Dove & Dragon Radio: Ambition: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees
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[00:01:00] Welcome
to Dove and Dragon Radio. I'm your host, Emma Albuschak. I'm here today being sponsored by Kevin. Jay Lane and his beautiful necklaces. And our today's author is Cheryl Johnson, who wrote Ambition, the missing attribute to your employees. Welcome.
Cheyrl Johnson: Thank you.
M.L Ruscsak: Now, what led you into writing this book?
Cheyrl Johnson: Well, I've been an instructional designer for, uh, roughly 30 years and, [00:02:00] um, got into the business of, you know, what I thought would be writing training to help employees, um, do their jobs better and perform at a higher level and come to find out over the course of all these many years that it wasn't really a lack of training that people were suffering from in their, um, jobs, especially probably more so in the last four to five, six years, I don't know, somewhere around that time frame.
And, um, just felt like I needed to dig a little bit deeper and find out what it was that was prevent, preventing people from, you know, achieving what they want out of their jobs and found out that a lot of them are just lacking in motivation. They just don't feel like what they're getting what they need out of their jobs.
M.L Ruscsak: Now, did you find while you were writing this that people are going toward jobs because they just need a job or because they actually want it as a career?
Cheyrl Johnson: Um, it depends. [00:03:00] A lot of the people that I work with were millennials. Um, I started probably in 2010 working as an independent consultant and got a little overwhelmed with work.
And my kids were in college and they were like, Oh, mom, will you give us a job? And I was like, Oh, okay, whatever. And then they were like, Oh, well, this is great. You know, we get to work from home, you know, before this was 10 years before COVID and they were all excited as college students. And to do that and to make, you know, fairly decent money.
So they were like, Oh, all of our friends want a job. And I was like, okay. So I started hiring a lot of millennials clear back in 2010. And, um, a lot of my information in terms of if you want to call it research, it's not formalized research. It's based just on a lot of my own personal experience, um, came from employees who came to work for me.
And then them sharing, you know, their experience in the [00:04:00] workplace from there.
M.L Ruscsak: We tend, as authors, to find inspiration everywhere. So, you hiring your kids as your kids, and then their friends, and then, like you said, the Millennials ten years ago. I find it funny because When I was in the actual workforce, working with a lot of millennials in restaurants and stuff like this, a lot of them were just there because, oh, I need a paycheck and don't want to put any work into anything.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yes, and that's, um, it was interesting. I got such a, you know, because I got overwhelmed with people who wanted a easy job where they could work at home and set their own hours. You know, they want to work at 3 a. m. instead of, you know, 8 a. m. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. And with the work that I was giving them to do, um, that was fine.
That worked out well, except that they didn't always understand that as flexible as this job [00:05:00] was, Work still needed to be done. Right. And so I really sat down with my daughter, who, um, was a lot of the inspiration for a lot of this many years ago and said, you know, we need to come up with some very strict guidelines in terms of not your working hours.
And, you know, not limiting your flexibility in terms of, you know, the types of work you can do, but just, there are timelines, and there are deadlines, and you need to meet these deadlines, and as long as you can meet the deadlines, and you can, and we got to where we started paying people on a project base.
You know, instead of an hourly rate because they just, you know, kind of took advantage of that to some degree.
-: Oh, yeah.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, which anybody would it's not just Millennials. And so we um, yeah, It it worked out really well, and I had several people be by nature of what I did I needed a lot of graphic designers.
I needed a lot of [00:06:00] writers. I needed people who could you know design and develop software and so My understanding and working with them was, you know, they thought 20 an hour was that they were over the moon, they were making a ton of money, um, when we first started, but it, and it averaged out to be about 20 an hour when they, um, even on the project base, just as long as they were working productively, was, you know, This is kind of your jumpstart into the real world.
