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The Leadership Revolution · Humanity Working

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: So, for example, we have in our model, we have one question like, I knew what to do to be successful in my job.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: And we asked the manager, my employee knew what to do to be successful in the job.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Just that.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: The gap on that is shocking.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_03: Where the manager will often feel 100% the employee knew what to do, and the employee will be like 40%.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Today I'm joined by Laurie Maison, who's the co-founder, president, and chief coaching officer of Sounding Board.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Lori has spent 25 years as an executive coach working with C-suite executives at major organizations like Citibank and Chevron.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And she's also worked extensively with smaller companies as well, including startups.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: She's the author of a really interesting new book called Leadership Revolution, The Future of Developing Dynamic Leaders.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to talk about some of the themes in that book today.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: So welcome to the podcast, Laurie.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I think one of the interesting aspects of the book is you're you're kind of using the structure of a of a leadership coaching series of sessions, as it were, to give insights in how the world of work is changing.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: Now we're we're both old enough to have seen a lot of change in work environments.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: The if you like the the how, the what, the when, the why of work, um even the where I suppose.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think have been some of the most impactful changes in work and work environments in say the last 25 years?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: I would say that uh the lack of homogeneity in the workforce is the biggest thing.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: Like if you look back in the 1970s, 80s, even 60s, when a lot of leader development tools were being created, it was primarily a white male environment.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um and who were the leaders?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: White males.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: So everything was kind of geared towards that.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: And now you look, and maybe it hasn't changed as much as one would hope, but there is a lot more diversity, gender, ethnic, cultural diversity in the workforce that wasn't there when all of these tools were designed.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and in addition to that, or kind of related to it, there's also many more generations in the workforce now than there was uh back in the 70s, 80s, and the last century.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: So just the different thinking of the various generations creates a lot more diversity than there was previously.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think the second thing, of course, is just technology too, the dramatic change in technology.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, that is a theme that kind of comes through in the book quite a bit.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um we it's something we've actually discussed a reasonable amount on this podcast.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: This this historical image of a leader um is really embedded in a very I think particular view.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: Like um, still to this day, I bet if you ask people to name CEOs through history, they'd be coming up with names like I don't know, Henry Ford, Jack Welsh, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, maybe Elon Musk now, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, all of them have a very specific uh they're all white men, yeah, domineering characters.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Of a certain age.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Of a certain age.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: And what constitutes traditional leadership kind of reinforces that, right?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: A hundred percent.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: And the the even the literature around research from uh that era is all I call it a five trait research.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like, here's five traits you need to have if you're gonna be uh a successful leader, and it's traits from the that style of leader.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um one thing I think has been very interesting.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_03: We mentioned Steve Jobs because he's been held up as a successful leader.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um I actually did a lot of work with Apple in the early days and so had a little of the inside view.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I think it came out later.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe he wasn't as um successful in some ways as one might have thought.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: But I think having um a different leader at the top of the organization for the last, what, now 10, 15 years that has a very different style, but is still very successful kind of debugs that idea that you have to be that domineering or that highly visible, highly you know, dramatic uh style of CEO to be successful.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: So let's get into the concept of what even a leader is then.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, what what do you think of when you say leader?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's a job role?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I definitely do not think it's a job role.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Umly.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: It can be a job role, but remember, you could have that positional authority and not be a very good leader, right?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: You couldn't just be self-serving or you could be really more in the manager level and not leading.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: So I have a really simple definition of a leader, which is a leader is someone other people want to follow.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that means, you know, ideally a leader would be doing something more in the greater good, but we can see even from politics today, you can be a leader, it may not be positive, and yet people want to follow you.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's still leadership.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so status, as it were, and a job title can provide a little piece of that, but only a little piece of that, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: That that's I call that a named leader.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: Someone is naming you a leader because of your titling, but that is not the kind of leadership necessarily that others want to follow.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why any employee in an organization or in a community can be a leader.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: If you are operating in a way where other people are following you, you're you're a leader.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a bit interestingly, in the book, a bit of an aha moment for me came when you connected a lot of this to how we measure and grow talent.