Learning at LifeLabs: A Conversation with our Co-Founders
In This Episode
Our mission at LifeLabs Learning is to help people master life’s most useful skills — and since we spend half of our lives at work, we like to think of the workplace as a practice lab for these skills.
In this season's final episode, LifeLabs Learning Co-CEOs LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna share LifeLabs' origin story, and how we’ve navigated the extraordinary changes the last two years presented, all while growing the business, supporting other organizations, and distilling what we’ve learned into our new book: The Leader Lab: CORE Skills to Become a Great Manager, Faster.
Wanna dig deeper? Get your copy of The Leader Lab: CORE Skills to Become a Great Manager, Faster anywhere books are sold.
Transcript
LeeAnn Renninger: We humans have this tofu-like structure under our skull caps called the brain, and it functions best when it's treated kindly. And if some brain friendly ways of working on one's own and working together that once followed can really make life a lot easier.
Tania Luna: LifeLabs Learning comes to the rescue.
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello and welcome to the LeaderLab, a podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host, Vanessa Tanicien, and those delightful humans are LeeAnn Renninger and Tania Luna. They're the co-founders and co-CEOs here at LifeLabs, and they're wild and generous scientists and passionate investigators of behaviors that matter.
Vanessa Tanicien: This season on the LeaderLab, we've explored some of the pivotal behaviors that SuperLearners, SuperLeaders, and SuperInfluencers use to create impact in their organizations. So to close us out, I sat down with Tania and LeeAnn to talk about those skills, as well as, surprise, the story of LifeLabs and our new book also called The Leader Lab. So settle in listeners, because you are in for a treat.
Vanessa Tanicien: Our mission at LifeLabs Learning is to help people master life's most useful skills. So why focus on the workplace? Here's LeeAnn to break it down for us.
LeeAnn Renninger: It has to start with that, we spend half of our lives at work. So, we wondered what would happen if we see the workplace as a chance to practice life's most useful skills. And then the answer to that is, we created a curriculum to help people do that. And with the emphasis being small changes that lead to big impacts.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah, I love that. And it's something that I repeat in my workshops kind of day in and day out. It's sort of almost tattooed onto my brain. And I'm curious, LeeAnn, can you walk us through, how did we come about selecting what we distilled to be life's most useful skills?
LeeAnn Renninger: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's always the question behind that. And I like asking people that question, what do you see as the most useful skills? And I think even just pausing to ask that question already is a useful skill. So, it does take reflection. It takes being able to put words to what people are doing naturally when they're good at something, being able to ask, who here is good at X? That's our most common question, who here is good at giving feedback? Or, who here is good at being a great manager in general, being a great leader, and then spending time with them to see what they're doing differently starts to yield out, what are the commonalities there? And so yeah, I guess the question could be answered in several ways, but the best way is just see what people are doing differently.
Vanessa Tanicien: Exploring what people have been doing differently has enabled us to identify leadership tipping point skills, the smallest changes that make the biggest impact. And as LeeAnn shared, we've also realized that it's not just doing something differently that matters, there are more steps required to make meaning and create impact.
LeeAnn Renninger: Well, there's a misconception that just doing something means that we're actually properly experiencing that thing. Basically, if you think about the brain as a series of neural networks, we're going to run down that one network path one time and experience it. But what'll happen is, if we can actually consolidate the learning, asking yourself regularly, wait, what's important about this? How can I relate this to other subjects? How is this similar to something I've done in the past and going forward? How can I use it as well? What we're doing there is immediately building in different network pathways. That's what extracting the learning actually is important and useful for.
Vanessa Tanicien: Like we shared in the very first episode of our superlearning series, extracting the learning is an essential tipping point skill. I asked LeeAnn about some of her own learning extractions lately, and how she's been keeping them alive for herself.
LeeAnn Renninger: Well, I started recognizing generally that there are moments when I'm really good at doing the things that we teach, and then there are moments where I afterwards, upon reflection think, oh that's a great chance for me to practice it myself more. And so, I was thinking, well, how am I going to remember this thing? And what I realized is, you know as I was saying, what if I had a button I could push, on my body, just push the button. And that's where the idea came for it. Why not create these little button tattoos on my wrist? And I use them daily.
