Anger in Leadership with Dr. Julian Barling PhD and Dr. Simon Rego, PsyD

You’re in a leadership role and the anger bubbles up.  Or . . .you’re the subject of the leader experiencing anger.  Learn about anger in leadership as well as transformational leadership from the best selling authors of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Leaders: How Improving your Mental Health is Essential to Avoiding Burnout and Leading More Effectively, Dr. Julian Barling PhD and Dr. Simon A. Rego, PsyD.    I have started sharing my podcasts on YouTube as well - find this one under @AlexandraMillerClark.  Some gems I learned from this interview include: 

* just a little bit of anger can be motivating

* showing anxiety can be more effective than showing anger as a leader . . . But not too much!  

*sometimes it helps to say “I don’t know” or “I’m sorry”

*it’s good to prepare for future crises as leaders

*leaders who show anger are just humans with a range of emotions

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

To love, learn, to laugh, to love, to be, loved, to see beauty, to understand, to bring grace to the things that matter most. This is Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. Welcome to my show. For every life stage, we have questions. Let's enhance our lives together as we explore the things that matter most. This is Dr. Alexandra Miller-Clark, psychologist and host of Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. It's my pleasure to share with you today Drs. Simon Rago and Julian Barling, best-selling authors of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Leaders. So this conversation is going to focus on leaders and particularly anger in leadership. We are all human. We all experience the full range of emotions, hopefully. And anger is one of them, and leaders will experience that too. But before we begin, let me dedicate this episode to the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. It's my favorite museum, and it's not the one with the bell, it's a different one on Chestnut Street. It features Heroes of Liberty because this museum is committed to building a society that values freedom of thought, civil discourse, and respect for all people, and of course, the pursuit of liberty. Last time I was there, I enjoyed reading about Dietrich Bonhoeff, a German, a German Lutheran pastor who was very brave. And he was around during the time of World War II. He could have safely stayed in England, but he kept going back to Germany so that he could help Jews escape into Switzerland. And as a result of this, he was hung for treason. He lost his life. Thank you to Dietrich Badenhoffer for giving your life for liberty. And I know that one of the things he stood for was silence in the face of evil is evil itself. Let's begin this episode on leadership and transformational leadership. I started with asking our guests to address the angry leader. We have all experienced that, maybe with someone who we were reporting to or maybe within ourselves.

SPEAKER_03 3:00

Perhaps the first comment I should make, could make, is it's really interesting to me how there is such a um a um a lack of consistency between how much we see it in the workplace and how much good research there is on the topic. Um it's a it's just uh almost an intrinsic feature in the workplace. We see angry leaders, um, and yet there is really not enough very good research, um, evidence-based research on the topic. Um, beginning with um any kind of prevalence data. Um we know that people um talk a lot about the difficult scenes when they have a leader who um has acute anger episodes, um, but we really have no good data whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Julian Barling was very compassionate on how he approached this.

SPEAKER_03 4:03

Um one of the things that I'd like to caution about is try to get away from the notion of calling some people angry leaders, others others not, and so forth. Even the best leaders, even the very best leaders have bad days. And for all those uh people who watch The Pit, um, and I watch The Pit regularly, in the last episode there was a wonderful example of this. Dr. Robbie, the protagonist in the movie, who is portrayed as somebody who is um excellent from a skill base, excellent from an organizational basis, um, really good working with his staff and patients, has a really angry outburst when one of his um residents, I think it was a resident, um, has a panic attack and he just flies off the handle at her. Um I know that um personally I've had a lot of people ask me, what happened? Um, how did somebody who's a model of leadership um have an anger episode? And my response was, he sure did. But for me, the intriguing thing is that afterwards he went and apologized. And that may be different, you know, one of the factors that differentiate um really good leaders who have a bad day or a bad moment versus people who um are not really good leaders, um, but have a bad, you know, those bad moments. The one study that's worth um looking at was conducted by Barry Stohr, Katie DeChellis, and Peter DeGuin. It's it was published in the Journal of the Plant Site in 19, in 2019. They do two studies. They do literally a field study um on college basketball players, and they look at teams um during the halfway period, and they look at coaches' interactions with teams, and what they find is that there's actually an inverted you effect of anger, well, it's really unpleasant affect um in their speeches. And so what they find is that um when teams are doing poorly, um no expression of no expression of unpleasant affect can hurt effort and performance in the second half of the game. But there is at an appropriate level um which they um describe as just enough to let people know that the coach is not satisfied with how things are going. Um, and then from there, from from to at that appropriate point, it it tails off. And it's it's like almost as if a um more just a little bit, a moderate level of anger, um, or unpleasant affect to being very specific, which if you look at the uh behaviors that we're looking at, definitely includes anger. Um serves an information purpose, but after that it depresses um effort and performance. And I think that that's how most people in organizations um would tell you they experience anger. And then there certainly are um studies that show that um people um experience anger negatively. So if we look at the the high levels of unpleasant effect or anger, um they begin to avoid their leaders, they begin to um withdraw, they their effort and performance goes down and so forth. And one of the intriguing aspects of the study is they also looked at pleasant effects and saw no effects whatsoever. There were no, certainly no um you know you-shaped relationships as opposed to inverted you. There was just no effect of the of pleasant effects.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Here I asked Dr. Barling, when you talk about effects, are you talking about emotional effects or behavioral effects as in behavioral change?

