Transcript, E104: Tiffany Dufu on accountability and support

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This episode of Hello Monday, "Tiffany Dufu on accountability and support,"​ originally published on Monday, April 12, 2021.

Jessi Hempel: From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel. And this is Hello Monday. It's our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us. Today's show is hosted by Sarah Storm.

Sarah Storm: So who do you reach out to when you need someone to tell you enough is enough, get your ish together, level up. Sometimes for me it's my spouse, or one of my closest friends. But here's the thing about those people, they love me and because they love me sometimes they're gentle when I need that an accountability check.

Tiffany Dufu: I'm a big proponent of having a different social category of people that I call a crew, who are in your life largely to understand what your ambitions are and what your plans are for the future and to hold you accountable for those. And I've been leaning on my crew and have been encouraging women in our network to lean on their crew more than ever.

Sarah Storm: That's Tiffany Dufu. A few years ago she wrote a powerful book called Dropping the Ball. It's all about prioritizing, putting yourself first, and learning what you can let go of. A couple of years ago, she founded a company called The Cru. The Cru sets women up with a diverse circle of accountability partners so that everyone in a crew can have support in achieving their goals. Tiffany has lots to say about two concepts that lead heavily on each other, highest and best use and accountability. How do we figure out what we really need to focus on? And who helps us stay accountable to the goals that come out of that discovery? Here's Tiffany.

Tiffany Dufu: My breaking point came with the birth of my first child, although I've spoken to hundreds of people and you're drop the ball moment can be almost anything, a diagnosis. You finally get the job of your dreams and discover that it's a lot harder to be the boss than you thought it was going to be. This crisis that we're dealing with right now has caused a lot of people to have to drop balls but mine was being a new parent, and not really understanding, or really being able to come to grips with the fact that I was not going to be able to have a livelihood, and be a breadwinner, and perform extraordinarily well at the office, and make sure that all of my mail was opened on time, and all of the hangers were facing the same direction in the closet, and that the kid would be fed on time, and that I would be able to move the car for alternate side parking, and get all of the holiday gifts, and keep everyone informed about what was going on. So after I had my son who is now started high school this year, and I'm happy to say that while it took me almost three years to figure out how to drop the ball, I certainly am on a mission to ensure that it doesn't take other people nearly as long.

Sarah Storm: I really loved your book. And I felt so called out by that moment where you described that you needed help, but that you were also kind of becoming upset with your husband for not recognizing that you needed help without you having to ask. So I'm not a parent full disclosure, Jesse is, I'm not, but I've absolutely been on both sides of that moment. Either way you haven't anticipated someone's unspoken need or they haven't anticipated yours. Can you tell me a bit about what that moment was like for you?

Tiffany Dufu: Yes, so Drop the Ball is a number of things. And one of the things that I did with the book in order to quite frankly get people to finish the book was to make it a bit of a romantic comedy about how I got my husband off of the couch. And not only did I not ask for help, I would engage in this dynamic that I call him the book imaginary delegation. This is when you assign someone in your life, a task, you fully expect them to complete the task and to do it on spec, you are frustrated, or angry, or disappointed when they don't do it. 

Every once in a while it will occur to you that you never actually asked him to take out the recycling, or you never actually asked her to take notes in the meeting, but usually when that happens you snap back at common sense. Well, can't he see that the recycling needs to be taken out? I mean, it's full, it is pouring over, Am I the only person who can't see it? Or, well when I was an analyst I did not need to be told that I need to take notes in the meeting, I knew that it was my job to take notes in the meeting, why can't these people get it these days in the workplace? And then you kind of repeat the same cycle. So if you're someone who ever walks into a room in your home, or in the past and office at work and things to yourself, why didn't anybody do X? It's likely that you are an imaginary delegator.

So moving from that place to doing what I describe as delegating with joy is really an exercise, and having intentional conversations with people in the book and in my home it sounds something like, hey, babe I want to talk to you about something, I know when you hear what it is you're going to be like why didn't you just send me a text message but that's how important this is to me. I feel really overwhelmed lately, there's a lot of stuff happening in the world. It's causing me anxiety. I feel like I'm not getting all the sleep that I can and it's having an impact on my wellbeing. There's a lot of really amazing stuff that I want to do in the world. And it would mean a lot to me because I know that you care about me, and I know that you care about this thing that we're doing called life together, if you would do this one little thing which is to take out the recycling. And unless the person is a total douchebag, which is probably a whole other book, they're going to say yes, whether or not they do that is a whole other chapter, but that's how to ask for help.