LeeAnn Renninger: Even this morning when I woke up, I pushed the celebration button, the flag. And the idea is, just generally, today is a day of pointing out when I think things are going really, really well. Where otherwise, I might do that naturally, but I'm trying to turn to dial up a little bit more on it. But definitely the most used button, the one with the biggest fingerprints on it, are the pause button and the questions button. And yeah, they help me a lot.
Vanessa Tanicien: For a while, we reflected on things we've learned over the years, the ways each of us had grown and changed since being a part of this company. I was curious to hear how LifeLabs itself had grown and changed, and how we're still evolving. Tania had some thoughts.
Vanessa Tanicien: What is LifeLabs now that it wasn't five years ago?
Tania Luna: I think five years ago, it was very much me and LeeAnn. And, while we already were starting to have a wonderful team around us, because of frankly a lack of our own leadership skills, we were still holding on to too much. We were still looking at this business as our business, our ideas. Fast forward to today, I don't see it that way anymore. I see myself as a member of this amazing community of Labmates, of learners, of clients. And, it truly feels like something that I'm a part of versus something that I am making myself.
Vanessa Tanicien: Which I love, because a lot of what we talk about as far as great leaders are concerned, it's built in curiosity, it's built in distributing power, it's built into listening. And one of the things that I think is always really interesting about the way that we work at LifeLabs, is the fact that we have this distributed leadership model. And, we do a lot of task forces, where people from across the company come together to make change happen. And it really reminds me of the topic of superinfluence, right? Opening up space and place for people to get their ideas seen, heard, and adopted.
LeeAnn Renninger: Well, I mean, even right now, as we're sitting here recording this, we've got a team of people who have volunteered and also are incredibly skilled at being able to help with tasks that this whole company may not have had any skills in before. And so, at any given moment, we're all upskilling in the things that we couldn't have anticipated we needed to upskill in. So first of all, there's an incredible flexibility that's on a systems level, but also then on an individual level, because I'll go back to the brain and that tofu-like structure, all it wants is to learn and grow and make connections.
Tania Luna: Tofu, you're making me hungry.
LeeAnn Renninger: That's why I'm talking about tofu. Yeah, and I could just say it from a leadership level, wow it makes life so much easier. It's scary in a way to be able to hand off very important parts of the business to others, but the moment you do that, then we create this collective feeling of ownership. For me, what it does is it frees me to be able to focus on things that are going to drive us, in terms of innovation, forward. And that's where my brain is going to be much better suited to be focusing on, rather than maintaining control in every single area and having my hands in all parts of the business.
Vanessa Tanicien: There's a risk to keeping that kind of control, Founder's syndrome. That's when brilliant folks start an innovative company that takes off, but as it grows, the founders just can't seem to let go. And eventually, the organization can't survive without them. That kind of attachment in flexibility and withholding is the opposite of what a growing company needs to thrive. Just like our tofu brains, for an organization to flourish, we have to welcome the newness. Leaders have to shift from knowing to learning.
LeeAnn Renninger: I think we switched from the focus on being know-it-alls into being learn-at-alls. It's my favorite saying to keep saying, I don't want to be a know-it-all. I want to be a learn-at-all, right? And so, if one is able to bounce back, take the information that's needed, and to be able to figure out, okay what am I going to pay most attention to? What can I actually make change around? And how to create adaptivity when we can.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes, #AlwaysBeLearning. It's one of our LifeLabs values. We could probably make #AlwaysBeSharing one of our values too. We're always dishing out what we're learning. Throughout 2020, LifeLabs spent a lot of time offering resources to help other organizations navigate the unprecedented changes the pandemic introduced. From public events and freely circulated playbooks to this podcast. We produced a lot of content to support leaders in need. This year, we took it one step further. In September 2021, LifeLabs Learning released a book, The Leader Lab: Core Skills to Become a Great Manager, Faster. I asked Tania and LeeAnn to share how it all happened.