SPEAKER_03 8:20

It's it's on behavior, it's on effort.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

On the effort of those receiving the communication from the coach or the leader.

SPEAKER_03 8:34

Um and then um they look at effort and performance. And then the second study, what they do, it's really, really um innovative, is they then take the most um unpleasant um and the least unpleasant and give it to a group to rate um in one of these scenario studies, and they find the same effects.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Okay. So an outside group to rate.

SPEAKER_03 9:09

But again, um given the the near ubiquity of anger in the workplace, it is surprising only how much we don't know from an evidence-based perspective.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

I shared with Dr. Barling that I appreciated his compassion for sharing that all leaders are going to experience anger at some point and maybe show their anger at some point. And maybe is it isn't fair to label anyone as the angry leader. Um, they will show it in different ways, and others will learn how to manage it really well. Right.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

And if I can just mention it's like a related area, um there's a whole stream of research modeled on family violence, on abuse of supervision. And if you if you go into that research, um, I mean, abuse of supervision is a very um eye-catching uh name. But if you go into the literature, what you find is that the uh the prevalence of abuse of supervision is actually again very low. Um but when it happens, um it's pretty dramatic. Um which shouldn't surprise us. So uh we should be careful against uh be careful about, I guess, um stereotyping leaders. Um the expression of these behaviors is unfortunately normal and I think a a function of lacking emotional um skills in tough interpersonal moments.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

I asked our guests to introduce themselves.

SPEAKER_03 10:50

Um my name is Julian Bowling. Um most of you will have noticed, um many of you will have noticed that I have a South African accent. Um I was born in Zimbabwe initially, spent most of my formative years in South Africa, um, came to Canada and Queen's University in 1984, and I've been at Queen's University since then. Um I've always been fascinated by both organizational and clinical research. Um I studied leadership, I've studied leadership for the past three or four decades, and I'm very focused on the developmental origins of leadership. Um where does leadership come from? And certainly we can isolate transformation leadership behaviors in young teenagers. Um with some colleagues, we've done research on developmental, sorry, transformational teaching and even on transformational parenting. And the behaviors are basically the same. The outcomes are very much the same. Um and now I'm for the last 10 to 15 years really focused on um the supports that leaders typically don't get in the workplace.

