Disrupt Yourself
Podcast

EPISODE 327: SUDHA RANGANATHAN

I’m your host, Whitney Johnson, CEO of Disruption Advisors, where we help you grow your people to grow your organization because organizations don’t Disrupt people do. The building block of that growth. It’s you. We do a lot of high-level thinking on this show Leadership styles and s-curves and launch points. These are all concepts and ideas. If this show were about medicine, we’d spend a lot of time in the classroom hearing from surgeons with legacies from scholars and academics about the big picture. Where is coaching headed? Where is the contract between employee and employer headed? Who do leaders have to be in a post-pandemic age? That kind of stuff. But if this show were about medicine today, we’re going to hear from the equivalent of a frontline Army medic.

Today we’re hitting the ground to get an idea of how all these ideas actually get used. Where and how a development strategy came from is one thing. You can have a genius level understanding of the human body, but if you can’t stitch a wound or you can’t put in an IV, what good is a strategy if you can’t actually go through with it? Sudha Ranganathan is a director of product marketing at LinkedIn. In that role, ecosystems are at the heart of what she does. She creates the conditions that allow these ideas like the S-curve or, as you’ll hear her, four G’s of great managers to thrive from the University of Mumbai. She’s brought her systems engineer mindset to Singapore, to San Francisco, to companies like Procter and Gamble and PayPal. Not only does she know the medicine, quote unquote, in that metaphor, she knows how to run a hospital in both ways. I suppose she’s building people up. Here’s my talk with Sudha, a true practitioner.

Whitney Johnson: So, we like to start these shows with a formative story, and we’re going to be talking a lot about building ecosystem today, not just for your company, but building them for yourself, too. It’s like mental scaffolding. Was there a time early in your life where you said, “Hey, this is too crazy for the tools I have? I need a new system?”

Sudha Ranganathan: Oh, too many times in my life, I’d say when I got married was one. But that’s a story for another time. I would say that the most formative memory that I have of having to build a new scaffolding is when I started to work at LinkedIn and I started to manage a team of fairly senior people, and I was brought in as an outsider and I inherited this team of people, which is very different than when you build your own team and you hire the people for yourself. And I was dealing with this whole new set of stakeholders, and I had just moved to the Bay Area a few years ago. So, there’s a lot of different things that have just happened in my life. The cultural context has changed because I’ve moved from Asia to the Bay Area. I’m working in technology, which I moved to from a background in CPG. So there’s a category change, there’s a region change. I’ve been leading people for a while, but this is the very first time I’m inheriting a team, not building my own, and everything feels very new to me and I’m noticing it in the way that I’m dealing with conflict, in the way that I am, dealing with the feedback that I’m getting. And I’m just realizing that I love this place and I want to be here. And if I want to continue being here and thriving, something inside of me has to change. And this is when I decided to engage a coach, and she truly transformed the trajectory of who I would become, both personally and professionally. And she also set me on the path to becoming a coach myself. So I’d say that was the most formative moment in the last decade or so when I had to develop new scaffolding.

Whitney Johnson: Mhm. I love that. And now I do want to go back earlier in your life as well so we can go to your marriage or we can go to childhood because part of part of the reason I want to do this is that I know that you’re going to share a lot with us, that we’re going to learn from. And I want people to feel like they know you and who you are. So if you can share something with your childhood or, like you said, your early married life, that would be terrific.

Sudha Ranganathan: I think my childhood is a great place to start. You know, I lived a very sheltered, protected and very loved childhood, basically, which is to say, there were no major pressures of any kind when I was a kid. But as you enter your teens as a girl growing up in India, you suddenly start to realize that all of the tailwinds you enjoyed so far and the comforts you enjoyed so far, they’re starting to hit a certain kind of ceiling now. There are boundaries, there are guardrails and expectations for what you can and cannot be. And now, you know, on an average, a girl can deal with it one of two ways. She can either go, it’s too much to fight the system. And I’m not in a context that allows me to fight. So I am going to comply and I’m going to do what they ask me to do. Article can go, Well, I’m going to fight the system and I’m going to channel my inner conviction, my rage, whatever you call it, and I’m going to fight back and forge my own identity. And this is like I ended up taking this path because of the paths my mother had forged ahead of me, etcetera. But I want to say that was like the most formative experience. Sometime in my teens, I was starting to get told, You can’t be this smart, you can’t be this tall. As if those are things that I chose for myself, especially my height.