I'm kind of helping prepare you. I'm, I'm that bridge between what the college didn't do to provide you with the necessary skills to move into the workforce and kind of helping to prepare you for that. And I had several people build really nice portfolios and someone on to work for Disney and someone on to work for other big software companies and Silicon Valley and other places which, you know, and they did that when they were like 22 [00:07:00] or 23 years old.
So because
M.L Ruscsak: they got experience working in a real job,
Cheyrl Johnson: working with, well, and it wasn't just me. It was more, you know, the setup that I gave them, I gave them freedom. I gave them flexibility. I trusted them. But if that, if that didn't work out, if that little informal handshake we had didn't work out, It was project based.
You just didn't, I just didn't reach out to you the next time I had a project. Right. And I'm, be honest, out of, you know, I don't know how many students I went through, but I would say only probably 20, maybe 30 percent of them actually went on and really did something. The rest of them just kind of fell through the cracks and decided that this kind of freedom and flexibility, that they needed more structure, they needed something different.
M.L Ruscsak: There's a lot of them that are like me. I work from home and I have the structure that I [00:08:00] need, but someone like my daughter, she needs a nine to five. She needs to have a set schedule and hours and be somewhere at every minute. It's just based on the person, individual, and what type of work you're in.
Cheyrl Johnson: Exactly. And it's, you know, totally different depending on who you are. And, and it's interesting because I, my husband is an extraordinarily ambitious person. And he's very successful at his job. He is totally self taught. trained, he never went to college, but yet he works, you know, for a law firm, one of the top law firms in the country doing cyber security, um, analysis on when you see all of these breaches, you know, around the country, um, he works on a lot of those.
And so he's motivated in a different way. Right. But yet he still needs that structure. He [00:09:00] likes that nine to five. He, for a long time, was needed to go into the office and have that place, that dedicated place to work, and he couldn't do that at home. And, and he's since, you know, since COVID, he's kind of, you know, changed a little bit there.
But, It's not a matter of that there's one's better than the other. It's just that you need to find the right match for what works with people.
M.L Ruscsak: Exactly. It's not, there is not one template that works for everyone. Everyone's mind is a little bit different on how they process work. Some of us, we need to go into office.
We need to be around people. And then there's people like me that I will work from home and on my own hours be very motivated and I don't need to leave.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and that's, I'm the same way. I've always been very, I, I work best by myself. Yeah, but you know, being kind of in instructional design too, [00:10:00] there's a very creative aspect of that and I find that when I work with people who are very creative and that type of thing, that I feed off of all of that creative.
energy in the room and do better in that, you know, environment for, you know, certain things, certain aspects of my job.
M.L Ruscsak: This is very true. It's just, we have to do more in educating people to figure out what kind of environment they work best in. We have the school structure from kindergarten to 12th, and my daughter's actually falling through the cracks in high school because we're homeschooling, and that's not the environment she needs.
That's not where she thrives. She's still graduating, but she's not getting the education because it's, oh, I can just do this, and then I have eight hours to do nothing.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and it's interesting because I had two daughters. Um, One daughter, uh, [00:11:00] for various health reasons, needed to, um, take a year or two off from school and, and homeschool, and this was, geez, Claire, back in 2006, 2007, before it was ever really, ever really a thing, and she did well.
I mean, you know, she needed some prodding here and there to get her work done or whatever. Um, but my other daughter, Miss Social Butterfly, you know, she needed to be in school. She thrived off of that, all of the, you know, the interaction with her teachers and her peers at school and that's what she needed.
So I think that's what people don't understand is one of the things that questions that I've analyzed over years and years. Um, I grew up a very, very self motivated, self driven, self, you know, independent kind of person. And I look around and I'm just like, [00:12:00] why isn't everybody like me? You know,
M.L Ruscsak: isn't that funny is I can do A, B, and C before people are even done with A because I'm motivated to get to the next step, where others Oh, I have from this time to this time to do letter A, and I can get to letter C sometime next week.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and I, I remember growing up and, you know, kids nowadays, You know, their parents take them once they're getting ready to graduate from high school, like the year before they go on all these college tours and their parents help them fill out all their applications for college and their parents help them make all this decisions and their parents do this and their parents do that.