Sarah Storm: What was it like the first time you realized you had to do that? What did it feel like to ask for that and to sit down and do that?

Tiffany Dufu: Well, in the beginning, it felt like overly dramatic. It's frustrating. You feel a sense of resentment. Just another thing that I have to do, which by the way is why we often don't do it because we think it's faster for me to just take out the goddamn recycling , than it is to go through this whole speech and ask for this. But that's how we end up with so many things on our plate and that's the first step to dropping the ball. Over time as with anything it's like asking for help, it's like yoga, it takes practice. You come to realize that it really is your super power that no one can read your mind. And that it really is our responsibility to get the support and the help that we need from the people who are around us.

Sarah Storm: Yeah, I hear that. I feel that very deeply. We have a lot of people who I think are in this position in the pandemic, and sometimes we can see the stumbling block in putting this in practice. Did you run into a stumbling block? What would you ask people to consider doing differently? Like did you trip at all as you were implementing this for yourself?

Tiffany Dufu: I still trip every day. I'm still tripping that's . Let's write a book about that. It's really tough. Right now I think first people just need short-term hacks to literally get through the day. My hacks include lavender oil. My hacks includes the melatonin gummies. They include index cards that I have in front of me all the time, that include affirmations and or things, compliments that people have given to me over the past few months that I write down. 

So for example, for today, my index card is a quote from one of our members at The Cru, I run this company that matches circles of women who collaborate to meet their life goals. And I was hosting an event for our members and one of our members posted in the chat in Zoom, I feel like I'm sitting through a masterclass on how to be the CEO of the future. And I wrote that down and I needed that today. I've got nice things that my kids tell me, that my husband tells me and I just rotate them. So those are short win hacks that I think we all need just to help us get through any particular moment. I've started doing breathing. I've started meditating. 

And then beyond that, it's figuring out well who's in my village? I have our immediate family, our managers are in our village. So those delegating with joy conversations with managers it's important for us to have right now. And then of course, I'm a big proponent of having a different social category of people that I call a crew who are in your life largely to understand what your ambitions are, and what your plans are for the future, and to hold you accountable for those. 

And I've been leaning on my crew, and have been encouraging women in our network to lean on their crew more than ever right now. Particularly because for most of us we're spending a lot of time giving in our usual social categories. We're giving to our family, we're giving to our friends, we're giving to our teams, we're giving to our coworkers, I think it's really important for you to have a group of people who are giving to you, for whom the relationship is based on you receiving, because the more that you receive the more you realized how vulnerability can be your superpower.

Sarah Storm: I love that. I would love to hear a little bit more about that. I want to understand The Cru as in the philosophy and The Cru as the organization. Help me draw the line between like, you wrote Drop the Ball, you were living that, how did you get from there to getting to The Cru? How did you start it? Who's it for?

Tiffany Dufu: So my life's work is advancing women and girls that's pretty much why I'm on the planet. Every job I've ever had, every dollar I've donated, every article I've written, book, every social media post except for some cute ones with my kids, in them have been about how we harness women's talent, and power, and ingenuity, for the benefit of all of us. The most important thing that I've ever done though is just say yes to women who reach out to me. 

I've listened to hundreds of women's stories. I'm a bit obsessed with it. And one of the observations that I made is that even though we have a lot of people around us, our family, our friends, our coworkers, we largely perceive our personal and professional journeys as if they're a solo endeavor, not a team sport. Meaning that if we actually have a problem the first question we'll ask ourselves is, how am I going to solve this problem? When I know because I'm the cumulative investment of a bunch of other people that the more important question for each of us to ask is, who is going to help me solve this problem? I have benefited from an actual crew, a literal group of people who hold me accountable for over a decade. And because I'm a preacher's kid I would evangelize this idea of the career. You were a preacher's kid, too.

Sarah Storm: I'm a rabbi's kid, yeah.