And so I was starting to realize there are things that people think should or should not be doing, but so what do I really want to do? And I decided, for better or for worse, that smart achiever is an identity I could hold on to because I didn’t have a lot else to hold onto. And so I started to develop systems that helped me channel my intellect in the most productive way. And I started to chart a path that would kind of liberate me or find me the autonomy that I wanted as a woman growing up in India. And really, the only path to that is education. Grade grades, get into great colleges, move out of your parents home, ideally. So then you’re free to make your own choices. And so I feel like those those messages that I heard early on, instead of pushing me to a path where I complied, pushed me into a path where I rebelled and in a really productive way, I chose to channel my energy towards studying really hard, applying myself, getting very comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing things, and then eventually being very comfortable, like being the only girl in a room full of guys or using my voice in a room full of men. And I think that that has really set me up really well for my later life.

Whitney Johnson: How tall are you?

Sudha Ranganathan: Five. Eight. It’s too tall for me.

Whitney Johnson: Oh, so and so in India it’s very tall.

Sudha Ranganathan: It is very tall for a girl.

Whitney Johnson: Mhm. How did your parents respond when you created this path for yourself?

Sudha Ranganathan: So this is really interesting. My parents come from a long background of people that believe studies are important and that everybody should be educated, including girls. At the same time, my parents are a product of their culture. So, you know, my mother, who was probably the more influential of the two parents on one hand kept telling me these things like, you can’t have these really strong opinions because you’re going to alienate your in-laws or your your new family when you get married. But on the other hand, she kept doing these things that were role modeling something completely different for me, which is she kept progressing in her career. She would come home and tell me stories about her work and how much she got done and how much of her identity was tied to her accomplishments. And so, you know, children always do as parents do, not as parents say. And so I just automatically picked up a lot of that from her. So even though I know it really scared her to see me kind of fly away, when did I know that? On the inside she was extremely proud when I got those grades and she was also very reassured that my my well-being would never be tied to somebody else, that my financial independence was in my own hands. And so they were they were both very, very proud. And I will say at some point, really concerned for what all this autonomy would mean for me.

Whitney Johnson: That jungle is really, really dangerous. And yet your mother goes into the jungle every single day.

Sudha Ranganathan: Every day. It’s so true.

Whitney Johnson: How did you decide to move from India to the United States?

Sudha Ranganathan: Well, I first moved from India to Singapore, so that was the first big change that I made. And I think a lot of it was realizing if I stay here in India, I will probably end up living with my parents and I’m starting to discover a part of myself that is trying to break free and forge its own identity. And I’m realizing, you know, we play certain roles when we’re around certain groups of people, and I play a certain role when I’m with my parents. And it was starting to become incongruent with the roles I was playing when I was away. And I realized if I needed that role to flourish, I needed to move. And so when Proctor recruited me and said, Well, where would you like to be located? India or Singapore? I said, Well, I’d like to try Singapore. Let’s see how that goes. And I’ve never moved back to India ever since. So that was my first move and how I decided to go to Singapore. And then, you know, about seven years later, for various reasons, I ended up moving here to the United States.

Whitney Johnson: So what’s an ecosystem to you? Let’s let’s talk about some definitions. When you think of ecosystem, what is it and what makes one functional?

Sudha Ranganathan: So let’s say at the very outset, I’m not an expert on systems theory. I think a systems theorist would explain this much better than I am. To me, an ecosystem is the larger environment inside which an individual or a group of individuals are trying to function. So if you take that that construct, you can apply it to families. Families are ecosystems inside which family members interact and choose various paths for themselves, but then also workplaces or ecosystems. And, you know, there are so many nested levels of ecosystems at workplaces, right? There is the larger umbrella ecosystem that the C-suite sets for an organization. But then also these micro ecosystems that each team leader like myself, sets for my team. So that I think at the at its most basic an ecosystem is it’s just this like construct where, yeah, it’s just a group of individuals and a context inside which people or teams are trying to survive.

Whitney Johnson: I think a systems theorist would find that a very satisfactory layperson’s definition.

Sudha Ranganathan: I appreciate that.

Whitney Johnson: Let’s jump forward to today. I’m sure that most of us know what LinkedIn is. You’ve been there for almost seven years. How would you describe your role within the ecosystem that is LinkedIn?

Sudha Ranganathan: So there’s a bunch of different systems inside of LinkedIn that help LinkedIn function as a business and at the same time help it serve its customers. So what we call at LinkedIn. The intersection of doing well, so doing well as a business and doing good. Doing good for society. Doing good for your customers right now. We do that in a bunch of different ways at LinkedIn. And let’s say there are 3 or 4 broad ecosystems within LinkedIn that help us do that. One of those big ecosystems at LinkedIn is what we call the talent ecosystem or the talent marketplace. Very simply put, it is it’s it’s this team inside LinkedIn that helps organizations out there hire and develop the best possible talent that they can. And so the marketplace that is in question then is the job seekers that are out there or the employees that are out there. And then all of these organizations out there that are trying to either hire job seekers or develop their employees. And so where I work is that ecosystem at LinkedIn, and then my little ecosystem within that is lead marketing for our North America business. So of all of the different regional businesses we have, I’m the leader for North America and I also have a special slice of the world that is very industry focused. So I focus on a specific bunch of industries and helping customers in those industries succeed at hiring and developing talent. Specifically, my team supports the search and staffing or the recruitment industry, the health care industry, the government and the academia industries. So that’s how I would explain my role at LinkedIn.