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's a piece, a small piece in the book where I think it's called putting people into boxes.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um it it gently but precisely critiques the uh the McKinsey Nine Box Talent Review.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'd love you to, for people that don't use it or haven't heard of it, can you explain a little bit what the nine box talent review is and the challenges that there are with it?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a tool, an HR tool that's been used really since I think it came out in the in the you know 70s, 80s, 90s.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: I forget the exact year now.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and the idea was to use that to determine who are your highest potential leaders.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a grid on one side is your job performance, one access, and the other access is your potential.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: And then the people with the highest job performance and the highest potential are the ones that you are supposed to put all your attention, time, and money on.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the problem with that is potential is like an internal to the individual quality.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, how is potential being determined?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: And there's no guidance around that in the nine box, and yet that's the one of the two key characteristics.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: So, what has happened is potential is being determined by people who have an idea of that for themselves, which might be biased or narrow or egocentric, and then are applying that to an entire workforce.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because often this uh subjective quality of potential is really determined by a conversation uh among higher level executives.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that is one of the reasons we haven't gotten as much diversity in the workplace as we might have if the view of potential either was widened or visible or more objective or more stated than it is in the nine-box approach.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I there that that nine-box approach has been debunked repeatedly in research.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: And yet I find companies every day that use that as the basis of their develop leader development programs.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we do as well.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I there's a couple of points that I would add to it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there is a there is all the flaws that you mentioned.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's another flaw as well, which is that um it kind of works on the assumption that not only are managers free of bias, which of course they're not, we're none of us are free of bias.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um but also it relies on the idea that managers are all equally motivated to grow the people under them.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: And in reality, what we've seen when we've taken more holistic looks at high potential programs, regardless of whether they use the nine box uh system or not, is that the people that grow inside organizations are typically the people that are managed by people who believe in growing their people.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that varies a lot inside organizations, right?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you've got managers without a lot of those leadership traits, if you've got managers as you highlight in the book, that haven't really made the transition from being an individual contributor to um to actually growing their team.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Others, right?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And growing others, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And are not motivated by the idea of growing others, then that doesn't just affect the team performance, it affects the ability of the people in the team to thrive as individuals and and participate in high potential programs and so on.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole system is is centered around really an idea that every manager wants to believe in growing their people and knows how to grow their people and is and is gonna spend that extra bit of time to grow their people.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: The capacity to actually do that.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um very interesting that you should target that because uh the you know, the organization I have founding board, um, we have recently over the last uh maybe year and a half really targeted in on the manager because yes, there's lots of HR programs, and some of those are can be really valuable, but on a day-to-day basis, it's really the manager that's the key to the growth of the employee.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: And as the as the work environment has changed and employees want more impact, they want more um individualized treatment, they want more development, they want faster development.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: The only way that can happen is if managers really step up and facilitate that growth.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and so much of the programming either is individual, like go on your skills platform and take a class, or it's HR-driven.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: So it's programmatic, so maybe a high potential program or something, but there's a whole crowd of people in the middle that aren't getting a lot of attention around their leadership growth, their functional growth, their personal growth that could be uh from their manager if those managers were in a place to do that with their skills, capacities, tools, et cetera.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it it's a trend, right?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because back in the early days, like of my career, you said we've been around the block a few times.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it was the manager's job to grow an employee.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then it kind of switched over to everybody's, you know, for themselves.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: So now you have to manage your own career.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: But we found that that what that has led to is people leaving companies really rapidly and uh a tenure of only like two, three years at a company.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_03: So my my kind of forward-looking thing is we're starting to swing back on the pendulum a little bit, where it really is the manager and the employee's job together to grow that employee so that they are retained by the company, they're advancing in their impact, in their skill set, in their professional growth.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: And that actually serves everybody.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love part of again a theme I kind of get from the book is sort of how related this is to uh to a mindset that needs to be instilled in managers and and leaders.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: So even when you have these managers, as you often do inside companies where the tenure is like two, three years.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think you point out in the book the average is like 4.1 years now or something like that.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Very low, right?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: And very, very different.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's another change that of course has happened, right?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: Jobs for life are really gone now, and so we really are these much shorter tenures, right?