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When Getting Results Destroys Your Team, Top C-Suite Advisor Phyllis Sarkaria · Create Magic At Work®

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Amy Lynn Durham: Welcome back to Create Magic at Work. Today, I am joined by a wonderful guest and friend, , and returning guest on the podcast. I might add, Phyllis is a certified executive coach, facilitator, and trusted advisor with over 30 years of corporate leadership experience, including serving as head of HR and internal coach to C-suite executives at Quidel Corporation, through her firm, the Sarcaria Group, Phyllis helps leaders tackle one of the most consequential yet least examined gaps in business: the space between how leaders see themselves and how they are actually
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experienced by others. I'm so intrigued on this topic. Phyllis is the author of Courageous Clarity, and today we are going to talk about her latest book, Harvest: A Leadership Story. Harvest is a compelling leadership fable following Emily Ross, a high-performing executive who gets things done, but whose relentless drive begins damaging her team and her career. Facing an ultimatum, Emily steps away to join an olive harvest in Tuscany, where she discovers that patience, awareness, and discipline of harvesting olives hold the exact keys to sustainable leadership. Phyllis, welcome back to
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Create Magic at Work. Thank you, Amy. It is a pleasure to be back. It's so good to talk with you again. And I think it's cool because the last time we connected, you were actually getting ready to go to the Olive Harvest in Tuscany. I distinctly remember us on Zoom with your husband David getting ready to go. We've been off doing our thing in the world, and then all of a sudden, I see you post on LinkedIn "Harvest, a leadership story. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, she wrote a book about the harvest, and now you're here to talk about it with all of us, and you're actually going again in a couple of
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weeks, right? It's almost time for the olive harvest again. Yes. So what can the olive harvest teach us about leadership? What inspired you to write this book for all of
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Phyllis Sarkaria: us? Oh, wow! Where do I start? So, my husband and I-you may recall that David and I have been participating in the olive harvest with friends who have an estate in Tuscany for more than a decade, and we go every year when we can. Over the years, we've gotten to know other pickers, and of course, when you're out in the grove picking, often you have the conversations around kind of what do you do back in the real world type of thing, and so after a while, I started to riff on how olive picking is like leadership. If you shift your perspective, you know you think you're done.
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You think you've completed a tree. You shift your perspective. You realize there's a lot more fruit. Initially, it was just kind of I was a little bit of a silliness, more entertaining, but it the idea caught on, and I started to use the concepts in some talks that I did at conferences, and it really seemed to resonate with the audience. And then I developed a framework that had specific questions and used that with some coaching clients, and that seemed to also resonate with them. And that's when I realized maybe there's a story here, not so much as with courageous clarity. It's more
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of a guide to effective leadership, if you will. But this felt more like a fable, so you know, a fiction. Write a tale, and I have to say that was a bit more challenging because I'm so used to business writing. You know, thinking about how do you really show versus tell, describing the scenery, having all the dialog, and including everything, and having the story flow easily. My hat is off to fiction writers because I think their job is much more difficult.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Well, I have to say, I read the entire book in one sitting. Wow! And it was because the story just flowed. It was a great story. Instead of reading, not that I'm saying something negative about other leadership books, instead of advice or reading about leadership concepts, it was just so lovely to follow the story of Emily and her experience. Promoted into a new position and trying to do what got her promoted in this new position. In your story, she's doing all of the things that she's used to being rewarded for, and that she's used to getting recognition for and
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achievement for, and none of it's working in her new role, and so there's confusion there as a leader where they're like, "What the heck? I just got promoted for all of this, and I'm doing what got me here, and now it's not working. My team's not talking to me. In your story, my boss just said, "Hey, you need to take a vacation and think about this for a little bit. So Emily goes off to the olive harvest. What's up with that? And I know that phrase, "What got you here won't get you there.