Whitney Johnson: All right, So when you think about growth, you’re in, you’re in the field of talent, you’re helping people find jobs and find people to do those jobs. When you think about growth within your line of work, what do you think is holding people back and are there any specific obstacles or are there any obstacles that are specific to your area?

Sudha Ranganathan: It’s a big question. Well, often it’s a bunch of limiting beliefs, like the only way to grow is to go up. So we conflate growth with an increase in title compensation. And I’m not saying they’re not often related, but they are not often related. So this, this conflation leads to this belief that the only way I can grow is by going up, when in fact there are so many other ways to grow by stretching your wings, learning new skills, and mobilizing laterally in an organization. And it’s hard because as a as a culture, we are wired to believe in immediate gratification. And when you move up, there is this immediate sense of achievement versus when you move laterally and pick up a bunch of different skill sets. It’s just going to take a few more years for you to see the fruit of that. And it’s just not how we’re wired or incentivized as a society. So I feel like that’s perhaps one of the biggest things that holds people back. I’d say the other big one that holds people back, I use this framework to describe it. It’s called the Performance Reputation and Exposure Framework. If you’re thinking about career advancement, your career advancement is not going to come purely from doing your job really well.

That’s performance. It’s going to come through a combination of doing your job really well. The Reputation pillar is about how do you get that job done. It’s not just what do you deliver, but how do you get it done. Your engagements with other people and the reputation you develop as a consequence. And exposure is. Are the people that are sitting upstream and downstream from your work exposed to the outcomes of your work. So they can leverage it, they can amplify it, and the ecosystem at large can benefit as much as possible from your work. And so that framework, the fact that we fixate so much on the P and most people don’t dedicate enough time and energy to the R and the E, I think is the other big thing that holds people back. So I’d say those those two, the limiting belief that vertical growth is the only growth and that we can just do our jobs and everything else will follow. But we don’t worry about reputation and exposure. I think those are the two biggest things that hold people back.

Whitney Johnson: So what is your day to day look like and what were you actually doing right before you hopped on this call?

Sudha Ranganathan: I tested my son for Covid this morning. My day to day usually looks like spending some time with my kid in the morning, getting to the office, organizing my day, um, trying to build a little bit of social time into the day. So, you know, I have a lot of friends at work and trying to figure out if I can catch up with someone once a day, either take a walk with them or be on the phone with them. It’s just really gratifying. And then just like architecting my day to figure out how do I maximize the mornings when I’m at my most productive? And then what do I get done in the afternoons? What’s my plan for the week? So yeah, just like breaking that down. But a lot of my day is about either getting things done directly or through my people and, and then a lot of conversations with my people to make sure we’re feeling connected, even though we sit in different offices.

Whitney Johnson: Our listeners will be very aware of the S-curve. But after all, that is just one ecosystem, one way to look at things. Although I think it is a wonderful way to look at things, it’s one shape of mental scaffolding. Tell us about yours. The four GS.

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah, Well, so the S-curve is intricately related to, if not the core inspiration for the four G’s. I’ve been thinking a lot about. What makes for great managers. What’s the secret recipe for a great manager? Because often we see that somebody is great in hindsight based on all the things they’ve done, but kept thinking, what if we could architect that with some foresight and. And what if we could boil it down to a codified recipe? And so that’s how I came up with these four GS, 17 years of being around some really great and some not so great managers myself. And then off that 15 years of being a manager myself and remembering times when I didn’t do a great job to times when I think I’ve done a really, really good job. And so the 4G framework is fairly simple and it’s think of it as a distillation of all of the amazing literature out there on what makes for good leaders. Think of the four GS of great managers as managers who help their people glow. So, you know, like shining, glowing. The second is help their people grow. This is an obvious one. But. But when we get a little deeper into it, it gets kind of interesting. Help their people get things done. And finally help the people go their own way. And when I say those words, I’m always reminded of Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way. And as.

Whitney Johnson: And as you said, that that’s what came into my head too. All right. So those are the row; get things done, go their own way.

