Extraordinary Leaders - A special series on becoming remarkable - Episode 2

This is a 3 episode podcast special.

In each episode I share the answers to three big questions I have had about leadership over the last 35 years:

• What is leadership, and what is the extraordinary version of it that achieves more and has greater impact?
• What are the most important skills and techniques that allow these extraordinary leaders to be more effective and successful?
• How do these remarkable everyday leaders grow from ordinary to extraordinary?  

Episode 2: The skills of extraordinary leadership

In this second of a three-episode series on extraordinary leadership, I share more important techniques and skills that extraordinary leaders use to have greater impact and influence.

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Transcript

 It's not about the ordinary. We've got enough of that. It's about the extraordinary. And we need more.



 Hi there, I'm Gerard Penna, and welcome to the Extraordinary Leaders Podcast, where we spend time with recognised leaders and global experts, exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership.



 Welcome back to the Extraordinary Leaders Podcast. My name is Gerards Penna, and I am your host. In this episode, we're going to continue the second of the three-part series around extraordinary leaders. In the last episode, we explored the impact on which strength and warmth, when brought together in someone's leadership, have a profound impact to create a catalyst style of leadership. Leadership that releases the energy, the contribution, and the commitment from other people. Of course, the other patterns of leadership, the more ordinary patterns of leadership we explored last time are always present. Control, relate, and protect. These are the patterns that we risk falling into, and therefore showing up less helpfully as leaders whenever we give up our strength or we give up our warmth and trade them off against each other, or perhaps give them both up entirely.



 I mentioned in the introduction to this three-part series that the first part would be the exploration of these two ideas, strength and warmth, and the way in which when they are put together, they produce something quite extraordinary. In this episode, the focus is going to be on practically how can you show up more effectively as a catalyst leader? What are some of the skills, some of the practices, some of the routines, some of the things that you can do that would allow you to more consistently show up in a way which releases the energy, contribution, and commitment from other people and effectively mobilizes and influences them.



 In the next episode, we're going to dig into the underlying barriers or limitations, the thoughts, the non-conscious feelings, the things that can hold us back from being able to step more effectively into catalyst leadership. I made the distinction in the introduction to the three-part series between horizontal and vertical development. Often when we work with leaders, we're working in the horizontal sense. That is, as if we were a tree, we're seeking to add more branches, we're seeking to add more leaves. These are adding more skills or techniques onto the structure that is already us. However, in order to grow laterally, sometimes we need to grow deeper roots. Deeper roots are all about examining the beliefs, the underlying assumptions, the values, the mental models, and the mindset that we carry about the world which drive a lot of our automatic habitual behavior, which is the vast majority of it.



