725. Expert Interview: Working Smarter–How to Reset the Chaos

Marisa Murray

“One of the things that I really encourage my clients to do is to take nothing for granted when we work together. We really want to question everything. The reality is a lot of us have developed a bunch of habits and routines…. And so the first step is really creating just this deep curiosity around why we’re doing what we’re doing, what we’re doing habitually.”

Marisa Murray is a Certified Executive Coach, Author and Speaker focused on unlocking executives’ leadership potential to yield superior business results. A former Partner with Accenture and Vice President at Bell, Marisa brings her over 20 years of first-hand experience to her research and consulting on the best practices that support her clients in achieving the outcomes to which they aspire. Marisa’s book,“Work Smart: Your Formula for Unprecedented Professional Success,” reveals 50 techniques to accelerate your success as a leader while creating more ease and enjoyment in your work, rejecting the notion that working harder is the answer.

Working Smarter: How to Reset the Chaos

“Most people can relate to the fact that we are experiencing mounting quantities of work. If you have been in the workforce for awhile, you know this constant thinning of resources of people, a lot of automation, and then thinning of the middle management and spreading responsibility. All of that amounts to a sheer kind of volume increase in terms of the amount that we’re all expected to get through. But probably more significant is a lot more uncertainty, which creates strain in a number of different ways.”

Why Is This Important?

”[Uncertainty] strains the ability to develop trust. We’re uncertain of how our opinions will be received, what are the challenges or conflicts between different colleagues that we may have, etc. …And [many people] really have a hard time connecting to the feelings behind the words of other people. They understood what they are saying, but they do not really connect to the feeling behind the words. And it often makes them give a response that is unsatisfactory to the other person and creates a real sense of insecurity.”

What Are the Key Lessons Learned Here?

“The type of problems that we are solving are increasingly complex and increasingly cross functional. So it is really impossible for any one person to have the expertise to solve any given problem. And so we’re no longer solving for individual intelligence. We have to solve for the collective intelligence of the team. I feel leaders who are able to build those connections skills–the ability to not just understand the words of the person they are listening to, but also understand the feelings behind the words, and to align their intentions with their impact on others–are the ones who can actually harness the collective intelligence of their teams.”