Melody Wilding: Something funny happens when you usually hit mid-career. You’ve spent years building your skills, proving yourself doing the work. And then one day you look around and you realize that’s not what it takes to keep advancing and to be successful. Once you actually reach those higher levels, you’re no longer evaluated on what you do well.

But on how much you can get things done through other people, you need to get buy-in. You need to build relationships with the right people. You need to be able to get a room full of stakeholders, none of whom report to you, to say yes. How you inspire and motivate your team to keep moving forward. Even when there are disagreements and shifting priorities, that’s what matters much more. No one ever prepares you for this, let alone tells you how to actually do it. You’re supposed to just instinctively know somehow, which is not a great strategy. And that’s why I wanted to bring on today’s guest. Mo Bunnell is the author of Give to Grow and the founder of the Bunnell Idea Group. His philosophy is that the people who have the biggest impact aren’t just experts at their craft. They’re experts at positive influence at bringing people along, shaping the agenda and making things happen through their relationships and their connections to others.

This concept of positive influence is something we work on a lot inside of Lead From Within, which is my premier advisory program where you get to work side by side with me as your career mentor for six months. And listen, if you are being told, just keep doing what you’re doing and you accept that and you think it’s going to get you ahead, you are wrong.

On the surface, getting that, yep, just keep doing what you’re doing. It seems positive. It seems reassuring that advancement is coming. But following that advice, not questioning, it usually gets you nowhere. Because in this age of AI what’s getting so much harder to find and becoming more valuable is someone who can navigate the human complexity of senior leadership.

And no, I’m not talking about the basics of just being empathetic, a good listener, a good collaborator. It’s the advanced stuff that no one ever reveals or codifies. Like how to become the one executives trust to handle their most important relationships and interface with the board. How to read the political landscape well enough to know which projects will matter in three or six months and attach yourself to those now. How to recover when you’ve lost a key stakeholder’s confidence without anyone realizing you’re doing it and how to scale yourself by building a team that actually frees up your time instead of consuming more of it.

Those who master this, they are getting tapped for director and VP roles. They are being handed higher visibility initiatives who keep rising while everyone else is just waiting for things to settle.

Don’t you wanna be one of those people? If so, make sure you have grabbed your spot at the free class I’m teaching soon. It’s called Rise Into Your Next Role, and you can RSVP completely for free at melody wilding.com/masterclass, or in the show notes below. And during that class going to be opening doors for the first time ever to the public to Lead from Within.

All right, with that, let’s get onto my conversation with Mo.

Mo, thank you so much for joining me here on Psychology At Work. I am thrilled to have you and to get into this conversation today about positive influence.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: I love positive influence, Melody. I just feel like the whole, the whole world needs more of it. We’re taught, so often we’re taught the technical skills of doing our job. We get promoted ’cause we’re good at that. But at some point in everybody’s career you reach a a point a a point where it’s all about positive influence.

It’s all about shaping the agenda. And those are skills not always taught, but that we’re gonna get into today. I’m excited about it.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. Rarely taught, unfortunately. Right? And they, they make or break your success once you get to that level where, where things shift. And one of your books where you talk about this idea a lot is called Give to Grow, which is such a wonderful phrase, give to grow. So what is the Give to Grow philosophy in a nutshell?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Well, the idea is that, the people who make the biggest change in the world are not order takers. They’re not just simply good at their craft and they do what they’re told. I mean, that that’s needed. That’s a great technical expert. But when somebody can pair being a great technical expert with the ability to have positive influence, shaping the agenda, using your technical skills to be able to take your department, your organization, or your function area, your clients to another place, to a better place, it’s that pairing of technical skills with the relationship skills that make all the difference. So when we get to give to grow, the way that you can make those things happen is by giving. Giving away your expertise in bite-sized chunks, but lead people in the direction that they need to be led. giving your expertise so you can grow yourself, your own career, the impact that you can have on your family, your teams, all those kind of things. So everything about give to grow the book and our philosophy, trade over 60,000 high-end professionals at this point, after 20 years is about. can we be a positive change agent, agent in the world? And we’re gonna do that by giving away our expertise in bite-sized chunks in a way that everybody wins at every turn, but happens to steer things in a way that we can win too.

