144. How Authentic Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams: Trust, Vulnerability & Engagement with Mike Robbins

Transcript – Episode 144: How Authentic Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams: Trust, Vulnerability & Engagement with Mike Robbins

Joe: If it’s hard to be authentic or ultimately vulnerable with a certain person or in a certain situation or in general for someone, welcome to being human. It doesn’t mean you’re bad or wrong or weak. It just means you’re human. And like a lot of things, we can take little baby steps.

Joe: Welcome back, friends, to the show that is food for the boss’s soul. Here on Boss Better Now, we talk with leaders, experts, and change makers about their experiences in the workplace — all in the name of helping you understand how to create the conditions at work for people to thrive. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to my friend and colleague, Mike Robbins. Mike is a leadership and teamwork expert who has helped some of the world’s most respected organizations build environments where people perform at their best because they feel safe, valued, and connected. In his work, he helps leaders build teams where authenticity and appreciation drive connection, trust, and performance. His client list is a who’s who of companies that you have heard of — Cisco, Microsoft, Pixar, Coca-Cola, Charles Schwab, Walmart, and more. Mike is a former professional baseball player, the author of five books, has been speaking for more than 25 years, and has shared his insights at more than 2,000 programs in 17 different countries. Mike and I met two years ago and we became fast friends, and I am so excited that you’re going to get to hear from him today. He is a really good dude. In this interview, listen for the terrific advice that Mike shares about how to nurture trust with remote teams, how to respond when conflict around political differences rears its ugly head on your team, and how leaders role model the behaviors that ultimately lead team members to take better care of each other. And now, our conversation.

Joe: All right, Mike, I am so glad that you are here. There is so much I want to talk with you about today, especially given the deep expertise and the gifts that you have to help leaders build stronger and more connected teams. Thank you for doing this today, buddy.

Mike: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s such a joy to get to talk to you anytime, but nice to do it in this context. I appreciate you having me on. We’re just recording like what you and I sort of have been doing on the regular these days, which is chatting about a lot of different things.

Joe: So let’s start with your origin story. I want to know what was your first real job and what do you most remember vividly about it?

Mike: Oh gosh. So my first real job — I had a couple of jobs when I was really young. I actually had a paper route in my neighborhood. I grew up in Oakland, California. In addition to the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a weekly paper called the Montclarion because we lived close to this area called Montclair. My sister had the job first, I used to help her with it, and then I got it. I hated it because it was a lot of work — it sounded cool, but then it became really hard. But then when I turned 14, I got a job as a busser at the new Mexican restaurant up the street that just opened in our neighborhood, the Cantina, where my sister had also worked. I was in the kitchen with all these older teenagers and 20-somethings, and it was like a whole scene. That sort of felt like my first real job.

Joe: It sounds like your sister was your doorway — that she was clearing the path for you in certain different kinds of jobs. Did you follow her anywhere else?

Mike: Yeah, actually. My sister Lori was four years older and we were raised by a single mom. She was super smart, really good with relationships, good in school. With everything outside of sports, which was another big part of my life, I sort of followed my sister’s lead on just about everything because she seemed to just understand the world in a way that I didn’t and she could explain it to me. So I would just follow what she did and try to make the best of it.

Joe: You’re like the third guest in the past few months who answered the question about first job with a paper route. This was a thing in the ’80s for a lot of us. I didn’t have a paper route myself, but my best friend did and I would go with him on mornings — so I feel like I’m in the paper route club a little bit as an adjacent participant. And those jobs are no joke. Get up early, deliver the papers. I always joke that every person in the world should have to work a retail job and a restaurant job at some point in their life. It gives you such an appreciation for what people who do that for a living deal with. What did working a paper route or working in a restaurant teach you about what you did or did not want to do for the rest of your life?

