S03 EP03 with Natalie Parker - Silence Is Expensive

Michael Cupps sits down with Natalie Parker, founder of Natalie Parker Enterprises, TEDx speaker, and host of the Signal Award-winning podcast So Your Boss Sucks, Now What?, for a conversation about what silence actually costs an organization and why most companies are still not equipping their people to handle it.

Natalie spent more than 20 years in corporate America across tech, finance, forestry, transportation, and defense before leaving in 2020. She watched the same pattern play out across all of them: 60% of new managers step into leadership without any formal training, and the employees underneath them are given no framework for navigating what comes next. Her ANCHORed Accountability model was built to close that gap, from both sides of the desk.

The conversation covers the trust bank, the false alignment trap, what the Challenger disaster and Enron have in common with most mid-market businesses, and why one in three employees said staying silent cost their organization at least $25,000. Natalie also gets into the AI disruption conversation from a grounded, personal angle, including why she thinks our ability to adapt is already inside us, and what leaders will need to stop doing if they want their teams to use new tools well.

Connect with Natalie Parker: linkedin.com/in/natalie-renee-parker

thenatalieparker.com | yourbosssucks.com 

Watch Natalie's TEDx Talk here

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Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to The Habit Architect. I'm gonna start with this: your boss sucks. Now what? And that's the guest at, on our call today. It is fantastic. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. She's done a TEDx speak. She does her own podcast. She does coaching. She's really wonderful. CUPPS: 0:35

But that, that, just that comment alone, your boss sucks it ought to get your attention. And there's so much to talk about here, but she's gonna talk to you about what that really means to you, what it means to your organization, what it can mean to the company in general. Does it affect financial per- performance? CUPPS: Things like that. So it's really gonna be a fun conversation. Just a reminder we are, sponsored by Time Bandit and Enterprise Diagnostics, so go check those out. Their websites will scroll along the bottom somewhere along the way. And don't forget to like and share and subscribe to all the podcast channels, whatever you, wherever you get your messaging. CUPPS: While we bring her on stage here I just wanna mention, just do forward and share and get more... More subscribers is better, so we can get great guests like Natalie. I'm gonna let her

introduce herself because she's got such a great story that I want her to do it justice rather than me. But while she's, while we're doing the technical thing to bring her on board here There she is. CUPPS: Good morning. NATALIE PARKER: Good morning, Cupps. How are you? CUPPS: 1:35

I am fantastic. I am so excited to talk to you today. This is a great topic, and frankly, something that doesn't always get talked about, right? People have had bad bosses, but they don't know what to do about it sometimes, and I think we're gonna, we're gonna learn a bit more about that today. CUPPS: So why don't we start with just who you are. Why don't you give us an introduction? NATALIE PARKER: Sure. So I am Natalie Parker. I am a wife, a mom, a minister, a friend, all of the things, but I'm also an entrepreneur, coach, a business owner, and a strategist. And one of the things that I have leaned into in this phase of business ownership is really creating agency and accountability in organizations. NATALIE PARKER: It's how do we help people on both sides of the fence, the employee fence as well as the leadership fence, join together and have mutual

purpose and mutual accountability? And so that's what's really important to me in this phase of my career, and just really excited to not only be here, thank you for having me- Yes NATALIE PARKER: but also to, to really help organizations make a difference in the environments that they create to produce what they produce. CUPPS: Yeah. And I, as you can tell by the gray hair, I'm, I've been around for a little while, but no one ever has ever come to me and said, "This is how you handle a situation when your boss sucks." CUPPS: 2:35

No one ever teaches the kids out of college, the people that have been in business for a while. It's just not part of the training curriculum. So I think it's wildly important and overlooked, but you've done a TEDx talk on this, I believe, right? NATALIE PARKER: I have. So when you think about it, you talked about how no one tells you. NATALIE PARKER: When we were growing up everyone said, "Get good grades, go to college, and get a job," right? CUPPS: Yep. NATALIE PARKER: And those are not bad things. Those are survival skills. It's something you need so you can eat, CUPPS: right? Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And no one has ever told us that, you know- 75% of people are some kind of disengaged, and the reason of that is because their

manager. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And if we take the logic on what's wrong, managers don't get training, they don't, have the right opportunities, whatever that is, I think it's time we give employees agency on how- ... you deal with the Russian roulette of having a bad boss. Because more often than not, the more I share this message, more people are saying, "You know what? NATALIE PARKER: That was me," or, "This is me, and I want to know how to deal with it," because you shouldn't have to be a victim to get a paycheck. CUPPS: 3:35