Melody Wilding: I love that. It, it’s, it’s such a, abundant way of approaching things in a world where it feels like there’s competition and scarcity at every turn. And that brings me to my next question for you, which is. Why do you think, or have you found, like you were saying, you’ve trained tens of thousands of professionals over the years, and why do you think this philosophy or this approach of Give to Grow is imperative now? Especially when we’re living in a time where people have a lot of information, they are being given a lot of data and tips and things coming their way, and so how does this philosophy fit into that?

Why is it important now?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: There’s a, there’s an old saw that, that I really love. People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. And when we think about buying, we, we think about buying into an idea, buying into a strategy, buying into a new direction, and think where, you know, all the AI and LLM tools and all those kind of things were f were, were, you know, information’s at our fingertips. That’s really good for synthesizing an area, the learning about an area we already know about. It’s not as always good for figuring out what to do next. So I think your listeners so many people have amazing insights. They might be in an organization, they know where the organization should go aligned with their domain of expertise, but nobody’s asking them for their things yet. We work a lot with, with business developers, with high-end professionals that have to build a book of business. So they’re, they’re trying to shape that agenda externally. Both things are, both, both applications are perfect, but the idea is that, most folks, once they know what to do, yeah, they might be able to figure some things out on their own that probably should be guided by an expert, especially if this stakes are high, but they might not even know what to focus on. And that’s where I think give to grow can really, make the biggest difference is investing in relationships in a way that we’re sharing where, where the agenda should be shaped, where should we focus on next as an organization internally or with clients externally. And then bringing, bringing some gifts to the, everybody involved, all the decision makers. So they actually realize that they start learning. They buy into the idea, and then we’re just naturally gonna be the person to help them get there. And that’s where all those wins at every, at every turn happen.

Where they’re hiring us internally or externally. To help them achieve the ideas that hopefully we even brought to them because we’re helping them see around corners.

Melody Wilding: That’s so important. It’s such a critical nuance because you know it. Anyone can just regurgitate information. I’m thinking about, I had a client recently who was giving a presentation and in the deck she was presenting some qualitative and quantitative internal survey results they had received. And she had the numbers, you know, 61% approved of this and whatever.

We had this percent of feedback who wanted to go a different direction. Here were some of the, themes we pulled out, but there was no sense making applied to it. There was no, here’s where we go from here. Here’s the decision points, this is, nudging us towards. And and that’s what I hear you saying is that judgment, having a point of view, moving the conversation forward, that’s what separates you now. It’s, it’s not just being the collator and the presenter of the information. ’cause you could put that into chat, GPT or NotebookLM, and it could spit out that summary for you right away. It’s that level of, of judgment and the, the word I keep coming back to is having a POV, having a perspective and being brave enough to offer that and saying, here’s where we should go.

Here’s what I see the future could be, or the risks we may be up against. Yeah. Is that something when you’re working with people that you see them have to step into?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Oh yeah, melody, you nailed it. I think we can almost flip everything the other direction and think how. How does this feel when people bring us ideas? When they synthesize information, when they bring us something, we’ve never thought about it, but it could change the entire trajectory of our career department, our company. I mean, we love those people. Like they’re the, they’re the ones that are truly indispensable. So I think when we flip it and we think when other people bring us great ideas that we hadn’t thought of in a, in a process, that we can actually implement those, it feels so amazing, that, that we know what it feels like when this is sort of done to us, when people are being helpful to us,

in other words. So why don’t we just flip that the other way and carve out some time. We can actually talk about this on the show. Like how do you carve out time? How do you think of these ideas? How do you bring them to others? How do you get the momentum started? That’s what give to grow’s all about. And I think that’s the way that people can have the biggest impact in their life with their career, their, their, everything they do is if they’re becoming that change agent, you know, as opposed to the person who just does a great job with what they’re given.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, and I wanna come back to that in a moment. How do you actually action on this Give to Grow idea. Before we get there, though, on the mindset side of things, there are some lies we tell ourselves that you go over in the book and I, I often see this come up where people will say to me, yeah, I understand the importance of building relationships, but you don’t understand my environment’s very political.