Mike: I think I did enjoy being around everyone, even though I was the youngest person there. I was in ninth grade, still in junior high actually, and there were a bunch of 20-somethings who were either still in college or just out of college and they had kind of a whole social scene. I was sort of like a fly on the wall experiencing this thing like, oh my gosh, this is a totally different world. What I realized is what I wanted and what I enjoyed about playing sports and being in school was being part of a team. And I didn’t really feel like I was part of the team at the restaurant. I felt like this young pimply-faced kid with braces who didn’t really belong there, but they gave me the job anyway. So it kind of taught me the importance — now that I’m reflecting on it, given what you and I both do — the importance of belonging and really being part of the team.

Joe: That’s a perfect segue, because I want to talk about the path you’ve been on from where you started. You have a pretty remarkable story of going from being a rising professional baseball player to eventually becoming a renowned speaker and author on teamwork and authenticity. I’ve heard your story, Mike, and I know you’ve told it many times, but for those listening who are not familiar with you — tell us the story. How did you get from here to there?

Mike: So kind of building on working at the Cantina in ninth grade — when I got to high school, baseball was my love, my passion. I was pretty good at it. I actually got drafted right out of high school by the New York Yankees in 1992. The Yankees’ first pick that year was a guy named Derek Jeter, which I think a lot of people have heard of. I got picked a little bit later in the draft, but I didn’t end up signing with the Yankees at that time because I had been recruited to play baseball at Stanford — about an hour from where I grew up in Oakland. Education was really important in my family, and Stanford at the time had one of the top baseball programs in the country. So I went to Stanford, played there, and then after my junior year in 1995, I got drafted by the Kansas City Royals and I did sign a pro contract. I went into the minors with Kansas City as a pitcher, working my way up trying to get to the big leagues. Unfortunately, my third season still in the minors, I went out to pitch one night, threw one pitch, and tore ligaments in my elbow. I was 23. I ended up having three surgeries over the next two years and ultimately wasn’t able to come back. I was forced to retire from baseball when I was 25.

Mike: It was pretty devastating. I had started playing T-ball when I was seven, and even though it wasn’t an actual job I was getting paid for early on, I had this dream that I wanted to do that for as long as I could. And I was fortunate enough to be good at it that it kept going. And then at 25, I had to figure out what I was going to do now. I had no idea. I mean, I’d always thought about plan B — part of why I went to college, particularly Stanford — but I didn’t have any specific professional aspiration. I was pretty lost at that moment in my life.

Joe: At 25, baseball player is your entire identity. Is that fair to say? So how do you move through that? You obviously found your way through and found work that I know you’ve found fulfilling for a long time. How did you get from that point to the next?

Mike: It was hard. In a practical sense, I literally had to go back to campus — I had graduated, I went back and finished school after getting drafted my junior year — but I’d never gone to the career center. I’d never written a resume. It just wasn’t relevant in my life at the time. I wasn’t interviewing for jobs like all of my friends. So I had to go back and ask someone to show me how to write a resume and how to find a job. Through the alumni network I met a few people. It was the late ’90s, the dot-com boom was happening here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I ended up getting a job working for an internet company doing online ad sales, which I was not qualified for and didn’t know anything about. But the guy who hired me happened to also be a former left-handed pitcher who had gone to the University of North Carolina. He looked at my resume, said, “Hey, you played baseball at Stanford — you could probably do this.” We had a conversation and he offered me a job. So all of a sudden I had to go to work and have a laptop and learn how to sell internet advertising.

Joe: And yet you’re not doing that now. At some point along the way, you looked around and said, this isn’t what I was made for.

Mike: Yeah. I spent a couple years doing that and then the dot-com bubble burst and I lost my job. Which was hard and scary but kind of gave me this freedom to really ask the question: if I could do anything, what would I do? A mentor of mine posed that question — if you didn’t have to worry about rent or your bills, what would you do? And I said, I would speak, and I would write, and I would try to tell my story and share what I’ve learned in a way that might help other people along their path. I had also become really fascinated by something I noticed as an athlete: it wasn’t always the best players that made the best teams. And then in my somewhat limited experience working for a couple of tech companies, it didn’t always seem like the most talented individuals made the best team either. There was something else. In baseball, we called it chemistry. I was like, I think that’s important. I want to study that and learn about it and maybe I could help people with it. That was what had me, 25 or so years ago, decide I was going to start speaking and coaching and writing. And all these years later, I’m still doing it.