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah. Exactly. And if we break those down a little bit, what does glow mean? Glow means a bunch of different things, right? But at its core, it’s the ability to see what makes people special. So turning the intrinsic, magical skills of your people into explicit skills, they’re so good at something, they don’t even know what it is. But it’s your job to turn that implicit into explicit and tell them what they seem to be really good at. So I’d say that’s one thing. The second is everything that has to do with that, by the way. Right? So everything to do with the skills bucket, identify their skills for them, make the implicit explicit, amplify those skills and help them apply those skills to the right projects and the right roles. So that’s all the things on the skills bucket under Glow. I feel like the second big part of Glow is psychological safety. As a manager, your people will never do their best work and never be their truest selves unless you can create an environment where dissent is not only possible but also encouraged and rewarded. So I’d say that’s the second one within Glow. And the third one, which I don’t know that we all think about very much, but it’s care and support. Do your people feel like you truly, truly care for them and does that care manifest in every conversation and interaction, even the difficult ones? So those are the three things that go into Glow. Everything about skills, amplification and identification, everything about psychological safety and then showing care and support and then under Glow and Whitney. Tell me if you want to stop at any point and talk a little bit more about any of these.

Whitney Johnson: No, Yeah, I want I want you to go through them at a high level and then we’ll see how they, how that and the S-curve coexists. So yeah, this at this level is perfect.

Sudha Ranganathan: Three things under grow, I would say. The first one is constructive feedback. The path to getting your people to unlock new skills and doing things better is your your skill level with giving constructive feedback in a way that shows them you’re invested in their growth, not trying to belittle them. So that’s the first piece of grow as I see it. The second is what I call productive stretch. So helping your people operate in the zone between real safety, where they’re so good at what they do, and between that outermost circle that we call like alarming danger, they’re stretched so far out of their comfort zone that they simply can’t operate. But in between is that zone of what we call productive discomfort and helping your people operate there so they can continue to climb the curve and be on the steep edge of the curve. And then finally, under grow, is career conversations just regularly having conversations about where are you now? What are you doing well? What do you need to do differently and what’s next for you? So that’s grow getting things done. You know, manager’s job is to unlock blockers in your way, a coach versus do things yourself and to reward the invisible work that a lot of our people are doing but we’re not noticing and then finally undergo their own way. This is a very important one as it relates to the S curve. Encourage mobility out of your team. Create autonomy in the day to day work so people can do things their way so long as they have clarity on what the outcome looks like. And then finally support flexibility. They can do their work wherever and whenever they can again, so long as the results are really clear to everybody. So those are the four GHz broken down and break them down because it makes it easy now to see that they have almost a direct correlation to where an employee is in the S curve. Right. So say more.

Whitney Johnson: So no, say more, because I think one of the things that I was really when we first talked really intrigued by is you had this very clear model around the four GHz and you said, yeah, I map it to I, I use them. I put these two scaffoldings together and we build a beautiful building. And so I’d love to hear a conversation that you’ve had with someone or how you’ve applied these together in developing someone on your team. I would love to hear a specific example.

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah, well, so take the Go your own way as an example, and that’s where we’re going to do some storytelling now, right? So I had this outstanding individual on my team who who was just so good at what she did, and she had been doing it for many years by the time that we started to work together. And so when we came together, there was there was a bit of a new scaffolding that she had to climb that gave her this temporary challenge to overcome. And then she got really good at that, too. And then you can start to see that you have this really competent person who’s sort of starting to hit their ceiling. And it turns out I’m the ceiling and the team we’re on is the ceiling, right? Because I’m the ceiling because yeah, like my seniority limits her from growing any further. And this is like the scope of my team. But also she’s been on the same business line now for over 4 or 5 years. So she’s facing the same challenges day in and day out. And so we decided to have this conversation of, okay, what’s next for you? And, you know, she saw an open door somewhere else. And this was a really bad time for me to be losing her. I promise you, she was such a valued employee. The selfish thing to do would have been to say, Well, please, just stay here and we’ll figure something out.

But the the thing that was great for the entire ecosystem is if I could say, you know what, I think this is a great time to help you move on to your next play and what a support for that look like. So talking to this new manager who was in the hiring process and said, well, what do you think of this person? And I said, She’s great. You’d be so lucky to have her. And then she goes through a formal interview process and we’re incredibly transparent with each other through all of this, which then also helps us negotiate the timeline of her departure. And then she helps me find somebody else that can backfill her in another team. So it’s just everything comes out of this really fruitful, transparent relationship where she knows I want the best for her. I know it’s time for her to move on. She’s found another great opportunity and instead of trying to empire, build and hold this amazing talent, I’m willing to let her go. Because if I’m good enough at what I do as a leader, I know somebody else will want to come work for me. And so that’s just a story of how the whole Go Your Own Way came to be on my way.

Whitney Johnson: I want to double click. I want to underscore what you just said, which is sometimes we don’t want people to go because we’re afraid that we won’t be able to continue to operate as a team at a high level. And you said you have to have the confidence that if you make it possible for this person to move on, that there will be someone equally good, perhaps even better, that will now want to work for you because you know that when it comes time, you will help them glow, grow, get things done, and then again go their own way.