I feel networking’s very transactional. I don’t want any part of that. So what are some of those most common lies that you see and how do we reframe them for ourselves to feel comfortable with this process.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Such a great question. You know, the science can give us some insight on this. There’s a study of professionals that looked at how they feel around networking. You know, used word, that networking word a second ago, and I’m gonna, I’m grabbing a hold of that ’cause it’s so good. And the vast majority of people actually dislike networking to the point that they actually want to bathe themselves afterward. We know, we know from other studies that says when you wanna shower or wash yourself, you feel like you did something dirty. It’s more than a metaphor. Like you actually, you feel awful about it. The one group that felt that far less in most cases, didn’t feel at all were people of high power, and what the researchers surmised was that it was the people that had nothing to gain. The ones that were walking into a network event to give, those were the people that actually felt great about it. So one of the most important things we can do is whether it’s our interactions around the office or actually, like literally going to a networking event or a conference or something like that, or just even our personal lives. If we can engage in every conversation and think, how can I give to this person and completely no expectation of anything in return, but how can I use my expertise, my network, anything else I’ve got? How can I give to this person? When we do that and that, that’s where things start. All of a sudden we end up with this small army of people that are now looking to help us because we helped them in the beginning, so. So steer me from that point. I know we went a little bit farther down the road and you might want to go in a different direction. I saw that. I thought I’d pause there.

But I think it’s just really important to start with the idea that a lot of times people can sort of start with, how can I get, how can I meet the right people? How can I get them to meet with me? We actually wanna flip that and think, how can I give, we’re gonna do it strategically, but. But it’s by starting with the giving that can start to overcome the lies. So tell me where you do you wanna dig into all five lies we found? Do you want, is there one in particular you think is important for your audience?

What do you think would be the next, right, next step?

Melody Wilding: Yeah, I’d, I’d love to talk a bit about this idea of politics and not, uh. Uh, seeing yourself as I don’t play politics or being in seeing yourself as in a very political organization. Right. And, and you thinking about, I do, I just wanna build genuine relationships with people, but I’m in this very political type of environment.

How do you, advise people that are in that type of situation that may have this resistance?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Yeah. Well, I can tell you there were times in my career, I, I resisted it. I didn’t, I didn’t wanna like butter up to people or anything like that. It just felt awful, you know? And I can see that just by your reaction, feel the same way. I think there’s another way to look at it and that is I my old self, and I’m going back 30 years now, I would hesitate to go talk to the boss’s boss or whoever the person in power was.

’cause I didn’t want to be that buttery up kind of person. I actually would avoid it. think now though, that these are opportunities that we can be helpful because there might be things they’re not seeing. We might have expertise that we can bring to bear. There might be a new strategy that they haven’t thought of because we’re, we’re seeing things from a different perspective. And if we. Really reframe all this to giving then, then that’s when we’re gonna win. One of the lines in the book Give To Grow that really lands this, that we, we gave a conference a couple years ago when we launched the book year and a half ago, and literally over 50% of the people said this was the number and insight from over 200 people at the conference, this line that we, that was in the book, but we repeated at the live event. It’s always my move and it’s always a chance to be helpful. There’s something about pulling all the vast amount of things that could happen back to our own agency and boiling things down to one move, one suggestion, one handshake, one introduction, one. One, sharing of a story or a strategy. It’s bringing everything back to a action and agency where I think a lot of the relationship unlocks can happen. By doing that in a way that’s helpful to them, sharing something that can be helpful to somebody else, but pulling the, the action back to, this is my move to make. Doing that over and over and over, day in and day out, week in, week out, that’s where we see the people that really have the biggest impact. They’re just doing little moves like that, that they’re weaving into their day-to-day life all the time.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And, and we know your, your actions will follow the beliefs you have about yourself. You’ll, you’ll be consistent with that. So if you’re, if you’re feeding to yourself this narrative of, well, I don’t wanna be a political operator, or what I hear a lot is I don’t, what do I have to offer these people that are so powerful?

