PAUL MARCIANO INTERVIEW "ONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!"

Hi, I'm good. Sharon, it's nice to see you, my old friend.

It has. It's always too long, I know. So how was your Easter holiday here in Flemington?

I know, yeah. It always makes everything better. Well, thanks for being interested in sitting down and having a conversation.

Cool. Should we hold the book up? We'll hold the book up. It's the closest I'll ever get to giving birth, because you find out you get the contract for it and you're all excited and enthusiastic, and then it's like nine months of pain, I guess. And then at the end, it's particularly difficult to get it finished, and then you have to nurture it for a long period of time. Anyway, it's my third book, and I'm excited about it. I've been in the field of human relations for 30 years, and as I've looked at a lot of the clients I've worked with, there's just dysfunction, often rooted in us not having straight conversations with each other.

I think there's a lot of dysfunction related to either not having the conversation or having it go badly. And the number one thing that people do when issues arise is we avoid it. We say things to ourselves such as, 'It's not going to make a difference. You know, Sharon and I have had this conversation before. What's the point of having it again?' Or, 'It can make things worse.' Or we say things like, 'Well, time will make it better.' But unlike acne, these issues don't usually clear up on their own. If anything, they get worse if left untreated, undealt with. And so we know, especially around important topics today, sometimes we don't want to discuss them, but the alternative is not discussing them and actually not addressing them means we don't make any progress around that.

So I'll share a personal note, because this has always been in the background for me in this work. My father and his brother got into an argument over a family business when my father was in his early twenties. They never spoke again. I never met my first uncle, and I've never met my first cousins. Not a good way to have a family dinner or go through the holidays. It's interesting because I've even reached out to them and they have no interest in connecting, so it's hard. You know, I think it's a personal experience that inspired me. But all of us have these stories. I heard one literally yesterday, Sharon, in which somebody sent an email for somebody's bar mitzvah, and the great aunt never got it, so she found out she wasn't invited. One thought she wasn't replying, and the other one said... and so it creates all of this dysfunction, so much confusion just spiraling from a misunderstanding. And especially in a family, but also at work, it's not just the impact this has on the two of us, it's the impact it has on our family members and the teams with which we work.

So my feeling has been, and the place that I come from, is skill development. Can I help people learn the skills to engage in productive conversations? Because I think the number one reason people don't have the conversation is because they don't even know how to start it.

Yeah, as you point out in your book, no question. And one of the most basic things that I deal with in companies is simply addressing employee performance issues. It sounds simple, but so many managers just view that as a conflict and avoid it. So a couple of things around that: one is, if you're not comfortable giving constructive feedback to an employee, you probably should not be a manager. The second is, I often think about putting myself in the other person's shoes. If I was underperforming, would I want to know that from my boss? Of course. Another thing is, I think you can give feedback to anyone about anything if you come from a place of caring about them. How you preface the message is just as important as the message itself.

That's right. So important.

Sure. So we're coming to you from the one bridge town of Three Bridges. Beautiful town. The road outside is Old York Road. We're 50 miles from New York and 50 miles from Philadelphia, right smack in the middle. It's cool. But this is the best hometown. Isn't this the best place to grow up? A great place to grow up. Hunterdon County was voted one of the best places in the country. So cool. I have one of those great stories where I would walk to the elementary school up here, and we had a dog, a mutt from the farm. I grew up on a 100-acre farm. Beautiful farm. And the dog would sometimes follow us to school. So Mrs. Miller, who was the administrative person there, would call my mother and go, 'Barbara, puppy dog's in the principal's office. You have to come get her.' So if that's not small town... when the dog's in the principal's office, you know you're right. Small town. So I grew up here on a farm. My father is first-generation Italian American, and he would say, 'If you want to eat seven days a week, you work seven days a week.' Strong work ethic. Literally doing the animals before school and doing them when you came back. Kids used to love the summer. I didn't necessarily like the summer. We got one day off, July 4th, that was it. So in some ways, going back to school was desirable. So that's on my paternal side. And I do have, as you know, a legacy on my maternal side.