Sudha Ranganathan: There’s a fine line between confidence and hubris. Right? And I hope I don’t cross that line in this conversation, but. I have a lot of self-assurance that that I have developed these skills as a manager through my career, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes before getting to this point where, yeah, now I have developed this reputation as somebody who’s really great to work for, not just because I’m easy, but because I will balance care and challenge in a in a really thoughtful way to bring the best out of you. And so that partly gives me a lot of confidence. But I have to say, Whitney, there’s another level of confidence here that comes from knowing that my ecosystem will support me too. And so should we. Should we talk about that a little bit?

Whitney Johnson: Yeah, let’s absolutely let’s do it.

Sudha Ranganathan: So when I think about the ecosystem. I had to have confidence. Not only that, letting this person move on would would create space for me to attract another person, but I also had to have the confidence that my manager. Would would prioritize finding a way to backfill that role in what is a very tight environment. So this is not an abundant environment wherein we’re in a very scarce environment right now. And so resources are tight. There is no hiring from the outside, right? So it’s all internal mobility, but had this confidence because of the work that this person was doing is seen as important enough by my ecosystem that they would find a way to support me in backfilling her or that I would get the support to help move some of those jobs to be done that she was handling of my team to other parts of the larger organization, because, I mean, those are the only two ways to go, right? And so I had that inherent confidence. I’d had that conversation with my manager, kept him in the loop on this conversation. So I had his implicit support. I had the support if I knew him and his peers who all report up to the leader of our marketing organization. So there’s this level of fundamental confidence I have in these people, but also I have this confidence in like the LinkedIn leadership ecosystem that.

We see internal mobility as a good thing. We incentivize managers and reward them for letting people go instead of punishing them when they let people go by telling them, Well, now you have a smaller scope and so now we can’t promote you and so on and so forth. So there’s. Think of the ecosystem as being a combination of mindsets, systems and processes and then guiding principles. And they all have to kind of come together to make things work. And in this case, I feel like all of those things were lining up really well. We have a mindset of mobility is good, not bad, and managers who do it are great, not terrible. We have systems and processes in place to say, Well, how do we make the internal mobility actually happen? How do we test people for skills, not experience to have them go into a new role? And then we have guiding principles like, hey, we think this role is more important for the system than that a particular individual would have been for their subsystem. And so this whole system over subsystem guiding principle, all of that kind of came together and so that gave me the confidence outside of my own abilities to say this is going to be a good idea in the long run.

Whitney Johnson: Yeah. So you think about it, the alternative is, is that you’re just operating your local pizza shop. You clock in, you clock out, there’s no curves to jump to, no four GS. There’s just so much that you lose, isn’t there?

Sudha Ranganathan: Can you can you imagine this person if they hadn’t moved on to another role, how utterly unfulfilled they would be in their current role? And is that really what I want? Someone who stays with me?

Whitney Johnson: They wouldn’t be there anymore. They would have left.

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah, probably not. And it’s a it’s a hard environment to find new jobs in. So maybe they would have stayed, but they’d be staying very grudgingly. And because they had no other alternatives. Well, sorry, but that’s as bad as my husband staying in the marriage because he has no other choice and not because he’s happy with me. So there’s something to that. You just don’t want that kind of equation where an employee is staying there because they have no choices. They’re unfulfilled and you’re definitely not getting their best work. And this is a people manager. So now there’s a ripple effect of the people that they manage to.

Whitney Johnson: Have you ever had a situation happen where you said in this instance with this employee, you went to their new hiring manager and said, They’re fantastic, you should hire them. Have you ever had people say. Really like. Are they that good? Because. Don’t you want to just keep them like they don’t quite believe you, that they’re that good? Has it ever happened?

Sudha Ranganathan: Not. Not in my recent experience, no.

Whitney Johnson: They believe you. Yeah.

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah, I guess so. Also, because it’s not just me saying that. It’s like an entire performance history that you can look through in our. In our work day system. For example, you can go talk to a bunch of other people who are probably going to say the same thing because this person has done a great job not just with their performance, but with their reputation and with their exposure so people know about them and how good they are. So, yeah, don’t feel like this hiring manager ever has to just take my word for it. They get to interview this person, they get to look at their reviews and they get to talk to a bunch of other people that have worked with them.

Whitney Johnson: Which goes back to your PR that you used earlier. So you have spent four years at LinkedIn volunteering, helping out with the company’s mindfulness and compassion programs. Can you say more about that?

