giving yourself permission w/ matt dolson, manager at deloitte

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Nothing to be running my mouth. Matt, let's get to people what they want. Man, who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Who am I? Do we have enough time for that? Back in 1989, right? You're 89, too? 89, baby. Yeah. Yeah. I am a lifelong learner, someone that's driven by passion, and someone that is consistently looking at how I can improve others on a daily basis. I am driven by the idea that if I can maximize someone's potential, that is success of the day. I currently work at Deloitte, do it at a B here at Taylor. Thank you so much. And I am a manager in the human capital space, meaning that I really focus on the people side of organizations, large scale, tech implementations, large scale process redesigns.

I am there to help people understand what's happening and why getting by and helping them feel comfortable and confident and then eventually building the knowledge skills abilities to be and thrive in the future stage. So that's kind of who I am at work outside of work. I'm all things vibes. If you can't tell by real wallpaper in my shirt. Just vibes, baby. Just vibes. Just vibes. I, you know, I've, I've support my wife as much as I can as the unpaid intern of a Bendigo boutique, shout out there. And beyond that, really just love some golf and cocktails, man. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If you ever, if you ever want to talk cocktails, bourbon, match your guy, I'm not your guy, mad as you guy.

He's incredible with that stuff. So well, Matt, let's dive in man. Lots of cover today. Obviously, we talked backstage for those of you who tune in now in the future. I don't do set questions. I don't like set questions. I think, I think it can kind of lead to a little bit, um, rigid conversations and especially with folks like Matt, I kind of want to speak whatever is on Matt's heart. And so backstage was like, hey, what, what's kind of on your mind right now? And he kind of said three topics. I want to dive in, Matt, you kind of made a comment about the unpaid intern at a Bendigo, which I think is a great, it's a great segue leeway, whatever way into this first topic around apprenticeships.

I've talked a lot about apprenticeships, internships, real practical real world experience. I think that is value now more than ever. What are your thoughts on this, especially what you're seeing in the market right now on your side? Yeah, it's really hard to translate academia and pure education to doing. And especially in my world of consulting, there's a lot of on-the-job learning that you don't want to show to the clients that are paying you for the work. And so because of that, there is this idea that apprenticeship, those that are in not even just leadership positions, but those that are of experience, full stop. That means that if you are an entry-level individual with two years of experience, you can apprentice someone that just joined your team.

If you are 10 years in and someone new is now above you and they're only two years in, but they're still above you, there's something to learn from them. There's always opportunity to be a apprentice or be the one apprentice saying. What I mean by apprentice is the idea of transitioning and translating your knowledge and skills and education, real life experience to someone without them having to go through it. So in a different way, hey, we have this presentation and I've noticed that an individual has raised their hand. I want to be the one that presents. Okay, great. What are you doing to prepare for that?

Have a we have some dry run sessions where I listen, I give real-time feedback. Hey, count your filler words. I hear a lot of likes and arms or you know's. That's a natural thing. And at the end of the day, unless I'm there to be that voice of real-time feedback, that person is never going to really grow. They're never going to improve in that space. So I'm really noticing especially now more than ever that people are hungry for insight, hungry for how do I show up better than what I am today. The desire is there, but we're in a hybrid world where it's so much easier to have that conversation face to face.

It's so much easier to just get in a conference room and hash out sort of a storyboard of a deck versus, hey, let's do it online and whiteboard it. So I'll pause there. I'm sure you have questions to dig into. I know that I just kind of gave you a lot to talk about. Oh, that's great. This is great. It's great. I mean, for me, I think there's a few ways to go about this. Why do companies need to have an apprenticeship program? Okay, so start there. Because I think companies will hear this in hiring, I mean, there's a lot of hiring majors. They don't comment, but they're in my DMs.

And I just feel like from a retention perspective, having an internship apprenticeship program, I think is huge. But I'm curious here it thoughts why organization have some like this installed. So it's definitely the retention conversation. It's also a culture conversation. If we have just the idea that we show up to work and everything is transactional, then sure, that is a way to view the world. That means that you're pretty much isolated. You're doing things as a checklist. Once you're done, you're done. There's nothing wrong with that. I, for instance, don't want that from my experience where I spend a majority of my waking hours in the most majority of my day.

I want a place that I can show up authentically Q shirts. I want a place that I can be vulnerable, have relationships and connections. And if that's what I want, I'm pretty sure that's what other people want. Anthropologically, we're driven by seeking out culture and tribes. And so instead of different ways for sake of apprenticeship, it's so important why organizations need it is because if you want a culture where people feel comfortable and confident to show up themselves and produce their best work, those go in tandem. If I don't feel my best, I don't feel as though I can naturally show up and have the tools to thrive.

