4. Engaged Listening with Dan Tangherlini

How do you maximize the intake of information in a short amount of time? How do you accurately evaluate if someone is, in fact, a good listener during hiring? What do being a paramedic and executive have in common?

In episode four of the HiPERleadership podcast, join David and his guest Dan Tangherlini, former CFO of U.S. Department of the Treasury and former Administrator of U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) as they answer these questions and more. The two unpack the steps Dan took to make radical change happen in the wake of an internal spending scandal at GSA. Learn the critical role engaged listening played in the turnaround. Walk away with techniques business leaders can use in their own transformation. To learn more about taking your organization from the new normal to the new exceptional visit www.hipersolutions.com.

Transcript

David Morris  00:10

Welcome to another episode of HiPER leadership. I'm David Morris, your host, and founder and CEO of HiPER solutions. Though HiPER leaders are listening and taking in loads of information, because of their sense of urgency, it may very well seem to others that they aren't listening. This topic of engaged listening isn't just important for HiPER leaders, but it is critical for our country as people start to have extremely difficult conversations. I'd like to introduce Dan Tangherlini. He had a distinguished career including CFO at the US Department of the Treasury, administrator of GSA, which is [the] U.S. General Services Administration, amongst other roles. Hi, Dan.

Dan Tangherlini  00:58

Hi, David. Thanks. for including me in in your podcast.

David Morris  01:02

Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Now, this podcast, Dan, and our intended audience are owners, investors, executive sponsors, and ultimately, those who are choosing leaders that are going to come in and drive major change, which we call HiPER leaders. And what I am so intrigued by, in terms of your background, is Dan is a type of behind the scenes guy. He has been in these roles in various organizations that have impacted all of us. Some highlights on Dan's background, is going back to the metro in DC and DC Department of Transportation and city administrator in DC government, and then getting to become the CFO of the US Department of Treasury before coming in to do a [sic] incredible turnaround of the GSA. Dan, when we started talking the other day about listening and engaged listening, what came to mind?

Dan Tangherlini  01:59

Well, first of all, there was the slight irony about talking about listening (laughs). But but really for me the important aspect of listening is this this notion that perhaps you don't know everything, and that there are people who have a much closer perspective of what needs to be better, what needs to be fixed, and what the problems are, what the concerns are, that if you actually can go and find a way to increase your surface area to gain contact with them, that you can then gain the value of their understanding of what's going on.

David Morris  02:34

As you think about some of the biggest challenges that you've been tapped on the shoulder to pull off, and, you know, specifically when you got that phone call from the Obama administration back in, was it April of 2012?

Dan Tangherlini  02:51

Yes, that's right.

David Morris  02:52

And there was a challenge at hand and that challenge was something that, you made it seem like it was sort of effortless ease [sic] and how you came in and did all that crowdsourcing and all of that, why don't you give us a little backdrop of what was going on at the time there?

Dan Tangherlini  03:10

Well, first of all, my wife described it as the worst birthday gift ever. She, she, her birthday is April 1. And I had actually (laughs), my plan was actually to leave the federal government and to go and begin to find my way in the private sector. And then I got dragged back into another assignment and she knew it was going to be one that would be pretty all-consuming for for some time. But when I when I got there, I mean, I think it's nice that you describe it as as effortless, or at least appearing effortless. It required a huge amount of effort. And it and many times, a lot of self-doubt and questions about whether we're you know, whether there was something we could do to address the issue because it had become so politicized so quickly. But I found there are, as in most organizations, a lot of smart, committed, and dedicated people who had ideas about how to make it better. They just didn't have a chance to raise them, and they didn't necessarily have a chance to work on them. They didn't have anyone also who was willing to take a risk to pursue those ideas. So, in many ways, I think active listening is is part of the as part of the work, and maybe that's the easier part. But in maybe it's the 80%. The 20% that's harder, but the 20% that actually gets the gets the work done, is the willingness to take risk on the ideas that people bring to you. And the willingness to be the person who will take the blame if they go wrong. And and then be excited about the idea of sharing success with people if they go right.

David Morris  04:50

Like so many HiPERs, humble and under political, you know, the part that intrigues me about GSA is how Dan did not jump right into the extreme of the situation. Let's talk a little bit about Las Vegas and what was happening there. And why ultimately, it was literally, if this was not addressed, if this GSA problem was not addressed, the implications to the overall administration, maybe a little bit of a backdrop, and then I'd love to unpack really what the first few months looked like when you went in there.