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah, let me just say at the outset, the whole mindfulness and compassion thing can feel so woo woo and so like hippie out there. What it really is, is programs that help people with self-mastery. So how do you optimize your inner self and then when you optimize your inner self. You can do the best job with other people. Really. So it’s a bit like that. Put your oxygen mask on and then put it on for other people. So the crux of a lot of these programs was how do you develop greater self-awareness, self-regulation, and how does that help you become more aware of others and manage others more effectively? And so as part of this program, a lot of what I’ve done at LinkedIn is, number one, I get to host some amazing authors and speakers in what we call our Lighthouse Speaker series. So the folks that I’ve had here are like Kristin Neff, who wrote about fierce self-compassion, Judson Brewer, who wrote Unwinding Anxiety. So we’ve had the chance to interview these folks and bring them to our employee base. Another thing that I’ve done is trained to be a workshop facilitator and and then conduct workshops on things like Mindfulness 101. How do you develop the best possible self-awareness then? Operationalizing compassion? How do you become the sort of leader that you can codify compassion into? Three fundamental tenets? And then how do you practice those tenets on a daily basis? A bunch of those sorts of things. And you know, I used to lead meditations, pre-COVID and now now it’s one off things here and there, but mostly it’s hosting these amazing people, sharing their wisdom with our employees and facilitating workshops.

Whitney Johnson: All right, So a bit of an aside and a mindful check in. How are you today?

Sudha Ranganathan: I’m very excited today because I was getting to talk to you.

Whitney Johnson: That’s the best answer. You’re happy, right?

Sudha Ranganathan: So just so delighted. Honestly, Whitney I’m a huge fan. Ever since I saw you at Talent Connect. I think it was last year. I’m a huge fan. You said to me I’m articulate. Well, you’re outstandingly articulate. I just loved that you were able to make so many vague talent development ideas really specific and tangible. And so I’m a fan, and so I’ve been really excited this whole week. Looking forward to talking to you.

Whitney Johnson: Well, thank you. That that makes me blush a little bit. And it’s funny, speaking of mindfulness, I was working with a mindfulness coach and we were having the conversation around anxiety. And because I deal with anxiety and she said, you know, it’s really important to sometimes ask yourself, am I actually anxious or am I just excited? And I loved that because it did allow me to to to kind of check like, are you just excited? And we kind of think that as we grow up, we’re not allowed to be excited about things. And so I love that you said, Well, I’m excited. That’s fantastic.

Sudha Ranganathan: It’s so true. There’s a state of, I think, physical activation and like new neuroscientific activation that our bodies go into that looks very similar when we’re excited. So like positive activation versus when we’re worried and you’re so right, some of that can be really good and powerful for us. And I’m feeling the good, powerful parts of that energy today.

Whitney Johnson: Good. Good. All right. So you said earlier that your career has taken you all over the globe. Singapore, you were in Mumbai, now you’re in San Jose, not San Francisco, but the Bay Area. Is there an impression or an idea that your all of your travels and living in different places has left on you? Meaning just how has that influenced you? Because you haven’t lived in the same place your whole life.

Sudha Ranganathan: Wow. That’s a really powerful question. But so you know how Brené Brown says we’re all wired for connection? And the one thing that happens every time you move from one place to another is you lose connection with a community that you had established in the previous place. Now, you may not always realize it, right? Especially if you’re an introvert. You’re getting your energy from inside. You may not realize how nourishing that connection is to your soul. But it is regardless of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. And when we’re young. We move around and we take a lot of those connections with us organically. So like when I moved from India to Singapore, a bunch of my business school community moved with me. A bunch of us got recruited to Proctor, so I got handed a community on a silver platter and I didn’t quite appreciate how useful that was in grounding me when I was in a new country by myself. It played a really huge role. But then when I moved from Singapore to the Bay Area, there was no such silver platter. I moved for personal reasons with my partner, had no friends here, and I spent well the first two months feeling very sorry for myself, you know, classic victim mindset. Oh woe be me, etcetera. And then I asked myself, what’s in my control here? What can I do? And I just started to shamelessly go out there and learn how to make new friends.

Sudha Ranganathan: And by that I would invite myself over. I would call people out of the blue and go, Well, I’m going to come come over this afternoon. We’re going to have a cup of tea. Is that okay? And, you know, it can be shocking, but more often than not, people are really craving connection, too. And so this is how I made some of my closest friends today. And then I have a lot of friends still in Singapore, in Europe, in India. And I realized connection isn’t about the place that you’re in. It’s about the space that you make to connect with each other. So still, a lot of my closest friends live many, many hours away from me, but we’ve nourished our connection over the phone. And so I guess the the short answer to your question is moving all of these countries has taught me that the importance of connection is really fundamental. But sometimes you’re going to have to architect it for yourself and it’s going to teach you a lot of really valuable skills that are going to feel very uncomfortable. Much like climbing an S-curve, one might say, Hmm.

