IAM619- Neuroscientist Helps People Manage Change

Dr. Nicole Gravagna is a neuroscientist and the president of NeuroEQ. She is also a prolific writer with articles in Forbes and Inc. and has posted over a thousand answers on Quora. She's published two books, Venture Capital for Dummies and MindSET Your Manners. Nicole is also a board member for Breaking the Bias.

• CEO Hack: (1) Bringing people when I can (2) Making myself removable to make the organization sustainable
• CEO Nugget: (1) My value is inherent, I don't have to prove it every day (2) Doing the things I say I would do
• CEO Defined: Seeing the whole thing regardless of the size of the company

Website: http://www.neuroeq.com/

Her most recent book – https://www.amazon.com/MindSET-Your-Manners-Nicole-Gravagna/dp/1537398318/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484161583&sr=8-1&keywords=mindset+your+manners

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello. Hello. Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dr. Nicole Gravagna of NeuroEQ.

Dr. Nicole, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 0:39

Thanks for having me. Gresh.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Dr. Nicole, so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Dr. Nicole is a neuroscientist and the president of Neuro EQ. She is also a prolific writer with articles in Forbes and Inc. and has posted over 1000 answers on Quora. She's published two books, Venture Capital for Dummies and Mindset, Your Money, Your Manners. Dr. Nicole is also a board member for breaking the bias.

Dr. Nicole, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Dr. Nicole Gravagna 1:07

Absolutely. Let's go.

Gresham Harkless 1:09

Let's do it. So I wanted to kick everything off I guess with where it started, I wanted to hear your story, your CEO story, and we'll get started for business.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 1:16

My CEO story starts in the laboratory. So I was a scientist first and then moved into the business side of things, and so I finished a PhD in neuroscience in 2011. I quickly realized that this was something I was going to do outside of the lab. I was going to use neuroscience in a different way. When I moved into the business side, I moved into what you would call the angel investing or the venture capital world. I wasn't doing the investing, I was supporting all of the work that goes on there. Actually, the book, venture capital for Dummies came out of that work that I was doing.

So now if you imagine I don't have this fresh science background, and now I'm working with investors, and then from there, I learned how to build a business by watching other people have their businesses invested in. So I thought, well, maybe I could give that a go myself. I started building businesses that I saw needs for in the world. Now what I do is consulting for businesses, generally, I do that on the people side of change management. So anytime change and people are involved, that's generally where I fit.

Gresham Harkless 2:28

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. I always usually say this, and I've never been a scientist other than in science class when I was younger, do you find that kind of same testing out skills and things like that translate really well into the business world?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 2:45

Oh, yeah. So I think of everything as an experiment and when I bring it up like that in business settings, people go, Oh, you're right. I was having a meeting recently with a group. They were talking about building a product or software product. And I said, hey, so can we talk about who is using this software product? I said, can we talk about this as a dependent user and an independent user? I was like, I'm just making this up, but it's sort of from science, an independent variable and a dependent variable.

It really clarified what they were talking about in terms of all the different users for their software. So yes, my science is baked into everything that I think and everything that I do.

Gresham Harkless 3:21

Nice. I know, you obviously focus on that people aspect and kind of change. When those two things kind of intersect, could you get to drill down a little bit on what that looks like? There might be people that may not fully understand what that looks like and how to see it and recognize that and how exactly you help support that.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 3:37

So here's an example of how we might work with a company. Generally the company is growing, and a lot of times, there's some initiative to grow to twice the size in the next two years, or four years or five years and that can be a really big strain on a company. A lot of times it's the strain on the individuals and understanding how I fit into this organization anymore. What do I even do here? Do I keep my title? How does this all work? People don't talk about it that much in terms of how they feel, they talk about it in terms of what's owed them or their contracts with like that kind of thing. What we tend to do is start with a company and talk with the executives first, we call it executive coaching. It's very simple, and non-invasive, we sit and talk with the top executives for about six months, like a couple of like an hour a month.

What we're doing is understanding what they care about and what they value. We're also seeing where they feel stuck. Do they feel like they're having trouble influencing their peers? Do they feel like there's some kind of barrier in the industry or in the company that they haven't thought to look into? Has something changed and they've missed it? We're looking for all of those things. And then after six months, we often shift into starting to dig deeper into the company to understand which layer of management do we need to look at next? We'll do experiments. I call them experiments, but really it tends to be like focus groups. We'll talk to somebody lower down in the organization.

