get the ball on the ground.
Okay?
Not only did we not get the ball on the ground, but here's a couple of ways, guys, that we need to step up our game to make that possible.
(33:33):
And so you're always bringing accountability back to the team, the culture, the room.
It's not a personal, it's not personal with me, the leader, right?
Like, because my standards might change based on how I'm dealing from day to day, right?
Again, we've already set up the framework.
We're measuring against the framework.
I love the cultural point because I think, well, two or three points in there.
(33:58):
I really resonate with, I think accountability becoming a regular conversation, I think is absolutely critical when it's out of the blue or only comes out of the woodwork when something has hit the fan, then it has a sort of smell and a tinge to it that people are going to want to avoid it.
Whereas ownership for problems that have happened as a team, as an individual on a regular basis, it becomes normal, but also taking accountability for the good stuff that's happened because I see too many people not want to talk about the good stuff because it's braggy or they feel awkward about it because it's not a normal conversation.
(34:34):
So I think that regularity thing is great and coupled with the good and bad elements.
I think that is fantastic.
And I think whether it's psychological safety, whether it's culture, I think they all kind of merge because it is the environment that I think a leader creates where those conversations are regular, are about good, are about bad, are about team, are about individual, aren't personalized unnecessarily.
(34:58):
So don't come with stigma attached to them.
That's the environment we want to try and create because that's what stimulates, your words, great high performance on a sustainable basis.
I think that's a great example, Jen.
I absolutely love that.
Gosh, maybe there's something in this clarity and prep that I'm picking up from you as well, because you just said, I don't just pitch up, Andy, and ask questions on the day.
(35:28):
There's prep.
And explain to me your process on clarity and preparation, because I suspect whilst you might have to have reactive questions, things have happened, I bet you probably bloody thought about that before things happened.
So in this scenario, what would I do?
Talk to me about that.
(35:49):
So I do go into locker rooms and every single interview I do with questions that are already written out.
Each question only has one objective.
I am very clear as to what I am trying to get out of that question, because when I am clear on what I need, I can ask it in a way that makes it clear for the athlete that I'm talking to.
(36:09):
I will start writing down questions in the first quarter of a football game, in the first inning of a baseball game, because if we expect to show up, authentically, and to be present in these high stakes moments, your brain will be so overloaded and so panicked and freaked out, you're not going to achieve your actual goal or your outcome.
(36:32):
And you're not going to be able to hear and be reactive.
I spend a lot of time just watching these guys, you know, I might have an hour to be in the locker room, the guy that I need to talk to might show up with five minutes left, right of that hour.
And so the first 55 minutes of it looks like it's a waste of time.
There's a lot of time spent just watching people, watching them interact.
(36:56):
You know their personalities.
Not all questions are equal.
I don't ask a defensive lineman the same question that I ask a quarterback or a wide receiver just based on personality types, right?
It's understanding what they're capable of in the moment.
But when it comes to the actual questions, I need to know how I would answer that question.
And I say that not because I know what it feels like to catch the game winning touchdown pass or to drop it.
(37:24):
I do know what it feels like to experience an embarrassing failure where I feel like I let my team down.
So I'm going to choose my words very carefully and how I do that.
And I'm not going to assume that I knew what that outcome was supposed to be.
I mean, every sports fan does that.
It's like, oh man, he blew the play.
He should have gone there.
(37:44):
You know, that guy, he wasn't in the right coverage.
You actually don't know that until you get into the locker room.
And so it's taking my assumption out of it and simply asking what happened on that play, what went wrong on that play, what was supposed to happen on that play.
(38:05):
Those are not emotionally charged questions.
Those are fact-finding questions.
They're coaching questions from a management leadership perspective.
They are perfect coaching questions.
Just suspending assumption and personal belief in what happened in that situation and coming with that, coming with the C word we talked about before, curiosity, right?
(38:29):
What happened?
Was that supposed to happen?
What made that happen?
What would we do differently next time?
Those are the questions that elicit thought and response rather than, I think, questions that come loaded with assumption.
You really screwed that up, didn't you?
But bang, I'm into reaction, not response, right?
(38:53):
I think that's really, really interesting.
But how easy is it to dispel that assumption?
(39:34):
I think that stance is great, putting the ego aside.
Really, really important, because you are, I guess, having to read and adapt to the emotional landscape that's in front of you, right?
And that takes practice and experience.
It's not just a God-given right to get that right, is it?
(39:56):
No.
And I will tell you, though, I will tell you, after a loss, and the most crushing loss that I have ever had to cover was the Seahawks' Super Bowl loss against the Patriots.
There was an interception on the one-yard line with 30 seconds to play, and it was crushing.
When you see grown men crying, throwing things, yelling, first of all, that is an emotionally charged environment.