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Marshall Goldsmith's famous book, right? What I have run across in my own experience, and also just with the many clients that I've worked with, is seeing that life grooms us for talking and telling more than asking and listening. And as you move into leadership, having the skills, doing the work becomes less important than being able to develop relationships, connect with people, inspire them, really achieving more through relationships, if you will. And yet, because we've been rewarded our whole lives for having the answers, for delivering the results, I mean, we
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celebrate in organizations. We celebrate people when they get results, and so it's hard to let go of that when that's the track record that people build careers on. And yet, I see it time and time again. Some leaders are able to make that transition well, and they either figure it out on their own. They have a good mentor or coach, or maybe is there a natural born leader? I don't know, but you know maybe there's something in their background or just in their understanding of people that they're able to make that shift. Whereas others have a hard time then letting go. They feel that they see
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things. This is what we need to do, and they spend more time trying to convince everyone else to do it their way than to opening themselves up to different perspectives to see can we do something better with the team input.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, my wheels turning now because the example in the book with Emily, she gets promoted, and she's moving so fast to try to get results that she is not listening to her team's input; they feel shut down, so they're scheduling meetings around her, like around her travel, because they don't want to deal with her anymore. I'm sure that's happened quite a bit out there in the world. And then there's this gap with how Emily is is seeing herself and how she's actually being experienced by others. Some might call that altitude sickness when you get promoted and you can't see
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that. What are some things from Harvest and from from her work when she went to do the olive harvest in Tuscany, that helped her open her eyes to how people were really perceiving her. A
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Phyllis Sarkaria: couple of things that really you know started the process for her is the way to say her intentions were good. She wanted the best for the organization, she wanted the best for her team, and similarly, when she went for the olive harvest, she's like, "Oh, this will be great! I'll contribute. You know, we'll finish faster. First of all, she had a highly competitive streak, so she went in thinking, "I'm going to do this better and faster than anyone else, and she initially had watched the pickers, and she's thinking, "Wow, they're moving so slowly. I already see process
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improvements for them. So, without without having the experience, drawing on the experiences that she had, she made a lot of assumptions, and all of us do this every day, often without realizing it, often unintentionally, and some of that is driven by a lack of self-awareness. And you know, most of us think we're fairly self-aware. I think the statistics I've heard are 95% of us think we're self-aware. And only about 15% of us actually are. Oh my gosh! And so going into the olive harvest with this idea of I'm going to just I'm going to attack the trees. I'm going to get the olives off.
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I'm going to be the best olive picker there ever was. She was making the wrong assumptions. She wasn't open to saying, "Hey, I'm new here. What should I be doing? Taking on a learner's mindset. And if you think about it, some of the best leaders you've probably ever worked with, even though they had incredible experience, they spent less time trying to impress you with their experience or what they knew, and more time trying to discover what you knew and what information would be helpful to them, and so that was part of the evolution of emily's journey. Is that going from this? I have to go in
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and perform, to this is an opportunity to learn something new. And as she began to do that and began to have conversations with some of the more seasoned olive pickers, she started to discover that the way she was approaching the picking was also related to some of the problems she was having at work.
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Amy Lynn Durham: So you know how new people come into a workplace, and they have all these new innovative ideas, and then the senior leaders say, "Don't try to bring any new ideas to the table right now. You're new. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. I've heard that before. Just learn everything and go from there. What's the gray area with that? Like, where do we have the learner's mindset? Where do we allow for people to bring new ideas in? Because it's interesting in the book, Emily showed up and she was like, "I'm gonna knock these trees out like nobody's business. I'm gonna pick all these
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olives like we're gonna be done. And she gets up and she's knocking all the olives down, and then the tenured olive harvest people are like, they're all smashed on the ground. You've stepped on some. You've missed a bunch. This isn't working. You should have had a learner's mindset. So I'm wondering, how do we not shut down these new bright, innovative ideas, and also have that understanding of the learner's mindset?
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Oh, great question! It seems to me that it requires a good ongoing dialog and openness on both sides, because using Emily's story as an example, her coming in recognizing I haven't done this before, and having curiosity and asking questions is important. Check your assumptions, right? And also for those who are more experienced, saying we've been doing this for a while. If you see something we can do differently. Let us know if you see something that might be an improvement. We'd love to hear that. Now, often in organizations, the other thing that maybe you've also observed
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is that we run into the oh, we've tried that and it didn't work. Yes, just kind of shutting it down instead of tell me more about what you're thinking. I'd like to hear more about where you're going with that. And in that conversation, especially both sides staying open to the possibilities and continuing to explore and build on ideas as opposed to just shutting things down, stop, learn, etc. I will also say, often, especially someone new coming into an organization, it is helpful to try to understand, and again, whether you call it learner's mindset or just a strong sense of curiosity, to
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understand kind of the steady state, what is, because even if you have been hired to be a change agent, if you don't understand what you're changing, it's difficult to know whether the the ideas you have, the things that have worked in other places, are going to be effective in the environment you've just come into.
