Darcy Eikenberg, PCC
Hello, Red Cape Revolution, friends. I always say I’m excited to be here, and I am, but I’m actually especially honored to bring to you today somebody who’s been a long-time friend of mine, a mentor, a teacher, an inspirer and an author of this great book called “Give to Grow” (And yes, you see all my notes in it) “Invest in Relationships to Build Your Business and Your Career.” It is my friend Mo Bunnell, Mo, thank you so much for being here.

Mo Bunnell
Darcy, I was just thinking about it. I think it’s over 30 years since we’ve been collaborating? It’s sort of scary to think, but we go back, and I just think of all the memories that that we had together, and this is fun to rekindle all this and talk about helping your audience can be so fun.

Darcy
So Mo and I work together at the place I consider that I grew up, the professional services firm where I spent 15 years. And Mo was definitely somebody in another group and another part of the company that I would learn from, get to partner with, get to work with clients with. And it is always interesting when we think about, you know, all the relationships that go through our lives and different places that we work, and how there are just some people who stick, and again, the work that we do with each other to make those relationships stick.

Which kind of, you know, gets to a lot of the heart of Give to Grow, when we talk about relationships. First, tell me a little bit about the work that you do in general with companies, and especially with professional services people–lawyers, consultants–tell us a little bit about what you do normally when you’re not writing a book?

Mo
Well, it’s really fun work, I think.

So you know, like what we were in professional services, so there’s all these systems to teach doing of the work, like just doing the work makes you better at doing work.

You get feedback, you work with a mentor. You have to deliver on time. You’re reading articles people are sharing–“hey, here’s a new technique” –and that works for somebody with external clients. It also works for somebody with internal clients, maybe somebody’s head of a communication function that’s watching right now, but they have a really important role inside of a really big entity. There’s ways to teach the doing of the work.

But what there’s not many ways to teach is how do I develop relationships so that I can get the yes and have positive impact on my clients, whether external or internal, in a way that I can go from just being an order taker, if I have the right skills, to being a positive change agent in the organization. Because I’ve built the relationships,  I can get the yes for the next thing, whether it’s bringing in new work from a client or shaping the agenda the company that I work for.

It’s those skills that we teach is those sort of the relationship building, the getting of the next yes, the generating excitement and possibility about something new. That’s what’s in Give to Grow. And what we teach,

Darcy
Wwhat I love about the way that you frame it. Not once, when you were talking about it, did you talk about selling!

A lot of times we talk about winning the work or expanding, or having more impact, but we often get stuck in that four letter word SELL, right? Because, you know, those of us like you mentioned professional services, you grew up doing the thing and being super good at doing the thing and live in the fantasy world that if I just do the thing, people are going to find me and hire me to do the thing–and it’s and then that’s why nobody really teaches it.

But what you’ve done here in Give to Grow (and I know in your Grow Big training that you do) is some very doable, practical ways that you can think differently about winning the work than from doing the work.

One of the things you said in the book that I thought was interesting is this assumption that, well, if I just do a good job, more work will come. You actually shared that the behaviors of doing the work are actually opposite of the behaviors of winning the work, or again, winning the influence, or getting more of what you want inside. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Mo
Yes, that has been such big insight.

I was at a huge worldwide officer meeting for one of our big clients, 2200 partners in the organization, and somebody named Christian just ran up to me. He’d been in one of our workshops. He’s like, “I got an advanced reader copy the book!”, and he shows me his phone, and he had taken a snapshot of these facing pages that show the doing of the work and the winning of the work. And he’s like, “This was so profound that I keep it on my phone all the time.”

And the nut of it is, what you hinted at is that this, it’s a classic which got you here, won’t get you there. The skills of the doing of the work aren’t just different than the skills of getting the next client or winning the work, winning the project. They’re the exact opposite. And I can even show an image because I think this is really fascinating, and this could help the audience a lot.

