The Productivity Skills That Will Fast-Track Your Promotions - with kendall berg
Ever wonder why some high performers skyrocket while others stay stuck in middle management hell?
Brian teams up with career coach Kendall Berg, who cracked the code after getting promoted five times in six years, and it wasn't by working harder. This conversation gets uncomfortably real about workplace politics, invisible performance reviews, and why your boss probably has zero clue about your actual contributions. Kendall opens up about her journey from being "too direct, too stubborn, too emotional" to mastering the unspoken rules that actually drive promotions, while Brian shares his AI trick that instantly reveals whether you're delegating like a pro or driving your team crazy.
You'll walk away with immediately usable tactics: the magic of investing 20% of your time in relationships, how to handle "urgent" requests without becoming a pushover, and the email structure that makes people think you're incredibly thoughtful. Plus, they pull back the curtain on what really happens in those executive rooms where promotion decisions get made, and why knowing your boss's peers might be more important than impressing your boss.
If you're exhausted from working endless hours without advancement, confused by office politics, or ready to stop waiting for someone to notice your hard work, this episode reveals the strategic moves that separate the promoted from the passed-over.
Ready to level up? Dive into the resources and links waiting in the show notes!
The Video
The Audio/Podcast
References In This Episode
Kendall Berg – “That Career Coach” – Kendall’s website and LinkedIn profile
Books Mentioned:
Secrets of the Career Game – Kendall’s book with 36 strategies to help high performers move up in their careers.
The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders – book by John Zenger and Joseph Folkman, recommended during the episode.
Concepts & Frameworks:
Nine Box performance evaluation system
Cross calibrations/Performance calibrations meetings
3-2-1 backup strategy (mentioned in context)
CORE delegation framework (Context, Oversight, Resources, Expectation)
ARS email template (Acknowledge, Restate, Solve)
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Productivity Skills for Promotions
02:59 Kendall's Unique Approach to Career Coaching
05:25 The Gap Between High Performers and Stagnation
08:28 Understanding Performance Reviews and Visibility
10:55 Navigating Urgency and Productivity
13:17 Effective Networking and Relationship Building
16:16 Planning and Structuring Your Work Week
18:56 The Importance of Strategy in Career Advancement
30:23 The Importance of Automation and Goal Setting
32:37 Effective Communication in Management
35:52 Delegation and AI: A New Era of Productivity
41:00 Communication Habits for Career Advancement
54:36 Navigating the Career Game: Insights from Kendall's Book
Today’s Guest
Kendall Berg
Career Coach, Leadership Development Expert, Corporate Strategy Consultant
Kendall Berg is a career strategist and executive coach who transforms high-performing professionals into promotion-ready leaders. After struggling with workplace politics early in her career, being "too direct, too stubborn, too emotional", she developed tactical systems that propelled her through five promotions in six years, culminating in a CFO offer before age 30.
Her book, Secrets of the Career Game: 36 Strategies to Get Ahead in Your Career, serves as a no-nonsense tactical guide for navigating corporate realities. Kendall specializes in helping middle managers break through to executive levels by mastering the unspoken rules of workplace advancement, relationship building, and strategic communication.
Known for her refreshingly honest approach, Kendall doesn't sugarcoat corporate life or pretend workplaces are meritocracies. Instead, she equips clients with concrete templates, scripts, and frameworks to advocate for themselves effectively while staying authentic. She believes career success isn't about working harder, it's about working strategically and building the right relationships.
Currently balancing her coaching practice with a corporate role (because her boss "refuses to let her go"), Kendall brings real-world credibility to her advice. She's the coach for professionals tired of playing games they don't understand.
Connect with Kendall:
LinkedIn: Kendall Berg
Website: thatcareercoach.net
Why Subscribe To The Email List: Brian shares separate hacks, tips, and actionable learning exclusively for his email subscribers. Sign up so you don’t miss out!
About The Creator/Host: I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that my life was going to be 10-20 years shorter than everyone else. As a kid I took time for granted, but now as an adult, time is the most precious thing that I have. After spending a career hands-on in the trenches as a leader at all levels, I now train Productivity Gladiators to level up their careers. Graduates wield superpowers in time management, practical leadership, communication, & productivity. If what you’ve seen here intrigues you, reach out, let’s chat!
“Time is the currency of your life, spend it wisely.”
Transcript
Brian Nelson-Palmer (00:06)
I'm Brian Nelson Palmer. On this show, I share personal, practical, productivity skills that will make you more productive and advance your career. And in this episode, we're talking about the productivity skills that will fast track your promotions. And with me on the show today is Kendall Berg. There is no one more fitting to have this conversation with than her,
So Kendall, thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Kendall (00:28)
Thanks for having me, Brian. I'm super excited to chat about this. And you and I were talking before we started recording. There's so many good similarities in what you talk about and what I do. So I think there's going to be a bunch of fun things that we can cover today.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (00:42)
Absolutely. And now for the folks who aren't familiar with you, we're going to talk about productivity skills that will fast track your promotions. Talk about how your background's relevant to that and what you do.
Kendall (00:52)
Yes, I always say I became a career coach because I was terrible at pretty much everything that we're going to talk about today. I was too direct. I was too stubborn. I was too emotional. I was great at my job, but severely lacking in all of those other skills that come together to make you successful in the workplace. And so I taught myself tactical templates that would work for how to communicate, how to network, how to build relationships, how to get promoted.
And then I got promoted five times in six years and offered a CFO ship before I turned 30. And then I was like, okay, so this clearly works. And that career coach was born. And so now it is just to the accumulation of all the things that I've learned by doing it wrong myself, or then helping clients navigate how to do it better. and that's how that career coach was born. And now it's
podcasts and books and free advice and coaching and all the fun things that come together to help exactly who we want to help those middle managers really start to move up the chain of command in their careers.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (01:53)
Kendall, that sounds like a bullseye here. I love this. But now do answer the question why there's a lot of career coaches out there. So what would you say makes you a little different from all the other ones that we might have heard of before or heard about?
Kendall (02:07)
Totally fair. There's some really great coaches out there. What I would say is I don't talk about any of the things they talk about. So I'm not a career coach to help you land a job, though I help with that. I'm not a career coach to help you get in front of the right recruiter. I am that career coach that handles everything in your job after you get the job. How do you advocate for yourself? How do you build a brand? How do you navigate corporate politics? And the reality is workplace does not work the way we wish it worked.
It's not a meritocracy. It's not this utopia where we make besties at the water cooler. It can be very cutthroat. It can be very manipulative. It can be really antagonizing. so learning the skills you need to navigate that successfully, I think is almost more important than can you interview to get the job? Can you write a resume? So where I focus is really in that niche of I'm navigating corporate politics. I want to stay true and authentic to who I am.
but I don't want to get fired and I can't keep working 80 hour work weeks. How do I do it? How do I learn to play this game and navigate these rules that nobody seems to want to talk about?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (03:10)
Gosh, you and I are like a bullseye because I, the productivity skills I teach are for the exact same motivation, which is how do you not work 80 hour weeks? And I begin every session that I do with organizations and associations and clients and everything. And it's always starts with the reason why I do this is because I want you to have more time to do the things you want to do and be a human
The idea is more productive to work less. So I love that we're we're kind of looking at that from two different angles and the same motivation. So yes. All right. Well, Kendall, let's talk about it now. So first, let's zoom out first. Overall, from your experience, what's the biggest gap between the high high performers who get promoted and those who stay stuck?