SPEAKER_02 12:07

I'm Simon Riego. Um thanks for having us on your show, Dr. Miller. It's always appreciated invitation. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a while since we've done this. I think I was in one of your first seasons, probably. I'm not sure if people can hear it anymore, but I grew up in Canada, in Toronto, Canada, and went to undergrad at Queen's University in the early 90s and was fortunate enough to have a class with Julian in the summer of 93, while Julian was still in the School of Psychology, Department of Psychology, before move moving over to the School of Business shortly after in the mid-90s, I think. Is that right, Julian? So I I was doing my Bachelor of Science honors degree in and one of the courses that was required for the degree was a course on experimental and quasi-experimental design, which was taught by the honorable Dr. Julian Barling. So that was when our paths first intersected in the summer of 1993, and I'll come back to that. I I then finished that degree, went on to do a master's in forensics at at John J. College of Criminal Justice before pivoting into clinical, and that's when our paths intersected. Alexandra and I went to uh Gizap with at the same time as you, and we also had access to to Terry Wilson and Arnie Lazarus while Arnie was alive and while Terry was still teaching there. So it was a very fruitful time at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers as well. And that's where our paths crossed. And then I left my internship after that. Did my internship on the west coast of Canada uh with another South African colleague, uh Jack Rashman was there at the time. I got to work a little with Jack Rachman, and then did my postdoctoral degree uh at uh University of Pennsylvania before coming to Montafe Medical Center in the early 2000s. There I've been ever since. In between, there's this fun story of Julian. As I mentioned, I was taking his course in the summer of 93, and this might be my reflection on Julian practicing uh or walking the talk, if you know, about leadership and leadership qualities you look for. I that summer my my grandmother passed away the last of my living grandparents, right in the middle of Julian's course, and he was in Toronto, but there were our uh family gatherings and funeral proceedings to take care of. So I went to Julian to explain the situation. I quite devastated because I was very close to my my grandmother, my paternal grandmother. And without uh hesitation and without further explanation needed, Julian just essentially said, do what you need to do. Don't worry about your grades, don't worry about the class. That self will sort itself out and go and go and take care of your of your business. And that meant so much that that little micro moment of a professor who otherwise, I don't remember how many people were in that class, but I was who was undergraduate psychology. So there was a lot of people of a busy esteemed professor that had already been there, and and it took that moment to treat me like a human with a being a real three-dimensional person, even though I was a student. And that made the last imprint on me. I when I went away, that that moment kind of lingered in my head, and then actually, wow, at I finished right here, so I was in 2016. I think it was it was about 23 years later, I got an email. So I must have been living in New York, and I got an email from the Queen's School of Business Alumni Association saying Juliet Farling is coming to New York City to f to do a book tour with his brand new book on the science of leadership. And if you want to come and stick on the book and and there's a little reception after you just sign up. And I couldn't believe it. I said, Oh, there's there's Julian again. I lost track of him. So I I had I I seen it. It cost me 35 bucks at the time, and I that's$35 to go and see him, but that allowed us to listen to that, Alexander, because I because just to Julian's point, he he it's all but said what I would have said about the question on anger. And for the angry leader is really just a human being trying to navigate the world. Experiences the question you asked earlier, to refactor for a moment, that I thought was behind the premise behind the book because leaders are human. And so when you asked about an angry leader, we started with the idea that that although they're put into a position where there's a lot of expectations of the leaders to ultimately experience everything else other people experience. And and our goal was to focus, as you hinted at, on the inner world of the leader to try to help leaders understand their from Julian's research, like the common areas, the most common areas in which leaders struggle, anger being one of them. There's a chapter on anger, and then how to actually cope with it better, which which then ultimately leads them to to be uh more transformational, seen as as more inspirational in the work that they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

In a little while, I'll ask my guests to speak more about what it means to be a transformational leader. But before that, I wanted them to address how it actually hurts to be angry. So if a leader is experiencing anger, they're suffering.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Julian's once, but I'm happy to take it up for two.

SPEAKER_03 18:21

Take it away, Sam.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

It's right in mind with what Julian was saying too, Alexandra. Like at a there's that inverted view of negative affect, which you could say that maybe I think correct me if I'm wrong, Julia Leaders maybe misguided. I'm thinking it has to be it's not a new, but it's a it's a sloped line in the positive direction. So it goes up. The more anger I feel, the more fired up, the more motivated I'd be. And that's not what Julian's study showed at all. They showed that there's a there's like a moderate improvement, and then there's a deterioration, if I heard you right.

SPEAKER_03 18:53

And Simon, can I just add one thing in? Um when we do speak to people who have these, if I can call them occasional outbursts, they're not bad people. They're not your so-called psycho leaders. Um, they're just they they're just again humans, they're leaders who are experiencing a typically a temporary, relatively short interpersonal blockage or they're being thwarted. And they actually really believe, in many cases, that this is the appropriate response and it will help and organizations I think do a um a pretty poor job um in helping leaders in this respect. Um though again, data are scarce, um, most leaders don't get leadership training before they become leaders. If they're lucky, they'll get it um after they're placed in a position. And if leaders are struggling in situations like this, they'll most frequently, I think, be given access to an employee assistance program. But most leaders won't go to them because of um stigma-related fears. So they really are left to struggle by themselves unless they go to an executive coach. Um, and even then, um, many executive coaches will not follow an evidence-based CBT model.