And I remember my kids asking me at one point, like, Mom, when are we going to do these college tours? And I was like, I don't know, when do you want to do these college tours? You know, and well, what schools are we going to go to? Um, what schools do you [00:13:00] want to go to? And the thing was is I didn't go to college right out of high school.
I sat out for a year, year and a half, and you know, I lived in Wyoming. I was from small town USA, and I wanted to go into the big city. I moved to California, lived with my aunt, and you know, I wanted to experience life. And then I decided, well, maybe if I went back to college, that might be a good idea. Um, but when I went back, I was ready for college.
You know, now they call that a gap year. I don't know, whatever. But the thing was, is I. My great aspiration as, you know, a teenager was I wanted to be a flight attendant. Well, college wasn't really going to get me what I needed in terms of being a flight attendant. And I remember, you know, my mom, I don't even remember my mom saying you need to be this, or you need to be that, or if you don't get good grades, you're not going to get into college.
And if you don't get good grades, you're not going to this, that. It was just simply, you know, [00:14:00] do what you want to do. And if you want to become a flight attendant, great. At that point in time, I lived, like I said, I was, lived in small town USA and not realizing that big airlines don't recruit out of little, you know, Green River, Wyoming.
Um, and so I didn't even know where to start, you know, and so I went to the public library and I found out the addresses of all of these airlines and started writing letters and then it took a series of letters to find out who, you know, where they're, Hiring department was, and who was the right person.
And then I'd get a slew of applications. And these were paper applications that you stuck inside a typewriter and you couldn't make one mistake. Right? You couldn't mass produce these things, not like nowadays. And so, I mean, and then I would get all excited and I'd, you know, turn in 10 applications, which was a lot when you had to hand type, you know.
My six page applications, and I'd ship them off, and then I'd get all [00:15:00] my rejection letters in the mail, you know, and I'd be like, oh, and they'd say, well, try again in six months, and I'd try again in six months, and then I'd get rejected, and then I'd try again in six months. And, you know, people have asked me, why did you keep trying?
What, motivated you? What kept you going? It was like, well, that's something I really wanted. I didn't have my mom breathing down my neck saying, well, if you don't get these applications in by such and such a date, and if you don't do this, blah, blah, blah. My mom didn't even know what I was doing. Yeah. She wasn't even aware that I was doing all of this, you know?
M.L Ruscsak: Right. My mother's the same way. It's when I started school and I did paralegal from home, I did, uh, online college when that was. just starting out in 2002 for paralegal. And then I didn't tell anyone. I went back to school and got a degree in a couple things in 2006 at Woodrow. It's completely [00:16:00] unrelated to what I went to school before in.
And I just told my mom, cause I just updated my last name on my certificates. She's like, when did you do this? Well, I didn't have people saying, you have to do this. It was something I was passionate to do at the time.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah. And that's where I think that, um, I, you know, we can go into a whole host, you know, because everybody's like, Oh, what's the secret sauce to motivation?
Well, Daniel Pink's got a lot of secret sauces in his book about drive, you know, and I, and I love his books and I read the, I just, I love Daniel Pink. But, um, I don't think there's secret sauce. I think it's, you know, it's a combination of a lot of things. I know growing up, my mom didn't, my mom and dad did not, um, I'm sure it's just the generation.
It wasn't my parents were unique or anything. They, I don't remember my parents telling me to do my homework [00:17:00] or telling me to get good grades. It was just simply, that's what you did, you know? And if I came home with bad grades, you know, which I did periodically, you know, they'd be like, what's going on?