Tiffany Dufu: Okay, there you go. I would minister to these women about the importance of having a crew. It wasn't until January 2018 that I had a conversation that really changed the crew from just a message into an actual business, into an actual organization, which was, I was giving my sermon about how you need to find a crew to a woman, I think it was Tuesday, 10:00 AM session. And she was listening to me and I could tell she really wasn't feeling what I was saying and I asked her if everything was okay, she said, it's not. And thankfully, she was really honest and saying, Tiffany, I understand theoretically, this idea of a crew but I don't think that you appreciate the amount of work that goes into finding this amazing group of women that you're talking about in this case. And she then proceeded to walk me through the workflow. She says, I'm exhausted , you wrote this book called Drop the Ball, I've got a full-time job, and three kids, and a mom with a diagnosis, and a dog, and a commute, I don't have time to find my crew. That's all I needed. 

That was what I call it Tiffany's epiphany moment, where I realized that I should stop preaching to women about how they needed to find a crew and that I should just find the crew for them because I was the one that was meeting with hundreds of women and had the bandwidth and capacity to. And so that was when I discovered what a business person would say, white space in the market. I discovered a problem set and decided that if dating sites can match people and have success in moving relationships forward, why can't we do that with a crew? So the way that it basically works is that you apply to become a member and then we match you with seven other individuals so it's eight of you that become a crew. You achieve clarity about your goals. You literally upload those into a digital tracking tool along with actions and deadlines. And you meet with your crew on a monthly basis and they support you in realizing those goals. 

The most powerful way to realize our goals is through accountability to other people. But most of us actually don't have accountability partners for our lives. Some people have heard of things like YPO. You might've heard of like, it's great to have a board of directors, or some kind of, but it's not a ubiquitous social category that everybody has, and I think everyone should have a group of people who were in your life just for that.

Sarah Storm: So take me back, like, way back, as a kid, as a student, did you always have a crew around you? What was your life like in high school? How did you grow from from those moments to realizing that you needed this?

Tiffany Dufu: I've always had people who were investing in me. I grew up in the church. My mom was a preacher's wife and I would spend a lot of time sitting down on the floor with her cornrowing in my hair. It takes awhile and people would come in and they'd bring like sweet potato pies, and they basically gossip. I wasn't allowed to say anything, but I overheard, the relationships and the value of women supporting each other. One of my earliest childhood memories was listening to a woman. As I interpreted the conversation, she was in a marriage because she didn't have a bank account. That's how my childhood mind interpreted it. And it just emblazed in my mind the importance of economic freedom, and power for women in relationships. 

As I grew older, it was in part because I was getting into the workplace without the same for lack of a better term pedigree, as some of my colleagues I hadn't gone to an Ivy League School, I didn't have parents who could just throw their kind of social or economic capital around for me. And so I discovered really early that you really need what now you would call mentors and sponsors but at that time they were just sages. People who would open doors for you, and you would get insight and advice from, I was a bit addicted to these kinds of people who would take me under their wing. So in a lot of ways it was just a function of me wanting to be successful but feeling like I don't have some of the other ways of being successful, that if I can be deemed a superstar and I run through the doors that people open for me they'll give me opportunities. And so that's how my career unfolded. 

I've basically been passed from woman to woman. I would move to a new city and a previous mentor would say, when you get to Boston go find Louis Lindauer, tell her that I sent you. When I moved to New York, somebody said go find Marie Wilson at The White House Project tell her that I sent you. And so it's very much an apprenticeship model of advancing your career with really powerful women who really believed in me, which meant that they set very high expectations and let me fail. And so that's how I understood the value of people really supporting you. It wasn't until that I got into what you would call middle management, that I understood the value of the peer mentorship and the peer coaching. You reach a point where it's like you're all climbing the mountain together, and you're like tethered to one another, and all of a sudden you've got enough capital that you can do things.

Sarah Storm: We're going to take a quick break, when we come back Tiffany teaches us how a crew is different from a circle of friends and why that's so important. And we're back. My guest today is Tiffany Dufu, founder of The Cru. Before the break, Tiffany brought up peer-to-peer coaching. And I wanted to understand how that dynamic is different from friendship.

Tiffany Dufu: Well friendship is certainly different from what I would call cru-ship. I think that friendship is really important. Friendships are usually based in commonalities, shared interests. Crew relationships are based on accountability, and a core commitment to one another, and really moving one another forward in an intentional way. So here's how you know if you have a crew. The first is that it's an objective group of people, meaning that they care about you but they're not actually vested in your decision-making. If your crew member gives you advice about something and you decide not to take it, if you feel like you would hurt their feelings, or it would have some impact on them, they're probably not a crew they probably more friends.