So here’s a PDF, the little download we created up those same facing pages. And we won’t go through all of these, obviously, but in fact, Darcy, maybe you can guide me. You know your audience really well, but some simple things like this–skills of doing like we we learn to expect that our internal stakeholders, our external clients, answer our emails after we’re already hired, or we’ve got the yes, we’ve got the mandate. They have to we’re all on the same team. They rarely reply when we’re winning the work. So we have to have completely different expectations.

10 out of 10 is appropriate for response in doing one out of 10 is appropriate when we’re winning the work. Emails, just another example, they should have the seven things we need to get the senior leadership team deck out by Tuesday and put it all, put it all in one place. But emails, when you’re winning the work should be 50 words or less. That’s in our little quick testing. What we found is one outlook screen on an iPhone. Well, that’s what’s going to get. A Yes, if we send a long email about, you should sign up for the webinar, and I’m coming to New York next week. Can you go to dinner and, like all these seven other things? Like, you know, how you feel when you get a long email? You’re like, Oh, I’ll deal with this later. You don’t even read it.

Darcy
I think that’s so important, you know. Again, thinking about even if it’s the same person, what’s that environment that you’re in are we actually doing if we’re doing the work together, then the long email may be appropriate, but if I’m trying to influence it, there’s something I’m trying to gain or win that then shorter, you know, shorter is going to be better because, you know, it, it, it’s too much for someone to think about, because they’re, they’re not in motion in the work yet. I think that’s a great point.

Mo
We won’t go through all these, but we need the point of this is which I think you just nailed this. We need to quickly realize that “winning the work” skills are completely opposite of “doing”. And this is a skill in its own right that we need to lean into. It doesn’t just magically happen. And so one, this is different, and the opposite two is, in our day-to-day life, we need to quickly be able to toggle which context I’m in, to your point. And then I need to have different mindsets, expectations and different moves, practical application, because that’s actually what’s going to lead to success.

Darcy
One of the things that I love about the the book is that throughout the book, and also there are, there’s a whole series of extra downloads that come with the book, that you can get, including a video series from you and charts like that. They’re also in the book, you know, as well as just other tools that support this message of how winning the work is different than doing for the work, but also, then you know how to go about it.

So one of the things you just said that I noticed throughout the book, and I think this is a phrase you use a lot, but I love to hear some background.  You talked about “your move,”  and, and one of the lines I think you have in the book is, like, it’s always your move, because I know the concern we have, if we’re trying to influence, we’re trying to get hired, that we’re kind of like, not sure, am I going to annoy it? Is it too soon to check?

Talk about the philosophy of “it’s always your move.”

Mo
That’s one of the lines people have really liked and for to add the ending. That’s not everywhere in the book, but in many places, it’s always your move, and it’s always a chance to be helpful.

And if we really hang everything off, the idea of relationships are paramount to just as a sidebar, before you mentioned that we’re not going to call this selling, it’s not. There’s lots of great selling methodologies, lots of books, things like that, but they put the transaction as paramount. How do I get the Yes? And maybe they don’t even mention relationships. And sadly, many if they do, it’s about manipulation. This is not the way to go.

The right way is to make the relationship paramount and build and build the relationship in a way that actually gets the yes that you want. So underneath that, if we think it’s always our move and it’s always a chance to be helpful, the book goes into a lot more detail, but there’s so many ways that we can be helpful to deepen a relationship that also happened to help us get the Yes, and it might be sending an article, introducing someone to someone else, sending them a potential client or somebody that they would benefit from, that lets them hit their goals.

What one chapter is about is, how do we roll up our sleeves? 90s, and actually give the person that the decision maker, internal, external, give them the experience of working with us, where we do maybe the first hour of what we want. The long-term yes to map out a project, build out a business case, and think through personas. Just start whatever it is, but just start doing the work that we want. The YES to get. That’s another move. So there are just countless ways that that we can take control, be proactive, and be helpful, also, in a way, deepening the relationship. Has that paramount and happens to help us as well. Yeah, and

Darcy
Thank you for touching back to that, because we said it in the title, but in my enthusiasm, we, you know, jumped into tactics. But really, the whole book is around relationships. And I love the phrase that you open the book with, and it’s broken up on multiple pages, but it’s “I wake up every morning looking to help my friends succeed, and some of them just happen to be clients.”