You know, and they kind of, is there something going on that we can help you with? It wasn't like this punitive thing or anything. And I remember when I was in high school and I was very athletic and I came home with an F in P. E. And that was, there was, that was a different story. Because it's like, okay, you are totally capable of A's in P.
E. This F isn't gonna fly. So we had a different discussion about that. So my parents just, they didn't, they didn't drive me everywhere. I wanted to go. They didn't sign me up for every little, every little league sport that was out there or whatever. If I wanted to do something, I went and signed myself up and I got myself to and from practices.
I mean, I did, I lived in small town USA, so, you know, it was a [00:18:00] different world and it was safe. You can't do that. You just can't do that anymore. It's not safe. But I think because of that, I was so used to just being very independent. And I was used to making up my own mind about what I wanted and what I liked doing and what meant a lot to me.
And so that made it easy for me to be motivated where I think kids now from the time they're born, you know, we ship them off to daycare. We ship them off to, you know, their lives are structured. They don't even get to pick what color clothes they wear, what they're going to eat. They just go from one activity to another, from school to after school sports, to whatever, you know, and, and their whole lives are just like their lives are spinning, and all they do is go from one thing to the next, with people telling them what to do at every juncture, you know, and as much as I like, you know, sports and things like that, or exercise, extracurricular activities.
I think [00:19:00] there is, you know, we used to just get a bunch of us together and play basketball and we made up our own rules. Who knows if it was really even basketball, you know? Right. And it was fun. Yeah. We refereed our own games. We made up our own rules. We resolved our own differences. And because of that, it was just a different world.
Um, nowadays, you know, you have referees that referee all your little sports and you have, you know, when you're in drama, you have all these teachers who select who gets to be what part, you know, where I remember I was in Charlotte's Web or something when I was in fifth grade or something and we all argued over who got to be Charlotte and who was going to be in charge of such and such, you know, I don't remember adults being there telling us any of that.
M.L Ruscsak: No, see, when I was in first through fourth grade, we used to put on pageants for Christmas shows. They don't do that no more. We used to dress up in the pageant [00:20:00] costumes. We, okay, here's a list. You're going to be Mary in the Christmas pageant this year. Okay, so you need to have this color robe. You need to have your hair done this way, you know, for this or at least look like the part.
They don't do that no more. It's, you sing, it's, that's it. You have the drama club, you have the teacher that organizes it, you have the props that are 20 years old. You have everything structured and you could participation certificate that you were in the club or something. It's anything you do, you have to get a certificate saying, Oh, I was here when we were in school.
It was, okay, we got our picture in the yearbook. Okay, great.
Cheyrl Johnson: We didn't even get that. We just, you know, I, you know, I remember I mean, this is totally somewhat unrelated, but I remember I was riding my bike. I was [00:21:00] probably eight or nine years old and a St. Bernard jumped a fence and started chasing me down this gully and caught the back of my thigh, you know,
-: and
Cheyrl Johnson: bit, and bit me, you know, and I don't know, I mean, it hurt and there, you know, it left a mark.
And I mean, a St. Bernard is a big dog. Yeah. Um, but I got home and, um, I don't know what, I didn't tell my parents, I didn't tell anybody about it, and I remember at one point my dad must have seen my leg, maybe it was summertime, and I was wearing shorts or something, I must have been, because that's probably how the dog bit me, um, but my dad was like, what happened to you?
And I was like, well, and I told him, and he was just like, Mortified like why didn't you come home? Why didn't you tell us? I was like, I don't know. I didn't need to go to the hospital. I didn't need Yeah, you know
M.L Ruscsak: we had a hill that we had We're not allowed to do this no more because it's not safe But uh, we cross the railroad tracks go up the [00:22:00] hill ride our bikes down it I wrecked tore up my bike had to wash it off with the water hose Iron out, hammered out the dance so it works again.
