How To Build Trust And Human Connection At Work With Randy Lyman

Welcome to the Future of Less Work, where we explore how work is transforming one conversation at a time. I'm Nurit Cohen, and today's episode will continue to explore how we need to evolve being human at work. As technology increasingly replaces our hands and minds, maybe our value-added work will increasingly come from our heart, our emotions, maybe our ability to connect with other people. Mike Getz today argues that human connection will become the ultimate competitive advantage. Because AI can write, analyze, summarize, and automate, but it cannot make someone feel seen. It cannot build trust after a difficult decision. It cannot notice when a capable employee has stopped speaking up. Randy Lyman is a physicist, entrepreneur, and author of the third element. Randy claims many of us have been trained to lead through logic and execution, and I tend to agree. And so we're not paying enough attention to the emotional awareness that shapes how we make decisions, how we respond under pressure, and how we connect with other people around us. And it's time for it to change. Randy, welcome to the Future of Less Work. Thank you. It's great to be here, Nurit. You know, what caught my attention, connecting your journey with what we're all living through these days, is that instead of saying we need to think differently, you're asking us to feel differently. Why is that? Well, first of all, I'm just asking everyone to feel. Not to make decisions based on emotions, but if we're not aware of our emotions, they get in the way of our thinking. They get in the way of our actions. And without being connected to our emotional self, it's impossible to truly inspire others. It's impossible to truly inspire ourselves when we get tired and then we reach burnout. And it's impossible to be the best that we can be. I tried it for the first half of my life. I pushed down my emotions so that I could educate myself better and I could work harder to get more done. And it took me quite a ways. But once I understood and I started to embrace my emotions, then the real success came. Not just personal fulfillment, but real business success came once I embraced my emotions. Okay, so I actually liked introducing you as a physicist, right? Because some people would say and we'd say, okay, here's another story about emotional intelligence. There's nothing new. We've been speaking about emotional intelligence and soft skills and encouraging managers to connect. But you have gone through a journey. And when you say it ends up being business, right? Walk me through how that changed, how you do business. What do you exactly mean by that? Okay. So if we jump to effectiveness in business, it depends on how much power we have. Power, though, is not what people think. Power through the definition in physics is the ability to accomplish work. And the best way for us as leaders to accomplish work is to inspire the people we lead to get the work done. And my power doesn't come from my title. My power doesn't come from how much money I have. My power comes from how much positive influence and how much inspiration I can impart into the team I'm leading and how effective my team is. It's never about me, the leader. It's always about my team. And the only way to get a team to respond to me is to have some sort of emotional connection. I'm not saying we go out and drink beers together or we're at all our family reunions together. No, this is about when we're at work, we see each other, not just as people in positions. We see souls who are showing up, wanting to do their best, wanting to succeed, wanting to be acknowledged for who they are. They want to feel like they're contributing to the cause and they want to feel like they belong to the group. And they have those three things. I'll go over one more time. This is important. I figured this out in 1999 through a big series of events. People need to feel acknowledged, seen for who they truly are as a unique individual. They need to feel like they're contributing to the cause. A lot of people's life feels really meaningless. So when I can give them meaning at work because they feel like they're contributing, sometimes their work becomes more important than their family life. Now that spills over into their family life eventually. And then the last thing is they need to feel like they belong. We as humans, we're tribal. If we are not part of the tribe, now this is not necessarily reality today, but go back 10,000 years ago, if I'm not part of the tribe and I'm thrown out into the wilderness, I'm going to die. That's not reality today, but we still are instinctual beings. We still operate on patterns that have been developed over the last hundreds of thousands of years. And so those things are more important than money. Those things are more important than facts. Those things are more important than hard work. And once the team feels, not just knows, but they feel that us as a leader are there to serve them and help them succeed, then they're on our side because nobody's for us or against us. They're all for themselves. And when they can feel we're there for them, then they listen to us. They follow our guidance. They speak up. They become a lot more effective. Yeah. And