 In this episode, we're going to focus principally on horizontal development, the sorts of skills and techniques and practices that you can load onto your leadership, ideally to move it to more consistently allowing you to show up as a catalyst leader. In the next episode, we'll dig deeper into vertical development. Possibly one of the best examples I can give you or illustrations of the difference between horizontal and vertical development, I observed in a program or a workshop that I participated in a few years ago. It was a keynote speaking workshop. It's an area that I was seeking to develop my skills and abilities in. The program was facilitated by some very, very capable experts in this space. It was attended by a group of very, very capable experienced professional people who've some from similar areas to mine and others from a whole host of different professions, but largely people who wanted to continue to work on how they skilled themselves to be able to show up and deliver keynote speeches or presentations to very large groups of people. We're talking potentially about hundreds, if not thousands of people at a time, requiring a unique set of skills and abilities. It was a three day program. Many of my colleagues or many of the people who accompanied me and my learning peers were very capable. One in particular stood out. She was an older woman. She had a gravitas to her. She showed up in a way that commanded people's attention. It was a sense of confidence. It was at the same time a real ability to connect with other people. She was just someone that you noticed and she was someone that when she spoke, you listened throughout the three days. We learned a bunch of different skills and techniques. And then on day three, we had the opportunity to practice and each of us took it in turns to stand up in front of our colleagues and deliver a short mini presentation. What happened to this woman when she stood up in front of the group was remarkable. A woman who had previously shown up as strong and confident and impactful, she lost her voice. She delivered her presentation with lots of fillers, ums and hours, her body slouched, lost its height. She lost her stature. And it was if the words that she was sharing and the beliefs that she was conveying had lost their impact. The two facilitators, they were very gentle and supportive with her afterwards and gave us some feedback. And the first one gave us some feedback and made mention of some of the things that I've talked about, the way she held herself, the way she moved, the words that she used. And he said, if you were to fix those things, you would show up much more powerfully and effectively. The next facilitator pause for a moment before giving his feedback. And he said, look, I agree with my colleague here, but I also don't agree. I think the moment that you work out why you're not giving yourself permission to show up out the front there in the way that you are capable of showing up, once you work that out, I think the other stuff will come. And this was a good example of the difference between working on the skills and the techniques versus working on the underlying beliefs and assumptions that or scripts that we have running within ourselves. In this episode, we're principally going to focus on the techniques and the tools and the skills. But if you find that any of these when you try them, or perhaps you've tried them before, they're not quite working for you. They're not quite loading properly, you're struggling to bring them into your practice. It could be that there's some deeper work that's required. And we'll explore the notion of that deeper work in the next episode. But for now, we are going to explore the skills and the tools and the techniques which will enable you to show up more consistently as a catalyst leader. I'm sure you're going to enjoy this episode. It's going to be a good one. Before I recorded this episode, I reflected for a bit on what I wanted to share. What was important to me was to share something with you that would be helpful to you, and something that would allow you to continue to transform your own leadership. So I thought through many of the clients that I'd work with or the people who had attended programs or workshops that I'd been involved in, and reflected on what had been some of the most powerful ideas, some of the most powerful ideas around the sorts of skills or practices or behaviours that they were able to learn from, or they were able to take and do something with which in some way transformed their own practice of leadership. And I identified six things and I wanted to share those six things and distill the key ideas or the key lessons within those in this particular podcast episode. The first habit or practice or skill or type or technique that I think is incredibly important, and it's incredibly important because it shows up at the very beginning of our interactions with other people and has a disproportionate impact upon the way in which we are experienced and therefore the way in which other people will respond to us and our leadership actions. This idea is connect, then lead. Now those words connect, then lead and not mine. They're words that I've borrowed from an article that was appeared in the Harvard Business Review and it was written by Matthew Kohut and Amy Cuddy. These are two individuals who in their own rights have written quite a bit about the notions of presence and influence. Amy Cuddy is particularly known for her work around power poses and she wrote a book called "Present". Matthew Kohut along with his colleague John Neffinger wrote a book called "Compelling People", people who seem to be able to influence and engage other people more effectively. The idea that they presented in that article is that there are these two things of which we have spoken about in the first episode. These two things, warmth and strength. Warmth being the way in which we show up to connect with other people and acknowledge through our behaviours and actions that there are other people and they matter and that our intentions are good towards them and strength being the competence and the confidence and the agency with which we show up and our preparedness to act to create the world in which we want to live, the preparedness to act to influence the world around us or the people that are in it. Those two things together are critical for mobilising other people and engaging other people and they are the two fundamental ingredients of catalyst leadership. In the article the point is made that both of these attributes, warmth and strength, are equally important yet one needs to show up before the other. That if we show up as warm and we seek to connect with people first before we seek to influence and mobilise them, that we're much more likely to be able to do that successfully. Part of the reason for that is just the way that our brain is wired. Your brain, like my brain which we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, has evolved and is now wired to make very rapid assessments of other people within milliseconds Those two assessments are to do with warmth and strength. The first assessment is what is this person's intention towards me? Are they warm or are they hostile? The second assessment is does this person have the capability to carry out those intentions? So warmth is assessed first and if we are found to be lacking in warmth or if the other person's brain upon meeting us decides that our intentions towards that other person appear to be self-serving or hostile, their brain is already wired then or predisposed to take what we call an avoidance stance towards us or a protective stance. Now a protective stance may be an attack, in other words the person will adopt some kind of aggressive behaviour in order to manage safely their relationship with us or they might move into a protective withdrawing position or stance and they're going to minimise their exposure to us. Now either of those two reactions to us when we are attempting to lead and engage and mobilise other people, neither of those reactions are helpful. So it's incredibly important that we turn up first with warmth. We show that our intentions towards the other people are honourable, that we are open to them, that we are not trying to protect ourselves, that we are not trying to hide anything, that we are not attempting at the very initial stages to purely just pursue our own agenda, that we're interested in them, we're interested in their needs, we're interested in their views. Now in simple ways that includes things like the traditional customary things like handshakes and smiling, but it goes beyond that. It's body language, the way in which we hold ourselves, the expressions that we have on our faces as we meet with other people, those initial words that we use. One researcher in this area has suggested that the first eight words that we use in a conversation with someone else will convey our intentions towards other people and have the potential to either create the conditions under which the other person wants to engage with us, or we can incite a fight-flight-fear response, you know the activation of the amygdala and the other person which leaves them compelled to either fight against us or move into a protective stance. So the idea here is show warmth first, then exercise strength, connect, then lead. This first of the six practices of catalyst leadership or extraordinary leadership is important because what it then allows you to do is to move into or set the foundation for the second practice. This second practice is based on the important idea that you can't lead people from where you are, you can only lead them from where they are, that you need to connect with them where they are, understand how they see the world, how they experience the world, understand what hopes, dreams, aspirations, pull them forward and what fears, anxieties or worries might hold them back, and then use that insight from understanding their perspective to help them choose to move towards where they need to go, to mobilize them to do the work that needs to be done because they want to do it. Now that first step which is about connecting with people where they are requires some underlying skills, curiosity, being willing to ask genuinely open questions to understand the other person's perspective,