SPEAKER_02 20:23

Maybe back to what you were hinting at, Alexander, there may be a lot of leaders that are misguided in how they view anger, so they may not be open to they can you on some level, I think that if you ask the and say, What well what do you think of the results you're getting? Are you uh you said there's a there's a it's like a double-edged sword, there's a price you pay for holding anger or having these interactions, which then I think by Julian's research, it's g you that often lead to you feeling either uh uh upset or ashamed afterwards. They they are they they ruminate over the the uh impulsive decisions they made to to yell or or ost ostracize or stick a lot of someone and criticize them publicly. And so now it compounds the problem because then uh although initially you the impulse maybe to think this is the appropriate response, the toll it takes over time emotionally, physiologically, and then behaviorally, interpersonally, starts to compound upon itself. So it's only the sound and say, like what do you think of the results you're getting in the style you're using? There has to be another way to do things more effectively.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

And you also often get the response that um if you try and speak to somebody who's just enacted one of these impulse um situations, um, they'll point out that um but the feedback that they get from their leaders is that they're doing Well, so why should they bother about changing? And you try and point out um, so these are the known consequences, and you can even do better, but that's not a persuasive argument. And um, in response to something Simon said, we do discuss a study in our workbook um that shows that after some of these after the outbursts like this, some leaders ruminate and have sleep difficulties for the next two weeks, um, figurating and worrying about the negative effects that they had from these outbursts. And at the same time, um the people that were on the other side of the outburst um just think that these people are, you know, fill in whatever word you want to. Um but they just don't appreciate that some well-meaning leaders who've acted like this um do struggle afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

I mentioned to them that in their book there was a study that found that if the leader expressed anxiety over anger, so a little bit more of uh what they were anxious about versus anger, it was more effective. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:19

Um certainly I think that and there's a little bit more research on anxiety than anger. And I think it would be appropriate to say that we just don't see um the same negative effects. Um but uh um I would be care I would be cautious um in telling a leader that it's okay to express all your anxieties, um, it would be a um an important balance. But I think that showing some anxiety would would show a vulnerability, and I think it would be perceived as a strength.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Their book had also mentioned a study that found that if leaders expressed moral anger, it could be effective. Um but moral moral anger can be a slippery slope because everyone has different views on morality.

SPEAKER_03 24:19

Yes, yes, and um you know, it would be a really appropriate time to discuss issues like that right now, when you know if society is polarized, then workplaces, which are just a microcosm of society, would be equally polarized. And um moral anger could easily be, I wouldn't even say misinterpreted, I would say appropriately interpreted as um something that is, you know, um not consistent with your values.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

So back to the experience of suffering, I asked the authors to talk about what tools their book offered to give relief to the leader that's experiencing anger. And particularly one that I liked was um helping the person to become more aware of their body. I use this a lot with my patients that are dealing with anger, and um it's a way of noticing where the anger sits in your body, but in their book, they talk about keeping a diary of your anger and experience of anger.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

The beauty of the tools we offer, uh, for those aren't unfamiliar with the book, it's it's chapter by chapter uh addressing a different struggle that leaders may have. We we came up with, I think, a list of nine, if I'm not mistaken, Julian, and the nine were were based on Julian's research of the nine biggest issues that come up in leaders' lives. And then each chapter is is divided into some background and history about what the issue is and its and its importance and its significance. And then the tools that follow chapter by chapter are all derived from cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy or CBT Act and DBT, which are largely interchangeable in practical purposes. Theoretically, they differ in some ways, but they're very practical skills that people can use for a variety of problems they struggle with, including the nine we highlighted in the book. And the nine chapters don't need to be read sequentially, and the book doesn't need to be read cover to cover. We design them to be able for leaders to be able to almost see like what is the main thing for me and go to that chapter. They give me the introduction and then go to that chapter. But then there's enough redundancy and overlap between the chapters that some common threads hold true, even though we try to give different examples. One of which is what you're hinting at, which is how if I'm feeling something I want to change or experiencing something I want to alter, step one, no matter what it is, across CTC, DBT, and AC is usually something along the lines of awareness training. How are we going to monitor what that thing is so I become more familiar with the patterns around it? So, for example, if it was anger, you might we have a we have lots of logs that allow us to look at tracking experiences, triggers, and cues when someone's angry. And then we built upon that to look at the typical anger-related or anger-generating thoughts that people have, because incognitive behavioral therapy, one of the foundational theories we use in the book, it's it's established that how you think influence is how you feel, and how you feel influences how you think. So we want, as an early step for people struggling with a particular emotion, in this case anger, but it could be anxiety, it could be depression, it could be stress if you can pick it the challenging uh uh emotion. We want to start by having people understand it, it may not be as random as people think. It often isn't. It's often cued by particular triggers or situations and the beliefs people have about those triggers and situations that we want to become uh uh have a heightened awareness about. And then we want to learn specific tools through DBT, CBT, and act on how to attenuate some of that anger, some of some of the anxiety and some of the stress, some of the depression. And there's there's commonalities across those as well, but it all starts with awareness training and self-monitoring if you want.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

I then asked our guests to talk about what is transformational leadership. That is what we are striving for as leaders.