I was reading your book. I thought that we need to kind of raise the volume on this because I think it's just became more important than it was before. Because in a world where we tell people, there's an AI that can do portions of your job. And oh, by the way, we're not quite sure if you're going to have a job, maybe AI will take over. Maybe you need to reskill yourself. The organization no longer worries about whether you're employable or not. You're kind of on your own. We expect you to figure this out. And then we also read the papers. So a lot of organizations are letting people go on the pretext of we've replaced you with technology, right? So you kind of look at that and you say, okay, if I'm sitting in an organization right now, I'm pretty sure trust is not far up on my list. I'm pretty sure I'm not feeling seen. I'm pretty sure I'm not feeling part of a common cause because it feels like it's either me or them, right? And I don't even know if we're feeling community anymore because I'm working with a bunch of agents. So I'm spending even more time talking to technology as if it were humans, but it's not. And as soon as any individual starts to worry about their job, their productivity goes to 20% of what it could be. An inspired person who feels like they're an integral part of a team that cares about them, they produce at this level up here and anybody who's worried, they're way down here. And that's reality. We're human. And I don't care if we are working in the shipping department or driving a truck, or I'm in the boardroom. If I feel that I need to be protecting myself, I'm not focused on being productive. There's no way I can be productive. I'm human. I have to survive. And when we get into survival mode, in any way we get into survival mode, we're not effective. So the whole idea is, as you said, trust and consistency. And am I valuable? And am I safe? So let's take it down a notch. Let's go take it to what it looks like in practice. And I know you have some, you talked about some tools because here's the reality about humans, right? Some of us are very high on the emotional intention. So we can feel, right? The sense that how the person feels and we see it. And others are completely blind. They can walk into a room, say something and not see how it affected anyone. So what kind of tools do we help leaders with that can help them understand emotional awareness if it doesn't come naturally to them? Well, the one that was a challenge for me to learn was listening. I thought I was a good listener. But when I took it to the next level and in another level beyond that, I realized that whenever I'm listening, I'm getting ready to speak my idea to the other person because either I'm afraid I'm going to lose it or they're going to talk too much, whatever that might be. And I realized eventually that if it's an important idea, either write it down if you're not going to remember it, or we're just going to remember it. And it's not as important as, does that person, is the person that we're listening to, do they feel heard? Do they feel that we've listened to them? They're not going to hear us until they feel heard. So I learned to pause, like long pregnant pause, like I'm talking five, 10 seconds. That's a long time. And say, hey, do you have anything else you'd like to add? And after that, it feels like you might have something else to say. And what else are you thinking? And give them the opportunity to dump out everything. And a lot of times, once they realize that I've invited them to speak, then they talk a lot and that's because they need to, they need to get these things off their chest, so to speak. They need to let these things out. And then once I've done that, nobody else listens to them. Their spouse at home probably doesn't listen that deeply. Their kids don't listen to them that way. Nobody listens. So now when they say, wow, Randy really listens. And he heard me. And I parrot back some of what they said or repeat back some of the words or ask for clarity. Now in this minute that I've allowed them to talk more or two minutes or 10 minutes, maybe I forgot what I had to say. It's not that important. If it's important, I'll think of it again. What's important now is they've been able to unload. They feel listened to. They feel respected. They feel heard. They feel seen and acknowledged. And they realize that they are important enough to me for me to give them their time, especially as CEO or president or VP. We think, oh yeah, these people realize our time's important. They're going to give us a message and walk away. No. When we take the time to listen to one person or two people, the impact we have on the entire group changes because if somebody else in the group says, Randy doesn't care. And this person speaks up and says, he does care. He's listened to me. He's recognized what I have to say. And then that's how we change culture. We don't have to take time to listen to a hundred people. If they all ask for it, we're going to find time eventually. But if we only take the time to interact with two or three people or however many are appropriate and we listen completely, the energy changes, the relationship changes, and that's how we change culture. Yep. And even, you know what, if I can add to that, I actually