You're not going to get the best from me more than ever. Companies should be concerned with absenteeism or present. Which is I'm here, but am I fully giving all of myself to you? So it's hard. There's no more checks and balances of, hey, you're in the office. I can see that you're here and maybe working on an Excel spreadsheet. There's a lot more trust that goes into a a hybrid world and environment that we all work in. Yeah, I love that. How? If people watching us now, like, you know, JC and Chris and others, you know, and they're like, well, I mean, this sounds great, Matt, but you know, we don't have an apprenticeship program within our organization.

How, how would you encourage folks to still reach out and still try to gain that experience without having something in place? It's a great question. And it actually leads me into the second topic that we were going to go. Not sure if you did this on purpose, but dang, you're good, man. Is the idea of permission? No. We constantly, I would say, default to waiting for permission before acting. So hear me clearly. If it's within the confines of what is okay and reasonable, yeah, caveat caveat, caveat, then feel empowered and in power to simply make this happen to simply start doing it. At the end of the day, I have started something within my own organization that is 400 plus thousand individuals.

I sent a Monday email called Matt's Monday motivation. And it's a literal weekly leadership reflection where I call upon what happened over the the past week or the weekend that I can translate from real life into application and learning for our professional lives. And everything spanning from, hey, I cleaned the gutters or I was putting on trim in our bathroom. And oh, by the way, don't forget the trim translates into, don't forget to go through and review things for the empty details to make sure that, hey, you put everything together, but don't forget the trim. So that's something I just started, not because someone told me I could do it, but because I felt like it was an opportunity and a need that I saw from an apprenticeship perspective for people to learn from my experiences.

And so if you don't have something in place at your organization, good, because that means that you get to be the person that shows up and make something happen. You see my sort of caveat, this side of change catalyst, I do not believe in waiting to act in what's right. There's always time and always opportunity to do what's right by you and your people. Man, I love that. I think it is interesting. I've had conversations with people lately. And one of the most consistent themes that I've heard is, well, I started doing this, but I stopped. And nobody was my advocate. And how much of it is on, I believe in having an advocate in your business, right?

I believe having somebody higher up, who's your advocate in meetings, you can't be in and all that. But man, when you're trying to execute on something, and you're trying to wait around for somebody else to give you a pat on the back, and this is coming for somebody who constantly need hugs, you know this. And it's just not how the business world works. Like you kind of got to get after it thoughts. Yeah, I have to agree with you. And I am naturally someone that is an integrator that I want to include people. I want them to feel supported. And I recognize that that's not the default.

We operate with a lot of type A through type B. And I would even beg that there's probably type Cs and Ds out there that we can actually get into further. And because of that, we all have differing styles because guess what, we're all human, meaning that we're not a copycat of each other. So you might be in an organization that the culture doesn't have, stand out people focused on mentorship or apprenticeship or really giving you that kudos that congratulations. And oftentimes what I've found is that people yearn for celebration. Yes. Love to just take a moment. And if someone else is willing to press pause in the meeting and recognize something, it begins to trickle.

It begins to ripple out because all of a sudden people are like, whoa, that meeting was so much better than 99% of my other meetings. Why? Oh, well, you know what? Taylor brought up that time and we were able to just celebrate as a team, a quick little retro if I can use an agile phrase. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Let's go. To just say, what do we learn and what can we celebrate? Yeah. Amazing. Why are we not doing that on a weekly basis? There is no, there's no win too small to celebrate full stop. Well, and sorry, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. No, and it's just something that I do on my team. Every Friday we have a wellness spot on our calendar. This 30 minutes, we don't talk anything about work. Right. We talk all about human relationship plans for the weekend. What are you excited about? How did you pour into your wellbeing this week? And then following that happens first. Only after we have a human moment, do we get into our actual 30 minute work meeting, which is when we actually reflect on the week and we do a nice little team start stop continue. Hey, what do we learn this week? How can we continue to show up for the client add value, drive outcomes?

What do we need to stop doing because it either doesn't serve us or doesn't serve the client? And what should we be ready to start to take on because we see it coming and the client maybe doesn't because we have that objective perspective. Yeah, I love that. And talk about, man, the celebrating the ways that they get huge. I feel like in today's world, we're always on to like like the next thing. Right. We're always on, you know, I forgot to do this. I should have done it because of what we're talking about, but I always I'm for the I tried to do it on the pod about saying, hey, I want to celebrate you today.

I really I promise I do this. And I'm like throw up like a promotion, a title change, all this stuff like because I feel like in today's world, I feel like our generation too, like we kind of were brought up. It's like like just be around, don't say things. And so we're really bad at talking about ourselves because when we talk about ourselves, you're bragging about yourself. And that's not how we were brought up, at least not me. So I feel like this whole like talking about yourself thing, like people really bad at which suck, which then it hurts you in the interview. But I think giving people permission, again, giving people permission to celebrate.