Vanessa Tanicien: How did we come to write a book about the skills that we teach at LifeLabs? How did this even happen?
Tania Luna: Ooh, do you want to know what was in our hearts or the logistics?
Vanessa Tanicien: You can answer both.
Tania Luna: Yeah, so in terms of how did we come to write a book? It was actually something that we had been talking about for something like eight years at this point. So, we've been wanting to do this for a long time. The reason is, I mean, very simply because, we believe that what we do makes life and work and humans better. And we wanted to get the skills and the insights that we've gleaned through our research to as many people as possible.
Tania Luna: So that's what was in our hearts, and then in terms of logistics, we actually weren't even looking for a publisher. And then, the wonderful humans at Wiley, and Mike specifically, our editor, reached out and said, hey, do you want to write a book? And we said, well yes, we do. And actually, we went from not even knowing we were going to write a book to having a complete book proposal that was green lit in less than a week.
Vanessa Tanicien: So the book has a fantastic name because it's the same name as our podcast, but...
Tania Luna: I see what you did there, haha.
Vanessa Tanicien: What is it about the notion of The Leader Lab that feels so compelling to our organization?
Tania Luna: Well, let me answer that with just briefly saying that it almost wasn't called a Leader Lab. I'm sorry Vanessa, I know you have a stake in this, but I personally had a little bit of a meltdown because I'm like, wait, the Leader Lab, it holds too many metaphors because it represents our lab, right? Our opportunity to bring people in and study them and glean findings from them. It also represents all of the different laboratories across the world that we look to for empirical findings that allow us to feel more confident in what we teach. We're not just talking about our observations, we're combining our findings with findings from all these other labs, but then wait, there are other labs because the ultimately most important lab that we really care about is the reader.
Tania Luna: What we want is for them to take this book, and instead of thinking about it as information, we want them to see it as the instructions for their very own Leader Lab so that they can take the book and actually start doing their own experiments. As much as we're going to try to make this as simple as possible, and we're going to try to give you the best tools, the best vocabulary, you still have to make it your own. And so ultimately, the best learners, the best leaders, the best readers or listeners of this book are going to be the ones that take it and use it as a catalyst for their own experimentation. And so I was like, wait is this too many metaphors LeeAnn? And LeeAnn said...
LeeAnn Renninger: No, and yes, yay! Yeah, you just said the magic word with the word catalyst too. The catalyst is this little substance you put in with all the other bits and bobs and in the end it can make real great change happen, and yet its own energy doesn't dissipate, it even can become stronger through that. That's the way I would like to live my life, hopefully to be able to be a greater and greater catalyst each day. And, what if we could do that together in our workplaces each and every one of us? That's when the world starts to become a much more interesting and exciting place.
Vanessa Tanicien: LeaderLab listeners, this should come as no surprise, this book is not meant to be read passively. It's designed as an instruction manual to support anyone running experiments in their own Leader Lab, helping them become a catalyst wherever they may be. But, making the world a more interesting and exciting place is a big challenge. So, I was curious to know a bit more about how the book could help us accomplish that.
Vanessa Tanicien: If you had to pick one part of the book that you're most excited for people to explore, and I know this is probably really hard, but just bear with me here, what would it be?
LeeAnn Renninger: Okay, so my answer here would be the strategic thinking section.
Vanessa Tanicien: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
LeeAnn Renninger: And I say that for two reasons. One is that everyone always presumes, oh, either this is really too complicated to do in everyday life, or they think, oh, it's too easy, I don't need to read through that stuff. And so, it's got stuff in there that people often don't realize is the smallest change that leads to the big impact. But on the other hand, it's one of those things that once you've got it mastered, it'll show up everywhere, including conversations with family, even my own thinking. It's regularly something I'm asking myself to do, oh let's do a gap analysis on that, on my own thoughts.
Tania Luna: Okay, I'm going to cheat a little bit and I'm going to say part one.