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so you end up potentially in sort of a vicious circle uh where where managers don't think their employees are gonna be with them for very long.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they themselves have gone from being an IC individual contributor to a manager pretty quickly.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um they haven't necessarily received the coaching or the skills development that they need in order to be able to in order to be able to do it well.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: And their mindset, you point this out several times, is centered around the well, I can do I don't I'd have to teach this person how to do this, I can do it faster than they can.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: It'll take me longer to tell them how to do it than to actually have them do it.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so they end up becoming what in my case in in Microsoft, when I worked at Microsoft, we called them super ICs, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: Where basically they just all they all they did when they became a manager was work harder, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that was it.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: And they just and they just sort of put in additional hours and additional hours, and then they have these people that work for them.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: In many cases, they didn't even really respect the people that work for them very much because they're like, well, I can just do it better myself.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's why I'm here, that's why I'm in this role.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then it was perpetuated this sort of like, we'll create a superhero, we'll turn the superhero into a uh into a into a manager, and then we'll load a bunch of administrative stuff on top of on top of the manager.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Until you shift that mindset to the point whereby your job is to maximize the potential of your team, and you will be measured on how you maximize the potential of that uh that team.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Until you do that, then everything that you do in terms of growing the people under you is just going to be what you do with any spare capacity and kind of out of the goodness of your heart, right?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where I think a lot of it breaks down.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: I just heard the stat yesterday, which is for um individuals that are promoted from individual contributor to manager, um, they do not receive any management training on an average for five years after they are promoted.
• 16:04
  unknown: Wow.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: So they're promoted and struggling and a bunch of them have already gone, right?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: And because look, that model you talked about, that's gonna lead to burnout right away.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like who that's unsustainable over time.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: So then people leave, so they just keep the wheel turning to fill that role.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: But those people never advanced to actually be a manager versus a super icy.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: I really love that term.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that leads us actually neatly into one of the really interesting, I guess, frameworks that you that you have in the book.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: You talk about skills, capabilities, and capacity.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me more about how those build upon each other.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is like a uh building block model.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: So skills, that's what we've been training since OSHA came into effect, and really starting primarily around the 1970s.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there's nothing wrong with skills.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_03: We're constantly talking about upskilling, reskilling, all of that.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: But skills are fundamental to the job function, but they're just not enough for leadership development.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: So we say there's another level, we call it capacities, which is blending those skills together to create um a larger impact.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: And that takes a different kind of development, and it takes transfer to your actual job daily work so that you can apply it in a contextual way.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: So the biggest problem with basic skill training is the transfer of learning is like 10% or less.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: People actually maybe get some ideas, but the transfer to their daily life is is very low.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: In the capacity level, now you can have more transfer because it's more effective.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: You're combining a set of skills to have a greater impact.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: And then the one above that really is capacity, and that is how to apply those sets.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yeah, capacity.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's how to apply those um capabilities in context, in the moment, um, in an environment that's unpredictable, predictable or unknown or volatile or rapidly changing, like those basic skill sets, that's really not going to help you when suddenly, you know, you're faced with a pandemic or the market drops out from under your business or something else.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_03: You need a higher level functioning to be able to handle the environment that we're currently in where there's so much unpredictable and unknownness about it.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I find this utterly fascinating because it kind of reflects the journey that we're on.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we began as a as a training um kind of like pure training organization.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: We found much the same that much the same things that you're uh that you found and your work.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's like people in quotes learn it, then they either worst case scenario, they forget it, but certainly they haven't figured out how to apply it.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we've been um like when we started, I I would say we were something like nine 90% of our focus was on like transferring knowledge, and now 70% of our focus is on how the knowledge and the skills get applied.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um in kind of traditional skills development there is so much attention paid to, I would say, almost like optimizing and streamlining how you in quotes deliver training, like I don't know, for a book or a guy that comes out and does an off-site or something along those lines.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so little attention paid to optimizing the process of taking knowledge and transferring it into a set of repeatable behaviors that can be used in a variety of different circumstances, like you're like you're talking.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: So um it's like we need to I completely agree with you that coaching needs to take a much more significant role to allow people to understand that.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then also I think we need to, like for those of us that are still in kind of like the skills transfer uh world and the skills development world, um, we need to be measuring and focusing on what is happening two months later or six months later or one year later, and how is that translating into a set of capabilities and capacities?