Dan Tangherlini  05:25

Yeah, so it was it was spring of 2012. So, it was the it was really the beginning of the political season, when President Obama was running for reelection, and more and more it was looking like Mitt Romney, a former management consultant, was going to be his challenger. And so, in many ways, this was representative, if you will, of a perspective that that administration, the Obama administration, they're going to turn it into an issue that they weren't good at running the organization. So, at some level, the GSA problem was was a political messaging problem. at another level, it was also a problem of a disconnection between an understanding of the pain that people were experiencing in the global financial crisis, and the way the government was responding to it. This was a, this was a big party thrown in a, actually a suburb of Las Vegas, you know, where there were, you know, performers and there were, you know, passed hors d'oeuvres and there was this sense that here was an organization patting itself on the back. The whole purpose of the the event was really to pat [sic] was the reward itself for its hard work on the Recovery Act, a nearly trillion dollar investment that was necessitated by a collapse in the national, and at some level, the global economy that caused millions of people to lose their jobs, millions of people lose their homes. So, this image of Government Employees whose salaries are paid by taxpayers; a good number of those taxpayers suffering massive consequences from this global financial crisis. You know, partying in Vegas was deeply, deeply troubling. And I'd have to say the it was troubling to, certainly the President, was troubling to the administration, it was troubling to the Congress. There was uniform concern about it, frankly, I didn't. [?] It was not a partisan issue. Everyone was mad. And and it was troubling to the, you know, the vast majority of GSA employees who had dedicated their life and their service to trying to make a more efficient and effective government. It was, it was discordant with what they thought the mission of the organization was.

David Morris  07:46

So after President Obama reached out to your wife and thanked her (both laugh) for you, accepting this role, reluctantly, just like a lot of HiPER leaders, because the mission has to matter in order to sign up for it, you show up and it's a mess and everyone's upset. The budget of the time the GSA was what? 

Dan Tangherlini  08:10

Well, it's a great question because you know, over $65 billion flows through the GSA through the 15% of federal procurement. It, it oversees, there's a federal buildings’ fund that oversees the 350 million square feet of office space that that reaches into the 10s of billions of dollars. The appropriation number is is a much smaller number, because it's one of the few agencies that actually operates a bit like a, like a company in the sense that it has to raise revenue from services it sells into the federal government space. So, there are a variety of different ways of describing the number but we can say it's it's a lot.

David Morris  08:51

And whether it's the White House or the IG or the leadership team, which you're trying to figure out what to do with that the GSA, what is the first few months look like, in your very calm demeanor, of going in and just listening? How do you go about creating this information flow to you, where people don't feel pressure of having to bring a solution to you, they can just bring the problems, etc?

Dan Tangherlini  09:18

Yeah, well, you know, the first step was actually engaging in a partnership with the Inspector General. We did something together that, that I don't think many other people have, or anyone else had actually done before: we issued a joint letter to the team, saying, “If you have a problem, it's it's your duty, it's your responsibility, it's your role to raise that concern to your supervisor. And if you feel that your supervisor doesn't sufficiently respond to that problem, it's also then your duty to pass that information that concern to the Inspector General”. And what we're doing is saying [that] we're inviting into our organization outside oversight, outside accountability, and I thought it was really important that we collectively give people permission to bring accountability into their work. The other, I just so happened to be reading at the time, Alan Mulally’s book, about his time of working on Ford during the global financial crisis. And I was really struck by the fact that Alan Mulally had created this continuous system of evaluation of performance around key goals that organizations set for themselves, and then rewarded people, not just for meeting the goals, but also rewarded people for raising their hand and saying, “I'm struggling with an issue, and I need everyone else's help to try to solve it.” You know, there is this there's this evolution of of a problem where it where it starts as a concern, and if left alone loan long enough and not dealt with can metastasize into a crisis. And the GSA scandal was actually one of those things where people had raised, a number of people had raised a concern, leading up to the event, said, “I don't like the looks of what's about to happen here. I don't, I don't think that this is appropriate”, but they didn't feel that the organization rewarded that expression of concern, or was willing to listen, and certainly didn't feel like the organization was going to take action, or if they did take action that would be retributive action. And so what happened was, is that little kernel of a concern was allowed to grow, metastasize into a crisis that cost people jobs, and even even led to some people being prosecuted.

David Morris  11:47

Stephen Covey says most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply, and with HiPER leaders, the sense of urgency, the mission orientation, the willing[ness] to do whatever it takes to win a noble cause could create a lot of opportunity to come across as impatient, interrupting, etc. How do you balance this urgency inside of you with the fact that, even in a conversation like today, there's just no interrupting. (Both laugh)