And my grandpa's like, why did you do that? I'm like, because it was fun. Okay, well, don't cross the rodeo tracks no more. Yeah, that was the end of it. So this is back in the 90s. Now you don't cross those railroad tracks now because now there's the police guarding the railroad tracks that never has a train on it.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yes. And I think if I were to say, you know, somewhat the secret sauce is when, when people can't think for themselves. And when people aren't able to make their own decisions and feel like they have some autonomy over their lives or over their jobs. So now we go to jobs and we're told, you know, like little robots, you know, we don't need artificial [00:23:00] intelligence to create robots for us.
Cause I think they've done a good enough job of that as it is. You know, they tell you, we want your opinion. Tell us what you think, blah, blah, blah. No, they don't. They don't really want to hear that. I don't want to hear it at all. Um, and I found that out as an independent consultant having worked many, many, many jobs where they came in and were like, Oh, tell us what you think and how, what's the best way to do this?
And you start to open your mouth and immediately they're like, uh, no, no, no, that's no.
M.L Ruscsak: Yeah. That's that. I don't want to do that. You know, you don't want to find a new procedure that makes your job easier. You don't want to. think for yourself. You don't want to greet the customers differently. You have to do, basically, be the little robot that they're creating.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and who wants, I mean, who's going to be motivated? I mean, I can't tell you how many jobs I came into as an independent consultant because what I would do is I would find a job description [00:24:00] and I would apply for that job and they'd look at my resume and they'd get all excited and I was all excited.
They were all excited. I thought it was a perfect match. I'd go to work for them and I'd get there and I was like, whoa, this is not at all what the job description said. And I finally learned most of the time their HR department just went on the website and found a generic job description. and threw it up there.
So I got better at interviewing them, you know, instead of them interviewing me. Oh
-: yeah.
Cheyrl Johnson: But you know, in the, the long drawn out painful process, I found out that people don't really want,
-: you know,
Cheyrl Johnson: yeah, they don't, not at all. And they don't want change. They, they, they just want people who come and do what they're told to do.
M.L Ruscsak: Yeah. You want, you want people that don't think for themselves, take orders. blindly follow the leader, and this is what [00:25:00] we're training people to do. We're not training people to think and have a unique thought anymore. So when do we get unmotivated? When we can't think for ourselves.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and that's where I think that To me, you know, if we talked about, you know, the secret sauce, it's interesting because if you were to ask an employer, they would tell you, no, we want people that, you know, can bring new ideas and, you know, freshen things up around here and change things.
But when the reality of that hits them, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, that's, that's not going to work here. That's not going to fly.
-: Right.
Cheyrl Johnson: And I,
that's kind of why I wrote this book was really just to say, are these really the kind of people you want? If they are, this is what you have to do to cultivate that kind of an environment where these people will [00:26:00] thrive. If you don't cultivate that environment and nurture those things, they, these people aren't, they're either number one, not going to stick around, they're going to go find some other place who will, you know, let them grow where they're planted.
M.L Ruscsak: Or become an entrepreneur themselves and grow themselves.
Cheyrl Johnson: Or, yeah, or, or they're just going to stay there. And you, you know, in a lot of ways, it took me a long time in doing this for like 30 years, and probably the first 15, I just spent so much time beating my head against the wall, and then finally I just started complying.
I was just like, I'd get a job, I didn't have my hopes up anymore, I would just go in, I would be quiet. I'd be like, okay, I'm just going to figure out the lay of the land here. What are they really looking for? What do they really want? And then I'm just going to mold myself to fit them. Cause I'm an independent contractor.
I'm only going to be here a short while and be gone anyway. Right. [00:27:00] And then I would get criticized because we hired you because we wanted a consultant to come in and tell us how to do things differently. And I was like, you guys need to make up your mind.
M.L Ruscsak: Yeah. Do you want me to conform to your way or do you want me to be a free thinker and actually tell you what's wrong with your business?
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah. And how we can, excuse me, make things better. And I'm at the very tail end of my career, I guess, getting ready to retire or whatever. And it's interesting because. I live in Virginia and I've spent the last two years working on the West Coast and commuting prior to COVID back and forth kind of thing.