(40:19):
You do not need any more of my emotion.
You do not need me to show up with anything more than just a sense that I am here to do my job, and I'm not going to step in the middle of this.
Sometimes it's easy to read that emotion.
Sometimes it is just understanding, I don't know what happened in the seconds before I walked in.
I have no idea if the coach just chewed him out.
(40:40):
I have no idea if they just got a phone call from their partner at home.
The kids are sick, and now they're dealing with something else that actually had nothing to do with the game, right?
You're taking yourself out of that and letting that emotion be.
Sometimes it's easier to see than you might think.
Well, I think that's really cool because this whole emotionally mirroring thing, I think, can get conflated sometimes.
(41:07):
I mean, if we really do take a breath, we probably know that if someone is shouting and screaming at us, it's probably not a good idea to shout and scream back because that's only going to escalate.
Yeah, it's also why I give guys options, right?
And so I think we should use this in business when we can.
These guys do not have to talk to me.
If they don't want to talk to me after a loss, I'm not going to press them because, again, I don't know what's going on on the other side of it.
(41:33):
And I will say, totally understand.
I will talk to you next week.
Or sometimes they will say, I can talk to you, but I can't do it right now.
I will wait until after, you know, you showered, you met with the trainer, you know, you've done whatever.
In business, anytime we can give somebody an option, it gives them more agency.
(41:53):
Now, I'm not saying you push this conversation off for weeks, but if you say, I know that we're going to need to have 20 minutes to talk about, fill in the blank on whatever that is, I am available between 1 o'clock and 6 p.m. today.
It doesn't change the conversation.
But when I get a chance to choose my time with you, now I am less defensive because my brain isn't attacked.
(42:20):
I got a little bit of a say in how I was going to approach that conversation.
And I can see your ETA thing in there.
I'm just minded to ask you, how do clients react to that position of, hang on, I need to find out now.
I'm going now.
He's going to tell me, she's going to tell me now.
You know what?
(42:41):
It doesn't do any good to force somebody to have a conversation if they're not ready.
It can ruin the relationship.
You're not going to get the answer.
This, again, is about understanding personality types, the energy in the room, the person that you're talking to.
It's just, I've tried to do that in my younger days.
It does not work.
I think your line of, be the human in the room, is just classic.
(43:04):
I think that is a little memory jog for most of us when we're in the moment, facing a tough situation.
Someone needs to be the adult.
Someone needs to be the voice of reason and calm.
Still getting to the point, not avoiding, but playing on the emotions, I don't think, is the right approach.
(43:26):
So being the human in the room is great.
Jen, this is a ridiculous conversation because it has flown by.
I can't believe I'm sitting with a sports journalist and I'm not getting to dig into some of the geeky stuff I would like to dig into.
What an opportunity.
I have loved this conversation, but somehow we've got to try and pull this together in a summary for today.
(43:48):
And you, my goodness me, you have left little helpful bombs throughout this conversation today.
But if I was to use my little segment called sticky notes, I'm going to ask you to give me three little pieces of advice that we could stick on some sticky notes and we'll whack them on the Instagram channel.
Some practical takeaways for having tough conversations, but I guess illustrating your point that giving feedback or having these tougher conversations does not need to end up or feel confrontational.
(44:19):
What would your three bits of advice be, my friend?
I would say be very clear on the objective and make sure everyone knows the objective and is in agreement.
Number two, give accurate praise so that there's leeway to give actionable feedback.
(44:41):
And number three, recognize the human in front of you and know that it won't always go the way that you had hoped, but that you have tools to make things better on the other side.
I love those.
(45:02):
They are three great sticky notes.
And for me, this has been a great conversation.
Before I let you go, Jen, if people want to track you down and find out more about you, a bit more about all of the things that you've got going on, where should they find you?
Where should they look?
Well, my website is probably the best place.
(45:23):
It is all-encompassing, TalkSportyToMe.com.
You can find me on just about every social platform that way, and on LinkedIn as well, Jen Mueller, TalkSportyToMe.
Brilliant.
Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting you.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I look forward to the next conversation and seeing what you get up to next.
(45:44):
Thanks so much for coming on.
Oh, fantastic.
Thanks, Andy.
I've enjoyed it.
Okay, brilliant.
Well, okay, everyone, that was Jen Mueller.
And if you'd like to find out a bit more about her or any of the things that we've talked about in today's episode, please check out the show notes.
So, that concludes today's episode.
(46:04):
I hope you've enjoyed it, found it interesting, and heard something maybe that will help you become a stickier, more successful business from the inside going forward.
If you have, please like, comment, and subscribe.
It really helps.
I'm Andy Goram, and you've been listening to the Sticky from the Inside podcast.
(46:25):
Until next time, thanks for listening.
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