Kendall (03:36)
Thank
Brian Nelson-Palmer (03:56)
What's that gap like?
Kendall (03:58)
There are two big problems to the average high performer. Okay. This is kind of a burg opinion. First one is my boss knows what I'm doing. No, they don't. They have no idea. They are too busy focusing on what they're doing to be focused on what you're doing. And if they are focused on what you're doing, they're micromanaging you to death and you're probably miserable anyways. So your boss does not know what you're doing. And if you're not advocating for yourself, if you're not building a personal brand, if you're not talking about why they should be excited to have you on the team.
then they don't know, okay? And this is one of those spaces where there was a CEO, this was probably six months ago, did this big interview and very viral on LinkedIn and he's like, I just need my employees to work harder. And the comments are 50 people like you and I, Brian, going, absolutely not, that's not the right answer, right? The right answer is very, very rarely my people just need to work harder. But it's that the work they're doing is not bubbling up to the right people. It's not getting the right visibility. It's not getting the right accolade. It's not getting the right attention.
And so what happens is the 80 hour workhorse, which we could talk about nine box and workhorses and all that, if we have time, the 80 hour workhorse does not get the credit for the 80 hours. They get the credit for the one thing they did in those 80 hours that made its way up to leadership. so 79 of those hours or 74 of those hours or 71 of those hours were wasted in terms of progression. And so big misconception is your boss knows what you're working on. They know the effort it takes and you're getting credit for it.
Problem number one. Problem number two is you don't take time to get to know people. And the reality is as much as I wish, somebody would just look at my Excel spreadsheet and be like, wow, the color coding and formulas in this are perfect. Kendall should be a CEO. It doesn't work like that. And so what happens is these high performers and these workhorses, they're making these beautiful spreadsheets and these wonderful campaigns and these perfect research testing algorithms.
and then they don't talk to anybody. And so nobody knows who they are. Nobody knows what they're good at. Nobody knows their personal brand. Nobody knows why they deserve to get promoted. And then a promotion conversation takes place and they're not in the room and everybody looks at each other blankly wondering what the heck this person does. And so two big issues, if we zoom all the way out, is you're not investing in relationships. You're not building them. You're not nurturing them. You're not keeping them warm. And you're expecting that they know what you're doing anyways.
And then that's why some high performers move up really, really fast and some high performers get stuck and their boss is too afraid to tell them what to do to move up because they don't want to lose them in the role they're in and they get stuck. So zooming all the way out, those are the two main issues it comes down to. There are 36 of them in my book that we could talk about, but those are the two big ones that I always tell people. Like if you're not advocating for yourself and building relationships.
You're gonna peter out and you're gonna get stuck in that middle management zone and you're never gonna get to that executive leadership if that's what you want.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (06:53)
Yes. You know, I'm imagining as you described this, the thing you said that just sort of struck a chord with me was whenever it comes to annual performance review time. This is how you know whether you were doing your job like Kendall just said, right or not is because when I would go to my performance reviews, how much when my boss, what would happen at least in the organizations I've been a part of, I would prepare my side and they would prepare their side. And then we would compare.
And if my side was drastically different than their side and I was surprising them with the stuff that I was doing compared to what they thought I was doing then that's a reflection on me that clearly I have not been sharing enough, talking enough, that kind of thing. So that's that comparison point is think about your last performance review with your boss and how much do they know that you do.
Not assumed, but how much did they already know? Like you didn't even have to tell them. That's cool.
Kendall (07:50)
And two,
two quick things on that Brian that I think are so key since we're talking about performance reviews is first off, even if they know what you're doing, do they know the effort and the impact? Right?
This is a huge mistake people make is they're like, my boss knows I worked on this project. I told him every week in a one-on-one that I was working on it. He knows I was there. Great, does he know how much of your time it took? Does she know how important it was to the company? Does she know what results it drove? Or do you get into this year-end performance review and you're like, hey, I worked on this project. I drove a 10 % efficiency gain and a 15 % cost reduction and I helped the company go from $1 million to $2 million in annual revenue. And your boss is like, you did what?
Right? Did you communicate the task, but not the impact? This is a huge problem. And the second thing that I would touch on in this is a lot of the time your manager side that you're alluding to Brian, right? Kendall fills out her performance review. She thinks she's fabulous because she is right.
when we think of the person who talks about themselves a lot on the female side, they tend to be very ditzy and they're like, my God, no, I did all this great stuff. And they're playing with their hair and the male equivalent was like the sleazy car salesman, like, bro, you should be lucky to have me look at all this awesome stuff I did. So yes, he's totally right. As I talk about myself, I will forever play with my hair because that is my self-centered persona. ⁓ But the second piece is when you're
Brian Nelson-Palmer (08:47)
huh.
You
my god. ⁓
Kendall (09:11)
When you're talking about the manager's performance review, if you've never been in management, if you're new to management, you're in that manager, senior manager level. You may not sit in performance reviews yet at your level of seniority. Some companies do it director and above some companies do VP and above some companies do include their managers and senior managers. But a lot of the time what happens is we have these things called cross calibrations. I've also seen them as performance evaluations or performance calibrations, call them what you will. But Kendall's boss goes in to talk about Kendall.
and they have their write-up. Here's what Kendall did. And they're talking about me in a room full of their peers before anybody sees my performance review that I wrote about myself. Okay, so my performance review is not even being taken into account yet. And my boss is going into a room to talk about why Kendall deserves to be promoted and she's not there. And everybody in that room is gonna chime in. I have sat in performance reviews where somebody came in to get promoted and left with a does not meets expectations review.
I've gone into meetings where somebody was in a does not meets expectations and ends up getting promoted because the other people in the room were better advocates for them than their boss. There's a huge swing that happens in these calibration sessions. And so you want to know as many people in that room as possible and you want them to know how great you are.
Because it's not just your boss who writes their review and goes, how does my review compare to Kendall's? It's that my boss wrote this review, talked about it with all their friends and peers. They all said how great Kendall was. They're like, maybe she's better than I thought. They take my score up a little bit. Or everybody goes, who's Kendall? And they take my score down a little bit. It's so much a group think, especially at the more senior levels of leadership. And I'll give a quick story. When I joined a firm, this was a few years ago.
My first performance review, I'm working with the executive team and I'm helping coordinate the review itself. And they send me this file and they're like, Hey, everybody needs to complete this and get it back to us by certain date. I'm like, great. So I roll out this form and it is literally a heat map. How well do know Brian green? If you know him really well, yellow, if you only kind of know him red, if you don't know him at all. And every executive is going to fill out a red, amber green for Brian. And he's going to say, how well do I know Brian?
and only the people who get all green are even going to be discussed.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (11:26)
Whoa.