 empathy, so that based upon what we hear that we can not only acknowledge that we've heard it but let the other person know that we understand the experience they're having and by doing so building trust in us and then using the information that we gather through that process and using that insight and the trust that we've built to encourage, to compel, to influence the other person to then choose to do what they need to do next to move them towards where they need to go. I want to step back to a moment that first idea about curiosity so if we're to lead people from where they are we need to understand the experience they're having. It's not just broadly their life experience but maybe the experience they're having with a particular problem or the experience they're having with a particular challenge or a particular opportunity and that curiosity in my mind needs to be genuinely curious and that is where we use open questions, where we open up all of the possibilities about what they're thinking, what they're seeing and what they're feeling and those three ideas are also important because often what we ask are questions about what people know that's they're gathering the facts. We may ask them what they think which are the questions which ask them about their interpretations of things so they're what they what sense they make of those facts. We sometimes don't ask them about the third which is the questions about what are they feeling so what are the what consequently is the emotional state that they are experiencing and this is important because we like to think that we are rational beings that human beings are compelled by rational thought but we're not. You just need to look into any of the research for example around behavioral economics and you understand that we're not rational individuals we are emotional beings that how we feel is what compels us to act or not act. So understanding what people know what they think and what they feel and asking genuinely curious questions is a necessary skill to be able to connect with people where they're at. Empathy is also incredibly important and I like to think about empathy as you know one of the the capabilities on a continuum of connecting with others in emotional states and that can range from complete disconnection from other people where we are we are apathetic where we don't care about what they feel or antipathetic where we basically tell them they're wrong to feel that way. At the other end of the continuum it can be we're so so tightly wound up or connected with how they're feeling in that we're bound to them emotionally. There's a version of this in human psychology which is called emotional contagion with what the other person's feeling is transferred to us. We're then held by that same fear anxiety or worry or whatever it might be which is rather problematic for us as leaders because then we're powerless to act. The right space to be on the continuum of emotional connection with others is the point at which we are able to acknowledge the emotions that they're experiencing even be able to name them to feel that we have some responsibility to help them move away from that negative emotional state but not feel the need to rescue them. We call this cognitive empathy that is being able to label and acknowledge the state of another person and affective empathy where we feel something in response where we want to therefore help them