Let's say you want to move to a new city for a really incredible job opportunity. Your other social categories, your partner for example, may not want to move to a new city, or your kid may not necessarily be excited about the idea of having to go to a different school, your friend may like that you guys are able to connect and have been doing that since high school, your coworker might have the same opportunity that they're buying for, your crew is objective. The second aspect of the relationship is that it's really all about accountability. So if you're getting together with your group of friends and you're like, oh my gosh, what did I tell them the last time I met with them? The last time we were having drinks? And have I moved that forward, have I made progress on that? If you don't feel any pressure then there probably are just, it's a social group, they're really are your friends. 

But if you're gathering on some kind of consistent basis and in anticipation of meeting them, you're like, ooh did I send the book proposal? Did I ask for the raise? I told them that I was going to do that. That's accountability to a group of people that really helps to propel all of us forward. And then the last is diversity. If your group of people was probably a default group, maybe you all went to school together, maybe you were all in the same sorority together, I'm a very proud member of Delta Sigma Theta, I do not knock sororities. I need my church friends. I need people who are like me. 

My crew is diverse. They come from different backgrounds, different industries. So just think about the origin of your group, if it was curated by a person who values diversity and who is intentional and really selecting who should be in that group, you might have like the kind of diversity that's going to lead to innovation and new ideas in your crew. But if it's kind of a default group it may be that you need to shake things up a bit. So objectivity, accountability, diversity are really core aspects of a crew that makes it different from just having a group of friends. In fact, you don't need to be friends with all of the members of your crew.

Sarah Storm: Well, tell me more about that dynamic. So how does that work? You're not friends with all the members of the crew but they're there for your accountability and support.

Tiffany Dufu: Yeah, women are socially conditioned to feel a sense of intimacy and have a lot of knowledge about people who we deem friends. One of the members of my crew is a really incredible woman named Anne Schuchat. Anne has a sense of my ambitions where I want to go. If I need something from Anne she's right there with me. I know that Anne is married. I don't know how long she's been married. I don't know her husband's name. I've never seen a picture of her husband. I know she's got two kids. I don't know how old they are. That is not the case for any of my friends. There's a level of intimacy with your friends that you may not necessarily have with members of your crew. So that that's in part, the distinction that I make. Sometimes you develop relationships and it's really amazing, but it's great and sometimes refreshing to have a level of objectivity with the members of your crew who are helping you move forward in a really powerful way.

Sarah Storm: What's the relationship between dropping the ball and understanding that you cannot get to everything, and relying on accountability with your crew, does your crew help you figure that out?

Tiffany Dufu: Well, I would say one drop the ball is all about you. It's all about you reprioritizing and re-shifting your expectations. You can't get help from anyone else unless you understand who you are. And more specifically what matters most to you, and what your highest and best use is in achieving what matters most. If you don't have that, no one can help you. Usually when I ask people what matters most to you we start to rattle off parts of our lives which is natural. My career matters to me. My family matters to me.

The core question I'd encourage every listener to really delve into is, what do you hope to achieve in relationship to that area of your life? My career matters to me, but at the end of the day what I hope to achieve is the advancement of women and girls through my career, through my livelihood. My marriage matters to me, but what I'm hoping to achieve is a healthy partnership because I happen to know that you can be married and not have a partnership. My kids matter to me, but what I'm hoping to achieve ultimately is that they're conscious global citizens, whether they go to Harvard, whether they don't, that to me is what is most important. 

And once you have clarity about that you can then decide, okay, so how can I apply what I do really well with very little effort, not because I'm a prodigy, but because I've probably done it a lot, what are the things that only I can do that would be callous or irresponsible to delegate to another person. So for example, one of the things that I do pretty well with very little effort is helping other people to achieve clarity through guidance and encouragement. One of the things that I feel like only I can do in relationship to my kids is instill values in them. I can outsource making lunches, commutes. It's kind of hard to instill, get somebody else to instill the values.