SPEAKER_03 29:05

Sure. And you know, I guess one response could be do you want the two-minute version or the grad seminar? Um, so um my take on transformational leadership is that I think that um the movement today would be to stop thinking about leadership styles and talk more about leadership behaviors. Um, I don't think that people are um so set in their ways that we can really talk about people who are purely transformational versus, and there are so many other sort of like named brands of leadership, um, LMX and servant leadership and uh et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I think that one of the most important um aspects of leadership is leadership inconsistency. Um even transformational leaders have bad days, and even abusive leaders sometimes say thank you. And ironically, the research, I think, you know, there's probably a dozen good studies or whatever. I think the research coalesces around the notion that um people would probably prefer a a leader who is uniformly bad than somebody who is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Because if you have some, you know, if you know you're going to work and you have an abusive supervisor or whatever, um, you can you can mentally prepare yourself for it. But if you don't know what's gonna face you at work, um you know going to work is just so much more uncertain and scary and out of control. So um to me, um transformational leadership is just um it would just um I think comprise of four behaviors that you would see in many different models of leadership. So it's ethical leadership, it is inspirational leadership, there's a developmental focus to it, a really important um developmental focus where you're trying to elevate your employees. And of course, there's a relational focus. And I think that um something that we see very, very much see in in real-world situations is even the most even the most wonderful years, um, never excel at all four. I think that would be asking a tremendous amount from any regular human being. But to have real strengths. Um when you uh when people have their retirement parties and you um ask people about what was their legacy, I think it's not uncommon at all to find that go around and ask people at a retirement party and they'll coalesce around what their legacy was. Um and it's not that they did everything, it's that they were really good in at least one of these areas. Um so so to me, transformation leadership is it's not about perfection, it's about leaders who have real strengths in at least one of these areas, who who work really hard um to develop and maintain their strengths, and who sometimes struggle because they work so hard to be a good leader. There is definitely an emotional toll related to being a good leader.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Leaders are placed under additional scrutiny. It's being under additional scrutiny that is one of their great pressures.

SPEAKER_03 33:08

Um absolutely, and I think that um certainly that has become worse in the last maybe five years, if we just um dated that as the beginning of COVID. Um, but there is more scrutiny on the role and behavior of leaders, which just ups the pressure. So they're really they're in a um they're in a very difficult situation. They're in a psychologically really demanding role. Um they're in the role where, you know, if your CEO types want something done, they go to these mid-level leaders and just assume that now that the middle-level leaders know, they'll do it and they'll get it done. People often look at CEOs and think, it must be great to be up there. But they report to boards, boards of directors, and they also get the scrutiny. And at the same time, um, I think that while in organizations we're doing a much better job at providing um resources for employees for improving mental health and psychological well-being, we're just not there with leaders. There's the expectation that um leaders are psychologically healthy and physically healthy, and that you would never have become, you would never have managed to get into a leadership position without being um, you know, more mentally healthy than others. There's even concern that um implicitly leadership selection committees are biased towards um more psychologically healthy people.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

I shared that I appreciated that their book addresses that leaders have a range of human emotions and they can experience depression, anxiety, anger, sleep problems, marital problems. And Dr. Julian Barling continued.

SPEAKER_03 35:15

Very much so. Um leaders are just um regular people who've landed up in a position where they have perhaps um more stresses than others in organizations and less support.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

I've noticed with the leaders that I've worked with that it can be a really lonely place. The higher they get up in power, the more they wonder who is really my friend.

SPEAKER_03 35:43

I was about you know, I just went about to say um the expression alone leadership didn't come out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Dr.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Simon Rago was running the psychology internship program at Montefiore Medical Center when the pandemic hit. And there was no rule book for what he should do as leader and managing these nine graduate students who came from various programs around the country. He was responsible for them, he was responsible to the hospital, and he talks about his experience.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