Yeah, and it's interesting because you said something. We're taught this, that we go to school, we learn, we... and then we get a job, and we pay the mortgage, and we do that thing. CUPPS: But we also were taught to respect our elders, and generally, your manager is senior to you in, sometimes in age, but o- m- many times tenure in the company and things like that. So there is a natural hesitancy because you may think you don't know enough, but you know how they're treating you. And you know what, how you feel when they treat you that way. So there, there's something there, and I love that. So can you walk us through just a little bit about how you got here? What, what led you to Your Boss Sucks? Did you have a bad boss, or did

you just realize that there are a lot of people that needed this help? NATALIE PARKER: So in my 20-plus career in corporate America, I'm a corporate quitter. I left in 2020. CUPPS: Corporate quitter. I like that. NATALIE PARKER: And I will say that the number of good bosses were wildly outweighed by the bad And I want to articulate this really clearly. They weren't bad people. Yeah. They either had poor management skills or fragility or all the things that come that inadvertently impact your life. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: 4:35

And it was really, my last job was really, it was it was a great job, I love the company, and it was disappointing some things that like as my- I was like, you know what? I'm realizing this is my last corporate job. Yeah. And I'm hoping it was gonna be, the land of milk and honey, sunshine and rainbows, Smurfville- Yeah NATALIE PARKER: if you will, and it wasn't. And I said to myself "Is it me?" In some ways it was me. Sometimes I was a little too aggressive. I didn't have the poise or the positioning I needed to make my argument. But I had to look back at my career, and I just started to look at the architecture

of some of the bosses. NATALIE PARKER: Everything from people who were micro-managing, people who were shall I say, not jealous, but definitely threatened, right? By the fact that I didn't necessarily always adhere to the position power, at least how we conversed. Yeah. Not that I went around them in terms of authority, but like I'm willing to challenge you, and that shouldn't make me lose my job, right? NATALIE PARKER: 5:35

And when I looked at that pattern, and then I started to talk to some people, like no, a lot of people have, are going through this, and I don't know anyone who's saying you're probably gonna have a bad boss, and you may not change that. But here's how you can not only survive, but thrive the situation so that you don't have to lose yourself. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic because I think you said something in there that about the- they're not bad people. But ma- many managers and bosses aren't bad people. And I was j- it just drew me back to when I, I was, when I first got into technology, I was in sales, and then so- they asked me, "Hey, you're doing so well. CUPPS: Why don't you be the sales manager?" And there was never any training. It was like, "Good job. Just go do that." And it was like, okay. And all you could do at that point was

just try to bring human, humanity to it and think about it and get there. But they're mo- most managers probably were promoted that way initially, and then they got to that position, and then maybe they excelled and they got another position. CUPPS: But there's not really a lot of how do you deal with people management training. There's a lot of management training about the numbers and processes and stuff like that, but there's not a lot about how to manage, how to help people, right? And it's just, it's a missing thing, I think. Or at least it was for me. NATALIE PARKER: 6:35

60% of new managers, this one stat I have, Wow ... 60% of new managers have never had leadership training. CUPPS: Wow. NATALIE PARKER: Just let that sit, that the, that, 6 out of 10 leaders come into the position not having a definition of leadership, a definition of what they value, an understanding of how to change their style to motivate others. NATALIE PARKER: None of those things. Yeah. And so you're deep end of the pool without any floaties, and you've gotta make your numbers. Yeah. The two pressures of those things typically lead us to the tasks rather than the relationship, and that I think is the cavernous gap.

Yeah. And unfortunately, companies, spend trillions of dollars on leadership training globally. NATALIE PARKER: 7:35

Trillions, right? But it's imbalanced to what we spend on employee training to help them navigate these things. And it's, it's hard for the company to say, "You know what? We've got great leaders and we have some bad ones." Yeah. "Just work with us as we're working through this." And there's not a lot of mechanisms to help the employee, one, advocate for themselves, to raise a flag that, of something that needs to be corrective, right? NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. More often than not, in the HR seat that I sat, the company typically leads toward- leans towards a leadersh- leader's perspective rather than the employees. Yeah. And there's this fear of "Hey, if we do 360s, all the employees are gonna gang up on the manager," right? And so- ... I think there's, I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to really dissect this and try to create equity in the approach, right? NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. Where we h- we give people the tools, because they are in the best seat. Here's the thing that I think, Cupps,