Kendall (11:26)
There were two
people in the whole org who got all greens, me and one other person. I'd been there six weeks. And my boss was like, how the hell did you get all green in six weeks? I said, well, I met with everybody who is my level. My boss's level.
and my boss's boss's level in the first 30 days, I met with all of them. I wanted to get to know them, what are their problems, how can I help them, how do I need to be involved? And then for every project that touched their space, I looped them back in. But in six weeks, you're all green. Yes, but they're gonna talk about me in this performance review now, even though I've only been there six weeks, when they're not talking about the 249 other employees in our org who've been there for years.
but don't have all greens. So I give that as an example of if you think your company is going to have your back, your boss is going to have your back, your boss really likes you. It's not enough. You have got to educate your boss, your impact, your effort, your work, but then you also have to build relationships with all the people that are going to sit in that room that are going to evaluate you who don't even know who you are.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (12:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is a brilliant insight as far as driving back to what you said about, Do you know the other people in the space? And if you're listening right now and you think about your organization that you're in, you know your boss. Do you know all your boss's peers? Do you know all your boss's boss and your boss's boss's peers? And if you haven't had a meet and greet with them yet, probably time. That's a good ⁓ point.
Kendall (12:31)
the center.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (12:56)
I want to zoom in now on the productivity piece of this because that's what productivity gladiator is about. So let's talk about the productivity part. Let's say you already got the all greens from that conversation you were talking about. And now they're talking about you. What parts of your performance are the productivity part that many people miss? And why do so many people miss these?
Kendall (13:17)
There are so many things here.
There are so many productivity tips that I could give you. So first off, 20 % of your time should be spent networking. That's how you're gonna build these relationships that you need. When we get busy, the first thing we do is we stop meeting with people. I'm too busy, I need to get my head down, I need to do my work. Worst possible thing you can do if you're looking to progress, if you're looking to grow quickly. So as part of your productivity measure for yourself is how much time am I spending nurturing relationships with people?
This is the people who report to you. This is your peers. This is your boss's peers, your boss's boss, like build that network and maintain it. I've talked about this on other podcasts before, but I, I meet with 26 people that are my boss's level or higher every quarter. That's only two meetings a week, but it's 26 people who I maintain relationships with, who I talk to regularly, who I make sure know what I'm working on, who gets support from me.
so that when things come up, I'm either the first that gets tapped to do them, if there's something cool and I want to, or they know what I'm doing and they know all the other pieces. So part of your productivity measurements for yourself should be how much am I investing in my relationships. That's one piece of it that people miss all the time. I think the second piece is, I had someone say this to me once and I love it and it's literally written down on a sticky note on my desk, somebody else's urgency does not have to be yours.
Mm-hmm. You do not have to react at the same level of urgency that things are brought to you. This is where strategies fall apart. We have a strategy. We know what we're doing. We're gonna work on the most high impact work. We're gonna work on the things that are really driving the needle for the company. We've got focus. We've got intention. And then your boss goes, my God, there's a fire drill and it's on fire and it must be done. And you have 13 minutes and I need it now. And everything blows up.
And now our whole week's plan is gone because we have to deliver this one thing that was very, very urgent. And what I have found is very rarely, with very few exceptions, is the urgent task actually urgent. What it usually is is compensating for somebody's mistake. What it usually is is compensating for someone's forgetfulness. What it usually is is compensating for somebody who didn't do their job.
And unless that person is you and you messed up and you have to urgently fix your mistake, it's probably not actually that urgent. Now exceptions to every role, right? If it's your CEO pinging you saying this is urgent, it's probably, it doesn't matter if it's urgent, you should probably do it. Right. But it doesn't have to derail everything. So a big question that I tend to teach people to ask when you're trying to master your own productivity is rather than jumping at every squirrel.
and every shiny object and every urgent ask, always present a trade off. Brian comes to me and says, hey, I need this data. I need it today. It needs to be done by five o'clock. It's due to the CEO tomorrow morning. And I say, okay, in order for me to drop everything I'm doing and get you this data, I'm not going to be able to complete month end close. I'm not going to be able to produce this deck for this big project. I'm not going to be able to
Brian Nelson-Palmer (15:51)
Yeah.
Kendall (16:16)
Meet with my team and do their one-on-ones. What is it that you're giving up to accommodate this urgent request and then temp check if it's actually that important. I'd say about 80 % of the time the person's going to go, well, I I don't have to have it first thing tomorrow, but I really need to have it by Friday. Okay. Well, that's really different on a Monday. End of day versus end of week. It can also be, well,
Brian Nelson-Palmer (16:36)
certainly.
Kendall (16:39)
your deck that you're working on that's going to the CEO and you're like, yeah, it's part of the readout tomorrow. And they're like, well, my data is not technically going to him for three weeks. I just really wanted to get a jumpstart. Like, great, now we can accommodate. to master your own productivity, you also have to be able to provide trade-offs to the people who are requesting things. Otherwise, you give into one urgent request and suddenly every request is urgent.
And now we spend our entire working days in a reactive mode of somebody asked for something. I'm the person who knows how to do that. I jump and I do that thing. But then did we get credit for that? Was it actually the most important? Did it drive the business forward? Does our boss care about it? Does our bosses? We don't have time to answer any of those questions because it's urgent. And so taking that step back and saying, OK, maybe it is urgent.
Here's what I think is important that I was planning to do with my time. Is this actually more important? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. And if it isn't, great. Here's when I can accommodate this request. Here's where this falls into my list of priorities. You would be amazed how often even a boss saying, I need something by five goes, I don't really need it till Monday at noon, And then we start to get to the truth of how much time do we actually have to deliver some things. So.
Big productivity hacks, make sure that your network is part of how you're measuring your productivity. Second is pushback. Give that resistance, give those trade-offs and those examples. Otherwise, just get sucked into the doing and the doing's not the fun
Brian Nelson-Palmer (18:06)
Can I yes and on the one you just said, as I was thinking about this episode and talking with you, you nailed exactly one of the things that I wanted to mention that I talk about a lot as well is that oftentimes people when things come in and they're urgent or especially if it's from their boss, they're like, gosh, you know, well, my boss asked, so I should drop everything and do it. there is this pressure that you can't say no.
You don't wanna be the guy that says no. And so the answer is don't say no, say yes, say yes. I can absolutely do that. And here's what's gonna happen if I do. And so you called it offering trade-offs. I call it, here is the bandwidth that I have. Here's the current things that will have to fall off. So which of these things should fall off in order to accommodate your request? And that's, it's the...
I love that you call it a trade-off thing because that's just like, it's like a different way to look at the same quarter. Like, ⁓ yeah, yeah, it looks different from this angle, but same idea. It's, you've gotta, you've gotta say, you've gotta be working on the important thing, not necessarily the urgent on fire thing, unless the on fire thing is also important. So I just, gosh, I love that you said that. So.