I think it's huge. I think it's a foundational aspect of good culture and organization. I couldn't agree more. And speaking about generational elements, if you look back and you think about really the Boomer generation entering the workforce, it was loyalty driven, it was on the backs of then the great generation that had been through the depression. And so the values that were in still were be grateful, show up and and do it just execute. And that's what you see a majority of the Boomer culture has done that even if we're still in organizations, they've had to adapt and those that are really conscious of celebration or breaking the mold for themselves.

And I want to shout out to them that you're doing it. If you look at unfortunately, the forgotten generation of X, you don't have as much of this, well, you have a voice. I mean, they oftentimes really get upset and rightfully so that they're kind of the forgotten generation. That just kind of we always talk Boomers and Millennials. And so there's almost this innate foreshadowing and self talk of, well, my voice doesn't matter why should I speak up now. Like I'm just going to be here. And then Millennials, we all got a trophy. And so we actually diluted the importance of celebration of real intentional kudos and pause and saying, hey, we should recognize each other for good things.

So it really is to your point, something that is cultural in nature. And culture is the sum of individual actions. So getting back to our apprenticeship. If my team sees me constantly focusing on certain things, and I have one on ones with them and I check in with them and ask what they've learned this week that they want to continue to build their leadership style around and bring on their career journey. I'm I'm recommending that they reflect that they actually think critically and essentially what they can embrace for themselves to then essentially use on their next team. So inadvertently, I'm helping to shift the culture of my organization, one person at a time, because that's how culture happens.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think again, I'm really big, I'm interested to hear thoughts on this because I'm really big on you don't have to have a leadership title to be a leader. And I feel like a lot of times in organizations, people are just going to sit around and I'm just going to wait, I'm just going to wait, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to do that because I don't have a title. And I think, I think it's human nature to feel that way, because I think people want the title and people want the recognition. But I don't know if it's a hot take or not.

I feel like in expression work culture, you got to prove it before you get it. Fun fact about my organization is you should be actually performing at the next level consistently for a year. Really? I mean, yeah. And to that point, it's with good reason. Why would we want to set you up to fail? Why would we just promote you because we feel like in our gut? Oh, you could probably handle it. You could do it. I want to see and make sure that you've learned that you can understand the role itself that you can perform without drowning. Why am I going to promote you?

Have you drowned, burn out and then leave the organization? Because what I've just done is I've kicked out a high potential, right? So you talk about retention earlier. And so yeah, I would say it's really a challenge sometimes to think differently and to be different. And to your point of lead, der, lead, der by definition is a positional title. And what you are actually speaking to, makes my heart so happy is leadership. And I went to grad school for this. So you know, nerd alert, leader has power innately because of their role. Leadership is something that we can all show up with on an everyday basis because it's purely skills and actions that we can take that make a difference.

Thanks, Chris. It's either recommending or voluntarily, either one of those sometimes happens on a weekly basis. And so what you are saying, what I totally buy into and essentially preach sometimes is you always can show up with leadership. It doesn't matter if you are in your first year in the organization, if you're in your final year at an organization, if you're somewhere in between like I am, who knows? If I can show up and I can create space for people, if I can empower people, if I can properly sex expectations, delegate and let them go and own something. So they feel tangible buy in. That's leadership because I creating skill.

I'm creating an instilling motivation. I'm also leading by example. So at the end of the day, leadership is something that we should all strive to to bring because we all have the ability. Yeah, 100%. So at so last like 9 10 minutes, I want to the next five minutes, I want to kind of go into so you do a lot of coaching. Career coaching and and and I want to kind of ask you based off like the people who you've coached before, what are what are things holding people back? I mean, some consistent themes, maybe some things you're talking about now that didn't quite fit into these pillars we talked about today, but I still want to give you a chance because you sit with people, you coach them, and I'm sure some of that information will be very applicable today.

Oh, man, again, unscripted off the cuff here. One of the big things is just knowing yourself. Yeah, most times when a career coaching conversation begins, it's well, I don't know what I want to do. It's like, okay, great. I don't think really most people do. It's like, but who are you? The thing that you asked me, the first question on this interview, well, who are you? Who do you want to be? And if you can articulate that, you don't know what your values are. You don't know what you want to be or are driven by doing, then how are we going to find a role for you?

So essentially, if we walk that back, there's so many different opportunities, whether it's taking the Enneagram, getting a sense of who you are and how you show up, whether it's actually doing some forced rank value exercises to say, what are your top five values that you attribute as to really influencing how you show up on a daily basis? That way, you have a sense for if a culture is going to be a good fit or not, we can find you a role. You can do things. You can have a job record with responsibilities that on paper. Yeah, check, check, check, check, check. Do you want to do all that stuff there?