And, we’ll, we’ll definitely unpack that a little bit more ’cause I want to hear your opinion on that. But if that’s your dialogue to yourself, you’re going to take action that’s consistent with that versus if you are telling yourself more of that agentic, the agency of I, I have something to give. And it’s, I love that idea of it’s my move, right?

I have more leverage or I have more control than I think I do in this situation. It’s just a totally different perspective that you walk into this with. Yeah. Now.

Getting into the topic of, well, what do I give? Because people can really psych themselves out with this of, okay, yeah, Mo, I hear you offer something from my expertise or a tip, or you know, commonly it’s heard when networking, well, can you recommend a book or resource to them?

Talk to us about what are some of those go-to gives that you recommend for people. Especially for that person who may think, I’m trying to get in or build a relationship with this person that is maybe one, two levels above me. What does little old me have to give to them?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: It is such a good question, so I’ll break it down. into three steps. One is we’re not gonna give randomly. gonna give in the direction that we want the person to think of us or in, in the direction of the bigger yes that we want. So nu step one out of three is to be really strategic. So if we’re gonna offer something to our boss, our boss’s boss, somebody at a different division, functional area, whatever, the first thing we wanna do is. not start with what we’ve got. We wanna start with where do we want to go? let’s say we want to get promoted to, a senior role. Well, what’s an aspect of that job that they would need to see us in action doing that would make them think they’d be great for this? So we actually wanna start with like. start with something strategic. What, how do I want them to feel? Or what do I want them to know about me in the end? So that’s thing one. Where’s my direction? It’s almost like if we plugged in a, in a Google Maps, where do we want to go? Well, we don’t want, we don’t, we’d start with where we wanna go, right?

We wouldn’t start with just, let’s go west. Like, it just doesn’t, like we need to destination. So we’re gonna start with destination thing one. Thing two is we’ll think, well, what is the little incremental step forward in that direction where I could let them see me in action. Maybe I’m going to, review some data. Maybe I’m gonna map out a process. Maybe we’re gonna do some personas and talk about all the stakeholders and what they need to do. maybe we’re gonna brainstorm and offer a, a 30 minute brain survey session. So what’s the, what’s the little 30 minute or maybe up to like half day amount of work? What’s a little offer we can make? starts moving in that direction. We want to choose the limit of that just enough they see us in action. But we don’t do the whole job. ’cause that can be hard to say yes to you. Just like what’s the first step? then the third thing is, super cool research by Vanessa Bonds outta Cornell, found a face-to-face ask, had a 34 times chance of a yes versus the same

request over

email 34 times. Like with an X, not a percent. So what we want to then do is say, when am I gonna have access to this person? can I orchestrate bumping into the hallway? Where’s the event we’re both gonna be at? What’s the zoom call we’re gonna be at? Where can I get that face-to-face interaction? And then I’m just gonna. I’m gonna get my, my offer down to like 30 or 45 seconds really fast that I can weave into the conversations what I were gonna have.

So step one, where do I want to go at the end of the day? Step two, how can I pull that all the way back to a really simple offer I can make? And then step three, how can I make that offer in person, um, given the access I’ve already got or how can I set it up? And that’s where we just doing that kind of thing over and over again. That’s where we really unlock all the direction that we want to go.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And, and there’s, there’s a shift here, there between policing your focus on, well, what do I have to offer is usually the first question people ask themselves. And what I hear you saying is, the first question should be, what does this person need? And then the next question is, what do I have to offer?