Whitney Johnson: So tell us about an escrow that you’ve jumped to recently. Yeah. What was it.

Sudha Ranganathan: Becoming? A coach, I think was a major S-curve moment for me in the first year of coach training with CDI, which is the Co-active Training Institute. They spend the entire first year teaching you how to unlearn the one thing most of us have internalized our lives, which is that we listen to be able to solve other people’s problems. We don’t listen to truly understand and go deep into what the problem really is. So we just spent an entire day with all of us manifesting our most habitual pattern, which is that we hear someone say something and we want to jump to well, let me tell you how you can solve this problem too. Just really listening and deepening the problem statement and clarifying and clarifying and then finding a way to help this person get to an answer by themselves. It was extremely painful because all my life I’ve been rewarded for finding good answers to problems. So it’s not because I’m a bad person or anybody is a bad person. It’s because that’s how we’ve been rewarded as a society, is to find answers to problems. And so all of a sudden helping other people find answers for themselves. That was a big S-curve moment for me, and it was almost a two year long journey of a lot of practicing this on new clients. And I feel like I’ve gotten so much better at it now.

Whitney Johnson: Michael Bungay Stanier calls it the Advice Monster.

Sudha Ranganathan: I love him, by the way. The Coaching Habit is one of my favorite books.

Whitney Johnson: It’s a great book. And, and, and it’s so helpful because we can we can feel it. And the place actually, I would say in a coaching environment, it’s relatively easy where the advice monster just looms so large is with my children and my husband.

Sudha Ranganathan: So well said Whitney. Home is the final frontier for our worst habits. Basically.

Whitney Johnson: That is the best quote ever. Home is the final frontier for our worst habits. So true. Um. So. Okay, so you learned how to do it. Have your people noticed on your team that you listen more and give less advice?

Sudha Ranganathan: Yeah. Well, and you know, it’s not a direct control test, right? Because over the course of the time I change teams and so I don’t have the exact same people that I did then. But there is a big qualitative difference in the kind of feedback I now receive from my people, my stakeholders, versus the kind of advice I received back then. Well, you see, the thing is, if you think about conflict resolution, a lot of people believe that the key to having a successful, difficult conversation is knowing how to assert yourself and get your point across. Well, actually, the key to a successful conflict conversation is the ability to listen and understand what the other person is truly saying. And so training to be a coach in inadvertently unlocked this special skill to be able to have difficult conversations much more productively. So I see that coming through in the feedback a lot. And my people, yeah, I get a lot of feedback from my people on just like, yeah, coaching abilities. She’s able to help me find answers for myself without telling me exactly what to do. And, and you can see that like unlocks new levels of. Operating efficiency, productivity and just like happiness and fulfillment in my people with every passing month. It’s deeply fulfilling.

Whitney Johnson: So good. All right. So Sudha, tell us, what are some of your we talked a little bit about the coaching habit and how we’re both super fans of Michael Bungay Stanier What’s another book that you would recommend that every manager read?

Sudha Ranganathan: Radical Candor by Kim Scott. One of my favorites. I spoke earlier in our conversation about care and challenge and balancing the two really well. And when I say balance, it makes it seem like they’re on opposite ends of a spectrum and you’re trying to balance them. But you know, what Kim does really well is she puts them on the X and Y axis and she goes, Well, when you do care really well and challenge really well, that’s when you have radical candor versus, let’s say, ruinous empathy and so on. I just think what a profound toolkit for a manager to have, because to me, the best managers are not just the ones that show profound care for their teams, but the ones that can stretch their teams in really productive ways to do things better. And that’s a skill. It’s not some sort of innate talent. And Kim does a great job articulating how to provide constructive feedback and have difficult conversations. So highly recommend.

Whitney Johnson: It’s such a good book. Such a good book. I have a copy that’s very, very underlined. Um, you talked about Stretch and when you’re in the sweet spot, that’s what’s happening. You’ve got this place of optimism in the sweet spot of the s curve. You have a place of optimized tension. Yeah, because it’s still hard, but it’s no longer too hard. And it’s definitely easier. But it’s not too easy. So it’s this place where, as you said, they’re stretched, you’re being stretched. But it’s not to this place of alarm bells going off anymore. And I think that’s really what the sweet spot is. It’s not where it’s easy street, it’s just optimized tension.

Sudha Ranganathan: It’s right. There’s a sense of competence that you’re still feeling because that’s so important to motivation, right? Intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, competence and connectedness. And that sense of competence, I think is really important. And that’s what you’re saying is you’re not feeling like you can’t do this at all. You are feeling like you can do it in small increments, but it’s not feeling easy, which is where flow comes from.