 but importantly not that much connection that we want to rescue them because the moment we rescue them from the experience they're having we potentially weaken them. Often it's that experience they're having which ultimately is going to be the only thing that will compel that person towards action. So if they're experiencing frustration, if they're experiencing anger, if they're experiencing worry these are ultimately the only things that these negative emotional states that that person will want to reduce in themselves. We just need to help them choose a more functional response to that and use that as fuel for their action. The moment we rescue them from that experience we potentially run the risk that they no longer have to choose to act in any way. They no longer need to do anything. I often share the idea that if you were to find a caterpillar which has built a cocoon for itself and is about to emerge from that cocoon as a butterfly that if you were to come along with a very sharp scalpel and very carefully without damaging the butterfly, if you were to carefully open up that that cocoon to allow the butterfly to emerge more easily, ultimately the butterfly would be unable to fly and that's because it uses the process of breaking out as a means by which it strengthens its wings and unfortunately what we do because we feel so emotionally connected to other people's negative states and want to rescue them sometimes that we do rescue them from that negative state but we disempower them in the process. So we have curiosity, we have empathy and then we have the idea about motivating them. If you're going to lead people from where they are and help them move towards where they need to get to, part of the challenge is allowing them to connect to something which is meaningful to them, to those things that naturally will motivate another individual. So we can look at that just from a purely science point of view and say we know that when people feel they have some level of control or when people feel like that they have the capacity to learn what they need to meet the moment or when they feel that they are connected to others and others care about them, we know that when those three things are present, those three fundamental motivations of human beings, that people will often act in functional, healthy, productive ways, that when you attempt to lead and mobilize them they will respond positively. But when we lead in ways in which we disempower them, when we leave them with insufficient amount of choice or we fail to get them in that right spot where they're stretching into the moment and but feel that they can make it or where we leave them feeling alienated or alone or disconnected that no one cares about them, then they're the moments when people will often get stuck. They won't move to somewhere else or they might even move backwards. So understanding these three elements, curiosity, empathy and connecting with others in a motivational sense of incredibly important skills that underlie the practice of connecting with people where they're at and then mobilizing them, encouraging them, helping them get to where they need to get to. Let me give you an example of this because we do this regularly in the work of executive coaching. The work of executive coaching is fundamentally about understanding the experience that someone else is having and understanding the way in which that current experience they're having is unsatisfactory to them. And ultimately, they would like to be somewhere else. They would like to be have achieved something they haven't yet achieved or solved a problem they haven't yet solved. And our job as a coach or my job as a coach is to help mobilize them to do the work that they need to get to that future state. The starting point for me always has to be to understand the experience they're having not in a judgmental way, but in a genuinely curious way to understand the experience that they are having. So often the first session which might be 90 minutes long is often just about understanding the experience they're having, allowing myself to see that experience from the different perspective, particularly their perspective, not just what they're seeing and observing, what are the facts of their situation? But what are they feeling? And what sense are they making of that experience?



 A simple example, I worked with a manager of a logistics center, this manager was showing up as disconnected from other people. He was kind of protective, very critical of others, wasn't engaging with them. Really smart guy, though super whip smart, incredibly capable in the area of logistics.