And where do those two things intersect? Right. That’s so helpful because it takes us out of our own overthinking about it. Because sometimes, you know, I, I work with a lot of people who are more sensitive than others, and we contend to overthink things. And I once heard someone describe it as reverse narcissism, where sometimes, when you’re more sensitive and perceptive to things, You are so preoccupied with, am I giving people value? Do they like me? Right? It’s not this sense of grandiosity, it’s actually this sense of, I’m small and what do I have to give? And so it gets you out of that, into more of this, service mode, which feels a lot better and feels easier to access. Yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Yeah, it’s so good. Melody, you nailed it. And I think so many people think, um. What do I have to offer? ’cause that’s person’s perfect, but they’re not perfect. B, they might not see what you see. C. They might know it but not have the bandwidth to do the thing. I mean, heck, if nothing else, what we could do is offer a conversation and say, I would love to have some interaction with you. I think I could learn a lot. I don’t wanna be the normal person asking for a mentor ’cause I know that’s just time out for you. I’d actually like to roll up my sleeve and help you with something. What do you got? That’s another way like of learning. Like what of learning what to do is like fall in love with their problem, figuring out what, what are their priorities in their words, and then come back in the next meeting and suggest, here’s what I can do. So there’s lots of ways to go about this. If, if we’re not sure what one of our mantras is, if you’re not sure what to do, ask them what to do. That can be a big unlock for folks. It is obviously simple, but hardly anybody does it.

Melody Wilding: That’s great. That’s great. What are you focused on right now? What do you need most right now? What’s top of mind for you? All of those questions can help you generate that. That’s great. Now, something I found really interesting in your book is you, you talk about keeping a key relationships list and a prospect list, even if you are not in business development.

What does this actually look like in practice? How are you populating this? How are you keeping up with it? Like talk us through how we actually execute on this.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: So it’s so powerful and it’s super practical. So I recommend to keep two lists. One is what are my list of opportunities that I would like other people to say yes to? And when we say opportunities, we’re usually working with people that are building a book of business externally. So those are commercial opportunities, but it can be opportunities for promotion, opportunities for a project.

you want to work on, um, opportunities to speak at a conference that needs an approval anywhere, you need other human beings to say yes to it. You write those down. That’s list number one. List number two, we now we have a funny word for this. We call it promo. a Greek word and it means basically it means first among equals or first in order. are your first among equals relationships. interesting about that Melody, I’d love your input on this, ’cause you’re so good at relationships too. Opportunity list is like, okay, yeah, these are the things I need a yes. Most people, if they do have a list, they stop there. But a great might make your year, but a great relationship can make your entire career, right?

So we want a list of relationships too. Eight or 10 people probably isn’t 200, right? We might have 200 people we’d love to keep in touch with, but who are our top eight or 10? Just write those down. once you’ve got those two lists, all you need to do at that point is something we call an MIT Process stands for most important things. you do is you spend 10 or 15 minutes a week. If you look at list one opportunities, you list, look at your pro to my list, your first among equals relationships and you just say, Hey, what three things should I do next week that are proactive? They can help me. They can help them, they could deepen the relationship. Things like ask for a coffee, chat with Jane, or, um, check in on the proposal I submitted for the speech at the conference or whatever. And we’re just gonna do three proactive things a week. Three most important things, three MITs, and it doesn’t seem like much, but if we can just weave those into our day-to-day life, that’s like 150. proactive actions were taken over a year, 1500 over a decade. You just start to shape your future in the way that you want. When you’re

of grabbing the steering wheel and just doing three things a week, it actually doesn’t take much to really change the direction of your career when you do three proactive actions a week.

Melody Wilding: Which is really helpful for the person listening who is a busy professional, who’s thinking, I know this is important, but where do I squeeze this in? And I, I, I wanna loop back to that. A different question first that was coming up as you were saying all of this, and I’m sure you encounter this when you are advising and, and coaching people in business development.

What do you do when the person, who is on either of those lists? There is a gatekeeper or a layer between you and them. And I’m thinking of most commonly, the folks who come to us are saying, I would love to build a relationship with my skip level or someone in the C-suite, but how do I do that without going around my manager and them feeling like they were cut out of the process?

And what do you do in those situations where there may be an in-between and you have to navigate the relationship with that person. You don’t wanna step on toes.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Great. Such a great question. What’s neat Melody about what, what I can you just, being a great interviewer is you’re like, I can tell you’re like. know exactly what the audience is thinking of this moment. You’re guiding me to that, which I think is a real skill, by the way. Well, it doesn’t always the answer, it doesn’t always work this way, but when you can, you want to actually engage everybody involved. So one of the most critical things about Give to Grow is everybody wins at every turn. So let’s say we’re doing a skip level. Well, what’s the win for your boss to do that? Maybe there’s something that maybe they wanna show that they’re great manager and they’re really bringing leaders up.