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_03: So and almost having some love that you're highlighting that yes, and maybe some follow-up about that helps people make that transfer.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um because I started also in the training industry, and the thing I was struck by even back then is people would want to spend the, you know, second back then we did in person, you know, day-long training or a couple day-long training.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the the key questions would always be but wait, this is all good, but how do I do it in my environment with my boss in this circumstance with this difficult person?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: And they needed that support to translate the learning to their particular environment.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think coaching is a very good way to do that.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: There's others, I'm sure you all do, other ways to that help that.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then the measurement helps you know, you know, how much of that transferred.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: And if it wasn't enough to really make that valuable, well, let's go back in and be like, hey, it's been two months.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what are you actually using from this?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: What could you use?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: What's blocking you?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and the kind applying a coaching mindset to that can be useful because the idea is people don't change their behavior and maintain that behavior over time unless.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Unless they change their thinking or their mindset.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: So we're in January, like the gym, everybody knows about the gym.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: Like, okay, we're all going to change our behavior and go to the gym, but in March, the gym is empty because we didn't change our thinking about that.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: So having like a follow-up sessions, like we have some programs where there's a training and then we have group coaching or peer group coaching afterwards to try to help people get their mind around how do I need to think differently so that I can actually use this skill, capacity, capability on a regular daily basis.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: And when the thinking and the behavior lines up together, now you don't have that cognitive dissonance.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so it sticks.
• 22:46
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• 22:49
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• 24:18
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• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, just to illustrate um how you can move beyond skills to truth capacity.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um I several times in the book you bring up lessons that you've learned from your practice in Tai Chi, which I understand you've been doing for decades now.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um by the way, that was something that I uh that I also found really interesting because I know nothing about Tai Chi.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: So before the end of the book, I was like watching videos of it and things like that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, fantastic! That's different from my like like done at a high level.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's quite different to what I you know, what I what I imagine.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so you've got me interested in that.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate it.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um but um you do um you do use a a good example in the book.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if you can remember it, which really illustrates how you move beyond skills to true capacity using Tai Chi as an example.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: So uh can you talk about that a little bit more?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh, I don't know exactly which example you're referring to, but I'll I'll say it like this, and you tell me if I got it.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the way Tai Chi works, you know, for folks on there, the Tai Chi is that um like sort of uh slow movement calisthenics you see people doing in a park, often elderly people.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but it also has a martial format and that includes a version of sparring.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you have a class and you're learning movements and that kind of thing, which are skills, right?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: You're a certain uh aligned to skills, a certain way of moving, a certain way of stepping, whatever it is.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: But then you go and you apply this in a sparring situation, which is live, interactive, has you know emotion, has force involved, and the skill that you thought you had that you were showing in class, you like just evaporates in the face of this live interaction.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so the idea is to keep going back and forth between this skill development and then the live interaction so that you start to develop your capacity to apply these skills in a situation that may be, you know, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually challenging for you.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because in the face of those forces, you the skill set tends to drop off.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, hopefully you're not doing something physical at work.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: But when someone's challenging your long-held idea at work and all your skills fall away, and you just get mad and argue with them, that's not probably your best, you know, approach to the situation.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: So that really that, you know, uh transfer of learning from a single skill to being able to use that in an interactive, challenging environment is the key factor.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's exactly it.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I thought uh to me it was fascinating because you talk, you you discuss a little uh, you know, example of where you might be in one of those sessions that you're talking about, and you've got a set of movements that you would do in like a certain order, and then suddenly something shifts and you don't even know why you did it, and your opponent even doesn't really know why you did it, but it worked, right?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then also you use that example of like, okay, so somebody comes up to you in the street and looks at you in a funny way, or somebody comes up to you in the street and is going to attack you.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: You need those are different types of responses that you need, and you need the capacity to be able to use those skills in that situation in the right way.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and a sort of right different to the idea of like learning this and then learning this and then learning this.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they're connected.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, you must if you if you haven't got those skills, you can't apply them.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: But if you do have those skills and you have the ability to be able to apply them in different circumstances in different ways, then you're then it's a very different type of scenario.