 And his line manager had asked if I would work with this fellow and I sat with him and said to the manager of this individual, look, the only way that this is going to work is if this individual feels like I can be helpful to him. So let me spend some time in a conversation with him and help me understand what it is that matters to him, what might pull him forward and what's holding him back. And then if we think that there's an opportunity here, then perhaps we'll be a good fit. So I spent a good chunk of time with this individual, let's call him Bob. I spent a lot of time with Bob understanding what was the experience he was having. And what was fascinating about Bob was that really smart guy had brilliant ideas about how to improve the performance in that logistics center, but was struggling to get people on board with his ideas. And for him, his real goal, his real dream, his real aspiration was to move that logistics center to really high levels of performance where he was able to use his expertise and experience and intellect to help that facility perform at its very best. Where he was struggling, though, was that he was struggling to get people on board. And he acknowledged that that was frustrating for him. He kept reverting back to his normal behaviors, which was a kind of command and control type of behavior. And when people weren't getting on board, or they weren't doing the right thing, or they were struggling to be critical and judgmental of them, not supportive and empowering and challenging. And as a consequence, people weren't engaging with the agenda that he was trying to drive. And he was stuck. And he knew he couldn't just keep doing what he was always he'd been doing up to this point, he knew something needed to change. And so what we did is we tapped into that experience that he was having said, you know, if you wanted to remove that frustration, would that be important to you? If you want to achieve that vision for yourself, would that be important to you? If you were able to lift this logistics center to kind of top quartile performance, would you care about that? And the answer is inevitably yes. And then the questions are, so are you prepared to do the work on yourself? Are you out? Do you understand that the only way in which you're going to make progress with this is if you choose to do something differently than what you've been doing? Are you prepared to run some experiments? And the answer was yes. And then the third sort of question that I had for him was, well, do you think I can be helpful to you in that? And I obviously had to share with him ways in which I might be helpful or where I'd done it before. But what was fascinating in that 90 minutes of just asking him questions and understanding his perspective, his brain learned that my intention was to help him, my intention was to help him be successful. And in that moment, when I said to him, do you think I could be helpful to you? His brain had already made a judgment that it trusted me, it trusted my intentions. And all it then needed to learn was how it could trust my competence. So I spent a bit of time chatting to him how we might be able to do that kind of techniques and methods that we might use the journey that he might go on, what that arc of experience might look like for him over a period and spoke about other people that I'd worked with who might have had similar challenges. By the end of that conversation, Bob was really keen to engage.



 He effectively had decided that I could be helpful to him. And he was going to allow me to work with him, trust me enough to work with him to help him get to where he wanted to get to, which was actually what everyone else wanted him to be able to do too, and what the business needed him to do. The third habit or technique of catalyst leadership I wanted to share with you was an idea about connecting to purpose. And the story that I just told you about Bob is a good example of that. So Bob's purpose, his individual purpose was to lift the performance of that logistics centre to top quartile. And all I needed to do was understand what his purpose was, what he cared enough about,



 and then connect the work that needed to be done to his purpose. And in doing so, Bob would then choose, he would become self empowered, self driven. And my job as a leader is really just a coach and guide, and to challenge and support. But it was his energy that was driving his purpose, his energy which was driving his action. And so this idea about connecting to the purpose of other people is incredibly important. The truth is a lot of the time we don't just work just for money, we don't just work just for security, we don't just work to kind of meet the fundamental needs that we have. As human beings, there's an incredibly important motivation which has been emerging in the literature recently. One of the words which has been used for it is this idea of beneficence. And that is that what makes us unique as a species, human beings, is that



 we are motivated often, once these other needs are being met, we are motivated to serve some purpose bigger than ourselves, to do something which is of benefit, not just to ourselves, but to the world around us, which might be other people, it might be our tribe, it might be our family, it might be our organization, it might be our customers, it might be our communities, it might be our nations, but it's something which is bigger than us. And if we as leaders can understand what that purpose is for the individuals that we're seeking to lead and influence and mobilize, and if we can connect their ability to do the work right now to that purpose,



 then they become self-driven, they become energized, they become increasingly motivated in a more sustainable way to keep doing the work, but even when it becomes hard.