Kendall (19:19)
Well, and it's so funny because I, I've worked for executives for the last 15 years and I always joke my CEO, every time I come into a room, he's like, Oh, it's Kendall. She can do anything. And I'm like, yeah, how many people are you going to give me? I can do anything you want. You want the moon? Great. It's going to cost you X million dollars and 53 people in eight months. I can do whatever you want. And I think that we take this approach to your point, Brian, where either we do everything.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (19:43)
Yes.
Kendall (19:49)
thinkless, urgent, not strategic, we become very reactive, or we flip way to the other extent, which is, no, I can't do that. Complain, complain, complain, complain. And the truth for success lives somewhere in the middle, which is, yes, I can do anything you want. If it's more important than these other things, if I have people, if I have time, if I have money, if, if, if I can do anything you want.
But the answer is very rarely just yes or just no. But you need to feel empowered as an individual to give that soft pushback and that ask. And a lot of people, especially if you're manager, senior manager, director, you're in that middle zone.
We get hesitant because we don't want to be seen as somebody who's difficult. We don't want to be seen as somebody who's not a team player. We don't want to be seen as somebody who can't do their job or isn't effective at their job. So we don't push at all. And the issue with that is you're not showing any leadership by saying yes. And you're not showing any leadership by saying no. You show leadership by saying, hey, if I think holistically about my space,
Here's where what you're asking for fits. Here's what resources it takes to deliver that or these trade-offs that it takes to deliver that. Does that still align with where we're taking the team with our vision, with our strategy? That's leadership. Otherwise you're just a yes or a no man. And that's not going to help you get where you want to get long-term. So I'm glad you touched on it too, Brian, cause the big pet peeve of mine, will come to me and they're like, my boss doesn't care what I think. He just wants me to do all this stuff. And I'm like, well.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (21:00)
Thanks
Kendall (21:28)
How did you tell him you didn't want to do it? Did you tell him that you had other things that were more impact that you felt were taking your resources and that a trade-off needed to be made? Did you tell them that this was going to be important, but it wasn't going to be due for two months and you'd like more time? Or did you just tell him to shove it and say no? Like, well, I kind of just told him to shove it. I'm like, okay, yeah, I wouldn't love that response either, it's your boss. And you wouldn't love it if you were your boss.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (21:57)
Right?
Kendall (21:57)
We
just have to get out of our own way, put ourselves in that other person's shoes and think, okay, if I'm Brian's boss, what does Brian's boss want to hear from me? Maybe he wants to hear yes, but maybe he also just wants to know what the heck's going on and if I can squeeze this work in or if this is the most important thing. Maybe he's being reactive to something his boss said. So take that step back and say, okay, what's important to my boss right now? What's important to me? How do I educate them on
what's happening in my space in a constructive, productive way. And then we decide how to move forward. It's very rarely as simple as like, sure, send over that urgent request. I had nothing to do this afternoon anyways. Like, and if you're in that space, we have like a whole separate different issue, which is like, you need to take on some more stuff. But finding that middle ground is really critical in your communication.
So I think for productivity, people do not plan effectively. And here's what I mean. I don't mean meetings. I always love that it's a Dilbert comic. like, I'm so excited for this meeting, to have a meeting about this meeting that we're going to have with this other meeting so that we can talk about the meeting that happened last week. And I'm like, my god, do we need so many meetings? That's not what I'm talking about. When I say plan your week,
You should know what is important and critical to your job being successful at the start of every week. Now, lots of different productivity gurus give you different tips like a top three. These are the top three things I must deliver by Friday. Great. If that works for you, that's fine. For me, I like to organize my week in two ways. One is what needs to get done to move the needle forward on my largest initiatives. So I have a year roadmap. Every year roadmap, I break down into three goals for every month.
And I drive those three goals home every single month. Now, everything I do throughout the week needs to be aligned to one of those three goals. And if I start getting a lot of work, that's not aligned to one of those three goals. Either my goals are wrong or it's really not that important. It doesn't align with my vision. And I need to either reprioritize or deprioritize. Right? So I have a year long target. Here's the things we're delivering. Here's what those three things are every month to keep that moving. And then I track to that. The second thing that I do is I like.
day blocking. So a lot of people talk about time blocking like, I only do my like Cal Newport. I have such a lady girl crush on you. But I cannot do deep work. All right. I am not a like three hours my schedule is blocked to do this thing. It very rarely works, especially if you work in a corporate or a fast paced environment. Blocking four hours on your schedule is just not feasible generally. So how do you do it? How do you get deep work done for me? I have days for certain tasks.
Right. And I do certain types of work on certain types of days and that helps me stay organized. So every day is an email day. Let's all be realistic. You're going to get a team's message, a high noon, and you're going to panic thinking you're getting fired. Like that's all par for the course, but I'm going to work on.
executive presentations on Mondays when I know I've got energy and I can be focused and can be detail oriented and I can get into the weeds. I'm gonna be focused on my networking relationship building on Fridays because people tend to be happier, they're close to the weekend, they have a little more free time, they love their schedule a little bit more open, and get the best version of people. Think about what types of work you do and can you do types of work on different days. That's gonna help your brain declutter itself or I'm not stressed about a Wednesday task on Monday.
I'm gonna stress about my Wednesday tasks on Wednesday. So how do I organize myself so that certain things are important certain days of the week and I can basically forget about them the rest of the week? Now, email is an exception, Teams is an exception, right? Those things are gonna be all the time. But if you work a more structured type job, I do a lot of presentations, I do a lot of analysis and I do a lot of people stuff. I've got days for each. Even in how I run my business,
I've got a day for content creation. I've got a day for responding to client emails. I've got a day for new sales calls and bringing in new business and working with my publisher and driving my book. I've got a day for book writing. figure out how you can organize your days in a way that's going to be conducive to you. Don't wait and then go, shoot, it's Monday. have 97 things on my to-do list and now I'm just panic checking things off. Organize in advance. I'm a big fan of Sunday night prep. I know some people.
hate it, like Sunday night.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (26:09)
Mine's Thursday. Thursday afternoon,
you should be planning the upcoming 10 days. Like looking ahead, let's do Thursday, then you can enjoy your weekend. You're already ready. ⁓
Kendall (26:15)
Exactly. And I'm like a Sunday night. I
don't want to come to work stressed Monday at 8 a.m. Like, shoot, I have a hundred emails. Like I clear my inbox. I prep my week. I've got my goals. I reorient myself. Like it's a good reset for me. Pick a day. Plan your stuff out. I don't feel anybody works well spur of the moment. There's very few people who you can put on the spot and be like, all right, Kendall.
solve this problem for me live in front of an audience. Like people don't operate that way generally. So plan ahead, build your structure, find out what works for you, and then make sure you're constantly orienting back to those strategic goals. If you are middle management and you don't have a strategy for your team, you are not doing your job. And you're certainly never going to get to the director level. If you don't know how to prove
Hey, here's what my team is driving towards. Here's what we're trying to get to. Here's why we're adding value to the business. If you can't articulate that and you're just taking tasks from your director and completing them, you will never progress in your career. And this is where so many people get stuck is you can be an individual contributor who's reactive and still be fairly successful. You can be a middle manager and still be fairly reactive and still be successful.
but you will never hit director and above executive positions if you don't know how to plan ahead, if you don't know how to drive a strategy. And as a leader, if you're told to be more strategic, you're like, I'm super strategic. What does that mean?