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Amy Lynn Durham: The other thing that that I like to think about is, I think some ideas are amazing, and. It depends on who's executing that idea. So the whole "we tried that before and it didn't work" like, okay, who tried it? What was their path on trying it? What was the steps they took? Those are some of the questions I have, right? Because if the end result sounds like this fabulous idea, that doesn't matter to me that we tried it before and worked. Who tried it? What was their path? Let's look at what this end result of the idea is. Right. The other thing from Harvest that I thought
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was super was an amazing example of quantum leadership was they sat back and let her make the mistake. Now I know in some instances you can't do that, but the art, the other olive pickers were like, "Okay, try your way, go for it, and they let her just go fast and do what she wanted to do and try her method. And then, after a few trees, she realized, "Oh, this isn't exactly the right way I should be doing this, and I should probably step into a learner's mindset. There's something about speed as well that I wanted to ask you. You pointed out in the book that going faster in a broken system
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just breaks it more thoroughly, and sometimes when things feel broken, we have this internal urge to try to move faster to fix. So, what are some ways we can pause and truly fix root cause with something?
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Oh, great question! Because if you think about it, especially in in the work environment right now, and with the pressures from AI and all that, there just seems to be this constant pressure to move faster, do more with less, go go go. And yet, we need to be able to work at a sustainable pace. And so, one of the concepts in the books, you know, where do I need to slow down in order to go faster? I've talked with some clients about this idea, and they're like, I cannot afford to slow down. And it's not necessarily going slower; it's being more intentional, more present,
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more focused on what you're doing, so that rather than mindlessly rushing through tasks or moving quickly without being really intentional about the things that you're doing, to be more conscious of the actions that you're taking, and sometimes this does require a pause. Just step back, and a pause doesn't have to be. I'm going to take the day off. It doesn't have to be. We're not going to meet our Friday deadline. It may be just right now. Let's stop and see where we are, where we want to be. It's kind of like if you're on a journey, are we even on the right road? How is our progress
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looking toward where we want to end up? Are we making the kind of progress we want to make? Is it the quality that we want to have? Where do we need to adjust as we continue moving forward?
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Amy Lynn Durham: It felt so calming reading Harvest, following the senior olive harvesters. Is that what you call them? Because olive pickers. Because one of one of them pointed out enjoying life as he's doing it. He would take 10 minute pauses to take a drink of water. He was recommending that to Emily. He was looking up at the sky, and his trees were perfectly picked, and he looked like he was moving slow, but he was actually the most productive because he didn't have to go back and redo his work or anything like that. What are some ways that we can overcome the guilt with the hyper
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achieving of taking those productive pauses in the workplace. One of the things I think is important to think
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Phyllis Sarkaria: about is where are you having to correct work that's been done rapidly, or you're finding mistakes. Does it need to be perfect? I don't want to get caught up in perfectionism because that has issues of its own, and yet often we are kind of moving mindlessly through. We're just going through the motions. We're getting things done, kind of checking things off the list, if you will. As opposed to really being intentional about our actions, and in Emily's case, she was blissfully unaware, whether consciously or unconsciously, but unaware of the impact she was having on the people
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around her because she wasn't paying attention. And had she paid more attention, she could have moved things along very quickly. But instead, what was happening is she wasn't communicating clearly. She's running from one meeting to another. Her team's trying to get things done, and as you mentioned, they were more productive, or they felt they were more productive when she was traveling, and so it was actually impacting both the speed and the quality of the work, and that was why ultimately her boss said, "Hey, this time out, you've become toxic to the team, and something needs to change.
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And so, in discovering more the rhythms of the harvest. It forced her to slow down and begin to reckon with what she had a tendency to do. It had become a habit for her to just rush through things. Wow! I finished this tree. Check that box, and then realize, oh wait, I didn't actually finish, or even worse, you mentioned this idea of stepping on the olives. So in the olive harvest, because the olives typically, when they're picked by hand, they go down into the net, and then the nets are gathered when the tree's finished and put into crates, and the crates sit for a few days often until you
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have enough to go to the mill to be pressed into oil, and so if there are any olives that are crushed, you have to throw them out of the net because the crushed olives will get the other olives wet and they'll start to mold. And no one wants moldy oil, and so I use that as a metaphor: the crushing the olives, stepping on other people's olives, is thinking about how we step on other people's work. And if we're trying to encourage more effective teamwork and more sustainable work across a team, then where do we shut people's ideas down? Where do we take the work that they've done and even
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not even realizing it damage the work that they've done or damage their engagement, rather than encouraging, you know, building on the ideas they come forward with. That's another challenge for leaders really to sit back and consider how do I get the best work out of my team and the best results for the organization overall?