I was in a position I remember very clearly now, still, where the hospital and the Bronx at the in from March till June of 20 was the epicenter of the of the pandemic globally. It was right where we were in the Bronx, New York was was where everything was unfolding. And so the hospital CEO had a mandate for nationalizing employees, and everyone was being called to action because of the volume of patients that were coming in to be hospitalized. The entire hospital converted into a COVID hospital. All the beds were all the meeting rooms, all of the offices were converted to COVID rooms because of the volume of people, and the directive of the volume in the hospital was everyone that will have a role in healthcare. And then graduate schools, how graduate students were on internship. Here's what you're advising you to do, just from your graduate school's perspective. I then the American Psychological Association was putting out rules about what they were recommending for the pandemic, and then the organization that manages the match of API, APTIC, put out their sets of policies around what they expected of students who had matched it. There were the family members that were out that were all panicking about what to do when we had no idea what it was meant to be to most of us presumed at this lethal, because it was. And so as training director on an almost daily basis, I was trying to navigate these very alpha dynamic changing policies together together while living my own life as a person with a family trying to survive another day at work in a hospital where a lot of people we lost 2,000 patients between March and June of 2020. And 21 staff died. And so I was a human trying to serve in the leadership role across all of these varying policies that kept changing as new information was learned. And it was it was to Julian's point, it was like a situation where people were looking to me as the leader of the program to give guidance, but the messages around it were very conflicting with real people trying to live out their lives. And so it's easy to fumble in those moments, and it's easy to make decisions or to be pushed by your emotions, and we're human in the end.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

And at the end of my term, the incoming president asked me what my advice was. And what I said is there are times when everyone has talked and talked and talked things through, and they want you to make the final decision. And in order to do that, in order to do that best, you want to get to that quiet place where you have that wisdom inside of you to listen. And my experience is that the more clear you can be, the more you can hear that quiet space within yourself.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

I like that a lot. And I would I would think it it it dovetails on what we say in our book about if I we do a lot across the chapters on clarifying values, being being deliberate about what are your big bucket values, which ones are the most important to you, which ones do you hold nearest and dearest to your heart? And then if you can be explicit about those values with yourself and share them with others, then I think you can have a clarity or at least a confidence in the decisions you make. If the decisions you're making are lining up with your values, you have the greatest chance of feeling good about your decision, even if it's an unpopular one. And if people understand that it's connected to a value, I think it it leads to at least the transparency of that helps people understand, even if they don't always agree.

SPEAKER_03 40:32

And I think from an organizational context, one of the things that I've learned is that if you're if you're doing all of that, if you're behaving more generally based on your values, it's really useful, it's really helpful for your employees, because and perhaps especially in crises, your values become their boundaries. And they know that they will always be safe if they if they behave within those boundaries, if they really are your values. But from a leadership perspective, at the start of the pandemic, um, I cannot tell you how many phone calls folks like myself got asking us to go into organizations to do leadership development, leadership training, you know, on what do we do now. And I think that um one of the most difficult things, one of the things I found that leaders had most difficulty doing was learning to be able to say to employees, I don't know. Because leaders are assumed that they know, so to speak, everything. But when the pandemic hits, and then with each different wave, um the the really um appropriate answer was I don't know. And that it's okay to say I don't know. And that you can actually be very calming by saying, I don't know. But you don't just say I don't know. You know, you say, I don't know, and and this is what we will teach, I don't know. Here's what I'm gonna do to try and find out. And in a sense, how you're reducing other people's anxiety actually by just being honest with it. And for me, um taking all of that together about how we somehow got through the pandemic from a leadership perspective, um, perhaps the biggest question is what are we doing for the next from a leadership perspective for the next pandemic? And my concern is across organizations, um, not enough. We just relieve the thing, you know, that we got through the last one. But, you know, we talk about being learning organizations, but I think the evidence is not necessarily there for many organizations that we really are learning entities.

SPEAKER_02 43:06

Yeah, I have two reactions. One is uh another dotted line with Julian. We reconnected, as I said, when I went to see him on his book tour in 2016, and then in 2020, during when the pandemic is really hitting us hard in the Bronx, I reached out to Julian, and we were one of the places that were bothering him for his leadership wisdom. So he very kindly zoomed in for a good half-day workshop for our leadership in our department. On the title of it was Leadership in Turbulent Times, if I'm not mistaken. And that was very helpful for our leadership group. To your point, Julian, one of my colleagues in leadership in the department, as we were navigating through the pandemic in 2020 to 2021, kept a book, a book he called Next Time. And he he he's literally had it filled with with lessons being learned in real time. So that

SPEAKER_03 44:30

We just have to make better use of it. But you know, participating on my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

And if you'd like to read more about our guests, um, they wrote the book, The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Leaders, how improving your mental health is essential to avoiding burnout and leading more effectively. That was Julian Marling PhD and Simon Rago Cy D. And if you have found any value from this show, you can buy me a coffee and you go to buy me a coffee dot com forward slash Doctor Alexandra, as in DR Alexandra. And thank you for listening.