think it's, again, it's even more important these days with AI because we go for productivity and everything is quick and fast and can be done, you know, with the help of tools and the human conversations and the human relationships and the pause in that sense that you can speak to a person that's listening to you becomes even more important to know. Frankly, it will probably teach leaders some stuff that they don't know about what's going on in their organization. When I was working with scientists and engineers, it's all facts. That's just the way we're wired naturally. And I had to evolve from that. It took me a long time to understand what people really need because I just grew up in a world where facts and information and take action was important. And that served me to a certain level. But once I was supervising and managing people who work for me, and even prior to working for me, I started to see people don't respond to just the facts. People don't respond to just the idea. And when I tell somebody to work harder, it makes no sense to them because they don't care about how hard they work. They care about survival. So we have to take that survival out of the equation and we have to put trust into the equation. That's really the bottom line. Yeah. Or other motivational drivers. Like you said, you're doing something important. Actually, I want to take another one that I think is really important. I actually think feeling seen is, if I had to, and you did do that, if I had to put them in order of importance, I would put seen first, right? Yeah. I usually say, a lot of people, I say that if you ask, if you think about the managers that you remember most for the best, the ones that furthered your career and got you to where you are, and you think about what it is that they did, and you get answers like, they gave me opportunities, but they also challenged me beyond what I thought was possible, et cetera, et cetera. You could end up putting seen as a title for that list usually. Because they can't accomplish those other things without seeing us. The only way we can help somebody, truly help somebody is to see who they are, where they're at, and either see what they need or ask them what they need. So that's absolutely, I agree with you, absolutely on the top of the list. Right. So what does not feeling seen feel like, do you think? Rejection, abandonment, rejection, betrayal, all those things are triggered. Maybe not every single one, every time, but all those are the result of not being seen. Yeah. What I wanted to do, and I asked this wrong, I wanted to say, what does it look like from the manager's side? So a manager, because what we also know from research, right, is you ask people, are your people going to say they feel seen? They'll say yes, right? There's always a gap between how we perceive ourselves and how our people perceive us. So what do you think they're failing to do that translates to you're not being seen? Slow down. I know that I was terrible at this. If I go back 36 years ago, because somebody would give me part of the message, I'd understand it and say, okay, got it. And like, I'm done. And I'd cut them off. And that feels awful to people. If I'm dealing with somebody who's only thinking facts, then that's different conversation. But very few people operate that way. And even the people who operate primarily in facts and numbers, they still want to be seen. They still want somebody to take the time to slow down and listen. So I had to slow down. Wow, that's a really good one. I feel bad now. Okay, keep going. So slow down, give people the time to finish their thought, even if you think you've already gotten it, you know, listen to what they're doing. If you walked into an organization and looked around, could you tell if the human connection is part of the culture or just written in a poster on the wall? I've learned to feel it. So again, 36 years ago, when I started my personal growth journey, I was not in touch with my intuition. I was not in touch with my feelings. If I'm not in touch with my emotions and my feelings, there's no way I can feel anybody around me or have empathy. So first I got in touch with my own feelings, my own intuition. So when I walk into a room, and some people can do this without really being in touch with their feelings, they still have the sixth sense, they still have the gut feel. But once I developed it, I can walk into a room and I can sense how people are communicating with each other. Are they looking at the floor? Are they looking at each other? Do they have open posture towards each other as they're talking or is one of them faced in a different direction? So there are physical signs we can look at, tone of voice, and then just how people move. Do they move with their shoulders down or are they proud? Are they happy to be there? Are they expressive? So when we turn that into physical cues, there's always plenty of physical cues and when we get to the more advanced state, which anybody can develop their intuition, we can walk into the room and we can feel it. Now for me as a scientist, you tell me that 40 years ago I'd say you're crazy, I can't feel that. What are you talking about? Today I'll tell you we can all absolutely develop that sense of intuition, that sense of feeling