Joe: So let’s talk about the work you’re doing today. Your clients invite you back again and again. I think you told me you’ve spoken for Google like 23 times. Did I get that right?

Mike: Almost. It’s actually 146, but who’s counting?

Joe: Are you serious?

Mike: Yeah. Over a 16-year period. For several years at Google, I designed a workshop called Building Authentic Relationships that we piloted back in 2010 and it kind of went viral internally. We started getting a ton of requests and I traveled around and visited about 15 different Google offices around the world, which was super cool. I’m grateful to Google and a lot of our clients who bring me back over and over again because, as you know doing this for a living, that’s not always the case.

Joe: The lesson here is that you seem to have a knack for making people in the audience feel something and want to do something. And there’s a through line in your work around connection and authenticity and vulnerability and trust. I feel like you were Brene Brown before Brene Brown was Brene Brown. What is the core idea or belief or behavior that sits at the core of your message to teams and audiences about connection and trust?

Mike: A lot of my work does focus on vulnerability. I started writing about and speaking about authenticity almost 20 years ago and people weren’t really talking about it, particularly at work — it was like this weird personal topic. What I learned when I really started digging into authenticity is there’s a simple framework I talk about called the authenticity equation: honesty minus self-righteousness plus vulnerability equals authenticity. Can we have the courage to be honest, which is not always easy? Can we then remove our self-righteousness — the arrogance that says just because I think it means it’s true? And can we add vulnerability? Can we lower the water line on the iceberg a bit and just be a little more human and a little more real and a little more imperfect with each other? Because what I’ve seen in my lived experience, and what my research has confirmed, is that’s what really drives trust. That ability to say I don’t know, or I screwed up, or I’m struggling with this, or I apologize — the human stuff. In today’s AI, running-a-million-miles-an-hour world, I feel like my work is pretty analog. It’s about human connection, which is as old and as fundamental as anything. Great bosses, great leaders, great teammates are people who are able to connect with the other humans they work with.

Joe: In that authenticity equation, which piece or part feels most foreign to leaders? Which piece are they not paying enough attention to that, with just a little more intentionality, could really make a big difference?

Mike: I think a lot of times it’s a small misunderstanding. There’s a distinction between self-righteousness — I’m right, you’re wrong — and conviction. Conviction is really important. Conviction means I believe this to be true, I’m willing to speak up about it, I’m willing to be passionate, I’m willing to engage in debate. However, I have enough humility and self-awareness to realize: first, I might be wrong. Or at least maybe it’s not a right-wrong thing, but I can acknowledge there might be another way to look at this that I can’t currently see. I’m not saying don’t speak up or be passionate or have strong takes. It’s the arrogance that says I’m right. And somehow we’ve been trained, directly or indirectly, to think that’s what confidence is, what executive presence is — that you never waver. But someone who’s really confident in themselves can say, “I changed my mind,” or “That’s a better idea than the one I had,” or “I never thought of it that way.” That’s growth mindset. And ironically, it’s actually vulnerable to be able to do that.

Mike: Also, Joe, a lot of leaders and people — myself included — find it scary to be vulnerable because we’ve had bad experiences with it. We’ve been hurt, we’ve been shamed, we’ve been taken advantage of, we’ve been ridiculed. So it’s a calculated risk. And I understand why people say, “I don’t want to do that,” or “I’m worried for my job,” or “I saw someone do that and it didn’t go well for them, so no thank you.”

Joe: So what do you say to folks who have that reaction? I imagine it’s about breaking it down into some smaller steps, some risks they can take, some experiments they can conduct in how they engage with others. What’s a small shift or small practice that people could adopt to put their toe in the water a little bit?