So my maternal grandfather, Ludwig Bemelmans, wrote and illustrated the Madeline children's books, the most famous books. And what a background he had. You were telling me a little bit about his background and just all the people with whom he met and just what an illustrious life. He was... well, both of my grandfathers were the American dream in different ways. My grandfather Bemelmans never made it past sixth grade. He came from Austria, and this was World War I time frame. So my great-grandmother put him on a ship and sent him to Ellis Island by himself because otherwise he would have been put in as a foot soldier in World War I, since he had no education. He landed on Ellis Island on Christmas Eve of 1914. He was supposed to be met by an uncle who never showed up. He thought America was cowboys and Indians, so he thought he was going to be met by a bunch of Indians. So he was kind of terrified, as you might understand. And then he worked his way up as a busboy in hotels, and he worked his way up to a captain at the Four Seasons.

I think eventually his uncle reconnected with him. But yeah, it was probably pretty scary times, going through the Depression. He didn't actually write Madeline until 1939, so he was already 40 or 41 when it came out. He hadn't achieved success before that, but obviously that was his big break. He wrote 40 books, about half children's and half adult. Many of the adult ones were New York Times bestsellers, and he traveled the world. It was amazing.

So he was on the island of Corsica, and there was only one motorized vehicle on the island, which was a bread delivery truck. He was on a bicycle and it hit him, and he ended up in the hospital. In the hospital, there was a little girl next to him having her appendix out. So that was the origin. And then the character of Madeline is really a blend of both my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother's name was Madeline, but that was difficult to rhyme, so he went with Madeline. Talk about a real break. Yeah, a real break. But he had all these adventures. He was a correspondent for a number of different magazines. He was covering a story down in Cuba, and it was dinner with Castro, and all the silverware was solid gold. It was surrounded by armed guards. He ended up... there's a great picture of my mother having a drink with Ernest Hemingway, which is very cool. And he was good friends with Onassis, and he actually painted the murals on his yacht. There's a great letter from Onassis inviting my grandfather and my mother to have Thanksgiving on the yacht. He painted the murals in those kids' rooms. And he had become very good friends with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The day after my grandfather passed, she went to their apartment in New York, and my grandmother had gone out for something and just left a note on the door that says, 'Jackie, let yourself in.' So very casual friends. Unfortunately, I never got to meet him. He passed before I was born.

Yeah. So he got to, in exchange for living at the Carlyle for a year and a half, which I'm not sure anyone else has gotten to do, he painted the walls and the ceilings of what's known as the Bemelmans Bar now. It's a great bar in Manhattan, and they make great martinis. He loved martinis. He said he liked them so dry that he just wanted the bartender to take the cork of the vermouth bottle and wave it over the top. So you can have a Bemelmans martini.

Probably. He liked to drink, apparently. So he led quite a life. He had quite a talent. I don't know if it was because of the great drinking, but he did a wonderful job. I've been there and it's just beautiful.

That's right. He wrote this book in English, and his education was limited too. He got up to sixth grade and then he failed out and came to the U.S. and just learned as he went, and then spoke several languages. At any rate, he achieved the American dream big time. And the legacy too is that he was a writer, and then you have sort of also embraced the legacy as well with bestseller Amazon books.

No, it's been a journey in a very different way. I'm very blessed to be able to be passionate about what I do, which has been about spreading respect in the workplace. And most recently, of course, this book. I feel like people say this all the time, but I feel like I'm making a difference in the world. A very specific, concrete business example: I worked with this global company. There was a satellite office in Mexico City, only nine people in this little office. The business development person and the sales person had not spoken in months because one left the other off an email. For me, it's all about respect, so he felt disrespected. But imagine in an office of nine people when two people aren't speaking. They're at an industry conference calling on the same clients. So I come down, and my job is to get them to collaborate. They don't have to love each other, but in a professional setting, I always ask people, 'Why are we here? For the mission of the organization, for the vision of the organization. Your behaviors are either contributing to and furthering that or detracting from it.' So we need to create this kind of respectful environment.