Vanessa Tanicien: That's totally cheating.
Tania Luna: But, the reason I'm really excited about part one... Part one is kind of the secret foundation to all of our most popular manager workshops. It's our BUs, or Behavioral Units, and I think of them as the leadership Swiss Army knife. So, have you ever played around with a Swiss Army knife, Vanessa?
Vanessa Tanicien: I guess I was not supposed too, but definitely...
Tania Luna: Maybe playing is the wrong word. Have you ever utilized a Swiss Army knife?
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes, I have definitely used one before.
Tania Luna: Okay. But you know, it's got a bunch of stuff. It's got a nail file, it's got a can opener, it's got a little stabby knife thing. You could do so many things with it, but it's really only just a small amount of tools. And in the same way, what we focus on in part one of the book are the very, very small numbers, so seven to be exact, Behavioral Units that are at the foundation of all of the skills that we teach.
Vanessa Tanicien: Because we love a good experiment at LifeLabs Learning, the book is paired with a virtual lab that you can hop into and practice all your new found skills. It goes so well with The Leader Lab book, it's kind of like a surround sound experience I would imagine. So Tania, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Tania Luna: We see in our research (and even in our experience within LifeLabs) inclusive leadership as being completely synonymous with great leadership. And so throughout the book, we send people back to a bonus site that we've created where we say, hey we've already been talking about skills that will make you a great leader throughout this book, but we want you to be even more intentional, even more deliberate about making sure that you are applying these skills and the benefits of these skills to every member of your team, especially people who have marginalized or historically underrepresented or oppressed identities.
Tania Luna: And that's because yes, everything that we teach already has inclusion baked in, but because it is so easy to exclude, to overlook, to allow our ingrained individual and systemic social biases to stand in the way of really creating these great workplace experiences for our team, we wanted to be even more deliberate about giving people those tools and that confidence.
Vanessa Tanicien: So when you visit the virtual lab, you'll be able to take quizzes, watch skills in action and hop into inclusion stations to get tips and practice inclusive leadership. It's pretty incredible stuff. It almost sounds too good to be true. In one week, we went from no book at all to a green lit book deal, and now we have a virtual lab? But, these two know their way around co-authoring books. That story is at the heart of how we got here in the first place. This is not the first book that Tania and LeeAnn have written.
Vanessa Tanicien: LeeAnn, can you tell us about the first endeavor into publishing that you and Tania have gotten to do together?
LeeAnn Renninger: Yeah, the short story there is, one of LifeLabs' first workshops was called “Surpriseology,” because surprise is an important emotion that we want to learn how to harness and handle. But, basically I was looking to buy the domain Surpriseology because I liked it so much, and then saw that somebody already had it, and that person's name was Tania.
Tania Luna: I got it first. But it's okay, because you had lifelabslearning.com first.
LeeAnn Renninger: I did, I did. And then as the world would have it, we reached out to one another and then just sat down at this bubble tea restaurant. Basically eight hours later we were still talking, and we had decided to write a book, and the rest of the story unfolds from there all the way through joining together and the co-founding of LifeLabs.
Vanessa Tanicien: Which honestly, couldn't be happier that the two of you hit it off so well, because where would I be? Just being a little selfish there. Yeah, it's pretty awesome here truly, but in all seriousness, with their shared passion for surprise, I wanted to dive into how Tania and LeeAnn experienced the last couple of years. Of course, it was challenging. It was for all of us, but I wanted to get a sense of their perspective. Honestly, over this last year and a half, two years, we've dealt with so much surprise. And, I'm curious...
Tania Luna: What are you talking about? What do you mean?
Vanessa Tanicien: Oh yeah, did something happen? So weird. So I'm curious, and Tania I would love to pass the baton over to you. What were some of the most surprising things that you saw happen in the world of work?
Tania Luna: You mean in 2020?
Vanessa Tanicien: 2020, 2021.
Tania Luna: Hold on, let me relive the trauma for a second.