Right? Nobody knows. To me, if you cannot articulate what your team is doing, why they are doing it, and what the bottom line impact is to your company, you do not have a strategy. Okay. If you are in marketing, some of your bottom line impacts have got to be revenue growth. They've got to be click through rates. They've got to be visibility into your core customer. Right? If you are in
Finance, it's gotta be cost savings, efficiency drivers, like figure out what impacts for the firm you drive. If you don't have any impacts, long term, you don't have a job. So what's your impact, what do you do? I'm gonna take a quick second here, project managers always come to me and they're like, I don't have an impact, I just make sure the project happens. If you can't figure out what your impact is, step back and say what would not have happened if I had not been here.
If you're a project manager and you disappear tomorrow, what's not going to happen? Your project's probably not going to happen. Okay. Well, what are all the outcomes of your project? Well, it's a new product. It's going to drive revenue. going to penetrate new markets. Great. You are now responsible for all of those impacts. They are yours. Maybe you don't contribute single-handedly, but you are a contributor, right? So figure out what your impacts are from your impacts. How does your team do those things more efficiently? How does your team do those things better? How does your team deliver?
Wisely right now your strategy should have something to do with AI. Save yourself the pain of getting to your, your end performance review and your boss going, you did really great this year, but we haven't used any AI in your space. Just save yourself. Just do it now. Be proactive. Learn how to write a chat. GPT prompt. don't know. Put AI somewhere in there and then walk back to today. Okay. If I want to get to these places, if I want to drive these impacts, if I want my team to do these things this way, then what do I need to do?
and start driving that when I, I do still work a corporate job. I've alluded to it already on this episode, but I do still work a corporate job, mostly because I really liked my boss and he refuses to let me go. But, when I joined his team, I told him, I said, if our team cannot operate like this in three years, if we want to grow as fast as the firm wants to grow, my team will need 15 people to do the job of three people today. Like it's not sustainable. We have to automate.
And he said, great, figure out how to automate it then. And we took three resources. At the time, we were managing about a $25 million budget. Those same three resources today manage $125 million budget with no additional headcount. But.
We automated a ton in the middle to make that possible, right? We introduced processes, we did process improvement. If you asked my team in the last three years, what have you been working on? They're probably like, my God, we're working on automation. It's all we've done for three years. It's the bane of my existence. But that's a clear strategy. Hey, you want us to do what we're doing at the same level of effectiveness as we're doing, and you want us to do it for five X the volume?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (30:23)
Yeah. ⁓
Kendall (30:33)
You got to automate somewhere in the middle of that in order to deliver. So have that strategy, be able to execute it, show those results. And then what happened is I hit that goal. We hit the automation and my boss went, awesome. We're doubling the size of your team and you're going to take over all this other stuff that we need automated that nobody knows how to fix. And you're like, awesome. Curse of competency. It's great. But if you're thinking about how to be productive, you have to have those goals because without those goals,
Brian Nelson-Palmer (30:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kendall (31:00)
We just do whatever we think we need to do that day and that's not gonna make you successful. It's not gonna make you progress your career.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (31:06)
And along the lines of what you're saying, Kendall, there's one with all of the things I think many you listening probably have thought The one piece in here that I think is really important. is that
Keeping your inbox and teams open the whole time is not going to get you promoted. And what I mean by that is all the things that Kendall just talked about strategy, strategy development, how does it tie into that? That requires your whole brain focused. You need to set aside some time. You need to be structured and look at that. You're having meetings with other men. You're doing all of these other things you're doing. If your main motivation is to get to the email as soon as it comes in or the teams chat.
I feel like Teams came around and all of a sudden people thought Teams was supposed to interrupt me. Like we were just getting to a point where email was not interrupting people. They get to it when they can get to it. Teams is the same thing. It's just a way to organize the communication so that internal is in Teams, external is in email. That's really what Teams accomplished. Same with Slack. Slack's been around long before Teams, same thing. not...
not getting derailed and I'm using Teams and email because that's the ones that you've probably experienced the most. But this is also true of text messages or random pop-ups on your phone or whatever. If you don't use focus mode and really focus in on the important things that are gonna drive the business forward, you're saying here, it's such an important thing to be able to focus in on those things and not get distracted by
Kendall (32:37)
Just to add to that, if you manage other people...
Please for the love of God, stop sending high teams messages and giving your team a heart attack. Okay? I don't need a 2pm message that's like, hey!
Brian Nelson-Palmer (32:51)
Hahaha
Kendall (32:52)
No,
what do you want? What do you want? Put the context in there. Give me a question. Give me some hi there tells me I'm getting fired in a 15 minute HR meeting. That's not on my calendar yet. Okay. So like be respectful, but something on that too, if you're a manager and you're reaching out to people, we have this tendency because teams is there. do treat it a lot like text message. we say, Hey Brian, do you have this? Hey, like we send like these short nothing messages. You must give your team context. What do you want?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (32:54)
Yeah.
Kendall (33:21)
And why don't just send them a note like, Steve, got a slide for me today that they don't know what you're talking about. You think that they're only working on that one side. Come on, let's be reasonable. Right. So give them enough context to know what answer they're trying to get you and what problem you're trying to solve. this is a big, this isn't necessarily a productivity piece, but this is just for my peace of mind. Managers make this mistake of asking for a thing and not telling people why or what problem they're trying to solve with it. And what happens is a lot of rework.
Hey, do you have the data on headcount? And they're like, great, here's all the data I have on headcount. And they're like, awesome. I don't actually need that. What I need to know is who was fired in the last six months. They're like, oh, here's the list of people who were fired in the last six months. Okay, so what I actually need to know is not necessarily people who were fired, but the people who left of their own accord and are treated and we haven't backfilled them yet. Oh, okay, great. Here's the list of everybody who are treated who hasn't been backfilled yet. Actually, do you know if Sally quit? Like, why did we have to go through six versions of data?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (34:17)
Yes.
Kendall (34:17)
to
get to somebody wants to know if Sally quit and I don't know the answer. Like why did we do this to ourselves? So providing context as a manager, you talk about productivity. I talk about this a lot with clients, it's in my book as well. You are responsible for doing four things when you ask for something. You have to give context, you have to give oversight. When are you planning to touch base with them? When do you need this buy? What is a due date that makes sense?
Resources, what resources do they have if they don't want to bug you in order to get this thing done? Hey, check this system, talk to Susie, do these things. And then expectation. Hey, here's the expectation of what your data needs to solve, be ready for, fulfill. Core. Those are your core things that you need to be communicating every single time you assign work. And if you do not give them all four of those things, you're not going to get back the right answer at the right time.
And so if you want to maximize your productivity as a manager, all the time, people come to me and they're like, I can't delegate. My team sucks. can't delegate. They're not going to do it. It's faster if I just do it myself. You suck at delegating. Right? You have one person on your team who's a really poor performer and you can delegate to everybody else. It's probably not a you issue. Probably a coaching slash bad fit issue, but you can't delegate to anybody. Now that's a you problem.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (35:18)
Yeah.