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: It almost reminds me of jazz in a way.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it is like that.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, there's a book I love.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's called Free Play, and it's about jazz improvisation.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it really is this how do you take your skills and make sure that what you're playing in an improvisational manner actually sounds good and isn't discordant and you know, unhappy on the ear.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: So, same idea because there's um an assessment you're doing, like, oh my gosh, here's the situation.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: What's what from all of my sets of skills do I need to apply here?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_03: What's the intensity of that?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, what's actually gonna work in this situation with this person in this environment?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_03: And that sense of judgment is very difficult to develop.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think sort of the traditional skills training was for a more predictable environment.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: So it did have for, you know, A, then B, then C.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: But anybody who works with people, especially nowadays, like you try A and then they do something totally different, and B now is not going to make sense at all.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: So, what do you do?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: You have to have a much wider range of skills to draw from, from to be able to, you know, respond in a more unpredictable situation.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's it's it's funny this when you when you start talking about this and sort of the nature of what companies are and just how different they are.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, just how unstructured and ambiguous they are, and how the workday is completely different for many people, and it starts at any time and ends at any time, and how the people in the workplace are so different to what uh to what they used to be.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: You tell you you tell a great story early on where you showed up in a in a lavender suit and and uh you're still wearing a suit, wearing one of your three suits, and it looked great, but it wasn't the right color suit, and so you weren't supposed to stay at that at that company, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: So so much of that stuff has has changed.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like we say, the what, the when, the where, the high, uh, the the how, the why, all of these things have changed.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: So much of that has changed.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: So many the people that are in the workforce are there for such a short a period of time, the nature of what companies are doing as a whole has changed so much.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, we still we're we're still relying on many of these old old uh systems, as it were, many of which were never even proven at the time, which is really interesting, but just became like they just became popular.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, they just became popular.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: I don't like taking it.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because they were a way of simplifying exactly.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's not necessarily a force for good, but it's become popular, right?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so to me, that links into another theme in the book that we talk a lot on about the podcast, the nature of what a company itself is.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you you talk about three basic models, you don't name all of them, but basically you talk about this kind of like all business approach whereby, which still exists, where where all the employees are kind of like pawns and you move them in and out, and you hire a bunch of them, you fire a bunch of them, and and and they're not humans really, they're just entities that are doing work, work objects.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: Then you have that uh an approach that focuses on belonging, and then you have an approach that focuses on community.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I noticed that you come out really firmly on the side of a community-focused approach.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: I find this fascinating.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: I've actually been involved in a lot of discussions about this myself recently.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: As I say, you come out really firmly on the side of community.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love you to explain why you do that and what the differences are between those different approaches.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, good.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, I uh that thinking is maybe a little bit controversial, but uh you mentioned my um work trajectory.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: I actually trained as a therapist and started my career as a social worker in my early years.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: And my uh perception around the idea of belonging is that is really an emotional um quality or capacity that people develop in their childhood.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's a big request to ask a company to provide that for employees, especially given belonging is based in the idea of unconditional love.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: And that just naturally the work environment is conditional.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's not unconditional.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: You do your job, you know, you may get kudos, you don't do your job.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's conditional on how or what or how people perceive you doing your job.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not an unconditional situation, and yet we're using language that has to do with unconditional love.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there may have been some good reasons for that in terms of DEI and how to how to make that visible.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I use the term community because I feel like it gets to a lot of the same ideas from a diversity perspective as as belonging does, but it doesn't put the onus only on the organization.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: It the organization is part of that, but the individuals are part of the community as well.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: And you can just see from social media, people really just have a huge desire to be part of a community.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's just a natural desire of humans.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and being part of community, you feel accepted, right?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: If everyone's allowed in the community, you're accepted.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: You have exchange, you can create relationships, you can learn from those communities.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you feel that sense of connection.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and so having a community-oriented approach at work, I think it works very well.