is this. Yeah. If leadership is a product If leadership is the product, then who's the consumer? It's the employee. The business gets- Yeah ... the byproduct, but the employee is the consumer. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And so how do we help the employee be better consumers of something that they choo- generally don't choose to buy? CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: So how do we manage the scenario of what they've signed up for, either by the fact that they've hired onto the company or they've been promoted to a different team or whatever that is? CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And if we looked at CUPPS: 8:35

it that way- No, you're absolutely right. And, yeah, I'm sorry. Didn't mean to cut NATALIE PARKER: you. Yeah CUPPS: no. I was gonna say, you're absolutely right. That is such an important distinction that that you just made there. I it's absolutely s- astonishing the way that we expect not only leaders to perform, but how we expect them to learn a- about the right skills to, to do the to be a leader, right? CUPPS: And then the poor employees, if they, like you said when we started, the, if they're just worried about making their mortgage payment and their paycheck, then how do they, how do they even get... they can't, they feel empowered to

even ask if there's a problem, right? A- approach their boss or their, or even HR, like you said. CUPPS: So it's an ins- it's an insane trap we put in front of people, right? NATALIE PARKER: For sure. For sure. Yeah. And I think that if people had a framework of "Here's how I at least understand what I need versus what the company needs, and how do I help negotiate that?" Yeah. For me, that's the missing part. NATALIE PARKER: And the company being supportive of people having those mature conversations. CUPPS: 9:35

Yeah. And you have two, two methodologies or frameworks that you use, anchored accountability and spark conversations. Are those different audiences? Or w- can you te- just if maybe s- I'll just ask you what those two are. NATALIE PARKER: Sure. So anchored accountability is really the flagship of what we're doing right now. It, it really anchors around, or anchors around both my TED Talk that talks about how we anchor ourselves when we get in conflict, right? So we assess the situation, we negotiate our needs versus the needs of the leader or the organization or the person that we're dealing

with. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. Then we consult people who know us and know the situation and have wise counsel. Notice I said consult, not commiserate. We're not around the water cooler- ... talking about how bad Jane is, right? Then we heed our triggers, like what triggered me and why? We observe their patterns, 'cause we can't real- we don't know what triggered them, but we can look at their patterns. NATALIE PARKER: 10:35

And then we resolve on what we want to do. Yeah. So that's the anchor part. The accountability part is really interesting, because I feel like of all of the words in the business field, that's one word we haven't defined. What does it mean to be accountability- accountable? In most cases, it's a negative connotation. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: But I believe that accountability is the reconciliation of your word, your actions, and the outcomes over time. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And so we have to take account, we have to give account. The person... So let's say if you gave me a task, "Hey, Natalie, I want you to run the podcast for two weeks." Okay, cool. What does that look like? NATALIE PARKER: What does success look like? How will I know I'm successful? What are the barriers? What can I,

cannot do? Can I not change the format? Do, what are the... When you give- Yeah ... accountability, have you given people the clarity of what success looks like? Yep. Then I actually have to agree to take it. Yes. NATALIE PARKER: 11:35

A lot of times we give people accountability and they say, "Sure, I'll do it." Yeah. But from there, once you give it and I take it, we have to keep accountability through the process, and I feel like this is one of the biggest threads that people lose. They shove the accountability over and they never keep tabs on the baby after it's been adopted. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And then when it's done, we both have an account. You gave it, I took it. We kept it through mutual accountability, and we have an accounting of what we expected. Now, the results may vary. It may not, but we get to say, "Here's what I did. Here's what you expected. Is it about right?" And that reconciles. NATALIE PARKER: And it's that I think we don't take time to follow that process- Yeah ... and make sure that people are able to do the thing we ask them to do. Do they have the

capacity? Yeah. Do they have the resources? Do they have access to you in order to be able to do the thing? So it's account-able. And so those two things- Yeah NATALIE PARKER: the accountability structure is how we get things done. The anchor structure is around how we resolve conflict in the middle of that process. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. And, it's interesting the accountability word can also for, I think for leaders, can also be a deflection because they say we're accountable to shareholders, we're accountable to the numbers. CUPPS: 12:35

And what that really is saying is you're not accountable. You're s- you're giving, you're giving that accountability away to something else instead of taking action on it. And I, so I like the way you frame that, and I do think that the anchor thing actually works because it's about our accountability, not necessarily, these pie in the sky values of the company kind of thing. CUPPS: It's how we're treating each other to get to the goals that we need, right? NATALIE PARKER: Exactly. Exactly. So I mentioned this in the talk, the TED Talk, is that, I had a situation where, I had a family member who was very ill, and I had a boss who was sh- yo-yoed in and out of

the workforce, if you will. NATALIE PARKER: She yo-yoed in and out of the office, and when she came, she was like, "I need all this attention, and I need things right now," when we needed, to do things periodically. We couldn't. It was usually like a full court press, go hard, man-to-man defense- Yeah ... and then it would let up. NATALIE PARKER: 13:35