Dan Tangherlini  12:21

I think that's a really, really great question. I think Mr. Covey's structure is worth further further consideration. I really, I really admire it. And I think, you know, I think that that's the biggest challenge because if you're, if you feel like you have some domain expertise, and you're enthusiastic and excited about a particular position or outcome, it's hard not to interrupt. It's hard not to try to win the day. I was a debater in high school. And so, so I, you know, I I sometimes bring to every conversation this notion of competition. But I lost a lot of debates too, because people were better at arguing than I was, they were, they had a better command of the facts, or they had a better way of structuring their arguments to be more convincing. So, I think I think it's okay, for people to stake different positions out, I think it's okay for you even to have a strongly-held position. But what's really best is if you recognize that your position may ultimately not be right, and be willingness to have a willingness, a certain amount of humility and open mindedness to have your position changed, and that's really hard. That's really hard. But, the great thing about the GSA job was, I'd never run GSA before. I'd been a customer downstream from them in a couple of areas. I had some thoughts and ideas about some of the work they did. But I knew people that I knew there were going to be people in the room that had forgotten more than I would ever know about the organization. And so frankly, having that limited experience, created the environment where I needed the humility to be an active listener and be someone who understood, not just responded.

David Morris  14:13

Based on all that information you took in, from the various stakeholders in the team, over those first few months, or whatever it may have been, help the audience understand a little bit of how you converted those insights into action, because you did make a lot of changes. And you did it. You did it with respect to individuals, you help them into new roles and new organizations. You did a lot of action. A lot of people may hear this and say, well, that's interesting, Dan's a nice guy. He takes in all this information, but what happens is you left in just under three years, and that place was transformed, so help us understand from insight to action.

Dan Tangherlini  14:52

Well, I you know, I appreciate I appreciate that, that assessment of the work there and maybe there'd be others who had a different view, but let's go with yours for the purposes of this discussion (both laugh). And I actually was reading the book, The Everything Store, at the same time, the story about Jeff Bezos and the creation of Amazon. And, one of the things as I was struck by was this culture of Amazon of the six-page memo. And the fact that that people would come around the table, they would write the six-page memo, they would come around the table, and before you even started the conversation, they would reserve some time so people read the six-page memo, and, you know, they basically said, “Look, we know that maybe you're going to be too busy to read it before the meeting, so it's going to be part of the meeting that you're going to read it”. And it's not like we implemented the six-page memo format. We, we did implement some of the Red Yellow Green discipline that Alan Mulally had done in Ford. But more importantly was was implementation of some discipline that forces the leader to be in a position where they actually have to listen, and forces some discipline around people coming in some programmatic and disciplined way around the table, even, you know, even when it got kind of tiresome. We spent the entire summer of what we call the top to bottom review, where we had every aspect of the organization come and present on who they are, what they did, what their, what their headcount and org structure was, what their budget was, what their challenges were. And we use that process to, not just teach me about the organization that I had been given the honor to lead, but really teach the leadership team, reteach the leadership team, what the issues and challenges were, that each aspect of those programs were facing. And we spent literally months in a conference room in the temporary headquarters of GSA, really diving into those issues and then trying to take learnings from one meeting and bumping it up against another. So, bringing different teams together to have conversations. Asking people, you know, “How would you, How would you make this place better if you if you had unlimited authority and resources?”, suspending some of the limitations that people bring as received wisdom to every discussion, and asking them to challenge themselves and challenge the organization. The same time then, we started something called the ‘Great Ideas Hunt’, which we asked every member of the organization to provide us with their great idea about how to make the organization a better organization. And we got literally thousands of recommendations from our employees. We had two rules: One rule is you could comment about any aspect of the work with the General Services Administration., you didn't have to follow organizational hierarchy or structure, and the second rule was, you had to put your name on your recommendation, you had to be willing to say, this is my idea. And what was interesting was, not so much the number of ideas we got, we were pretty shocked by the volume. But we were really shocked by the number of people who commented on those ideas and actively worked with the original suggester [sic] to try to make the idea better. And I think that that's really the key to it. It's, it's, it's not saying that this is my philosophy and patting yourself on the back for believing it. But it's actually creating the organizational structure and rhythm and discipline about creating the forum and the methods and the structures for people to to contribute their ideas that that you should and have to listen to.

David Morris  18:50

I guess that's how you get to culture change and how you get to, even after you leave the assignment that those habits continue.

Dan Tangherlini  18:59

Yeah, it's really interesting. The Deputy Secretary of Treasury, the former Deputy Secretary of Treasury, Neil Wallen, got a call from one of the people who came behind him and said, Neil, what's the deal with these quarterly performance reviews. And the quarterly performance review was a process that we started at the Treasury Department to support Neil in his role as the COO of the department to create some continuous mechanism by which concerns and ideas were surfaced to the highest level of the organization so that action could be taken. And we built it as a key component to the budget process, because the budget process is just an allocation of resources around a strategy. We use it to set strategy; operational strategy for the for the sub agencies, and we frankly use it to make improvements in areas of weakness in those agencies. So, to your point is, if you create these cultural mechanisms for listening and change, they have a tendency to just keep going; they become the culture of the organization.