Mike: Well, I think it’s first just understanding how we individually react to fear or threat. I remember a mentor of mine saying to me years ago, “Mike, you’re living your life as though you’re trying to survive it.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You have to remember something really important.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Nobody ever has.” I was like, “What?” He said, “Yeah, you’re not going to get out of this thing alive. So stop wasting all this time and energy protecting yourself from failing or getting your feelings hurt or making a mistake.” Understanding that we want to take calculated risks in life — but at some level, if it’s hard to be authentic or ultimately vulnerable, welcome to being human. It doesn’t mean you’re bad or wrong or weak. It just means you’re human. And like a lot of things, we can take little baby steps. I often say: don’t go have the hardest conversation first. Don’t go share the big idea with the person you’re most intimidated by. Maybe you have a great idea for your boss or the company — go talk to your spouse or your friend or a coworker first. Work through it, get some feedback, take some baby steps. Then when you go have the sweaty palm conversation, it’s not the first time it’s coming out of your mouth.

Joe: If leaders need to work on this for themselves, we’ve given them a couple of specific things to think about. How do leaders then nurture that between members of a team? How do they help create an environment where members of a team can be honest with each other, can be vulnerable, can take those risks, can remove ego and self-righteousness from their interactions?

Mike: I try to keep things as simple as possible. My belief around influencing others is that there are really only two ways, as far as I can tell. One is that we model the behavior we want — we be the change, like Gandhi taught us. If you want people to be more open, to have those kinds of conversations with you or with each other, start by doing it yourself. They see you do it with them, with other people, with your own peers, with your own manager. That starts to rub off. The other way is you can give feedback — and sometimes feedback comes in the form of pointing something out or correcting someone, coaching someone. But sometimes it comes in the form of encouragement. Tom Peters said, “Celebrate what you want to see more of.”

Mike: When I was in high school, I played basketball and I wasn’t as good at it as I was at baseball. But my favorite coach of my entire life — and probably my favorite teacher — is a guy named Don Lippy, who I’m still close to to this day. He was my high school basketball coach at Skyline High School in Oakland. Our whole system was fast break, full-court press. We would run until we ran out of breath and then he’d put someone else in. And his pet peeve was if we ever lost the ball and didn’t get back on defense. We’re playing a game against Oakland Tech in their gym. I’m a junior, 17 years old. I’m bringing the ball up the court, and their best player steals the ball from me at midcourt. Big kid, barreling down the court the other way. I hustle back as best I can, but he’s already ahead of me, he’s bigger and stronger. I try to get in front of him. He ends up dunking on me and I foul him. The gym erupts. I’m on the court in a heap. Everyone is laughing. My own teammates won’t make eye contact. It was a bad moment for a 17-year-old kid. I get up, embarrassed, mortified — and I look over and Coach Lippy is jumping up and down on the sideline going, “Way to get back on defense, Robbins!” And I’m like, what is he talking about? But he was reinforcing: that’s what I taught you to do. Even though it wasn’t the result we wanted. I never forgot that. All these years later I’m 52 years old and I think about it sometimes when I’m scared or when I make a mistake. I just want to make sure I’m putting forth the effort even if the outcome isn’t what I want.

Mike: As managers, as leaders, as people — parents or just friends — we can influence each other in ways we don’t even realize that are pretty significant. And even if we do things the right way, it doesn’t always give us the result we want. But that doesn’t mean we failed. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep showing up that way. Spread out over time, doing things the right way, you are going to get the result you want more times than not.

Joe: I keep thinking of my son, who is 13, who would describe what you went through as being posterized. [Laughter] His favorite thing to do is lie and wait for dad to come around the bend, where we have a little basketball hoop hanging in the entry, and then posterize dad unexpectedly — launching himself across the top of me and dunking over me. It gives him a tremendous amount of joy. Just one of those little fun family things.

