Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Daring to Succeed podcast.
My name is Julianna Yau Yorgan and I’m a workplace strategist who teaches leaders how to show their value and increase their impact through compassionate strategy.
This week I posted about how I was out for dinner with friends and guessed that our server had a three-year-old child. It was kind of interesting because I’ve been out for dinner with these friends before and as one of my, I don’t know, hobbies or things I like to do when I’m out and about is people watch and last time we went out for dinner I made some random guesses as well. So this time my friend thought, well you know what, She’s our server. We talk to them. I am fascinated by whether or not you’re right, so I’m going to ask her
And turns out, you know what? I was right. She did have a three-year-old child at home and Someone asked how I was able to do this and guess that, make this type of guess or guess the type of life that someone has or what’s going on in their life right now.
And my first instinct was to say that it was a natural gift. But honestly, that’s a pretty lazy answer. And it’s not true. Because when I push myself to really think about it, I realize that I’ve been watching people since a very young age.
So I grew up in a very large extended family in Chinese culture or at least in my family’s culture. We spent a lot of time with our cousins and I was the eldest but also the only girl in the family until my youngest cousin was born when I was actually in university. So I was older than my brother by four years. I guess I still am. And then everybody else in the family was a boy.
So going out for family dinners or even going to my grandmother’s for family dinners, it was kind of the adult table where the adults all kind of talk to each other, all the boys talk to each other, and I was kind of floating in the middle because I wasn’t old enough to be an adult and I didn’t really want to talk about all the boy things. And remember, I was very young at the time.
And for a while, I was bringing books with me to dinner and reading so that I’d have something to do and keep myself occupied. But after a while, my mom said, you know what, that’s actually kind of rude for you just to be sitting there reading. So I’m going to have to ask you not to do that. So just for something to do, I ended up just observing the adults around me and observing my cousins around me.
And over time, over many, many years, of course, I started to really notice what I could notice about people to really understand what’s going on in their lives, why are they reacting in certain ways, why are they interacting in certain ways, what interests them, what fires them up, and what topics they shy away from.
And all of this is kind of accumulation now for me of just what almost feels natural but was a, we’ll say, an unintended trained skill set that I picked up that became really useful in the workplace because then I was just very, well, not say naturally, but as an almost a reflex, I was always observing the people around me.
So whether I was a business analyst leading projects or when I moved into leadership, became a very valuable skill for me to understand what was going on in people’s lives, even if I wasn’t necessarily right all the time, which was never really the point. It was that open curiosity of trying to figure out what is happening with them.
What’s bringing them to work every day? Why all of a sudden are they behaving differently? Why are certain topics frustrating them and other ones exciting them? Why are they fixated on certain things and just do not want anything to do with other topics? So it just became part of how I led teams and how I interacted with my peers, with the people senior to me, so that I could very effectively apply that to my strategic planning.
So for as an example, let’s say I had to roll out a change.
Going back to the office comes to mind because it’s a very emotionally charged topic for a lot of people. As part of my planning, I was able to anticipate For the most part, who would be more open to the change and who would be more resistant and why? Because I knew my staff. Because I knew what was going on in their lives. It was easier for me to have those conversations with them, to work through the process, to be like, okay, well, I understand these parts of your life and why it would be difficult for you to readjust immediately. Let’s figure out a plan to get you there because this is an objective.
And then also managing that back up to my leadership to explain why they weren’t all jumping to get back into the office right away, but to show, hey, I understand my staff. These are the barriers, but here’s also the plan that we’re working through together to get there. And although this is something that I’ve honed over the years, there’s actually a faster way that you can develop the same skill. And it’s kind of through the same thing, but in an accelerated way.
So make a habit of observing people, even if you’re just starting small, whether it’s going out or with a co-worker, observe someone, make a guess about something about them, whether it’s what’s going on with them right now, maybe their family situation, whatever you think is comfortable and appropriate, and then ask them if it’s true.
If you’re right, that’s amazing, but if you’re not, again, the point isn’t to be right or wrong about your guess, it’s to collect the data to understand the connection between what you’re observing, what your assumptions are, and what the reality is.
So let’s take myself again for an example. I had someone on my team who had children who were much older than I expected them to be by like maybe 10 years. And I had a natural conversation out of genuine curiosity about her situation. She had mentioned, like I didn’t ask her about her children, I just kind of assumed she had children but they were younger.
And at one point she had mentioned that they were graduating from high school and I’m like, whoa. did not expect that. And again, the point wasn’t that it was right or wrong about her having children at all or how old they were, but that when she shared that she had these older children or children who were older than what I expected, I continued on that conversation to kind of understand what was happening in her life, what was happening with her children, sort of the things that she had to worry about as a mother outside of the workplace that I can then in turn plan around or be aware of as I’m having conversations with her about her career, her work, her future.
And that curiosity led me to understand her more and That type of, I don’t know, behavior of my own, that type of practice, allowed me to understand my whole team in a very natural way that wasn’t, hey, I’m going to interview all of you and run you through all these questions to find out every little thing about you. And again, that understanding allowed me to anticipate how they would react to changes, ideas, challenges, whatever was happening in the workplace at the time.
And that ability to anticipate improved my ability to think and plan strategically for the team, whether it was long-term planning or just planning their month’s worth of work. So that’s it. Hopefully that was interesting and helpful for you and I encourage you to try that out. I’d be very curious what your results are so definitely reach out to me and DM me if you have anything to share and I’ll see you next time.