 Ian McLeod at Coles was a great example of this. I've spoken in previous podcasts about the experience that I had earlier in my career where the Coles business, which was a set of more than 300 supermarkets around Australia, plus liquor and alcohol stores and convenience stores, had fundamentally become quite broken and it was performing very poorly. So the engagement and the morale of people who worked there was low. The experience that customers were having in the stores was less than, not just less than desirable, it was quite ordinary. And the organization from a commercial point of view was not profitable and was therefore not sustainable. And it had gone fallen into a bit of a doom loop as a consequence. Low levels of profit or no profit was resulting in the organization not investing in the things it needed to, which was causing service standards and quality innovation facilities, et cetera, to decline, which led to a decline in customer experience, which meant that they weren't then shopping there, which was driving revenues and profits down even further. So Ian McLeod was an individual who the owners of Coles at the time bought in to lead a turnaround in a transformation.



 I met Ian for the first time about 12 to 18 months into this five year turnaround where he had assembled a team. They were starting to try and improve those things that were fundamentally broken, the low hanging fruit, the things where they can get some gains really quickly. And my first experience with him was turning up to a, what they call a town talk or a, an atrium level meeting, which is where there'd be hundreds of people at the support office gathered around and Ian and others would talk about how they were traveling and how things were going with this mission. And the very first thing that Ian said



 as he stood up in front of people was he said, so let's remind ourselves that the reason that we are here is to give the people of Australia a shop that they trust, delivering quality service and value. So let's talk about how we're going with that. He didn't start with, here's our revenue figures. Here's our customer service standards. Here's our profit. Here's where our expenses are. He first spoke about purpose, the underlying reason why we exist as an organization.



 He believed that if everyone in the organization made that mission, that purpose, their reason for existence and use that to drive their efforts, then you would remove a lot of the siloism that exists in organizations that people wouldn't be fighting against each other and other functions. They'd be all focused on how do we collectively produce this outcome for our customers.



 He also believed that that would remove the attention deficit disorder, which plagues many organizations. That is where they get distracted on these different things. They get so unfocused,



 crutched, diffused effort, too many priorities. And his view was, well, we've all lined up behind one purpose, then we can agree what are the most important priorities or things that we should all be working on collectively to pursue that. And then the final idea was that if everyone was pursuing a purpose instead of a set of numbers or metrics, then that is an infinite source of energy because that purpose is never fully realized. You're always working on it. You're always moving towards it. And that notion is incredibly important because the purpose, if you live it fully, will inevitably produce the outcomes that you're looking for. So if you give the people of Australia a shop that they trust, they'll come back more often. They'll come back and they'll buy more from you. They'll actually generate more revenue, more profit. You can reinvest that profit into improving prices, improving stores, improving the customer experience, create more value for them. If customers are buying more from you, that gives you a better negotiating position with your suppliers. You can therefore drive down prices. If you can start delivering lower prices and higher value to your customers, that encourages them and compels them to come back even more and shop with you. And so you create this virtuous cycle, principally by pursuing your purpose. So the purpose is not to make money. The purpose is something else. Making money is a consequence of fully living the purpose. And Ian understood because he understood that for most people, making money for this abstract institution, the corporation, and for these shareholders that they never meet, that's not the thing that drives them. That doesn't have sufficient meaning and purpose to compel them, to energise them, to mobilise them, but to deliver an experience for people who are just like them, to give the average punter in Australia an experience in which they can buy better quality, better value, feed their families at a better price, have a better experience.



 That's the kind of thing that they can get behind, that they can feel like is bigger than them, that is honourable enough that they want to serve. But connecting to purpose is not just what we need to do as leaders. In helping others connect to their purpose, we need to be connected to our purpose. In my experience, catalyst leadership is fuelled by a very clear sense of underlying purpose that drives our own leadership. It's the thing which fuels us, which energises with us, which causes us to show up with optimism and enthusiasm and resolve and energy, and that when we show up that way, other people notice, other people listen, other people engage. So we need to have a clear sense of what our purpose is. And I know for Ian at Coles, that sense of purpose was very dear to him because he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood where often people couldn't feed their families. And the idea that when he came to Australia and he saw the fact that prices of groceries were way beyond what they were in other countries, such as in Europe or in the UK or in America, his first sense was, well, the people of Australia are actually getting ripped off.