Mike: Well, look — if he’s fortunate enough to keep playing and he plays in high school, it might actually happen to him in real life. And then it’s a whole other thing. [Laughter]

Joe: He is the smallest kid in seventh grade. He will never posterize anybody. But he’ll get back on defense. He’s got the hustle. So that’s good. I want to ask you a couple of specific questions about teams in this day and age, because there’s been so much change in how we gather and how we work together. COVID shows up and accelerates the rise of hybrid and remote work. Deep political divisions in our country have been creeping into workplaces like never before. And now AI is changing so much about how we work. I imagine you get asked a lot about how to foster authenticity and connection in hybrid and remote work environments. Give us some advice — how can leaders help people across those kinds of teams access each other’s humanity, find things in common, and actually feel like they’re part of a team when nobody’s chatting together while waiting for the Keurig?

Mike: It’s tricky. I think we did learn over COVID — as that, as you said, accelerated all of this remote and hybrid working — that the superficial stuff, the “Hey, how’s it going? How was your weekend? How are the kids?” bumping into people in the hallway or eating lunch together — we didn’t realize how important that stuff was. You can’t really recreate that on Zoom or Teams. That said, I think it’s about acknowledging it. We’ve got to talk about the elephant in the room: hey, we’re not together. Hey, we’re distributed. A lot of people personally really like having the flexibility to work remotely. But collectively, we see a negative impact on collaboration, connection, performance, and people really feeling like they belong to the group. The teams that are thriving in this environment talk about it a lot. They’re constantly adjusting and asking: what can we do to stay connected in ways that actually work for the real people on this team, with the real personalities and the real work? Because there’s not a one-size-fits-all. What I often say to leaders is: you’ve got to know yourself and know your team. And if they’re not in the same building, it amps up to another level — you’re going to have to get more creative and more intentional. And you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. You can actually talk to and collaborate with the team about it, because it’s got to work for everybody, not just you as the leader.

Joe: I love that you talked about intentionality. In so many conversations I have with leaders about this, I talk about how important it is to be explicit with your team when we do make time in those virtual environments to not do the work stuff — to say, “Hey, we’re going to engage in this team building question or an icebreaker or go around and talk about our weekends.” These are practices that are important for enhancing how we work together and creating an environment where we support each other. Because if I can find things in common with you as a human being, if I can access your humanity, then when mistakes happen or when we let each other down, we’re much less likely to jump to a negative conclusion. The more that we know about each other and the more connected we feel, the less we make up and the better we are able to support each other.

Mike: Absolutely. And one example I often share with leaders — if you’re meeting virtually on a regular basis, it might seem a little corny and cheesy to do a little team building or an icebreaker. But here’s the thing: if you ever lead workshops for a living, you know that you have the content of the workshop to teach, but if you don’t do some kind of “who am I, who are we, let’s get connected” icebreaker, it doesn’t work. It could be the most brilliant content and people aren’t ready to receive it. You’ve got to get the energy going in the room first. And in the same way, even if you’re the manager and you meet with your team regularly and everyone knows each other, a virtual meeting needs a little bit of thawing at the beginning. Even if it’s just a couple of minutes, you bake it into the actual meeting on the front and back end or throughout — because we don’t have the ramp-up part where we’re chatting beforehand or the time after the meeting ends.

Joe: Yes. I mentioned political divisions. I hear from leaders all the time who struggle with how to respond when conflict erupts between people with stark political, sociological, or religious differences. What advice do you have for them? What core ideas or principles should leaders draw on when these kinds of differences rear their ugly heads at work?

Mike: That’s a big one. I wrote a book called We’re All in This Together. I actually wrote it in 2019 because I was starting to really feel like things had amped up in the years leading to that — all of this political divisiveness was showing up at work in a way I hadn’t seen in the first 15 years I was doing this work. And it’s ironic because when I think back to 2019, it almost seems quaint relative to today, after COVID and the last couple of election cycles. It’s at such a higher fever pitch than it even was then.