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Amy Lynn Durham: Speaking of crushing people's potential unintentionally at times, talk to us about a leader that's constantly stepping in to fix things or to rescue their team. Where's the line with that? When are are we crushing potential? When are we sending the message that hey, you can't do this yourself? And when do we really need to step in to help? How do we figure that out?
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Phyllis Sarkaria: I think this tendency to rescue can become a bad habit with leaders. I mean, ultimately, leaders have to assess whether team members have the skills necessary to do the jobs they've been assigned, And the leader, you know, has the ultimate responsibility to deliver on whatever the expectations are for for the team. At the same time, if you as a leader are constantly stepping in to do the work, then there's a problem there. And the first question I have is the problem really the team or is the problem with the leader? So I would start kind of as a leader start with myself
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first. Have I been clear about expectations? Do people have the tools and knowledge to do the work that they need to do? And if the answer to either of those is no. Then, how can I address that? Because if I feel that I've been clear, then maybe I just need to ask team members. So, what do you see as I have delivered a message? What have you heard? Because often we feel like a message delivered is a message message received, and that is not always the case. So it's kind of checking in on that, and then exploring with them where do you feel stuck. So really engaging, actually, in
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more of a coaching mindset as opposed to a doing mindset. As a leader, it's not necessarily your job to step in and do their job. You don't need them if that's what you're going to do. Yeah, but instead, how do you develop them so that you, as a leader, can operate at a higher level? Because there, you don't have to work down a level doing their job because they are growing and learning, and you are part of their development. So, in Emily's journey and harvest with the olive harvest, she has all of these aha moments, and she comes back to her work, and she gathers her team and admits some
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mistakes that she's made. She shows vulnerability in being imperfect, and one of my favorite quotes from the book is, "An apology opens the door, but actions walk through it. I was like, "Oh my gosh, that
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Amy Lynn Durham: needs to be put up in a banner everywhere. I mean, this book can help you in your personal life and not just in work. Obviously, leadership skill building translates everywhere for all of us. So yeah, an apology opens the door, but actions walk through it. And when she has her team together, she create she starts to create psychological safety for open feedback, for dialog, for all of these things to hear how they are really hearing the message, how they are really seeing things. If somebody right now is listening and thinking about all of this and wanting to gather their
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team together to see to get some real feedback, what's one tip or suggestion that you would give them? One
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Phyllis Sarkaria: of the real gifts to me as a writer was when I sent out the initial manuscript to my early readers and got feedback on the story, I actually ended the story with her return from. You know, it's like she she left. She had these lessons. She went back to work, and several of my readers said, "How realistic is this. It would be very useful to show people you can make all the change in the world you want as a leader, and yet if others don't see it, and they're not necessarily going to see it unless you talk about it, unless you describe, I've been working on this, or you ask for
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feedback on how you can do this better. What you know, if I want to be a better listener, what would that look like to you? You know, that type of question. There needs to be more development in the story there. So that was a real gift to me as the writer to realize: yes, I need to expand the story so it doesn't need to end with. She went away. She learned these great lessons, and she went back. Because how many of us have had an incredible experience where we've we've gone to a conference, we've gone away to some event, or even just a vacation, and we've had some kind of epiphany. We come
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back all supercharged. We come back into the same system we were in before, with the same pressures and the same interactions, and so it's very easy just to fall back into old patterns. So, if in fact, then you want to make a change and you want to develop a different type of relationship with your team, It takes the courage to talk with them about, and the humility to talk with them about something you want to work on. And often, with with my coaching clients, I'll talk about what do you want to model for them. Do you want to model continued growth? This is not necessarily talking
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about where you're falling short. It is showing them how you grow and that you want them to do the same. You're making it safe for them to do the same. So it's demonstrated that courage and humility to say, you know, I want to work on this, or I have decided to do this, or have learned something new I want to try, and being open to feedback and input from them, and enough ego strength to hear what they have to say that may be difficult, and yet you need to hear it because asking certain questions to get feedback doesn't make them think those things. They already think whatever they think
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of you. You have to create an environment where they can actually tell you, and if. You have a negative reaction that shuts them down. You know, you only get one or two chances. So, asking, and then when you get the difficult feedback, not defending or excusing, but just saying thank you. In fact, thank you. You've really given me a lot to think about. I may want to follow up with you with some questions later, if that would be okay. Full stop. Whether you follow up or not, it's not about setting them straight. Which sometimes people say, "Oh, they have it wrong. I need to correct that. It's
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like no, their perception is real for them. As a leader, what you need to work on to create more safety within the team is accepting their perception and thinking about what do you need to do differently. Brilliant, very good insights. One question on that: How do we avoid creating a culture of complaining when we're trying to do that? Great question.