and sensing what's going on around us. So start with physical cues and then pay attention to what other sensations and ideas and thoughts that come through. Intuition is very interesting. It's quiet. It just gives us an answer or insight. Turn left. It has to give us free will. I think the more it's almost like you start recognizing the cues without looking for them, right? I think I was wondering about remote, right? We talk about the physical cues that you have if you're actually with the people in the office. A lot of people these days work with teams and most of the communication is digital in some way. So written or even the kind of conversation we're having right now. I wonder if you have some ideas for that as well. Absolutely. And some people say you're crazy, but I'll tell you, I'm still a scientist. I'm still left brain. I'm still a logical person. But when I open my heart and I take a breath and I feel my physical body and my presence, and I focus on my heart and feeling love for the person I'm interacting with, even if they're an enemy, if I can get to a place of opening my heart, now I have a better opportunity to sense what's going on through my intuition and through my feelings. And even if I can't connect with my own intuition, once I open my heart and I become present, my mind calms down and I can become more intellectually aware of the person I'm interacting with. So it works at all levels. And if people don't believe that we can really feel the other person through a physical, emotional sensation, suspend that doubt for a moment, connect with your heart for yourself, take a breath and be in the moment for yourself. And now our eyes and our observation are better. You know, I agree. I would also say, so I've worked in multinationals, so I managed teams globally for many years, right? So you have to create human connection, even if you're not physically in the same space. And when we met, right, and it's digitally by design, your first question was to ask me how to pronounce my name, right? Which always is my first question too, because I'm supposed to pronounce your name correctly when I interview you, right? But I think it just shows that there are things you can do to create a human connection with people that they feel that they're seen and somebody's noticing them that are not just limited to sensing really the multitude signals we give out when we're physically located in the same space. But, you know, even things like you said, pause and ask, right? These are all definitely translated. I'll share something I haven't shared before, not because I'm ashamed of it. I just never had an opportunity. I never thought of it before. In 1993, I started my personal journey in 1989. So 1993, a few years later, I took three different individual night classes on small talk because I didn't realize I didn't know how to make small talk. I didn't realize people aren't interested in anything really. Most people are not interested really in something important until they get to know us. How do I get to know people? I had to learn how to make small talk. I had to learn how to see the soul behind the face, to see the soul behind the facade, to recognize the beauty and even people I disagreed with. And once I got to that point of seeing the depth of every human I interact with, then all my interactions improved. You know, this is really interesting because you can take this to personal careers as well, right? I mean, I ask people, especially during transformation times like these, there are a lot of people out there that could use what you know how to do, but they're calling it different names and different industries and different, you know, job descriptions. And the only way to figure it out is to kind of step away from your standard network and go talk to people that are not, you know, in the same space you are. And I usually get dismissed because it's the, I don't, you know, I don't like it. It's a small, it's a little similar to a small talk story, right? And I have to say, that's how I basically tell people coming from me, you kind of think, okay, she's probably, it's easy for her so she can, you know, give you this advice. So I actually tell them that it is physically difficult for me to step into a conversation with someone I don't know when there's no specific agenda. I'm not selling, I'm not buying, I'm not trying to pitch something. And yet I have been doing this for over a decade, right? Having what I call conversations for no purpose because of how important they are to open our perspective to things we don't know, we don't know. And sometimes the things we don't notice that we know and we shouldn't, right? So, so I think it's a really good career advice also, not just leadership advice. Go back to Dale Carnegie from, I don't know how many years ago, a long time ago, how to win friends and influence people. Listen, pay attention, see the person that we're, see and hear the person we're interacting with. So I had to learn that. And one reason that I'm great at teaching other people this today in my corporate executive and leadership coaching is because I had to learn all the step-by-step how to transfer myself from being completely left brain to being right brain. It wasn't easy. It wasn't like I just read a book and I