This piece of it’s about the people first, and that anything that I’m doing is to help somebody and teven remembering that I have gifts to offer. I have services. I have things that is are going to help somebody do more of what they care about, or do help them succeed in different ways. You know, I talked a lot of people in marketing, and I think sometimes people think, well, marketing, like sales, gets a bad rap. But I was just having this conversation the other day with somebody, if no one knows about the gift that you have, the thing that you can do that can make their life easier, do the thing faster. You’re doing a disservice by hiding that.

You know it’s your job to be helpful and care about them, and they are. They’re still an adult to be able to say no, if it’s not for them, it’s not for them, but you know to to know that it’s always your move as you’re trying to build a relationship. I think is a just a really fresh way to go about it.

Now, one of the things you go through in the book is you, you know you’re you’re a realist, and you’ve talked to 1000s, hundreds of 1000s, probably of people at this point who are hesitant. And so you have a series of what you call lies that are in the book that you debunk. You debunk the lies. So I won’t go through them all here, but what’s the biggest lie that you think people tell themselves when they say, “Well, I can’t possibly make the first move.” I, you know, I can’t possibly build that relationship any deeper. I need to wait for them. Or what’s the biggest lie?

Mo
Oh, man,  well, they’re all big. Let me share some. I’ll share another image here, and this is in that toolkit that you mentioned. I just think this is so fascinating. We reviewed, we did a ton of research, I’ll skip over how it happened, but we realized that we actually didn’t know the major lies people have in their head, or what gets in the way of the thousands of people we’ve trained. My publisher asked me that question, like, hey, what gets in people’s minds? I’m like, I actually don’t know, because people only share their successes. They don’t really share when I’m stuck.

But anyway, we didn’t know if there would be three roadblocks. 23 turns out. There’s five lies. And these can pop up at any time, and as you saw in the book, there’s, there are exact verbatims that came from the exact lies that we heard. And I think these are really interesting, because these are exact things that people shared with us. So when people read the book, they’re like, Oh, wow. I didn’t even know I was thinking that. But now I see it on the page. I don’t know the content well enough to talk about, or I don’t want to ask some questions. So I think, if I had to pick one, I think that’s universal, and that people fall for that. It’s the I’m too busy lie.

We get to a point where there are many times we do know what the person needs. We do feel it’s our move. We do know practically what the move is. And we say we don’t have time. The key to blasting through this, and people can see the exact verbatims people shared with us is to not think of doing the work or winning the work like an old school scale or a teeter-totter, where if one goes up, one goes down, or if I’m if I’m doing work, I cannot be getting the next Yes.

The right way to blast through this I’m too busy lie is to think integration. The busier we are, the more access we have, the more insights we have, and the more ability to shape the agenda in the way that we know. Client or the internal organization needs, and we want to integrate those so the one practical move just to help the audience is there’s some research out of Cornell. Vanessa Bonds found that in our team found that a face-to-face ask was 34 times more likely to get a yes than an email ask. That’s hard to even think about. It’s the difference in her study, from a two out of 100 chance of a yes to a 68 out of 100 chance of Yes. That’s our face to face

Darcy
So say I’m working with you on a project already. We’re going through the timeline for the deliverable or the edits on the document, and if I have like, if I’m planful enough in that meeting that I already have that you are going to show up to on time, ready to work, and to say and to make a move, you know, to make an ask, to make a move, or something that has a 34% higher chance of getting a yes than if it was an email or something else? Is that what you’re saying?