Right. How do you know that? If you don't know who you are and what you value? So I would say one thing holding people back a lot of times is the lack of self awareness. And it's not their fault. I want to start with that as well. It's not our fault that we don't have the time that we're not given the space to really focus on this in our adult lives. We do this in elementary school. We even take some sort of placement tests in high school, but that's hogwash because it's all just tactical application. It doesn't get to the core of who we are.

And so there's never really unless you go through some sort of leadership development program, some sort of workshop that's facilitated by somebody folks on leadership. We're not ever given the time. And so you might have to make this time for yourself. The other thing that I find is people's innate sense that the next step has to be the last step, that there's just this anxiousness or expectation that, well, if I'm leaving here, my very next thing has to be it. It has to be the thing that is right for me. And I say, can I just reframe that? What if it's just right for you right now?

Can we think bigger and broader? Can we think of a longer-term plan, a longer-term vision that you'll honestly never attain? I know that I want to help people, that I want to maximize their potential. And so where I am is great for me right now. I don't have a crystal ball. I have no idea what is going to happen in the future and no one should. We should all be really hyper-focused with perspective on what is it that I'm looking for in this moment to be my best self to thrive that can set me up in line with my future vision of where I want to be.

Man, we can go on forever, but I have a hard stop at 10, so that's great. So all right, so for those of you who are watching, Matt, how could I have a rapid fire four questions real quick? But how can people find you? How can people reach out to get down to you? You can find me LinkedIn, Matt Doleson. You can find me on Instagram, Matt Doleson. That's really, I mean, between those two, that's a main form of communication. If you want to, for instance, be subscribed to my Matt's Monday Motivation email. I want that. You got to send me your email, dude. I didn't know you had that.

That's awesome. Yeah, so it truly, it's an outreach. You can let Taylor know he can pass along your email. We know on LinkedIn as well. Send me your email. I'll send you this past week. So you get a taste of sort of what it is to receive that in your inbox on Monday. So yeah, that's that's the quick context. I love it. All right, four questions real quick. One, if money was the same, what would you do outside of your nine to five, outside of tech for your, for your day job? If money was the same. Oh, man, or more, or more. Here's, here's the great thing.

I actually feel like I'm getting to do that Jesus. That's not what I'm looking for. That's not what I'm looking for. You know what I would be, I would be a motivational speaker who also includes and somehow brings in cocktails to the proper thinking. Everybody just gets wasted at your talks. That's what it is. You have an open trick that that you do the cocktails for and then you speak on motivation. And then everyone's just wasted because they're just having a fun time. Everyone's looped up ready to go. Second question. Um, uh, what's, uh, man, what's, what's one thing you've read, watched good piece of content?

Does that have to be educational? Just fun. Just anything that you've been watching or reading. Um, so well, I'm actually, this is a shameless plug for the book called Sidekick. Um, I care. My wife is also pregnant like Taylor's, by the way, their best friends. So, you know, um, and I'm, I'm diving into the world of, of parenting books because yeah, I've never experienced it yet. So why not do a little bit of reading? Sidekick was a mind blowing concept that your wife is the hero of this story. They are Batman and you will forever be Robin. So embrace that and be the best Robin you can.

And that was humbling and it was also enlightening and giving me permission to say, okay, what is the role? What's the land I can play in? And so it's, it's really well written. It's super tongue and cheek. It, you know, teaches you a little things here and there that you wouldn't expect in a, a parenting book for, for dads. So yeah, Sidekick. I love it. Last question. Uh, the show's called guidance cups are too pronounced because you had guidance cups as a middle school college in high school, but now as adults, we don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to and ask for career advice questions.

What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Matt Delson? Oh, don't, don't get caught up with perfection. There isn't a right answer in the professional world. Yes, academic shirt. There's a right answer. And if it's wrong, red check, uh, in, in real life and where we all operate, whether it's in tech, whether it's in consulting, wherever it might be, there isn't probably a right answer. There's a spectrum of optionality. And so don't get caught up with perfection being the enemy of good enough. Fail fast, fail forward, bring that recommendation, bring the point of view. Don't wait. And whole things hoping that you're going to give the perfect epiphany based answer to someone that's more experienced than you are.

Be the one that's hungry. That's a bringing optionality and showing that, that, that tenacity. That's what you can do. I love it. I love it. Well, y'all, thanks again for hanging out with us, say Matt. Thank you, my friend. We'll love their part too. This is so good. I mean, I obviously was really looking forward to this, not only because you're my friend, but you're just a fantastic speaker, bring a lot of knowledge. So we'll have to do part two again. Um, but for again, for those of you hanging out with us today, either comment or non commenting. Thank you so much. And, uh, we'll see y'all next week.

Matt, thank you for the context of 90 backstage. See y'all. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful because you know why there's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again.

If you need to reach out to me at t-dasting on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.