Kendall (35:34)
And if you want to maximize your time, you need to learn to assign work effectively. You need to learn how to follow up effectively. You need to learn how to see those things through because you cannot do everything. And the more senior you get, you're going to do even less. So learning that skill early is also really important if you want to be able to amp up your capacity and your productivity time.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (35:52)
And I want to yes, and there's a thing that just happened now, because we're all hip to you were just talking about AI. Let me if you're not sure, I'm going to share an awesome productivity hack with you right now. And it's also an amazing indicator of how good of a delegator you are. So here's the hack. When you prompt AI for something, ask, let's just say, hey, I need a script for the upcoming social media.
That is an example of the type of teams message that Kendall just said that you would send to one of your team or something. Hey, I need this. And AI, if you do this to AI, AI is gonna give you something that is completely wrong back to you because you didn't share all the things she just said. It's the same almost as like a structured prompt. That's the comparison I was sharing in my head. You have to give it all of the context.
Kendall (36:31)
Mm-hmm.
Ooh, I like that.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (36:42)
And so here's your one pro tip with AI. If you're not already doing this home run thing, please at the bottom of every big prompt, I want you to put the phrase one sentence and it says, ask me questions one at a time until you have everything you need. And if you do that to AI, it's going to turn into a Q and a session with you and AI. And it's going to ask you all the things that you weren't good in your delegation.
all the things that Kendall just said about the end in mind, what are you actually looking for? What's the end state? What's the, that context is the part that you missed. And so if you, here's how you know you're a pro delegator is if you ask AI that question at the bottom of your prompt and it doesn't have any questions, then you get an A. Then at that point, you got it. You're very good at this, but until then pay really good attention to what Kendall said and.
work on your ability to share the context and everything because that's an easy way to grade yourself. Like how many questions back to chat GPT have for me when I delegated that task? It's like man and by the way, use that with AI anyway all the time because man, I am so much more productive with AI now that I do that.
because the answers it gives me are the answers to the questions. And I'm not a pro. I'm saying this right now and I'm not perfect. I still get a question or two back from chat GPT when I give it these tasks and I give it some real complicated tasks and like I do pretty good, but it's still not perfect. But that's what I'm striving for. And that's your indicator to yourself is like, all right, one or two questions. You're pretty good. But if you get three, four, five, if you get tired of answering the questions from chat GPT,
then it's too many and that's a sign that like, okay, I really didn't do that well with that. So it just side note.
Kendall (38:33)
love this Brian, because I had never drawn the parallel between prompt engineering and management delegation, but you're spot on. It's the same thing. This is why people suck at prompt engineering because we're like, look at all of this and tell me, Hey, and the prompts like, uh-huh. What does that mean? That tells me nothing. I don't know what you're asking for. Right. And so this is why prompt engineering is so complex. And you're right. It is the same core task as.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (38:51)
Yeah.
Kendall (39:02)
delegating is can I tell you enough to get the result that I need and do it in a timely manner? One thing that I would add when it comes to using any type of prompt engineering, AI type of work. I think we're still, it's great for this example. We're still in early stages where I think right now executives are like, just solve it with AI. It's a super manual process. AI can do it. You don't like doing it. AI can do it. And it doesn't really work like that yet. We're getting there.
slowly, surely, like we're on what model 16 of some of these language models and it's getting better, but AI is not going to be the answer for everything, but I wouldn't recommend telling your boss that. So while we're talking productivity, there are areas where we can apply AI effectively. Hey, it's helping with my delegation skills. It's helping me with this one really manual screen scrape exercise I have to do. It's
It's not going to be the answer for everything yet. So again, this comes back to educating effort, educating complexity, educating impact for work that we're doing so that you don't get your boss turning around going, well, why doesn't AI just do that? Why do you need an extra person? And be like, can you imagine writing the prompt to explain this full scope of job that I need to AI that take longer than training the person? Can we just train somebody to do it?
Finding that balance too of like AI is great. It has so many capabilities right now. It's definitely really popular. I work in IT and so it's a very hot topic, but there are still spaces where like appropriate education to your leadership is going to be really key. If you don't want that rebuttal every time of like something's on fire, you're like, ask AI to do it. And you're like, mm-hmm.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (40:32)
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, man, Kendall, you and I could talk extensively about AI. So I wanted to use AI as an example. I don't want to go down that path too far because I want to come back to now. I want to, I actually want you to talk about communication habits that are, let's, let's set aside, put a pin in the AI thing, but I did want to share that prompt because it's just, it's the same thing delegating to AI and delegating to a human. If you do one well, you're going to do the other well.
Kendall (40:48)
Yes.
I love it.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (41:08)
And if you do one badly, you're going to do the other one badly. And so look for that indicator because it's a good one. So talk to me about communication now, communication seems to be a big part of the coaching that you do. And so about productive communication habits, like, for example, managing email effectively or running meetings, how much does that actually influence promotion decisions?
Kendall (41:12)
Yes, love it.
So I would say up to the senior manager level, very rarely is communication going to come up unless it's really bad, right? If you're really, really poor communicator and you're going into meetings, picking fights and throwing shoes at people, it's going to come up and it's going to hold you back. Okay. ⁓ but if you're just average, you're not super great, but you're not super terrible. You respond to emails eventually. Like it, it's probably not going to come up very often in your review, but.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (41:49)
Ha
Kendall (42:02)
To hit senior manager and above, it will be talked about 80 % of your review with 20 % actually being what you deliver. And I'll use an example. I'm not going to use a name because that seems cruel, but I have an individual who I've worked with who's really poor at timely communication. Not a bad communicator, just very hard to get a hold of. Every performance review that comes up. He wants to get promoted. Yeah, but he doesn't respond to anybody. So no. Every review.
It is the single thing holding this individual back and he knows it. He just doesn't care enough to fix it. And that's totally fine. But that's an intentional choice that he's making through continuing this behavior. Right. So communication, there's a, there's a book called, the new extraordinary leader. It's very dense. Don't necessarily recommend reading it unless you really like textbooks. ⁓ but
Brian Nelson-Palmer (42:45)
You
Kendall (42:47)
In it, they do a study of leaders over 60 countries. And they say, what do all leaders have in common? And the outcome is really interesting to me. every single leader must be a great communicator. Hard stop. You cannot communicate your ideas, your value, your impact, why it's important. You will not be successful. You will not be seen as a great leader. Communication and collaboration must exist for anyone to be a great leader. Beyond that.
What makes a great leader is actually what they call spiking, so being really good at one thing. So in school, we're taught to be good at everything. Like you can't fail anything. You might really love English, but you gotta be okay at math to graduate. In the workplace, it doesn't work that way. If you're great at English and you suck at math, doesn't matter that you're terrible at math. It only matters that you're great at English and communication and collaboration. As long as you have those two things with a spike, you will be seen as a great leader at some point in your career. And so what I teach,
clients I talk about in my book is if you cannot communicate and collaborate, you will stall out your career. And in fact, this is the feedback that I received. So it's been probably 10 years now, maybe 11. I had a VP I really respected going into my performance review. I want to get promoted. I'm like, what is it going to take? And he goes, Kendall, everyone loves having you on their team. You're so good at your job. Nobody likes you.