Mo
Even more 34 times? So wow. So a difference between two out of 100 chance or 60 out of 100 chance in her study, given that exact ask and things like that, heck, it might even be more in the real world, where these were people in studies that don’t even know each other, like, what if you actually know the person? I think it might be close to 100 and what will happen is, when we think of I’m either doing work or winning work, thus I’m getting ready for that meeting.

I loved how you teed it up, most people think, well, I can’t ask for the next thing, because I gotta focus on the current thing That’s hogwash. Like we’re back to our helping idea if we see somebody that should be thinking about something now that six months from now, but we can start planting that seed in a way that’s helpful to them, to get them to pop up a level worried about the next thing. Do two things at once in parallel, like we owe it to them to do that. So a simple thing might be, “Hey, Jane, while we’re waiting for Philippe to join the call, I  just have to tell you, I’ve really enjoyed working on this strategy project. We need to start thinking about implementation. I know we’re still a few months away, but I might want to introduce you to my colleague who focuses on change management because she’s awesome. And even if you just had a 30-minute call now, she’d be able to start tell you the things that we can do right now that don’t take much extra time, but we’ll save probably six months later, and I think that’s really worth our time. How does that sound to you? ”

Well, I didn’t do the stopwatch, but what was that 30 seconds? That 32nd 100% chance of a yes, and we just saved six months, and you’re introducing your colleague. It’s helpful for all these other good things. So there’s a million ways to do it, but the idea is, if we can integrate the doing and the winning together, while we have access insights, building trust, all that stuff, where everything just speeds up, and it actually, in some ways, doesn’t take any more time at all, because the meeting was still 30 minutes, and you got that ask and everybody wins at every turn, is the idea, yeah,

Darcy
It makes so much sense to because when you’re in a relationship, and then, you know,  being able to continue to extend to be helpful. Because if you even think about that same example, if I only prepped for the meeting and I really didn’t have my act together to think about what else while I have, you know, this person’s intention, what else do I want to bring up? Or seeds do I want to plant?

If later I go home, and then I send the email to say, Oh, by the way, we should be thinking about implementation. Would you like to meet? You know, so and so that goes back to your chart, right? That’s the that’s the email that I don’t need to pay attention to.  That’s really, it’s really interesting.

And I think this applies to a lot of folks in our audience who may be working internally, who maybe one only once in a while, get in a space or on a call with maybe a skip level person you know, not directly their boss, or maybe they’re in an influencer role that you know. They don’t report directly to the people, but they need their advocacy and their input. In the middle of doing things be thinking about how what else might be coming up, and ask for that additional time, or asking for that, you know, getting them curious too. I think that’s really smart.

Mo
You got it. Another couple practical examples are, you know, say somebody’s having that skip level meeting. It’s a really big deal, and obviously clear this with your boss and things like that. But let’s say that there’s an opportunity the company has that that person doesn’t see that’s two levels above you. That happens all the time, right? Right? Well, to be able to say, “Hey, I think we’ve got this opportunity to if we could get these two databases connected together, I think we could develop insights that we do not even know right now. I feel so passionate about it Janine, that I’d be willing to do some nights and weekends work and just mock up what a tableau dad’s word would look like, and look at what, what the ability to be able to interface, if we got those two databases together” –let’s say I’m in IT function or something, or marketing.

Well, think about how that’s received on the other side. I mean, people want people to be proactive. They would that would blow people away if you made a suggestion like that. So the simple construct is, here’s an opportunity that I think we should be thinking about, and then a real, tangible next step so that usually ends, that ends a sentence from that starts with, “would it be helpful if I [blank]?”

Darcy
It also puts it on you, not puts it on them, to have to think about it. You know, one of the things that I talk a lot about in my coaching and in my work is just how the brain works, right? The brain needs certainty. The brain, you know, if it’s unclear, the brain will just freeze up. So you’re telling me, we could combine our three databases, and it would be great. But if I don’t have a place to start, I’m like, “yeah, that’s nice.”