Hmm. Well, maybe if you show leadership and you’re commenting to their boss, what a great boss they are. You know, obviously do this stuff if it’s true, um, well maybe that’s the big win for them. So there’s some science that just has the Mount Rushmore of researchers on it. It’s called the IKEA effect. Dan a Norton outta Harvard.

Just Dan outta Duke. Just some, just some incredible researchers. And they named this mental heuristic or mental shortcut, the IKEA effect. And basically what it says is two things. We buy into what we help create, number one. And number two, we view our own work product on par with worldwide experts, even if it isn’t that good.

So, so we love our ideas and we think they’re better than they are. So one, one of the most important things you can do is engage everybody. Um, maybe go to your boss and say, Hey, I’ve, I’ve just got like a 60% right draft here of my career plan. I would love to run this past you. I think it’d be really helpful to run this past, maybe your boss, some of the folks that, some of the other stakeholders in the organization that, you know, we work a little bit with, but not a lot.

I’d really like to get a lot of people to review this ’cause I really wanna make it great. I’ve got some high aspirations, as you know, over the next three to five years. I would love to start with you. Let’s get it to like maybe 80%, right? And then would you sponsor me to be able to just have some 20 minute conversations with some others around this because I, I really think I can add a lot of value to the organization over the next couple years.

And by the way, when I do this, got a great relationship. I wanna make it really clear that you’ve enabled me to do things that I never thought I could do. Well. They’re probably gonna like that. So now they’ve sponsored you to go to these other places and there’s something about the IKEA effect.

There’s something about people buying to what they help create. You don’t bring ’em the final version, you bring ’em the air quote, 60% right version. ’cause that signals, Hey, got 40% I, I need to get better with you. Maybe we can get it to 80 and I can go to the other people to get it to a hundred. There’s a signal there with a percent that says we got work to do. And it just triggers engagement in a way that I’ve never, like if you just str stamp draft on it, everybody thinks you really got it all the way. There’s something about putting a percentage on a plan, 60, 80% that really, really gets people’s sleeves rolled up.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. Yeah. And that, that tracks with exactly what I recommended in, in my book, Managing Up

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Yay.

Melody Wilding: Contr. Yeah, the most controversial section of the book is about skip levels. Where I have received, I’ve received very spicy messages from people that have said, I can’t believe you’re even recommending that people do this, that they’re going around the hierarchy.

And my philosophy is, if, if your boss is aware, you’re transparent, you show why it can be a win-win for both of you, then great. And so we’re, we’re on the same page simpatico with that, which is wonderful to hear.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: would you add though? Because like, this is your,

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: your thing. Like what, what,

Melody Wilding: Yep.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: another pro tip that stands alongside these?

Melody Wilding: Yeah, it might be a smaller ask at first. And so just like you were saying, yes, try to bring them into the process. But you may say, what if your manager comes to our next one-on-one or comes to our team meeting and, as part of that, I can spend five minutes presenting on this piece of work. So it’s less threatening for you and their boss to meet one-on-one instead. What if we make it kind of a joint session where you are getting exposure to that person as well, but without, a little less kind of cutting your boss out of the picture? Yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: love it. You reminded me

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Story back. We’ve been at, we’ve, we built, we started Bunnell Idea Group about 20 years ago. Trained 60,000 people. But before that I was a partner and senior partner at a consulting firm some of the larger global accounts that I led, I would typically have a relationship with the C-Suite executive, but a lot of our day-to-day work would be like one level below that.

Well everywhere I could. It was my job to sort of have a relationship with the highest level folks, more honestly, approvers of our work than the buyers of our work. But you wanna have that relationship one level above who the buyer is all the time. in just dozens of situations, if I didn’t know that person, I could go to the folks that we had built some trust with and say, Hey, I’d like to have a relationship, with that person, here’s the benefits to you. Here’s how I would interact. We would prep before meetings. Every time those folks would introduce us if we didn’t already have it. We’d typically have a targeted reason for meeting at first, I’d be showcasing the work we did together, talking about other opportunities. But, to your point, if, if you can always think of the way that it’s a win for everybody, it gets, are not gonna get a yes every time, but you’re gonna get a yes, like nine times out of 10 do a skip level, whether it’s in external or internal. And when you can follow back quickly and say, man, that meeting went great.