Her desire for kind of that immediate response versus my crisis was a conflict. Yeah. And at the time, for a long time, I blamed her for how it made me feel and the frustration and the nee- what I felt like I needed to choose between my job and my family situation. But when I went through the process of what is it that I want? NATALIE PARKER: What is it that I need? How do I do this? I think more of us would make better arguments or conversation about negotiating what we need- Yeah ... and helping the other person get what they need as well. CUPPS: Yeah. That's so true. And I hate to bring up COVID and the way that work was disrupted or get pa- came back around and all that stuff, but but what I do wanna ask you about is because it's... CUPPS: I don't think we applaud ourselves

very much for what happened during COVID and how we had to learn to rework and do things. But, and then all of a sudden it started we gotta get people back in the office. They're, then they're not accountable or, I don't see them at de-" and some of everything is right? CUPPS: 14:35

Sometimes you do need to be in the office to collaborate, and sometimes you don't have to be in the office, and there's somewhere in between there that's right for everybody. But it just seems like there's always this extreme conversation, you have to be in the office or you don't have to be in the office kind of thing, and I just wanted to get your take on that because I think, I actually think we, we did some amazing work in a really tough period of time, and we're still doing it. CUPPS: We're still doing well with navigating, different circumstances. People moved to other locations and stuff like that. I'm just curious if you have stories or perspective on going into COVID and coming out of it and the w- and managers and the employees. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. I- I was working for a company during COVID that manufacturing company, I was still doing organizational development, and they asked me to be in a whole different state during COVID. NATALIE PARKER: Oh, geez. So I would drive from Charlotte to to, to two states away to get to where I was

going to sit in an office by myself- CUPPS: Oh, yeah ... NATALIE PARKER: for two whole months. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And it was- Yeah ... it was painstaking because we couldn't talk to anybody. We had to... it was just was... And I get the intention, but it just defied logic in a couple of different ways. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: I believe that what is required of us in this season, not only from a post-COVID world, but now an AI disrupted world- CUPPS: Yeah ... NATALIE PARKER: is people learn to write with our left hand, right? CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: 15:35

My daughter's I can't do that. It's my bad hand." I'm like, "You don't have a bad hand. You have a dominant hand, and you have a non-dominant hand." NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. If for some reason you broke your dominant hand, you would figure out- Yeah ... to a level of grace and specificity of how to write with your other hand. And CUPPS: I feel- You're absolutely right. NATALIE PARKER: Absolutely ... a lot of us are going back to what we know- Instead of crafting new integrated ways to do the things we need to do. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. So there are some times where you need to be in the room. You can see people- Yeah ... hear people when you need to do brain melding and those kinds of things. It's important.

And there are absolutely times when you need to, you can work by yourself to do things. I think we struggle with where to integrate and how to do it well virtually- Yes NATALIE PARKER: rather than demanding. I think a lot of times the return to office is both a financial mandate to make sense of the expense of the building- Yeah ... but also a lazy one because we have not- Yeah ... taught managers how to manage virtually. You have to check in. You have to know what your people are doing. NATALIE PARKER: 16:35

I'm surprised still at how many leaders are like, "Yeah, I don't know what they're working on." Why not? Why not have them- Yeah. ... check them in? You don't even have to meet with them every week. Have a- Yeah ... have a project board. What is going on? Yeah. And so I think that's our inability to have the habit of- creating mutual accountability I think is a problem. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. And when you engage, I, this is off what I was thinking, when you engage, do you do sessions with managers and employees or... NATALIE PARKER: so we typically will go in and it just depends on the project, but we will typically go in and do an assessment of the

leaders and then do assessments with the employees- Got it NATALIE PARKER: and then try to bridge the gap- Yeah ... and give accountability of "Here's what you need to do. Here's what the organization is asking." Yep. "And here's what the people are asking of you." Yeah. And a lot of that deals with transparency and trust and lack thereof because there's accountability at a personal level, there's accountability at a team level between me and you as the boss and the the employee, but then there's organizational accountability. NATALIE PARKER: 17:35