 They're being charged too much. And that sense of purpose, that sense of we can actually transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, even in only a small way, by driving the price of groceries down and giving them better value and a better experience, that was what compelled him. And he truly believed that purpose. And anyone who interacted with him, I believe, would actually come away with that exact same sense, that this is something which drove him, that he believed absolutely, and that enthusiasm and energy was infectious. But it also helped him continue to do the hard things, allowed him when he was tired, when he was fatigued, when it felt like it was all too hard to continue to step in to do the work that drove that fierce resolve that is part of that special version of leadership that Jim Collins talks about. So connecting the purpose, connecting other people to their purpose, and remaining connected to our purpose ourselves as leaders is one of the signatures of catalyst leadership. The fourth practice of extraordinary leaders is their ability to change their leadership dance. To explain this, I need to back up a little bit in perhaps some of the podcast episodes that we've run so far. One of the ideas that's been introduced is that there is two different ways in which we lead or two different versions of leadership that people hold in their minds.



 There's a version of leadership which most of us are very familiar with. And many of the people who we would have seen in our lives taking leadership positions, they exercised this version of leadership. From our very youngest years, we saw our teachers, we saw police, we saw our parents, they would all be doing these things which was to make everything okay for us. Their job was to provide direction, protection and order. They're the words that Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz use in the practice of adaptive leadership. This work is about letting people know where they're going and what they should be doing. That's the direction part. The protection is that when threats are in the environment, so if the safety or security, stability emotionally or psychologically or physically of the people that we're leading is challenged, then our job is to protect them from those threats, to let them feel safe.



 And then the third part is order. So when the rules aren't being followed, when the equilibrium of the system, it's not working the way that should our job as leaders is to reinstate that order, do what we need to. And to exercise those things, it's the dance of what we call authority. You know, we use the authority of our position to provide direction, protection and order. And that work is largely about making everything okay for people. The dance of authority or the dance of leadership from authority, because we're doing that which we are authorized to do, that which other people expect us to do, that which we have the accountability, we have empowered to do, then it's what other people expect us to do, so we're just meeting their expectations.



 But what happens when we need to act in ways which is to not meet their expectations? What happens if our job is not to make them comfortable? What happens if our job is in fact to challenge the status quo, create some disequilibrium? In an earlier episode, not that long ago, I spoke with



 Michael Johnson and Maxine Fern about the notion of provocation as leadership. That is, sometimes our work is to actually provoke and challenge the status quo. Otherwise, if we don't, then the system, we just keep doing what we've always done. Nothing changes. Often the work of leadership is about transforming things, changing things, moving away from the status quo, innovating the way in which we're doing things or what we're producing. So that requires a different kind of leadership. It requires a leadership around them. We're making everything okay for people and smoothing and soothing or creating order and structure. Sometimes our job is to crack disorder. Sometimes our job is to ruffle feathers. Sometimes our job is to turn up the heat on people. Sometimes our job is to not have all the answers because that's the work of authority. Authority has all the answers and it tells other people what the answer is. The dance of authority is the one in which we quickly diagnose the problem and then we come up with the solution and either we implement it or someone else does and the problem is fixed. Many of us do this all day long in our work and it's an important part of our work because a lot of the time our job is to keep the system going, whether that's the organization, the function, whatever it might be. But sometimes our job is to change the system.