Mo
Are we going to do that? We don’t have budget? Yes, you nailed it.

Darcy
But it’s never going to happen. But if I said and I’d be willing to just map out, you know, I take a couple hours and just kind of map out what that could look like. Would you be open to would it be helpful to sit down in a week and show you what that looks like? Yes? Great!

Mo
Why wouldn’t I say yes to that? And now we’ve elevated our sort of perspective with that person. We’ve elevated our personal brand, which I think you’re just so good at helping people do. And would it be helpful? Lifts can be business cases, analyzes, a project plan, persona development, introductions to other people that have done that thing, design work, like mock up, a wireframe, or something like that. Graphic design. So it’s anything that’s like, what? What could we do in a short period and a couple hours, we’re going to scale up or our and down our investment based on how bad we want this.

But what could I do that’s in my control, that that would take a few hours but get momentum going in the direction that I want to shape that we call that a “give to get”. The book’s called Give to Grow; a give to get is this precise offer of helpfulness, almost like a small, free project at no charge, and just the end the would it be helpful if sentence with that give to get that is just chef’s kiss, that’s just the just an amazing win for everybody involved,

Darcy
It’s a tool that we all have access to. You don’t have to have any special talent or skills. You just have to identify what’s a problem that I could solve, I could start to solve Can I take an action? Can I move it one more step? One more rock along the stream and, and just if I put some time into it and it goes nowhere, then I’ve had a learning experience, right?

It’s like something that I’ve learned to do, but, but being able to give, to be able to grow, is such a just a powerful way to take control of your life at work. As I always say, we only control three things, what we think, what we say and what we do.

We can’t control anybody else, but I think the book is full of scripts to help you say different things. Book of mindset, you know, all those lies that think different things take control in different ways of your thinking, and, of course, actions that you can do.

So I hope everyone will pick it up. It’s on all the major booksellers. Mo, where else can people find more about Give to Grow?

Mo
The no brainer i  just grab the book everywhere. Not only is it all major bookstore sellers, but it’s in we landed deals with all four major airport bookstores. So when you’re in an airport bookstore, it should be in there for the first part. Last of 2024 at least first part of 2025

I personally spent a week in studio reading the audiobook. So if somebody’s an audiobook enthusiasts, just know it takes over 40 green teas and honeys to read an entire business book. That’s your metric that you can think of. But it was fun to read it myself. I think that’s important for a business book, our nonfiction book author to read the book themselves. So that was a week well invested.

And the other thing I’d mention is that we built that course that you hinted about with the visuals that we showed, but like a couple dozen more, a full video training and all that’s at GivetoGrow.info. You can imagine the pressure an author feels when they write a book called Give to Grow to give away a lot!  That training packs a punch with dozens of downloads, videos and all kinds of stuff that help with the book.

Darcy
We’ll put that in the show notes. And if you’re out in the wild, if you’re traveling this fall next year, traveling for business, and you see Give to Grow at one of the airports, pick it up. Take a picture of you with it. Send it to me. Send it to Mo. We would love to see the book out in the wild.

It’s a fun and powerful read. So I hope you pick it up. We’ll have all the information in the show notes. But Mo, it’s just been a pleasure getting a chance to talk to you and again, continuing to learn from you, even all these 40 years later, or however long it’s been. We’re not old enough for it to be 40 years later. I don’t think.

Mo
Well it’s just awesome being on the show and fun to reconnect. I just think it’s neat how our content aligned so well– you help people achieve more in their lives than they ever thought possible, and that’s something I believe very strongly into so it’s just been neat to combine efforts on this. Thanks.

Darcy
Thanks again for being here and again, go check out Give to Grow. Bye for now!

---

Get the book on Amazon here, or select your fave bookseller here.

Get free access here to Mo’s other training, downloads and other tools to help you build relationships and make an impact.

See my interview with Mo on his first book, the Snowball System, here.