Yeah. And a lot of times we have lost equity because the organization has been incongruent. Yeah. One of my favorite business books, and I feel like, a lot of them could be like, I don't know, 20, 30 pages, not 190- Yeah ... is The Speed of Trust by Covey. And the reason I like this is because he talks about the trust bank, and that- Yeah NATALIE PARKER: in a lot of relationships we have a trust bank. Yep. And, your being congruent with your word is what adds trust to the account. And a lot of times, I believe we as either leaders or organizations have, defaulted and

have negative balances- Yes ... inadvertently because we're not showing and we're not seeing how we're impacting people. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. Ev- that's a great... And now I love the trust bank. I've talked about it quite a bit also. I think it's important because, you can make deposits in the trust bank, but the other, the bank has to be willing to accept it too and quantify it and all that starts with communication, right? CUPPS: 18:35

And making sure you understand that. I think it's great for s- spouses too, I think. It, m- any any interpersonal relationships, right? CUPPS: The, yeah, that so let's talk about the if you don't get this right, what are the consequences to your business, to your people? Because they're ca- they can be quite significant it s- it seems like to me. NATALIE PARKER: So I would say that- the goal to any relationship is open and honest communication even when it hurts. That's the goal. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: When you don't have that, people will conceal, they will hide, they might even lie if they don't- Yeah ... feel safe. I was reading a s- statistic in

HBR had a HBR had an article recently, it's actually on my desk here. NATALIE PARKER: The false alignment trap, and it talked about how one in four employees feel heard in the organization. One in four. So that means- Wow ... three-quarters of people don't feel like they can speak up or say what they need to say. Yeah. So what are we missing from a productivity perspective, from an innovation perspective, from a compliance perspective? NATALIE PARKER: 19:35

You can think of tons of situations where people were silent, and I, I'll go- Yeah ... grand on you and say I was, I think I was six years old when the Challenger flew out the sky, right? Yeah. Yeah. And we were watching it in the auditorium at AE Burlington Magnet School- Oh ... in New Jersey. I will never forget it. NATALIE PARKER: Wow. And then to read the stories about how people knew, right? Yeah. It just, those are the, it's a big example. Enron is another big example of where people knew. Yeah. And I believe most major business issues, most major challenges are accountability challenges. Because if you can't- Yeah ...

if I can't create mutual accountability when I see you're doing wrong against either the values or the processes or all of those things, then what do we have? NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. Then we have chaos. CUPPS: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that chaos can, and when it shows up in c- employee retention, if you're constantly training new employees, you might wanna s- sit back and think, "Why? Why are these employees leaving so much," right? And it just seems simple to me. CUPPS: 20:35

Not every job is a fit for the right person, and there's always gonna be misalignments there, and that's fine. But if it's just consins- consistently happening, you either need to check the leader, check the goals, or s- something's out of alignment there. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah, and I'll add this one stat from Crucial Learning. NATALIE PARKER: It said that one in three employees said that not speaking up in a crucial moment cost their organization at least $25,000. CUPPS: Oh, wow. Wow. That's a significant thing. Yeah. And especially if you're a small business or a medium-sized business. Mid-market business.

$25,000 means something, right? CUPPS: Yeah. It means pre-roll sometimes, or it means something, NATALIE PARKER: you know- It CUPPS: does ... yeah NATALIE PARKER: And at the end of the day, when you... when people feel like they are silent in an organization, they go from being active participants in your success to spectators. Yeah. And so they end up picking up the popcorn "Let's see how Joe's gonna mess this up now." NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. CUPPS: Yeah. We NATALIE PARKER: told him not to do it, there's no telling Joe." CUPPS: 21:35

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's f- that's amazing. That's amazing. And those stats are astounding. Do you work across all industries, or is it... or do you find any particular... Okay. Yeah 'Cause I know your background is you've done a... CUPPS: You- you've worked with a lot of varied type of companies. NATALIE PARKER: I d- so I've been in tech, I've been in finance, I've been in forestry, transportation, and defense. So it's been a wild ride. And when my business coach from the Small Business Association, when I started, he's like, "Who's your audience?" I'm like, "People." NATALIE PARKER: And he's no, you gotta have your audience." And I'm like, "At the end of the day, people are people." CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: I understand enough about business and how businesses

make money, but the people challenges, I don't care if you're unionized, if you're not unionized, they are generally all the same. CUPPS: Yeah. Yeah. CUPPS: That's... I love that. I love that because I hear that all the time. "What's your ICP? What's your ICP?" How about those people?" So that's awesome. That's awesome. So I'm gonna ask you two personal questions. First off, do you apply this at home? NATALIE PARKER: Oh, yeah. Yeah I, so I have a husband who's a pastor, and it's a, it's an amazing ride because we wax poetic between corporate speak and Bible. NATALIE PARKER: 22:35