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: And often you have already just community works well when you have common denominators where you have common interests or values or some commonality.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: So, in a work setting, you just have the basic commonality that you work at the same place, which is not a bad basis for starting a community.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I really advocate for the community approach versus belonging.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: I think belonging is very hard to create if people don't have an internal sense of that by the time they get to the workforce.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I found this discussion really interesting.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: We've had uh a couple of um DEIB folks um on the podcast um recently and gone into various different uh various different aspects um of it.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um what I found particularly interesting though was the sort of connection that you make between this concept of of belonging and then the concept of family.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um and like you, I've seen organizations that use terms that are similar to family terms when describing their organization.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: But a context I wanted to add about that is that in some of the discussions I've been having about this, quite reasonably, people have pointed out that actually, even the term family, we have this assumption that the term family is a universally positive thing.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: For many people, that's not the case.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Some people grow up in highly dysfunctional families, right?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: Some the the the point about a family, a sort of an observation about a family, is that it's very difficult.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: You you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave, right?
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's very difficult to leave a it's very difficult to leave a family, no matter how uh dysfunctional it is, right?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you have to put up with a whole bunch of elements with you know that could be related to you personally, that can be even abusive situations in families, et cetera, and you just can't leave it.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um because it's it's in you, it's your blood, right?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, or at least it's very difficult to, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: So opting in and out of that environment is not something that uh that many people can do.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: So even that for many people is just not like the the right term in the in the first place.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: But then secondly, as you point, as you point out, in a world in which we live today, right, people join communities based on shared purpose and shared interest.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: There may be a sense of belonging in that community.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: There may be.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: But that's that's if you like an attribute of the community, right?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: There may be the the community may be a welcoming community and you may feel a sense of belonging.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: But in a functional community, you should be able to join that community and you should be able to leave that community when the sense when the the sense of you know, when it's not aligning with your mission or you've moved on or whatever it would happen to be.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so I love that I love the the overall construct, which is one that sort of reflects the reality of it.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you point out, which I think is really intriguing, is that not only is there this idea that if you sort of center everything around the the construct of of family, can it be challenging in the moment for the company to keep up with that?
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: But given the world in which we live, like what happens to the community once you start uh what happens to the to the the family, as it were, I should say, right once you start having to get rid of people, right?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then it's a very different situation.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's a very awkward situation, yeah.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: A job is a job.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, a hundred percent.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: What you're really highlighting, I think, is the fact that it is as well-meaning as all of this is, right, and centered around the idea of caring about the whole person and being there for people and all this kind of stuff, as well-meaning as it is, there can be a downside to it.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, definitely.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's definitely a downside to it.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: I think companies can feel like if they create this sense of family belonging, people won't leave.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was almost like a reaction um to a lot of uh this, you know, shortening lifespan of employees at a company.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: But I I love your reference to Hotel California because I do think it becomes a little like that.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_03: And just because people are still there doesn't mean they're doing their best work because now they're like caught in the net.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: They are not having a choice about it.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_03: I've found people do their best work when they choose to do their best work, which, if they're feeling trapped inside an organization, um, one that potentially feels abuses or something, they are not doing their best work.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: So choosing to be part of a community of workers or employees or whatever gives a lot more agency to the individual, which then gives a lot more potential for impactful work than that feeling of having to be stuck, being trapped.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and you have to know when it's that tight, like a percentage of those people don't feel like they belong.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: They feel like the awkward stepchild or something in there, and that doesn't go to productive work behavior either.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:29