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I love that question because when I was in house and in corporate, one of the things I would often say to my team, if it felt like we were headed down the path of you know we're complaining about a certain project or group or whatever, I would give them a little bit of time to you know let's get it all out let's hear it and then I would say you are smart people how are we going to do things differently that will make a difference, because it's very easy to point the finger at others and ask them to change, or that they need to change, and maybe at times that is the solution, and yet
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there is always something each of us can do to make steps toward a better relationship because interactions, relationships, they are two-way streets, and you may have to interact with someone who is a jerk. And you know, you think, boy, does this person get up in the morning and think about how to make my life miserable? And Perhaps I'm a little naive. I really don't believe that the majority. There are probably a few people in this world, but for the most part, most people do not intend to be jerks at work. They don't intend to make the people around them miserable or create issues, and so
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when we are able to change our view of someone as being the problem, and think about instead how do I behave differently to create a better relationship with this person, it's interesting how often that can start to shift the interactions in a more positive direction.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Amazing, thank you, Phyllis. Okay, I'm going to pull an edge walker card for us and get a message for everyone from this conversation listening. It's going to be a quality or a skill of an edge walker. We look to the future with creative, positive visualization. We're the wise and effective change agents talking about managing change, and we'll see what we get here. Ooh, we got vision. We got vision. The back of the card has the definition of vision for Edgewalker. It's the gift of being able to see what others cannot, possibilities, trends, the future, and guidance from
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something greater than oneself. And the message for all of us today, talking about harvest, I stay connected to what wants to emerge in me, I stay connected to what wants to emerge in me.
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Okay.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Any connections coming up for you on that, Phyllis? Surrounding what we've been talking about today, I stay connected to what wants to emerge in me.
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Phyllis Sarkaria: The first thing that comes to mind there is how important that pause is to allow space for that connection. When we're so busy pursuing our goals, delivering on demands, checking things off the list, that the rush of life-it's easy to lose that connection, and being purposeful in a pause, which can be something as simple as I'm going to go take a walk around the block. I'm going to turn the phone off for just a set period of time. Maybe while I'm in my car, I'm just going to have silence. Something that gives you a chance to just decompress for a few minutes can be
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tremendously healing and also create space where you move. It's the creativity where we move from busyness to rest and rest back to busyness. That's where some of the best ideas emerge and and allow you to stay connected to those things.
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Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, thank you. I know that this was perfect timing for me to read Harvest. I have been moving at a very fast pace and fell into a space where I'm not taking the breaks. Or the biggest lesson I got from reading Harvest or reminder, the sole reminder, is I'm racing to this finish line, and I'm not enjoying the moments on the way. And we know this deep down, but we need to remind each other of these things. And reading the story of Emily and going into Tuscany and and doing the olive harvest was just such a great reminder that I think we all need from each other. So
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you're heading out in a couple of weeks back to the olive harvest. I'm sure more inspiration and more lessons will emerge from that. Oh, and by the way, for everyone listening, make sure you go get Harvest. It's on Amazon, right, Phyllis?
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Phyllis Sarkaria: That's correct. Yes.
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Amy Lynn Durham: So head over to Amazon, type in Harvest Phyllis Sarcaria S A R K A R I A. Grab a copy of Harvest. It will be an inspiration to pause and remind your soul of how we're really here to experience the human experience, and there's also a link in Harvest for the actual place in Tuscany. If you literally want to go and have the whole experience, I was looking at it last night at the rooms. I was like, "How fun! This is like under the Tuscan sun. I was thinking of that movie and everything. It was so cool. But, anyways, one final thought for all of us on harvest before we close
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today:
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Phyllis Sarkaria: you don't have to take a big trip in order to get a break. The beauty of breaks, even just a brief break, is that it allows you to be more fully present, and that's a big part of what we're talking about here: is that bringing more presence and intentionality in back into your life will make a huge difference in the work you do, the outcomes you have, and the relationships you continue to build. Beautiful,
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Amy Lynn Durham: Phyllis. Thank you for bringing the lessons of the olive harvest to us, and for sending some magic to everyone today.
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Thank you, Amy, and I I love hearing how harvest resonated with you. That's just terrific.
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Amy Lynn Durham: I'm sure it will resonate with everyone. Get your harvest copy on Amazon, Phyllis. Thank you so much.
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Phyllis Sarkaria: Thank you.