learned I had to make the mistakes. I had to pay attention. I had to focus on my behavior and my activities and how I approached it. So when I go to teach somebody, it's, it's easier for me, who's transformed myself through a lot of trial and a lot of error and a lot of mistakes. It's easier for me to teach somebody than somebody who does it naturally. Because if I go to teach somebody how to work on a mechanical system, I'm a great mechanic. I just take it all for granted. I forget all the steps I learned since I started working on things at four years old. And so it's too natural for me, but because I started my personal journey at age 28 and it was a really difficult journey for me, I remember all those steps. Yeah. And we do, I mean, maybe it's move some people, but we do know that you have to go through the journey that you need to then take other people on. So, um, I totally, totally agree. And you've said it in a much more, um, scientific way of explaining why that's true. So thank you for that. Um, you know, a leader's listening to us and they really, I mean, in their mind, they understand why this makes sense, but it's hard. It's hard for them. If it's, if it doesn't come naturally to you, it is hard. What do you think they have to do first on a Monday morning, walking into their office or virtual office for all I care. Then you need to put aside their need to protect their ego by being perfect. Now, if we're making medical equipment or airplanes, we better make it perfect. Okay. But when we're leading people and when we're going through our own personal transformations, we're not going to do it perfectly. It's going to be messy. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to need to put our ego aside. And if we try and do it perfectly every step of the way, we're just going to paralyze ourselves. So we always want to be caring. We always want to be compassionate, not only with others, but also with ourselves. That's a, that's a big part that I had to learn is to not be so hard on myself and then know that you're going to make some mistakes. But if we set our intention on improving and we take the efforts to read and listen and learn and talk to others, we're going to find ways to show up differently. But again, I said it four times already. We're not going to do it perfectly and we don't need to. We just need to start on that path and start making improvements a little bit at a time. Yeah. Yeah. And what I found helpful, this is funny, right? But I have these post-it notes on my screen below me, right? And I usually put the one that I want to focus on today and it doesn't come naturally. So I'm going to put a post-it note so I remember, right? It could be, remember to start every one-on-one with how are you and ask some questions and wait, right? Or take, I love the, you know, take a few seconds before you answer or, you know, let, ask a follow-up question that's a listening question. So you've given all these ideas and you've got so many more in the book. One of the things that, that I, I was going to say worry about, but circle around a lot in these conversations is we are living in a more and more technological world. And I do believe it, it raises the volume on our need to find the uniquely human skills and capabilities that will make us, well, workers and creator, creators, whatever it is, right? So we seem to think that AI can do some of the stuff, therefore we don't have our own contribution. And I don't think that's true. I'm wondering if from your very unique perspective, you have a perspective on what you think will emerge as the top human capability. Leadership. People need to be inspired. People need all the things we've already talked about and no machine, as you started with your, in your opening, no machine can ever do that. And great leaders who find their own emotional clarity, who are always on their, continually on their own journey of growth and learning and emotional evolution are going to stand out in the future, even more than they've stood out in the past. If I go to Herb Keller is a great example. He founded and ran Southwest Airlines for a long time and he's passed, but he was a very emotionally centered, caring guy. And he beat all those other airlines that had a headstart, who are all focused on facts and numbers and profits. And in the end he had the numbers and the profits because he focused on the people first. And so it's not that this method hasn't been effective in the past. It was not necessary in the past. We're in the third and final stage of human evolution. Everything in the universe fits into one of three categories in no particular order. I thought it's an information. We're going through the information age. We have been for 30 years, our physical body and the physical world we live in. We went through the industrial revolution a hundred years ago, and now the third and final category and the evolution of man is emotions. Not because we're all going to become sobbing, emotional messes. Not because we're just going to express our emotions without thinking first. Not because we're going to make decisions based on our emotions, but because we're going to become aware of our emotions. We're going to become fluid in our emotions. And in doing that, we're going to feel some bad