And every once in a while I'll tell him "I don't... What's your anchor here? What are we doing?" CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And he's "All right. Let me tell you what, I'm n- I need to negotiate what you want in this one." And so we do that, and it- we've come a long way, Cupps, because I will tell you when we were dating, I gave him a DISC assessment. NATALIE PARKER: I'm like, "What kind of style are you?" "I think you're conscientious." And as we grow- we've grown in our relationship, he's he'll say every once in a while "Listen, Natalie, don't HR me, lady. Don't HR me." But we do practice

this, and I teach it to my kids too. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: That they're 10 and 7, and they've been saying things like this is unfair." What's unfair? Let's talk about the definition of fair. Yeah. Let's talk about what you want. What do you want? You state what you want. Okay, what does mommy want? Okay. Yeah. So how do we both get what we need? NATALIE PARKER: And so I think also teaching people early, and I'm seeing them come back and say, "Okay, Mom, I want to go outside, but I know you're gonna tell me to make my bed." I am. Yep. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And so it's helpful. Yeah. CUPPS: 23:35

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I had a feeling that you might apply some of this at home, and you mentioned kids, so I'm glad you said that, 'cause I th- And you know what's interesting about that is when your kids show up to work whenever that may be, whenever they're old enough or they may be in the workforce now, I don't know, but they're gonna handle it differently than somebody that hasn't had that experience. CUPPS: So good on you, NATALIE PARKER: thank you. CUPPS: Yeah. I also want to ask you, 'cause I've had a health scare that kind of changed some of the trajectory of what I do and how I do it and why I do it. I know you did too. W- what, was that part of building this new adventure, or was it was it were you on that path beforehand? NATALIE PARKER: So I will say

that in 2022, so we're like towards the end of COVID, I was in Washington, DC for an event with my husband. And we were eating dinner with a couple, and I got just deathly ill. And they rushed me to the hospital, and the doctor said, "We're so glad you're here," which is not something I would expect the ER doctor to say, right? CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And hemoglobin is apparently something you need. 13 is good, 10 is concerning, eight's bad. Mine was six. CUPPS: Oof. Wow. NATALIE PARKER: 24:35

And as I laid on that gurney, I had to ask myself, this is towards the end of my last corporate job "If I died today, would I have done everything that I purposed to do in life? NATALIE PARKER: Have, would I have fulfilled my purpose, my godly purpose?" As a person of faith, that's important to me. And the answer was no, and it made me very sad. Yeah. Yeah. And so through the process and time of recovery, I sat down and was really intentional about if I'm going to do this, what does this look like? NATALIE PARKER: Gotcha. I told a few people about what we were trying to do with the

business, and the level of excitement that was met was just not expected. People were like, "We've been waiting for you to start a business." I'm like, "Really?" "Okay." CUPPS: Nice. Nice ... NATALIE PARKER: especially to the point that the day that I, My last day of the job, the next day, the, that same day I got my incorporation papers and I had my client, my first client the next day. CUPPS: Good for you. NATALIE PARKER: Good for you. And it was that. I will tell you that every company that I've worked for I've learned something from. I've enjoyed the people. CUPPS: Yeah. Sure. NATALIE PARKER: 25:35

It has been an amazing journey. I don't besmirch any of that, right? Yeah. I f- I did have bad experiences. I'm not bitter about it. NATALIE PARKER: I'm mature enough now to know that I needed all of that so that I could help other people not have a similar experience. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And that's where my goal is to, to... We all have, unless you're independently wealthy, we all have to work. Yeah. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And as we continue to see this AI gap, I think it's going to get worse. NATALIE PARKER: I think people's skills are con- gonna... Think about it. COVID compounded with AI. Yeah. I think our people skills are gonna continue to deteriorate,

and so I really- Yes. Yeah ... want to help people gird themselves up with ways to keep humanity in their business. CUPPS: That's beautiful. Yeah, and I appreciate you sharing that story. CUPPS: I, mine was very similar. Not as dramatic of an emergency room, but a doctor that assessed something said, "Whatever you think is important over the next 30 days, get it off your calendar." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "It's not important anymore." And when you feel that, it's different, right? CUPPS: 26:35