So if we work with a company that's say makes a food product, so maybe let's say a company that makes pies. This is a company we've talked to recently. So if you think about a company that makes pies, they have people who are literally making pies. But they also have administrators, they have office people, they've got aboard. And so there's this layer of folks from the actual pie makers on the floor, all the way up to the people who are strategizing. Some conversations get lost along the way, going from the top down and from the bottom up. So we really help to, I think, ease those conversations, in terms of being able to tell everyone in their own language, what they need to hear from everybody else that maybe started on a different language.

Gresham Harkless 5:42

Oh, nice. I love that because it kind of sounds like you're definitely translating. I think sometimes we forget that about communication that, you know, we're communicating in order to have that conversation and that back and forth. A lot of times we forget the essence of that, and being able to not just talk to speak, but talk to communicate and have the person understand and realize and have that back and forth.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 6:01

Yeah, so it was a really good example I have of how that language gets lost. We were able to measure behavior. There are like 100 behaviors that we can measure on a 100-point scale, and we just use somebody else's software. But we really use this data quite extensively. What we're doing, and one of the behaviors that we've noticed is very different. The people in the office, versus the people on the floor of like a manufacturing or warehouse environment, is the people in the warehouse are thinking in terms of working to a standard. They do the same thing every day, they work to a standard, they're really trying to push as many boxes as they can up to a certain number. They're trying not to break anything, they're trying to make sure it all stays organized and gets into the truck, okay, they work to a standard.

The people in the office are working to goals. It's not a standard, it's different every day, you're setting a goal, and you're achieving it over time. Then once you achieve it, poof, it's gone and then you set a new goal, and you achieve that. So both are very productive ways of going about life, but they're very different ways of talking about productivity. So at some point between those two groups of people in an organization, the goals people don't necessarily think in standards and the standards people don't necessarily think and goals. So there's one layer of management that's going to have to do that translating. If they're not conscious of it, they may translate it wrong, just like with any translation.

Gresham Harkless 7:20

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you definitely need both of them as you talked about that codependent so to have one without the other is kind of not having a business or having a successful one at least. I definitely appreciate that because I think so many times, I always say when you peel back the onion of business, you realize that it's made up of people. I think so many times we gloss over that as we're looking to you for getting venture capital or something, you're scaling a company out, you think about the processes, how we're going to grow and scale and do all those things? But you don't think about all those integral details and aspects of people that are within the organization and how certain things and decisions affect them?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 7:57

Yeah, you think if I just hire somebody with the right skills, and they're smart, it'll be fine.

Gresham Harkless 8:02

Right.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 8:03

But there are ways of getting stuck that are so easy to overcome when you identify them like this difference between standards and goals.

Gresham Harkless 8:10

Absolutely, no, I appreciate you for articulating that and breaking that down so we can definitely understand that. I don't know is it that ability to kind of maybe see I don't know if I would say the forest for the trees, is that what you feel is like what I call your secret sauce, the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 8:26

It does seem to be something that people have identified in me that I do well, that they maybe don't realize that they or maybe they don't know how to do it, or they don't see it. I wonder if it's partly because I was trained as a molecular biologist and neuroscientist that I thought about how the organism functions as a function of its molecules. So maybe I'm thinking about a business as a function of its sub-parts, which are the people's behaviors.

Each individual has this whole set of behaviors, and so we can measure those on a really small scale and see how it affects the whole. So it's this ability to zoom out and zoom in, and not just big picture, but not be totally in the weeds, but to be able to switch between them. I do think that's my secret sauce that I'm able to navigate that deftly in a way that I think other people get stuck in.

Gresham Harkless 9:15

Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So that could be like an app or book or habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 9:25

My CEO hack is to bring people in when I can to do the things that I can train them to do. So I'm constantly thinking about how can I remove myself from this situation. Sometimes when you're building an organization, it becomes so much about you. When I just have that overall arching goal of making myself removable, either so I can go on vacation for a month or so that I could sell the company and it can function just as fine without me. Those things make my life easier in the day-to-day but they also allow the organization to be more sustainable, because then it's not dependent on my health or my energy levels.

Gresham Harkless 10:06

Exactly. No, I love that. I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO, nugget. So that could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or something you might even tell your younger business self.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 10:15

So the lesson that I needed to learn back then was that my value is inherent, I don't have to prove it, I just have to do the things I said I would do every day. As long as I keep up with that very, it feels minute to say, I'm going to do something, and then do it. I said, I'd send you an email, and I do it. I said, I would finish this document, and I did it.

Gresham Harkless 10:41

Awesome. So I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're gonna have different quote and quote, CEOs on the show, so Dr. Nicole, what does being CEO mean to you?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 10:51

No matter how small the company is, or how big the company is, the CEO sees the whole thing, they may see the whole thing from a great distance, they may see the whole thing without really understanding the detailed parts of the bottom of it, but they see the whole thing and they they care about the movements of the whole company.