Whitney Johnson: Right, Right. And what we did actually in our book, Smart Growth, is we took the self-determination theory, which is autonomy, competence and relatedness, and we reconfigured it and turned it into the acronym car. Because you’re going fast. So competence, autonomy, relatedness, you’re in the sweet spot. You’re accelerating into your growth.

Sudha Ranganathan: Oh, love it. Oh, I love it.

Whitney Johnson: All right. So, Sudha, tell us what’s been useful for you in this conversation.

Sudha Ranganathan: Well, that car, that car thing, was it really just stuck with me because, you know, I’ve always thought of it as autonomy, competence and connectedness. And Kak just doesn’t sound great. It sounds like a duck going quack, but car sounds really good. And now I want to look up self-determination theory because I don’t know what that is. But it sounds really interesting.

Whitney Johnson: You do though because you just described it. You do know it. You just don’t know. You know it.

Sudha Ranganathan: Uh, you just made my implicit skill explicit right there.

Whitney Johnson: And that’s how you’ll know. And that’s actually one of the markers of knowing that you’re in the sweet spot of the curve. If you look and you say to yourself, Am I feeling competent? Yes. Am I feeling a sense of autonomy and control over my environment? Yes. Am I feeling connected to the work that I’m doing and who I’m doing it with? Yes. Those are indications that you’re in the sweet spot of your curve.

Sudha Ranganathan: I see. I see.

Whitney Johnson: So any final thoughts?

Sudha Ranganathan: No. I mean, look, we talked so much about the serious stuff, right? The four grams of great managers, the role they play, the role the ecosystem plays in getting people onto the S curve. Like, I don’t know, maybe one thing I’ll leave you with is over the last decade or so, I have learned the importance of humor. It’s just like not taking yourself too seriously. The laughing, the levity, all of that. And I’m noticing that really good leaders are not just bringing care and challenge to the equation, but they’re bringing humor to the equation, too. So I’m kind of curious to see how how that progresses in our culture. There are two Stanford professors, Jennifer Aker and Naomi Bagdonas mean, think they’d be great guests if you ever wanted to bring them on. But they’ve written this book called Humor Seriously, and it’s about how to weave humor into business. And I’m just becoming a big fan of of how do you architect more humor into our day to day? So yeah, maybe that’s like one thing I’ll say as a parting thought.

Whitney Johnson: I love that. And we have had them on the podcast, so we will include that. So this is so fun. Um, and I, I agree with you and it’s, and I will just add to that. So I remember after having them on the podcast, they gave, they issued the challenge to find three things to laugh about in a day. And I found that when I was really looking for opportunities to laugh and looking for opportunities for humor, I found them. And during that period when I was reading the book and I was preparing for the podcast, there was more laughter in our home, there was more levity. And so and like you said, there are proven positive effects of having more levity in our lives.

Sudha Ranganathan: This is so true. Yeah. And I personally developed it because I’ve always been a very serious and almost a very boring straight person. And so when I disagree, it can it can be very abrasive. And so I developed humor as a skill to soften the rough edges that I have as a personality. But now it’s just, yeah, it’s serving me in a very different way through my family, through my team. So yeah, maybe that’s the one thing to close our conversation as we end it with a chuckle.

Whitney Johnson: I love it. All right, Sudha, thank you so much for joining us.

Sudha Ranganathan: Thank you for having me. Whitney, What a pleasure.

Do you see what I meant by that metaphor with medicine and Sudha being a real frontline medic. She’s a real practitioner of the art of growing people. Here’s my takeaway. Sudha has been so incredibly deliberate and intentional about her own growth. Her life has been full of check-ins and setting new courses. She’s built a personal narrative that’s supported by her personal ecosystem, which I imagine isn’t too far from the four GS. Everyone’s got their own ecosystem in their heart, and Sudha’s is built on community and responsibility for that community in India. That was her family and her education in Singapore. That community was already there for her with all the students from her business school in the US. There was no community, so she took on that responsibility to put herself out there and find it. Sudha knows deep down the connectedness is one of the roots of personal development. Glow grow and go. And on that last g get it done, I was thinking about how Sudha differentiates between anxiety and just being excited because it really is the same symptoms for both, right? Your heart races, hands get clammy, thinking speeds up and if you can separate the two moves from one to another, you can unlock a real superpower. It’s two sides of the same coin, to use a cliche. For more, we mentioned Michael Bungay, Stanier. I spoke with him about the trap of advice in episode 141. Of course, we also mentioned Brené Brown Episode 189. I’d also like to recommend Kim Scott and Tre Bryant two changemakers in owning Your language and the tax of workplace bias. That’s episode 263. Thank you again to Sudha and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, hit subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode. Thank you to our producer Alexander Turk. Production Assistant Ange Harris and production coordinator Nicole Pellegrino.

I’m Whitney Johnson

and this has been Disrupt Yourself.