And until you fix that, you're not getting promoted. And I'm thinking, I'm super likable. Like, who doesn't? I'm so nice. So nice, right? But the reality is, I was so in the work that I didn't take time to know the people. And what that translates into from a tactical perspective is a lot of arguing. Hey, your idea is okay, but my idea is better.
It turns into a lot of no, no, can't take on that extra work. I'm so busy with everything else I'm doing. It turns into not responding to emails in a timely fashion because so-and-so asked for something stupid and it's not a high priority. So I'm just going to ignore them, not the appropriate response. And it turns into a lot of what I call like emotional attachment to your title. So you become very emotionally attached to the outcome of your job because you see the outcome of your job as a reflection of your identity. And when that happens, all of our communication crumbles. And so.
People with poor communication, they don't see it because the work is there. But I delivered great work. I got the project done. I delivered this result. It shouldn't matter that Brian now refuses to work on projects with me. He's just sensitive. We got the work done, right? But communication is the base. Especially you start getting senior manager, director, senior director, VP, executive levels, 90 % of your job becomes communication.
Right? Your whole job is to talk about what you're doing and why you're doing it why it's important, convincing leadership that it's right, then telling your team to go do it. And so effective communication is everything. Couple of tactical things you can do if you're getting the feedback, you need to work on your communication. By the way, side note, my least favorite feedback, not because it's not true, but because that doesn't tell you what you need to fix. Okay. So if you're getting the feedback, Hey, you need to work on your communication. Your immediate response needs to be.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (45:50)
Yeah.
Kendall (45:57)
Can you give me some specific examples where you felt like my communication was not as effective as it could have been? Because they may send you emails. Great, we need to work on written communication. They may say, hey, in this meeting, you were really tense and really aggressive and really direct and it wasn't conducive to the conversation. Great, we need to work on our collaboration skills. They may say, hey, you don't talk. Cool, we need to work on asking more questions, being more present, showing up more actively.
Bad communication can mean so many things. So if you get that feedback, first thing is, please give me some examples. And then ask your boss to give you real time feedback as you're working through this issue. It's going to be annoying at first because you're going be like, my God, they're nitpicking everything I say. But it is the only way to figure out what it is they actually want you to fix. For me, when I was given this feedback that nobody likes me, it was because I didn't do small talk at the start of meetings. I had an agenda. I was prepared. And that's what we were going to talk about.
I don't care about your little dog. It's not relevant to me getting this spreadsheet done. So shut up, talk about the spreadsheet with me. Small talk is big. Two to three minutes at the start of every meeting, just do it and be engaged. Legitimately ask things you care about, remember them, write them down if you have a poor memory. I saw an executive a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a few months and I was like, didn't your son graduate in May? How did that go? And he was like, I can't believe you remembered that. Yeah, he did graduate. like, was it your...
first or your second, was like, it's our first, I was like, oh, how are you guys feeling? Three minutes of conversation, but now they know I'm authentically interested in them, I remembered something about them, I care when they talk to me, that strengthened a relationship significantly, it took two minutes. So a small talk is big. The second thing is asking questions. We have a tendency when we think someone is wrong to tell them they're wrong.
but you can be much more effective at proving them wrong if you just ask them. So Brian comes to me and he's like, I think the sky is purple. And I'm like, awesome, Brian. I can totally see your perspective. Can you give me an example of when you saw a purple sky? And he's like, you know, it was like 7 AM. I woke up early and I'm like, a sunrise? I love those. So now Brian wasn't necessarily wrong. He did see a purple sky.
I didn't have the full context of what we were discussing and I'm able to get us aligned, right? So asking questions is huge rather than outright disagreeing. Hey, how would what you're proposing work in this situation? What examples do you have of when you saw this? Can you provide me some written documentation for this? Ask the question. Don't jump straight to disagreeing. And the third thing is acknowledge before you respond. So this is something I coach on a lot.
When somebody brings something up in a meeting, whether you agree with them or you disagree with them, acknowledge what they brought up first before you react. Okay? So Brian comes to me, sky is purple. We go, Brian, what an interesting perspective that you brought. Can you give me an example when you saw a purple sky? And he's like, it was 7 a.m. I was hiking, it was beautiful. And I'm like, was that that sunrise two days ago? I thought that was beautiful. Now I have acknowledged his perspective.
before I asked a question or agreed with him. Somebody comes to you and says, hey, Kendall, we're going to revamp process A, and we're going to do it like this. And you're thinking, that is not going to work at all. You say, hey, I really appreciate you thinking about this. I agree this process needs some improvement. Can you help me understand how it's going to work in this situation where it's certainly not going to work? Give them that opportunity to defend themselves. If you acknowledge before you respond, a person feels heard, they feel collaborated with.
they feel like you are effective in communicating with them. It is so simple to add a, Hey, thanks for bringing that to my attention or Hey, I'm so glad you're thinking about this or what a great idea. Add something to acknowledge them before we jump into everything else that's going on. It will fix 90 % of your communication issues. If you can implement that one tip, I swear in emails, in verbal communication, in a meeting, just take 10 seconds to go.
Okay, I can see why you would think that because most of the time we can, we can see where somebody is going. They might be wrong, but we see it. Hey, I see where you were going with that. I'm just concerned. won't work in this situation. And they go, no, you're right. It probably won't work there. And like, okay, well, what if we tried this and that situation could become somewhere in between the two. Now we're collaborating. We're not disagreeing. So I could talk about communication for a whole hour, but those are three main tips. Do the small talk. Just do it.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (50:17)
Yep. Yes.
Kendall (50:24)
Learn to ask questions rather than outright disagree, at least for some situations. There's a time to say, hey, I really don't think that's the right choice, and to voice your concerns. But there's also a time just to ask. And then acknowledge before you respond. If you implement those three things, most of your communication issues are going to resolve themselves. And then it's just down to those, like, nuance cases that require a little bit more hand-holding.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (50:44)
I love those three. Those are so tactical. Thank you for those. And I want to yes, you. I write. You and me both. I'm going to give you one more tactical one that is a lesson learned, and that is when you write your emails, I don't care how you receive your emails, but when you send them out in Teams or in email, your emails should always acknowledge the person before starting the message. like oftentimes,
Kendall (50:49)
I'm a tactical person. I don't like this more like work on your communication and I'm like, I smiled? My super-
Brian Nelson-Palmer (51:13)
when we're in a hurry or we're communicating, you just hit reply and whatever they said, you respond to the question and you just go right into the conversation. And here's the problem. That works until it doesn't. And the one time it rubs them the wrong way that you didn't even say, hi Kendall, and then whatever you were gonna say, then all of a sudden, now it's a thing and then your boss heard about it and it doesn't matter that the last 40 emails with that person didn't have this.