So my highest and best use in raising conscious global citizens is engaging my kids in a meaningful conversation each and every day. Who did you laugh with today? What was important to you today? And in that way I can help them develop a positive relationship with themselves, the world around them. It is only at that point that I have the capacity to say, okay, there's a bunch of stuff that's obviously not happening here while I'm having these meaningful conversations each day, who can I then engage in helping me with those other things that need to be done? I don't feel like I need to make dinner in order to be an awesome mom but how is that going to get done? And that's been, when you can pivot out to engage your crew, engage your family, engage your coworkers to support you.

Sarah Storm: So does someone really need to have figured out all of their prioritizations before they go looking for their crew or can that happen in tandem?

Tiffany Dufu: It's very helpful to know what you're looking for when you go out to ask for help. It depends on how extroverted or introverted you are. You know if you're someone who actually gets a lot of energy from just talking to people , you know, at random, it actually might bring you quite a bit of energy not to be as focused. I need to be focused. So that's probably why I try to be as strategic as possible when asking and when reaching out to people. I also feel like people have a lot on their plates, so the more specific that I can be in asking for help, the more people can just say, of course, I'll do that one thing and move on, as opposed to feeling pressure to have to develop relationships with people, in order to get support from them.

Sarah Storm: I feel that, I receive that, yeah. We're coming to the end of our time together. What haven't you gotten a chance to say?

Tiffany Dufu: That's a great question. I think that sometimes we make things that doable, much more complex than they need to. And I feel like we only grow outside of our comfort zone. So, I would just encourage everyone to just lean in to the discomfort and lean in to the messiness. One of my favorite commercials is Delta Air Lines Commercial that I've obviously listened to many times because the voiceover begins. What does it take to fly? It takes knowing that we've got a lot of work cut out for us. Flying brings more challenges every day. But if you ask the pilots, they'll tell you that the first thing they learned in flight school is that if you run before the wind you can't take off, you have to turn into it and face it. The thing you push against is the thing that lifts you up. So I think it's helpful for people to understand that you only build resiliency through the mess, through the adversity. It's like my mother-in-law says, "If things are getting easier, it's probably because you're headed downhill."​

Sarah Storm: Wow.

Tiffany Dufu: And to know that when you're at that moment, when you're at that breaking point, either the breakthrough happens and if it doesn't, it will be because you didn't reach out. So reach out for help and support. Vulnerability is your super power.

Sarah Storm: That was Tiffany Dufu. Best-selling author of Drop the Ball, and founder of The Cru. Okay, I don't have a crew just yet but now I do have a better understanding of how to ask accountability partners for support in achieving my career vision. And I want to know who helps hold you accountable to your goals. Let us know by posting on LinkedIn with the #HelloMondayPodcast. Or drop us an email at hellomonday@linkedin.com. Then, bring your thoughts on goal setting and accountability to this week's Hello Monday office hours, we'll meet Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 PM Eastern on the LinkedIn news page. You can find us by following LinkedIn News, or email us at hellomonday@linkedin.com and we'll send you the link. If the show speaks to you, will you do a couple of things for me real quick? First, send this episode to a friend who you think might need to hear it. Then take a minute and give us a rating and a review on Apple podcasts. It really helps us reach new listeners. Thanks.

Jessi Hempel: Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. Today's show was produced and hosted by Sarah Storm. Joe DiGeorgi mixed our show. has had original audio and video. Dave Pond is our technical director, Michaela Greer, Samantha Roberson, Carrington York, and Victoria Taylor also support the show. Our music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. You also heard music from Podington Bear. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel, our show is back next Monday. Thanks for listening.

Sarah Storm: I'm just so curious, like when you were a preacher's kid, what did you envision you were going to be when you grew up?

Tiffany Dufu: A teacher and educator.

Sarah Storm: Wow.

Tiffany Dufu: Yeah, either that or a social worker, or a nurse, because that's what the women around me were. I probably would have had ambitions of being a minister myself but unfortunately, I grew up in a sexist church where the doctrine was such that women and girls didn't do that.

Sarah Storm: Like, you really carried that with you, it sounds like, all the way through to what you're doing now.

Tiffany Dufu: You're helping me realize that in this moment 'cause it's not often that we go back and think about what did we want to be when we were young? But in a lot of ways, what I wanted to be is what I am which is an evangelist and a teacher for sure.

For more on this episode of Hello Monday, check out this article about our conversation with Tiffany Dufu, and leave your thoughts in the comments!