That's what the CEO's job is to do.

Gresham Harkless 11:11

Absolutely makes so much sense. Being able to kind of see holistically exactly what the company is all those different aspects as we kind of talked about and alluded to earlier in the interview.

I definitely appreciate that perspective and appreciate that holistic definition as well, too, of course, appreciate your time. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of your books, and hear about all the awesome things that you're on.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 11:35

Yeah, so I'll take this opportunity to talk about the book mindset and your manners, we haven't talked about that yet. We talked a little bit about integrity, and that's a big part of what comes up in mindset. Your manners in terms of that is so powerful, and how to use it in a way that it is hard to imagine how to always come through with the things you said you were going to do, especially when you're setting yourself up maybe a little bit for failure, but you're setting yourself up with outcomes instead of with the things that you have control over. So Mindset, Your Manners was a book that I wrote when I was making my own transition from being a struggling CEO type.

It's not that my companies weren't doing well, they were but I had an internal struggle where things just were not going gracefully for me. I was fighting with myself, I was fighting with other people, it was tough. I took a class, I made a big shift, I read a lot of books, and I figured out what I was doing wrong. I realized there must be another way and so I wrote Mindset, Your Manners. It's not about me, it's about the path that somebody takes, it's a bit of an instruction booklet on how to do this in a way that isn't going to kill you, you really can do a lot. You can do more than you think you can without feeling like you're doing too much, as long as everything is sorted within you.

So that shift was so huge for me to be able to have sort of a clean internal self-trust and to be able to move forward that way, because before I really didn't have that.

Gresham Harkless 13:03

Yeah, that's extremely powerful. I think that again, you know, having that compass internally, that you're measuring yourself by measuring goals, and you're looking at the kind of day-to-day task or the minute-by-minute tasks, whatever, how we break that down rather than the outcome. I think so many times, you have to have 50,000 in sales or whatever, when in reality, we should be focusing on those things that we can do on a daily basis and measuring our success according to that rather than the end result, which we can't necessarily control.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 13:30

Yeah, and I mean, even to this day, I find myself getting into that place where I feel like muddy inside stirred, like stirred up water. I think, Okay, what am I doing that I know better? I shouldn't be here. Usually, I've set myself up with too big or too big to-do list. It's things that are actually impossible to accomplish within a single day. So now I have this list of papers that I'm supposed to do, but I can't actually do it. It's. So I've set myself up for not trusting myself. So I take that list and I slash a bunch of things.

It scares people to do that and you think, well, I have to do all these things, otherwise, they wouldn't be on my list. But you don't, there's always a way to slash it. There's always a way to take something off and or give something to someone else or pause something and just call someone up and say, hey, guess what this report I said I'd have to do by the end of the day? It's not going to be too until the end of the month. Sorry. It's just the way it's going to be.

Gresham Harkless 14:29

Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 14:29

I hope this doesn't ruin your day or your year, but this is just the way it's gonna have to be. A lot of times asking people where you can get a little bit of flexibility, hey, did you really need this report by the end of the week? Can I have two weeks? A lot of times they say yes, but it really does extend what you're capable of accomplishing, so that you can continue to trust yourself.

Gresham Harkless 14:54

Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, you can set those or hit those goals that we set internally because so many times I say that even about sometimes things that don't go as we want them to go according to plan, sometimes we go to more in our heads than it actually is. Being able to kind of understand that, being aware of oneself as well to understand like, Okay, why do I feel that muddy waters as you kind of spoke to being aware, you can start to make changes to make sure that you are kind of staying in alignment with who you are.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 15:22

Yeah, I mean, I've had recently, a couple of muddy water incidents, and I'm like, okay, it is time to hire somebody to handle it?

Gresham Harkless 15:29

Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 15:30

Because I've just just been sitting on my to-do list and not happening. So here we go, just gonna hire a consultant to make it happen.

Gresham Harkless 15:36

Yeah, absolutely. And it's great that we're able to kind of definitely do that, so I truly appreciate that and definitely looking forward to the book as well too.

Is there anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know and then how best they can get a copy of the book and get a hold of you?

Dr. Nicole Gravagna 15:49

I'd like them to look into Quora. It's just a great platform for writers and readers. People ask all kinds of questions from How To Grow Bonsai Tree to How do I go this relationship that's failing? So I mean, it could be literally anything that people are into. I really like writing on it. So if people are interested in more of the things that I have written about, or things that I had to say, that's a good place to start.

Gresham Harkless 16:11

Awesome. Well, we'll definitely have the links and information in the show notes so that they can follow up with you and see everything for the core. I definitely appreciate your time, obviously, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest today.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Thank you for listening.

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