Well, in that relationship, and I talk about this in the book, one of the most important things is for people to really get the impact that that has on the rest of the team, walking on eggshells. People are pretty egocentric by nature, so they're just focused on the fact that they don't get along. When there's a loss of respect, communication just goes out the window. So now I'm relying on my co-workers to carry the message, and it just gets so tense and awkward. So the first thing is helping people become present to the adverse consequences of this not talking or collaborating on others. And then helping people to understand empathy, how we come to different views. We do personality assessment work and team building, team effectiveness training. And at the end of the day, you just sit down with them and talk about it. You make choices in life. We can understand and interpret what's going on in the past, how we've gotten to where we've gotten to, but then fundamentally what matters is moving forward.

Yeah, there are all kinds of conversations that are and aren't taking place, and when they're taking place, they're so divisive. It's not advancing anything. It's kind of sad what's going on in our country right now.

Yeah, well, by the way, I always go to values, personally and professionally. It's like, what matters to you? If what matters to you is people just hunting and killing and all that, then that's okay if that's what you want your company to be. I wouldn't want to work in an environment like that. To me, that's never a great business plan. It's not. Look, all the values are about finding great people and then helping to develop them. I worked with one sales organization, and there was one gentleman who was absolutely toxic. He would claim to have had meetings and identify those as active leads so that the other team members couldn't call on those clients. Is that in the best interest of the organization? It's not in anyone's best interest. And lying never really fosters a lot of trust, which you need in that type of environment to work collaboratively.

Personally, I'm being straight with you, I would fire him. Because it's inconsistent with the culture. There's a law firm with whom I've interviewed before, quite a large law firm, and the gentleman who's the senior partner really lives it from a place of respect. So you could be a senior partner, and if you speak disrespectfully to a junior clerk or somebody in the middle, you get one warning, that's it, and then you're fired. That matters in life. It truly does. When you have organizations say, 'Well, they bring a lot of money in,' or 'It's just their personality,' or 'They have a set of skills that are so valuable that we can't lose them,' you can't keep them. You just can't afford to keep them. Overall, as a leader, people lose respect in you when you allow bad behavior to go on, when you allow somebody to be intimidating to others. The cost is the respect that people have for you.

Well, you miss the micro-interactions which foster relatedness and connectedness, like going to lunch together or the proverbial watercooler conversation. As an example, in the past we might have passed each other in the hall, and I might have seen that you looked gloomy in some way, which you never do, but I may notice and say, 'Hey Sharon, what's going on with you?' We might have a conversation about something going on with my kid or whatever. We lose all that bonding. And the other thing is, in COVID, as probably everybody knows who's watching this, there's this burnout that's occurring. The stress level... I was on the phone with an HR manager yesterday who was just so upset because there are no boundaries anymore. None. Especially when you're working from home, it's like you're working 24/7. You really can't turn it off. People just expect to find you because they know you're not going anywhere in a global pandemic. The way I look at it, and I know we don't have a lot of time, is pre-COVID, this image of like we're all flying on an airplane, personally and professionally. And all of a sudden, this bolt of lightning hit us, and we started going upside down. Our instruments didn't work anymore. We couldn't find our way. And then finally we figured it out, and now we're starting to descend through the clouds, and the landscape looks different. I'm not sure where we're going to land. We're not going to land where we took off from. The world's different, and it's going to be different, and we need to figure that out, particularly in the workplace. It goes back to issues of respect. So it's going to be interesting times. But you know what you got to do at the end of the day? You got to talk about it. We got to talk about it. That's the most important part.

Absolutely. I look forward to continuing the conversation. We all need to continue.

How did that come out?