Um, now I'm working from home, but I definitely, when they hired me, I, they, their, their job description was so far off from what they were really looking for. But I've been through this enough times and I, like I said, I'm toward the. Getting ready to retire. [00:28:00] And I was like, eh, whatever. I don't care. And I went in and the job was totally different.
It had nothing, nothing at all like what the job description said. But the other thing I found that was really refreshing and interesting was I just really liked working for these people. You know, they didn't really want my opinion on how to do things better in terms of, you know, the job itself, but yet they were just nice people to work for.
And they seem to genuinely like me. Yeah, and I genuinely like them. And it's funny because, um, my contract's up at the end of this month and, um, due to COVID and all of the cutbacks, you know, and everything there, they can't renew the contract. But a girl reached out to me. She says, Oh, I see you're having a virtual lunch.
And we're all going to have a brown bag virtual lunch and for, you know, your goodbye. And I'm like, I've never had a goodbye cause I've never been in any place long enough to have one of [00:29:00] these kind of things. Right. But she said, Do you really want one? And I was like, you know. I'm really going to miss working for these people, and they've asked me to do so many things that were outside my skill set.
I mean, and I'm at this late stage in my career, and you know, most people at this point aren't like, I don't want to be learning all these new things and everything else, but I was. I love learning new things, and I loved working for them, and if you ask, I wasn't doing hardly anything that related to instructional design in a lot of aspects, or training, or whatever.
Um, and every once in a while they'd come across a training project. They're like, Cheryl, you're going to be so excited. We have a training project for you. I'd be like, Oh, yay. You know, but they were just so nice. And I was like, wow, this is so weird to work in a place where people are actually nice, you know?
I think people just, I think it's partly because, and I don't mean to sound like a wet blanket or negative, [00:30:00] but I think because we live in this world where people. Don't really go to work because they love their job. They're not passionate about things that they just kind of, they're not pleasant. It's not a pleasant place to work because nobody's there really.
M.L Ruscsak: Your managers are not happy in their job, so they're going to be negatives. So then it trickles down to your employees. They are not happy because the manager's not happy and everyone's just miserable.
Cheyrl Johnson: Yeah, and even if they're not miserable, they just simply are there doing a job, you know, and Some people are climbers and, you know, you kind of have to avoid them, um, because, you know, they're going to step on your toes, um, but, and it's not that, I mean, almost every place I've worked, I've come across at least one or two people that I really enjoyed working with and, you know, liked, but overall, um, it's [00:31:00] just been a really, I have found the biggest challenge I've had in all my years of working is getting past the culture of, you know, and the environment in most workplaces.
M.L Ruscsak: Right.
Cheyrl Johnson: And that's sad.
M.L Ruscsak: Yeah, it is sad, but we're almost out of time, and before I let you go, where can our viewers and our listeners find you?
Cheyrl Johnson: Um, LinkedIn's probably my big, you know, Space, but it's um, if you look up my book and my name Cheryl Johnson on LinkedIn not big into social media So I don't have Twitter and Facebook and all that kind of thing, but my book is on Amazon It's just called ambition and he You have to type in my name and the title of the book to get the actual book itself, which is interesting and Then my website [00:32:00] seems like it's unrelated.
I have a Well, I should say the website is ambition quotient comm and that that will lead you to a lot of other Places where I tend to socialize on the internet
M.L Ruscsak: You know, our author sites, our business sites, whatever we use, they are filled with so much other stuff besides just our books that people go, are you an author or is an author your hobby compared to everything else you do?
-: Yeah, exactly.
M.L Ruscsak: But it was so great having you on the show today.
-: Yes, thank you. And by the way, I do love your necklace and your earring.
M.L Ruscsak: Thank you very much. And For all of our readers and our listeners, happy reading.
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