So let's talk a little bit about I, it gets me emotional when I talk about that. You talk about AI and accountability as well. So how are we gonna make it more human? How are we gonna, how are we gonna tackle that AI can do more of your work, it can do the things that you maybe thought were important to your job, but now AI's doing it, so you're scared, right? CUPPS: You think you're gonna lose your job. There's more opportunity in it, too. So how are you coaching and counseling people on this? NATALIE PARKER: I'm actually surprised. So my brother was the person who hipped me to the AI train about four or five years ago. He's been using a lot of it since, s- it was probably before I started my business. NATALIE PARKER:

He's "Here's what you need to do." And I'm like, "Oh, I don't know." And as soon as I started, he's "At least get Chat." So we got Chat, and now I have a lot of them. I'm surprised at how many leaders and executives I'm having to coach around dipping the toe in the water. CUPPS: Really? NATALIE PARKER: Wow. That is fascinating to me. NATALIE PARKER: 27:35

Mid-level leaders who are like, "Yeah, I don't know. The company hasn't given us a p- a platform yet." And so I think there's a couple things we're dealing with. One is that organizations, there are very few organizations. This- Then there was another, I think it was The Atlantic, if not- Yeah NATALIE PARKER: Harvard Business Review, that said there are v- very few companies who are at the transformation stage of AI. Yeah. Many of them are still tripping over adoption things, right? Yeah. What's the governance? It's fa- It's fascinating to me is like the product is out, the baby is out. Like the- Yeah. Yeah NATALIE PARKER: the toothpaste is out of the tube. Yeah. Yeah. And the first thing, we're like, "How do we govern it," right? That's fine. That's important so that nobody gets sued or fired or hurts. Get it. CUPPS: Yep. NATALIE PARKER: But there's a lot of people who are still very much scared

of the technology. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: And so the first thing I'm working on is helping them frame why, right? NATALIE PARKER: Frame why AI, why not. We've, we, and I'm assuming we're not too far off in age, Cupps, but- ... we've gone through a ton of change. We went through the dot-com bust. We went through the housing. We've seen a lot of these changes. I am old enough to say that I, for at least 18 years, I didn't have an email address. NATALIE PARKER: 28:35

Yeah. I'm old enough to remember- yeah ... when I got my first email address. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: I'm old enough to remember when I got my first flip phone, yeah. And so the technology we've grown up with the agility needed to deal with this. CUPPS: Yes. Exactly. NATALIE PARKER: But then there's folks that have not, and so I think that's a big rock. NATALIE PARKER: The second big rock I would say is people having personal accountability for their own mastery. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: What do I mean by that? I have two degrees. I have five other no- bookcases

like this at house. We read a lot. We learn a lot. Yeah. We are a learning household. That is very important to me. I am glad that I can get a thought partner in my AI, but I have very, I am very respectable about I have ownership, right? NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. And I want to... so don't tell me the idea. I wanna refine this idea, or tell me what I'm missing, tell me what... Pressure test it, but I don't need to learn- Yeah ... organizational development from Claude. CUPPS: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: Yeah. NATALIE PARKER: 29:35

I think that the next big rock then is how do we define meaning as a lot of the work is gonna go differently. NATALIE PARKER: How do we ha- Because you and I both know a lot of people who define their lives by the work that they do. CUPPS: Yes. NATALIE PARKER: And so you see it when people retire. When they retire, it's hard to navigate what does my life mean anymore, right? Yep. Who am I- Yep ... without this work? Yep. And I think a lot of us are going to have to take stock more quickly than we thought on creating that meaning in a different, new way. NATALIE PARKER:

Arthur Brooks has a a good book called From Strength to Strength, and he talks about how it's important for us in our 20s and 30s, even our 40s, to map out what life is like after 60- Yeah. Good ... so that we can still have meaning and a sense of purpose. Yep. Yep. I believe we're gonna have to continue to evolve that as the technology requires us to. NATALIE PARKER: The times are changing. CUPPS: 30:35

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic. I yeah I agree with you, a- on all of those. I don't, everything you said there was perfectly presented. The, I what's exciting to me is how the mid-market and the small businesses now are gonna get to compete with the big guys, and the nice thing about it at that s- that level, small and medium-sized businesses, they do listen to their employees. CUPPS: Not always, and it's an individual, but most of the times the employees know how to solve problems. And now if you can take some of those problem-solving skills the sky's the limit what you can do with AI helping you get along that journey. So I'm really excited about it. I like the way you presented it. CUPPS: And I really hadn't thought back, y- you're right, we didn't have an email. I didn't have a cellphone when I started my career.