Mike: What I think is important — similar to the virtual thing, even though it’s very different — is to acknowledge the elephant in the room: there is a lot of divisiveness, a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of uncertainty. I travel a lot and I live in a place that’s pretty politically liberal and progressive, the San Francisco Bay Area, but I also spend time in parts of the country that are more conservative. What I find is that even when our politics are really different, most people I talk to are concerned about the divisiveness. So weirdly, one place we can find common ground is our concern for the fact that it seems so divided. And can we then lower the waterline on the iceberg enough to get to a place where we can connect with our common humanity? Down below the waterline of someone who disagrees with me politically, even vehemently, they probably have joy and pain and gratitude and sadness and excitement and fear. They probably want their kids to be happy and healthy. We have more in common than I think we realize. And without avoiding or sugarcoating the divisiveness, there’s a way we can speak to and remember the common ground at the same time.

Joe: I think it’s important for leaders to create fundamental expectations for how people talk to each other in workplaces, because the quality of those interactions depends on what we as a leader expect, what we permit, what we communicate, and what we role model. You can have people who have differences of opinion on a whole host of subjects, political or otherwise. But if how someone is expressing that is doing harm in the workplace or violating core values, that’s a performance management issue. The leader can step in and say, “Hey, we need to talk about communication style — it’s not about the politics, it’s about the packaging.”

Mike: Absolutely. And an example I often use: if you’ve ever had the experience of traveling abroad for work, one of the important things to do is learn a little about the culture and customs there. I’m not going to become an expert on Japanese culture before a meeting in Japan, but it would be a good idea to pay some attention, ask some questions, so I can connect and relate a little better. If we bring that back home — we live in an incredibly diverse place here in the US, and a lot of people I work with are managing global teams. A level of openness, curiosity, and wanting to understand what’s going on in the boats of the people around you. I often say it’s more like we’re all in the same storm but we’re in different boats. Great leaders do a great job of trying to figure out what’s going on in the boats of the people around them. Whether I understand it completely or agree with it is almost irrelevant. It’s more my desire and curiosity of wanting to be aware so that I can manage performance as best as possible, motivate them, communicate with them, whoever they may be. And the truth is — we could be the same age, the same race, have grown up in the same town and still be wildly different in our values, beliefs, personality type, and what motivates us.

Joe: Good stuff, my friend. All right, I’ve got a couple of rapid fire questions for you that we kind of close our show with. What’s the most absurd or unnecessary rule you’ve ever encountered in a workplace?

Mike: Oh gosh. The first one that came to mind was our college coach used to make us wear a coat and tie on the road when we traveled, and it used to drive me crazy. Although now I appreciate it — but at the time I was super annoyed.

Joe: You appreciate it now because you’re older. What’s the reason?

Mike: There was something about being dressed up. There were like 25 twenty-year-olds walking through the airport and everybody would look at us like, “Who are those guys all dressed up in coats and ties?” It seemed very stuffy and conservative to me at the time, but now I sort of appreciate that there was some structure to it and it made it a big deal.

Joe: If you could ban one workplace phrase forever, what would it be?

Mike: “Let’s take this offline.” I never quite know exactly what that means. It’s basically, “I don’t want to talk about it here,” but it always feels weirdly jargony and inauthentic when people say it.

Joe: I’m that way with “Let’s put a pin in that.” What does that even mean? Are we ever going to come back and take the pin out? It just feels like one of those weird phrases. What is one piece of professional advice or wisdom that has stayed with you throughout your career?

Mike: One of my most important mentors in my life was a guy named Richard Carlson, who wrote a great book called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff. He passed away many years ago, actually three weeks after he wrote the foreword to my first book, Focus on the Good Stuff, in 2006. My first interaction with Richard — I’d read his book, was inspired by the content. I wrote him a letter and he wrote me a letter back before we even met. This is the late ’90s when we used to write letters. I reread that letter from time to time now. And in the letter, in bold type, it says: be yourself. The second book I ever wrote was called Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken. I try to remember that, as simple and almost corny as it sounds, in everything that I do. I can’t be anybody but me. And I’m not only trying to teach authenticity in my work — I’m trying to be authentic in how I show up in life. A lot of us, myself included, at times create all kinds of unnecessary stress by trying to be someone else instead of just being who we are.