David Morris  20:13

Powerful. And then at a one-on-one level how again do you manage for and even others that you really respect who are who are great at this listening and I’m even thinking about your brother, who I had the opportunity meet, who works at San Francisco fire is is the ability to sit across from someone and, on one hand have this sense of urgency to get something done, yet listen without this interrupting: just any techniques you would recommend to the audience?

Dan Tangherlini  20:41

Yeah, well, you know, my brother, since you mentioned him, I'm I'm super proud of both my brothers, but my younger brother is a paramedic-firefighter in the San Francisco Fire Department. He's now the Assistant Chief in charge of medical response, but as a paramedic, you know, here is this great example. Here's this great embodiment of this notion of where you have to listen, right? Because the patient, if they're awake is going to tell you what's going on. You have to talk to people about what happened. But you have to have this massive sense of urgency because you've got this golden hour for medical intervention that maximizes the chance of saving someone's life. So here is this great example of someone who has to run to a problem, has to very quickly and very carefully listen to the inputs about what it is they're looking at here, and yet, at the same time, has to move as quickly as possible to stabilize and transport the patient. And so, I think, to the extent that there are techniques, the techniques are making it part of your, your response to any problem or concern is not necessarily knee-jerk reacting: the initial information you tend to get tends to be wrong. Or it tends to be filtered through a perspective that maybe needs additional perspectives in order to gain the true sense of what's taking place. And at the same time, you have to understand that the time is not your friend. So, you have to, you have to make sure you're balancing the need to listen and balancing that need to decide. And I think, you know, constantly working with that and exercising it like you would exercise any muscle.

David Morris  22:35

As we think about the audience, people hiring HiPER leaders, whether it's a board of directors, investors, CEOs, President of the United States, choosing people to be able to go make breakthrough change happen, you know, reflecting on all of this, Dan, what is your sense if you're in that position, the best way to evaluate how good of a listener the candidate is?

Dan Tangherlini  23:02

Hey, you know, I think I think I think you can gain a sense from a conversation. Although I still think the hiring process is one of the most inefficient processes in the world because it's kind of complicated to decide, how are you going to have a multi-year relationship with someone based on a few hours of conversation? So, I think the responsibility that any manager really has the in that hiring decision then is to try to talk to and listen to other people and draw out the question from both the person you're interviewing and and the references you're checking is, “How well does this person incorporate information from sources other than their own internal ones?”, and maybe find examples. See if you can challenge the individual to give you an example and then see if you can stress test that example with with other references or ask for examples from references.

David Morris  24:00

So literally you're doing listening of their other stakeholders, references, etc. to judge it. You can't just do it in that interview.

Dan Tangherlini  24:09

Exactly, exactly. I think you, you can, you can, you can get an idea from the interview. But then the trick is to actually listen to what you get in the interview and stress test it with other people that you you talk to and listen to.

David Morris  24:23

Terrific. Well, as we close out, given that it's June of 2020, any parting thoughts in terms of what's going on in the world right now and how listening in a nonpartisan manner is critical to moving this world forward?

Dan Tangherlini  24:38

I think that question almost answers itself. What you hear out on the streets is people saying, we wouldn't necessarily have to be here if people listened to us for years and years and years, and I think it's about time that we start hearing and and, in the words of Mr. Covey start understanding the pain, the suffering, the challenges, of bias and racism and societal structures that have interfered with people's fair opportunity to gain opportunities. So I, I find the situation we're in exceedingly painful but also a point of potential inflection for hope and optimism. And, I don't know, I look at almost every situation that way because the alternative then is is is, is one that would keep you from working on difficult problems. There's one more point I'd like to make. And that is one of the things I really respect and admire about you and why I enjoy our conversations so much, is that, not only are you a great active listener, but you also are great at asking the next question, drawing out additional information and additional thoughts from people. So, you know, being in a position to receive comments from people or even being in a position to ask that first question is, is good, but what what converts someone into great is when they're actually actively interested in hearing what the person has to say enough that they stop and ask the next question or even the follow-on question and incorporate what they heard and into that line of inquiry.

David Morris  26:28

Well, thank you, Dan, you've been a great teacher over the years and it's been such a pleasure learning more about this, and for the audience to understand that you can be taking in information, you can be taking in data, you can be collecting information from other sources, and then ultimately, when you have that conversation, and they feel that they were heard, you, you bring all that information back, you do amazingly. So, thank you so much.

Dan Tangherlini  26:53

Thank you, David. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on this podcast and and learn more from from your other guests.

David Morris  27:03

Thank you for the audience. Please visit our website for all the episodes of HiPER leadership podcast. And stay tuned next week as we continue to bring you inside the minds of HiPER leaders.