Sung your praises on this. Hey, they said this might be a good thing for us to do. Like you just kinds of doors unlock when, when you have this kind of relationships with, with everybody.

Melody Wilding: And, you know, speaking of what, what the listener might be thinking, you know, some people might see that as maybe I’m sucking up a little because maybe I don’t have the best relationship with my boss. So is it a bit disingenuous to say, ah, I was singing their praises. But what, what I hear from you is, why not invest in making the relationships you have the best they possibly can be? Right. That doesn’t make you a political operator or just this conniving jerk who’s trying to, you know, work the system. It it, to me, it strikes me that it, it feels good for you to say, you know, yes, I, I mentioned how you supported me or how you gave me that opportunity for that project.

You don’t have to embellish it right, just to, to suck up. But, rather than just being outright resistant to it, why not try to build the best relationship you can with that person? So,

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: exactly right.

Melody Wilding: yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Just to be clear, to say what we’re not saying because I think you’re with me on this, is we are not saying to be disingenuous. We’re not saying to be inauthentic. Those things are super important when you’re, when you’re disingenuous, when you’re not being authentic, if somebody senses, you’re being manipulative, those things backfire.

Tons of science shows that we’re only gonna, if by, by even my examples, when I say sing your praises, that’s only if it’s true. If it’s not true, we gotta come up with something else. So I don’t, it’s, examples are tricky things because

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: always true. At every case, just assume, uh, I hope the audience knows that when we’re giving an example, it’s always in the vein of being authentic and truthful.

Melody Wilding: Of course, of course. Uh, I do wanna close the loop on the idea of creating time for this. You, you mentioned the idea of MITs the most important things, which is great.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: I’ll give you three tips on this one. and again, Managing Up, like you’re the, you could probably add a lot to this too. thing one is just start doing like, honestly 15 minutes of planning time, coming up with three little proactive actions. Many times the kind of thing you can weave into meetings you’ve already got. A request, a, uh, a question. Getting to that 34 x kind of, uh, superpower of in-person asks. I almost give a story. I’ll be brief about it, but, but when I, I’ll just say it this way. When I first, when we wrote our first book called The Snowball System, man, I had no time to do that.

I didn’t know how I would do it, but I just made a commitment to myself and our team to say, Hey, I’m just gonna do a few minutes a week, whatever fits in. And at first it was like fitting in the Lego pieces of the little 30 minutes here, 20 minutes there, you know, that I had. Of course, as you know, writing books, that’s not enough. But by week 5, 6, 7, 8, now some blocks of time orchestra to start emerging now is leveraging the team. Just action creates more action. So, so that’s idea one. Idea two outta three is a process we call cut to climb. It is incredible. There’s a whole subsection of the book on it, but a quick version of it is just somebody can just pull out a scrap piece of paper, take a look at their prior quarter or so.

You can look back longer if you want. get your outlook calendar week by week and just start marking down what are the meetings of the things I did with my time I don’t need to do going forward. And what I try to do every quarter is go find 50 hours. That’s about. It’s 200 hours a year, about 10% of a normal work year, roughly. man, that is an incredible way to ladder up your impact because you’re always cutting off the low value stuff, delegating, eliminating it, automating it, whatever. And then you’re adding high value stuff on top. third example I’ll give you. Schedule a 30 minute with meeting with your team that reports to you and you say, what have I been doing that I don’t need to do that you could do. Man, that’s an unlock because they will see things you don’t see and and you just say, Hey, I’m trying to do these things where I’m being more strategic. I’m gonna pull our function up or our organization up. I can only do that if I’m having more time with our leaders if I have more time to be strategic. I’ve gotta free up some time. I’m targeting 50 hours a quarter, whatever. You know, come up with a number, a metric, a goal, and then work with your team to go find that. What people usually find is their team can do far more than they thought. They just didn’t know they had license to it. And then, man, you can start to do this every quarter with your whole team, with yourself, whatever.