Joe: I love it. My last question for you is a very Mike-specific question. I want to know when voice notes became your love language — and I want to know how the people closest to you feel about your prolific voice note usage. For people who are listening: Mike is a voice notes person. When Mike communicates, some people get text messages, some people get emails — Mike sends voice notes. And let’s be honest, Mike, some of those voice notes are actually not voice notes, they’re podcast episodes. Mini podcast episodes. You’ve said this to me: voice notes are my love language. So how did that become your love language, and how do the people closest to you feel about it?

Mike: I appreciate you asking. We have to thank my beautiful and amazing wife Michelle, who I’ve been with for almost 26 years. We had a mutual friend a couple of years ago who would send us voice texts and we thought it was a little weird at first — this was before people were really doing that. And then Michelle started sending them to me and I was like, well, that’s interesting. One of the dynamics in our marriage is I talk a lot, and I come from a family where people interrupt each other — it’s sort of a contact sport. My wife comes from a family where no one ever interrupts each other. So 26 years in, we’ve had to navigate how we communicate. Michelle loves the voice text because I can’t interrupt her. I can’t ask her any questions. She can get a whole thought out. My wife will send me 15-minute voice texts sometimes. And then we voice text back and forth. I started to realize: oh, I kind of like both giving and receiving these. And ironically, Michelle and I will literally call them podcast episodes. “I got three great episodes from you today, thank you.” Or, “I’m not caught up on all the episodes yet.” [Laughter]

Mike: There’s something spacious about it. And if I get a voice text from you or some of the few other people in my life who I voice text with, I enjoy listening to it. It’s like a personalized podcast for me. I don’t feel rushed like I have to do a quick text or talk on a voicemail before it beeps — and nobody even listens to voicemails anymore. And 26 years in with Michelle, I find there are ways we share things with each other by voice text that, because of the busyness of our lives or having teenage girls or whatever, we may not actually share throughout the day. This way, it allows us to do that with a little more depth.

Joe: That’s beautiful. And of course it tracks with who you are and how you show up in the world. You’re talking about building connection and trust and authenticity, and we’re all operating in a world where technology keeps creating more and more distance in relationships. Of course it would track that you’re not sending texts and emails but actually taking the time to use your voice and that longer format to share and connect. And I have to thank you because I’m doing it more now because of you in a lot of ways. You’re so good at relationships and just making people feel seen and cared for. There are so many people in the world who get described as, “Boy, when you talk to that person, you feel like the only person in the room.” And that’s who you are, Mike. You have no ego about it. When you meet people, you could meet the janitor cleaning the toilets at the conference venue or the keynote speaker on stage who is a former Olympian, and you will talk to them and hold space for them in all of the exact same ways. It’s one of my favorite things about you, buddy. Thank you so much for being who you are and role modeling all of those things in the universe for the rest of us.

Mike: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you for the kind words, thanks for having me on, and for this great conversation.

Joe: Where can people follow you or find out more information about you and the terrific work that you’re doing?

Mike: Best place to do that is at our website, which is mikerobbins.com. My podcast is We’re All in This Together — wherever you get podcasts, you can check that out. And I’m on all the socials, pretty easy to find. Robbins is R-O-B-B-I-N-S — mikerobbins.com.

Joe: Well, there you have it, folks. My deepest thanks to you, Mike. Thanks so much for the great conversation and for spending this time with us. If you liked this conversation, be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss an episode of our show. I am always grateful for your reviews, your shares, and your feedback. You can share your thoughts by dropping a comment in the box below our episode here on YouTube, or you can email me at any time for any reason at bossbetternow@gmail.com. In the meantime, don’t forget: commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com for more information. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Joe: Do you need to take your leadership knowledge and skills to the next level, but don’t have time for overpriced courses or lengthy training programs? Then you want to check out Boss Hero School. This immersive 3-day leadership development experience with me is like getting an MBA in people leadership in just a couple of days. We’re going to teach you the methods and the mindset to create environments where people join, stay, care, and try. For more information, visit bossheroschool.com.