  unknown: Wow.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um all right, let's let's finish up here.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm really interested in the insights that you bring about how we go about measuring people.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: So early on in the book, you point out flaws in things like Myers Briggs and and then later discuss the importance of performance alignment between managers and employees.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is all interconnected, but I'd love to get your take on that.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, I think we are stuck in an old-style version of measurement.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, especially like when you when you look at skills, it's like, do you have it or not?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's a binary form of measurement.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we still love a Likert scale or a 10-point scale that doesn't really reflect a lot of information.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm kind of suggesting we find some new ways of measurement.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the ways is um more a gap analysis approach, which is, you know, here's what we want, and here's where we are, and here's the gap.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: So, how how do we close that gap?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that I specifically identify that around performance evaluation, um, so that instead of just evaluating something in the past, that we're actually closing an alignment gap between the manager and their employee around their work going forward.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: And so now it's like a way to actually uh create a plan.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_03: How do we close this gap versus if it's a point in time, you know, evaluation, okay, you were, you know, meets expectation last year, exceeds expectation.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's very difficult to create something um lively and growthful out of that conversation.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's just a very uh uh less evaluative way of of thinking and a more um creative, you know, uh growing way of thinking to think more of a gap analysis or or a different way of measuring that's non-binary.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Laura, I think this actually um is really vital now.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: We've done some research on our side to look at the the delta between what employers are expecting and what the expectations of employees are.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: We've seen a widening of that delta um that's happened over the relatively short period of time that we've been in existence about three years.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that what's really interesting about what you're saying here is that um in the absence of this type of gap analysis, it's it's extremely common for managers, uh particularly untrained managers, to think of in quotes lack of performance of their employees as being solely on the employee.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, I hired this guy who I thought was gonna be amazing and isn't, and that's a failure of the employee, and not take their part of the ownership of that that equation, right?
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: You hired that employee for a reason, so either you're bad at hiring, or um you're bad at uh uh conveying your expectations, or you're bad at helping that employee grow into the role, or something, right?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: But you have some measure of responsibility for the lack of performance of employees, and this this um gap analysis allows both sides of that equation to understand that that there are two sides to that equation, right?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: That they have a role and that the other party has a role.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not surprised that it's popular because it's quite different, right?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's quite different.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, people love the conversation, you know what so much of performance and evaluation, and as we said before, potential is based on perception.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's not the reality, it's what somebody has dreamed up in their own head and is now measuring by.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_03: And these kinds of gap analysis and alignment conversations just put those, make those measuring sticks visible.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_03: So, for example, we have in our model, we have one question like, I knew what to do to be successful in my job.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: And we asked the manager, my employee knew what to do to be successful in the job.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: Just that.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_03: The gap on that is shocking, where the manager will often feel 100% the employee knew what to do, and the employee will be like 40%.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: So, right there, just saying, Oh, I thought you knew what you were supposed to be doing, and the employee saying, No, I didn't.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and saying, like, well, so how do we make sure you do for this year?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: Right there, now you have a generative conversation.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: And surprisingly, it goes the other way.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_03: The employee will say, 100%, I knew what to do.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the manager will say 40%.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: Guess what?
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: What you thought you were supposed to be doing isn't what I thought you were supposed to be doing.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: So again, closing those gaps on thinking perception.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and amazingly, employees and their managers feel really good after those conversations when they're closing the gap.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: It feels so very different from the conversation of you didn't do what I thought you were going to do.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's that conversation is like a blame conversation versus an alignment conversation.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: Love that.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Laura.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there were a million other things we could have talked about.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, we're kind of up on time for today.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but uh just a fascinating, fascinating topic.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_02: Once again, the book is uh Leadership Revolution: The Future of Developing Dynamic Leaders.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, highly recommend.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so Stephen, go and uh go and grab a copy of that book.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think you'll learn a lot, um, even if you're whether you're a situation where you're trying to develop as a coach or whether you are trying to uh develop inside an organization your own management skills, or even if you're just trying to understand how organizations work.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's a whole bunch of really um interesting information there told in a really um uh approachable way.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um if you're like me, you will have Wannabe by the Spice Girls in your head after uh after reading it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: And you'll learn more about Tai Chi.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so many, many benefits to uh to having this.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for uh for joining us on the podcast today.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, thanks so much.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: And you did such a great read of the book.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like you almost know better than I do.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.