It just unlocks all kinds of time. People rally to your support and it’s a lot of fun. It’s really invigorating.

Melody Wilding: And, and to what I hear in that too is, is challenging the very idea of why we struggle with delegation so much as, we, we feel like we have to do everything ourselves, including figure out what to delegate.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Yeah. Isn’t that

Melody Wilding: We often.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: right?

Melody Wilding: Yes. Let, let me spend time thinking about what I need to delegate. And in instead, you’re saying ask the people.

Ask the people because they will have a different perspective. Help them help you. Yeah. It’s so smart.

one last question for you, Mo, which is when you have done that, that, and is it cut?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Cut

Melody Wilding: What, what was it again?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: to

Melody Wilding: Cut to climb.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: gonna, we’re gonna cut off the bottom lower value stuff so we can climb up to the next level of impact.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. I am curious when you have done that for yourself, are there examples you’re willing to share of things you are commonly cutting? Just to give the person listening, maybe even some permission.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Yeah, that’s, God, that’s such a great question. Um, the things I’m usually looking for, I go in order, eliminate, delegate, automate. So eliminate are things I’ve been doing that made sense to say yes to or get in habit or whatever five years from now, but just aren’t good now. So they might be, uh, I remember once there was a conference we were going to, and we were speaking at that we went to like three years or like on paper.

This thing should have been awesome for us. Not one great relationship came out of it ever. It was just the, it was a level that was like two levels below who we usually with, which are C-level executives. Like, we’re not going again. though they, they were do, they loved our con They were, they’re begging us to go.

We’re like, it’s like 40 hours by the time you prepare and go there and come. That’s like a work week. Right? It just

Melody Wilding: Hmm.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: So that’s eliminate, um, delegate. is one for me that’s a little more of smooth, incremental progress. So one of the things we did, it’s our team. We did this all together a couple weeks ago. We realized there were a whole bunch of leads that were coming in that I didn’t, I’m our figurehead, I’m our namesake, but I didn’t really need to be on these. So we, we’ve got a triage system now. Lead comes in who should be on the call? It used to just be me on all the calls. But the problem is we’re getting so many leads, I was on all these calls and a lot of ’em weren’t, somebody else could have handled it. Well, now we have like a, C, B, A, we have like a three level approach. Mo’s on these calls. So-and-so’s on these calls, so-and-so’s on these calls. So that’s good. And then the third one’s automate. Let me tell you, we are training AI models like crazy. Proposal writing, follow up, session descriptions, speech description. There’s so many things that we’re setting up projects. We’re loading in A+ content into those. We’re training the models on how to give us a first draft and used to take five hours or taking 30 minutes. To get all the way to completion. So I think there’s a, there’s an automate ability we all have now that we never had before. So anyway, I like in those orders, eliminate, take it to zero. Just don’t do the thing. That’s the fastest way to succe success. Delegates where you gotta be a little bit involved, but somebody else could do it. And then automate is sort of the, the last, the last thing. And AI’s really helping us all with that.

Melody Wilding: Fantastic. Fantastic. Mo, where’s the best place for people to connect with you?

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: Great question. I would say, we built, you can imagine the Melody, the the pressure an author of a book called Give to Grow to give away a lot of stuff is.

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: So we created this whole free course that, I don’t know, it probably cost a thousand dollars for most authors, but it’s all free and it’s at GivetoGrow.info Give to Grow Info. We made it so that it’s better if you have the book Give to Grow. You can get it everywhere. Books are sold, but this free course at Give to Grow info, like it stands on its own videos, worksheets. made it so that even if somebody was a college student and didn’t have $20 to buy a book on Amazon, they could go sign up for Give to Grow Info and it would all make sense and add tons of value.

So give to Grow. Give to Grow dot info. Those are all great, great places to go.

Melody Wilding: It is so fantastic and yes, it just speaks to, to who you are. So thank you, Mo, for being here, for sharing your wisdom and your resources. Really appreciate it.

Mo Bunnell, Author of Give to Grow: you so much. I’m a fan of what you’re doing. You’re gonna be on our show, which is exciting, so thanks, Melody.