They noticed it that one time and now it's a thing and now it's showing up. So I share that only because acknowledging the person is good. And so for me, I am a very tactical person and I'm like you Kendall and they're like, I don't care about small talk. Let's get the stuff done. I'm freaking, it's called productivity gladiator. I own the trademark to this thing. I, like I am all about productivity and productive by yourself doesn't get anything done. So for me, I start by asking for exactly what I'm asking for.
Kendall (52:04)
Yes.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (52:09)
And then before I hit send, I have a two minute delay on my messages in my Outlook. And I can go back and pull that email back if I forget to acknowledge a person. And I make sure after I ask for what I want, I go back in the beginning and I say, hi Kendall, how was your holiday weekend? Gosh, I can't believe it was so short. Can you do it? mean, like, and I'm not saying I'm using a tone that makes it sound like it's stupid or whatever. And no, it's actually really important.
Because for the person who's receiving it on the other end, if you communicate by acknowledging them first and then the thing, it's a huge difference in the way that it feels. So I say that that's true for your team's messages, that's true for your emails. The only reason you can stop is if you are real time going back and forth in less than a second, back and forth with this person in Teams, then okay, fair enough, you don't need to say. But if there any period of time has elapsed, please acknowledge the person.
in Teams or in email, the person first and then the task. And it's so helpful.
Kendall (53:10)
Just, just and, I'm going to take your and, Brian, is the first two things I fixed when I was working on my communication was small talk at the beginning of the meetings and how I structured my emails. And I teach to use a template called Ars, because it's easy to remember when you're dealing with someone who is one. But A is acknowledge the other person, right?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (53:13)
huh. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Kendall (53:34)
R is restate what they asked you to, especially if they didn't give you enough context or they didn't fully explain what they wanted. Just to be clear, you're looking for XYZ. Then you solve, you answer the question. Here's what the answer is to that. And then it's extolled mostly because it works with the acronym, but like, thanks so much for reaching out. Let me know if you have any other questions, right? If you follow that structure in your emails, people are going to be like, wow, they're so nice.
Look at them. They said hi. They thanked me for reaching out. They answered my question. They offered more support. It comes across completely differently than the answer is seven. It just does. And so to your point, if you fix those two things, such a huge improvement and they're easy and they're tactical. They just take intentionality and consistency.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (54:24)
Absolutely. Big time. Well, so a couple things. First, you have a book I will make sure that you have the copy of the link in the in the notes of this episode so you can check out this book. But talk about your book.
Kendall (54:36)
So I recently published a book called Secrets of the Career Game, 36 Strategies to Get Ahead in Your Career, and it is intended to be a tactical textbook for navigating your career. It is not a, wouldn't it be nice if we all trusted each other and had great leaders and culture was awesome?
No. ⁓ So it is a textbook for what is actually happening in your career. What is actually happening in performance reviews? What is actually happening at your year end performance? What is actually happening when somebody says you're bad at your communication? What is actually happening when you work for a toxic boss? On and on, it's all of these situations that we are all going to face in our careers. And then tactically, what do you do to fix it?
It comes with templates. comes with instructions. comes with scripts on how to phrase things to your boss. It comes with the arse email template. It has everything in there to help you take control back. And I talk about the career game a lot. I think it gets a bad rep. Like who wants to play this game? And people are like, it's sleazy. It's not authentic. The reality is the game exists and you can choose to play or you can choose not to play, but I just encourage you to do it on purpose.
Don't choose not to play because you don't know how, and then you get held back in your career, you don't advance and you're frustrated. You can play, you have to know the rules. It's like chess. If you ever played chess without knowing the rules, there's like 50 million moves you're not allowed to make that nobody tells you, very annoying. And so if you want to learn to play chess, you got to learn all these complex rules to be successful at it, or you're probably never going to win. Your career is the same way. And there are times where we will choose not to play the career game.
Right? I've had a boss ask me to falsify data in a report. If I really want to play the game, I'm going to falsify that data and run with it because that's better for my career. But from an ethics and accountability perspective, I'm not comfortable with that. So I can intentionally choose not to play, but I need to know what that cost is before I make that choice. And I need to accept that versus I show up to work. I work hard every day. I don't get promoted. I don't understand why you should know why. So the book is 36 strategies that'll help you get ahead.
It's tactical, it'll tell you what's happening behind the curtain, give you insight into performance reviews if you've never sat in one. It's written to be a textbook for your job and I'm hoping that it helps in that exact space.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (56:54)
And those that link to that will be here in the notes. So you've got that along with everything else. If you want to keep in touch with Kendall, Kendall, I want to put you on the spot with one more question before we close. And that is if the if the person listening could implement just we talked about a lot, Mike, I feel like you could listen to this episode like three times and get something different out of each time you listen. And if you implement just one of the many things we said, my gosh, it's going to make a huge difference in your promotion. So I hope you do listen to it more than once.
But for the person, if they had a place to start, if they could only do one thing from all the things we talked about this week that would make them more visible to their next promotion, where would you recommend they start?
Kendall (57:34)
Go meet with all of your boss's peers. Just have coffee, go to lunch, 15 minute teams chat, I don't care, meet with them, learn what makes them tick, learn about their career, learn about their team, learn about their interests, share bits of yourself and what you're doing and build authentic connection. If you just do that.
You'll see a huge shift in how you're perceived across the organization and how your promotions go. Like that is the number one easiest thing to start doing. it takes a little bit of time. Don't be afraid that they're too busy. They're not too busy. Everybody says they're busy until you want to have coffee and then they're like coffee. I can make some time for that. Right. So T if you're in the UK, I don't know how big your UK audiences, but I have a lot of people yell at me because I don't talk about T enough. Get T, but make sure that you're meeting with people. If you're building authentic relationships,
Communication will be easier, your personal brand will be easier, getting credit for your work will be easier. It's the best place to start.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (58:31)
Absolutely, I love it. And for those people that wanna keep in touch with you, where do they find you? What's the best way?
Kendall (58:38)
So I am that career coach pretty much everywhere, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, thatcareercoach.net. But the easiest way is probably Instagram. I check all of my DMs personally, no bots. So check me out over there. There's tons of free resources, links to my coaching, to my book, all of that sort of thing.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (58:54)
Awesome. Thanks for that. for you tuning in, think about someone in your life who struggles with that promotion. I know you got somebody who didn't get the promotion, whatever it is. Maybe it's a colleague or it's a friend. It might be somebody you haven't talked to in a couple of years from a previous job. regardless, would you share this episode specifically with them? Because I know that Kendall and I would love to know that our conversation actually helped someone who's facing this.
and who needed to hear this. Cause sometimes people just need to hear and Kendall and I did a pretty good job of the real talk. But sometimes if you need some real talk, ⁓ man, please share this with somebody who needs some real talk. And we would love to be your excuse to reconnect with that person you haven't talked to in a while. So also if you want more productivity insights beyond just the podcast, my email subscribers get access to everything that I create. So come join the email list if you haven't already. And I love sharing productivity gladiator with you.
because together these productivity skills are gonna change your life. That's a wrap.