emotions we don't want to feel, but we're going to heal those and release them. And then we're going to have more space available in our heart and our mind for love, for joy, for fun, for connection. And that's the final evolution of man. And we're in that now, whether we want to admit it or not. It's happening. Yeah. And frankly, that's where technology can't enter, right? But that's the distraction. That's by God's design, I would say, God's spirit, whatever. Because, okay, if we're in the advanced class, then it's not supposed to be easy. We're supposed to have these distractions. A hundred years ago, 200 years ago, how do we survive on the farm? Okay. Today, how do we stay in our heart when everything takes us into our mind? And yes, the mind is still important. I still think my way through things. I write lists. I follow my schedule. Thinking and logic is important. Being in touch with my heart, being in touch with the people I work with, it's the most powerful thing I can do today. And again, we've already said it many times. I am a scientist. I'm a logical guy. I'm an engineer with multiple patents. I don't focus on emotions because I'm naturally emotional. I focus on emotions because I've seen. That's where the positive results come from in my personal life, in my personal health, my relationship with my family, and my business success all comes from that emotional awareness. If people want to understand it, they can pick up my book. It's not that hard to read. It's cheap, and it's fun and interesting. I didn't write this to sell books. I wrote this book because I want people in the world to know what buttons to push and what levers to pull, what rules there are in the world, some simple rules to follow that bring us happiness and success. I want to share what's brought me so much joy and success. I want to share that with the world. It's not complicated. It just hasn't been shared in the past. Yeah. Randy, I think, seriously, even to the people who get uncomfortable with these kinds of conversations, what I would say is, remember again, the technology that can think does not feel, does not connect. Even the limits of the imagination of what's possible and the creation and the ideation, there's something that is uniquely us. It's got to be in this space of the emotions of the heart, of the ability to connect. I think that we are going to have to cultivate that because we are now capable of handing over some of that other stuff, technology. I called this podcast, The Future of Less Work, not because of the dystopian version, because I wanted to talk about less of what doesn't matter and more of what does. But to get there, you need to embrace the fact that you can hand over some of the stuff, and then as we free up our capacity, tap into the things that make us uniquely human. That's one of them, if not all of them. That's what we're here to experience. We're here, we're spiritual beings on a human path, and we're going to learn skill sets and how to get along with people and things like that. But we're also going to learn about ourselves. Where are my fears? Where are my doubts? How do I overcome those? How do I open up the Pandora's box of emotions to deal with the painful emotions, so then I can also feel the good emotions of joy and inspiration and love and connection? We can't just shut off the bad emotions without shutting off the good emotions too. We are here to experience love. So many people in business, when we're younger, we're inspired by our dreams and our goals and our ideals, because we want to feel good. We want to be happy. Those are emotions, and that's how we start on this path. Then once we start down the path myself, okay, I'm going to shut off my emotions because I'm going to be smarter and I'm going to work harder. So I'm making progress. Then the whole reason I started on this path was to feel good. I shut my feelings off. How do I reconcile that? It's not easy, but it's possible. Yep, absolutely. I'm going to wrap us up, and I always ask for a question. What do you think is the question we should be asking ourselves about the future of work? Where do I doubt myself in regards to how other people see me? Because if I'm worried about how the rest of the world sees me, that's ego. That's the first way to get in touch with how we can improve, is where are we changing the mask that we put forth to the world? That tells us what emotions lie underneath that are going to be the most powerful to address. So again, when we're looking at the world, how are we worried about how they see us? How are we worried about how we look? That's our biggest fear. That's the biggest aha moment when we can figure that out, and that's the first place to dive into. Wow. Thank you, Randy, for joining me today. You're welcome, Narit. This was a lot of fun. And for more about Randy Lyman and his book, The Third Element, check out the links in the episode description. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to follow The Future of Less Work, or retake your podcasts. And remember, your best people do not work because they have to. They do not work because you tell them to or you measure them on it. They work because they want to. Because by working for you, they're doing what's important for them in life. Till next time!