Tania Luna: What was most surprising? Okay, obvious things aside, what was most surprising for me was probably how the focus on people skills went from this is a nice to have to this is a must have, and that's something that we've always known, always believed. If you think about the world of work, it can be a horrible experience or it can be the best parts of your life, depending on the people skills, depending on the leadership skills of the people that you collaborate with. But it really wasn't until we were in the midst of this pandemic and people were really leaning on each other when there wasn't much else to lean on. Especially managers started having so much pressure on them to be part coach, part therapist, part cheerleader, part friend. And it was so much pressure and so much weight that suddenly companies started realizing, oh my goodness, we haven't been investing in the skills that our leaders and all of our team members really need, to be able to persevere and thrive in the midst of so much change and pain frankly, and uncertainty.
Vanessa Tanicien: And if there's anything I've learned from being a part of this team, it's that when things are hard and we are faced with change, pain, and uncertainty, LifeLabs leans into learning. How did Superlearning show up for us at LifeLabs in the last few years?
Tania Luna: Oh my goodness. I mean really, it has been the thing that has allowed us to overcome any and every obstacle because we never went into things going, we know how to do this, or we have all the right answers, but we went into this saying, we know how to learn. We know how to learn quickly. We know how to learn with humility so that we can adapt and adjust.
Tania Luna: 2020 was a great example of this. We were hit really, really hard. So many of our clients needed to stop doing training with us because they had to do layoffs or they were going out of business.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah.
Tania Luna: So we all went into this learning, I want to say frenzy, but it was this organized chaos where we all just said, okay, what are the needs that people have right now, whether we're going to be paid for them or not that we could meet? And we just asked ourselves, what is the way for us to be of service right now? And that required us to do a lot of rapid learning, a lot of experimenting, a lot of coming together, sharing our knowledge, sharing our mistakes very openly so that we could remind ourselves how lovely it is to stay in this perpetual state of learning and exploring and having a sense of wonder.
Vanessa Tanicien: Humility, exploration, wonder, those are some of the keywords that come to mind when I reflect on my conversation with LeeAnn and Tania, and they're also the qualities at the heart of curiosity. So to wrap up, I ask them to share what's been driving their curiosity lately and LeeAnn took the notion of life's most useful skills to an unexpected and resonant place.
Vanessa Tanicien: Being in community and relationship with you, I think I've grown as a much more curious person with intention. And I'm curious about what you've been curious about lately in the world. Anything really.
LeeAnn Renninger: Well, so okay. So, I've had this fascination with death.
Vanessa Tanicien: Small thing.
LeeAnn Renninger: And, it's not going away. It's not going away because the more I learn about death and dying, the more I learn about living, and the more I appreciate about living. And I can only say that it's a very happy, important, light, exciting topic is to read more about death and dying. We're not going to become DeathLabs, you know, LifeLabs Learning, but we should start learning about the dying process so that we can really lean into living.
Vanessa Tanicien: Can you walk me through your thinking a bit more on that one?
LeeAnn Renninger: Yeah. I mean, okay. If we put different words to it, basically what we're talking about is openings and closings of thoughts, of moments, of memories. Currently, I'm really interested in the idea of a lived self and a remembering self. And so, we might have an experience and how are we going to extract out the learning to make it actually be something that we remember throughout the rest of our lives? And I don't want to live my life and just live it. I want to actually also be able to remember the things that matter most. And I think that matters not just in everyday life, but even in, as a manager, as a great leader, we want to be doing that for others as well and helping them to develop that habit.
Vanessa Tanicien: It's been such a delight and a fantastic honor to finish out this season of the LeaderLab with Tania, LeeAnn, and with you listeners. So, as we find ourselves at the closing of this moment, we want to say thank you for joining us this year as we explored and extracted the superlearning that matters most.
Vanessa Tanicien: The LeaderLab is executive-produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tanicien. NeEddra James is our senior producer, and Alana Burman is our editor and director. For more information about The Leader Lab book, or to explore training for your team, check out lifelabslearning.com. We'll be back with more episodes in 2022, so see you in the lab soon.