And I had to, I remember I was a traveling sales guy, so I had to pull into Holiday Inns or wherever and go find the phone bank and pull out my MCI card and start calling customers, because it wasn't something you could do on a in your car at the time, right? So it's, it's- ... it, but we adapted. We had the agility to adapt, and I think we all ought to be thinking about how are we helping our employees i- get that agili- agility to do that. So that's wonderful. I love the way you put that. CUPPS: That's awesome. And 'cause NATALIE PARKER: 31:35

I think the other thing that I'll lean into here is when it comes to helping the workforce, a lot of leaders tell and yell, right? So it's "I'm telling you," or, "I'm yelling. I'm just gonna say it louder," rather than helping people paint by number. What do I mean- Yeah NATALIE PARKER: by that? If I don't know what I'm doing- Yeah ... sometimes you're gonna have to sit with me and say, "First push that button. Let me tell you- Yeah ... why you gotta push that button, and now test..." We're going to have to start doing a lot of more alongside people, especially because the entry-level workforce is not only larger, but they're coming into the workforce later. NATALIE PARKER: So there's a ton of stuff that they're

not gonna know. Yeah. And we're gonna expect it, and it's not a good expectation. You're gonna have to sit with Jane and be like, "Jane, here's why you fill out this 1099 report," or "Here's," yeah. I think we're gonna have to do more of that. NATALIE PARKER: Exactly. And a lot of folks don't have the- A lot of folks don't have the patience for it because- Yeah ... we didn't have that kind of learning. CUPPS: 32:35

Yeah, absolutely. A- that's a great point, and I think the reverse is true. Stop and listen. Listen to those employees too, because w- in my work in technology, obviously we build products and things and sometimes if I just listen to the younger people say why don't we do it this way?" CUPPS: And you go, "Why would we do it that way?" And they explain it and you go, "Yeah, let's do it that way," right? Yeah. Because they know a they know a thing or two especially when it comes to tech and stuff like that. So that's a great time. We're about to the end of our time, so I've got a couple of questions for you that I ask everybody. CUPPS: But before I do that how do people find you? What's the best way to engage with Natalie? NATALIE PARKER: So I'm on all of the channels. So I'm on LinkedIn obviously, and as well as TikTok and Instagram and all of the things. But you can

also go on my website, thenatalieparker.com, and you can find my podcast wherever you get podcasts, Apple, Spotify, all of the things. NATALIE PARKER: Or you can go to this podcast website called yourbosssucks.com. CUPPS: Yes. NATALIE PARKER: And then if you wanna hear my TED Talk, it's on YouTube. You type in Natalie Parker, How to Handle a Bad Boss. CUPPS: Yes. And I'm sure the link on your website to the TED Talk. That I didn't have time to watch that, so it's gonna be on my, it's on my list now. CUPPS: 33:35

So the question I ask everybody these days I used to ask about habits, but we kinda ran that out over two years of doing the podcast. The new one is if you could replace something today that you do on a daily basis and you plan to replace it, what i- with AI or what have you, what is it? CUPPS: What are you handing off to, what are you delegating this, in the next few months? NATALIE PARKER: I wanna say my calendar, but I did that already. CUPPS: Ah, good NATALIE PARKER: I wanna say somebody who's literally shout out to Dana Anderson, who is the resident Natalie handler. She is. Ev- I think ... Listen, I tell people God takes care of babies and fools, and sometimes I'm a bit of both, and so I

believe every once in a while we all need adult supervision. NATALIE PARKER: But I would say that I have so many ideas, right? NATALIE PARKER: I would love to have what I would consider so in your world you'll call it a solutions architect, right? Yep. I've got the idea. I have the framework. Now s- give me the solut- like, help me with the solutioning to bring the product to market. NATALIE PARKER: 34:35

For me- Yeah ... that's one of the things I would love to farm out, because I've got all of the things, all of the ... I've got the recipe. I've got the product. But now, give me- Yeah ... the solution that gets us to market. I would love to, to have that off. CUPPS: That is, that's fantastic. This is a good timing. CUPPS: I, there's a f- a network friend of mine in Charlotte who has built something like this I'll connect you two. If that ... and I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but it's an interesting, she's taken an interesting approach to it. And so if nothing else, you'll get at least a link and a connection- I'd love- CUPPS: there in Charlotte to talk to. I NATALIE PARKER: love that. Thank you so much. CUPPS: Natalie, thank you so much. What an important message that you're sharing, and you're helping companies realize the importance of it. I will recommend you any, anytime I hear