 Innovate the system and sometimes there for our job is to not have the answers and sometimes because we're dealing with problems which we haven't yet got the answers for, we can't possibly have the answers. Our job is to challenge other people to come up with the answers. Our job is to remain alive to different ways that we could see the problem, different ways that we could make progress with, different ways that we could experiment our way towards the next step. Catalyst leaders understand that they need to exercise that range in their repertoire, that sometimes their job is to give the answers, sometimes their job is to provide direction, protection and order. Yet at other times their job is instead just to ask questions. Sometimes their job is just to identify the problem or the challenge and give the work back to other people. Sometimes their job is to not make everything okay, sometimes their job is to let people feel uncomfortable so that they are forced to actually have to engage with the problem or the challenge or the thing that they need to make progress with. But this is problematic for many leaders because like most of us when we're asked to get on the real dance floor, so if you're at a party or you're at an event and someone asks you to get on the dance floor, you'll know as well as I do that you have your regular dance. These are the habitual ways in which you move on the dance floor, the way you move your limbs and body and it's probably pretty predictable. It's uncomfortable and challenging and hard for us to change our dance but sometimes that's what we need to do if we want to get a different reaction. Catalyst leaders are able to understand when the dance they're doing is helpful and when it's unhelpful and when they need to change their dance.



 I worked with a country leader of a large multinational energy organization who had built a repertoire of leadership over time which was, it was very warm, it was very consultative, very engaging, very I wouldn't say soft but it was not hard, it wasn't conflictual. Often what he would do when there was disorder or disharmony amongst the team, he'd pacify it, he'd hose it down, he'd try and reinstate that order and harmony and that was fine in the business that he was in for several decades which was a business that had built a way of making money and performing, getting the outcomes it wanted and then that business became challenged because the world around it changed. The way in which this business made money, the way in which it succeeded was no longer fit for purpose. Their results were becoming harder to get, their standing in the community was becoming



 more controversial and people in the organization were struggling to find new answers to new problems instead trying to use the same old band-aid solutions they'd used in the past which just weren't working. The only way that the organization would be able to adapt to the new reality is for this leader, this country leader, to be able to allow conflict to emerge, to allow people to talk about the challenges for there to be different versions of what was going on to be aired in the organization, some of them controversial, some of them uncomfortable but the only way the organization could respond to the moment was to allow those viewpoints, to allow those ideas to emerge and to be engaged with and for there to be therefore a sense of conflict in the organization, conflict between the old way of doing things and what may be the new way that's required, conflict between the traditional ways of seeing how things were playing out and the answers or the interpretations that people were making and new interpretations and new versions of things that other people needed to come up with which might be more helpful and that conflict and accepting that that conflict could be productive, it could be helpful. That leader, that country leader had to then start to engage in a set of behaviors that was very uncomfortable for him because they weren't part of his traditional way of leading, he had to change his dance, he had to when he saw conflict of ideas or conflict of perspectives as the heat rose in the conversation, he needed to let the heat sit there and not be afraid that it'll go nuclear and blow everyone up in the process. He needed the conflict between people and their perspectives to sit for longer, to allow it to ferment. He needed to learn to dig for the conflict, he needed to actually engage and use the conflict, seek it out and understand if it wasn't showing up where was it because it was only in that engaging with the conflict that people and the organization would make progress. It took a while for him to learn how to do that but learn it, he did and he was able to take the organization for a period of time into the space that it needed to in order to begin the process of transformation. Leaders need to change their dance. In that explanation I gave that organization needing to change itself and the leaders role within it, I started to touch upon a really important idea which is the fifth practice of catalyst leaders. Even the idea of catalyst gives you a bit of a sense of what this practice is. So when we add a catalyst to otherwise inert material there's a transformative reaction. For example I use catalyst all the time when I'm repairing surfboards. Fiberglass is used in surfboards to repair fiberglass surfboards. We use resin, we use fiberglass cloth but we also use a bit of catalyst because the resin when it's in the can if you open it up it's just this kind of liquidy goopy viscous kind of material and even if you were to place it out in the sun it wouldn't sort of dry, it wouldn't harden, not nowhere near at the rate or to the extent that we need for a surfboard. So what you do is you add just a few drops of catalyst into the resin and you stir it in and then it starts to create this chemical reaction and ultimately what that would allow you to do is that that resin has then been activated and if you apply it to your surfboard then it will harden incredibly and then you'll be able to sand it and repair the surfboard. But in that process of adding the catalyst often what I do is I hold the container that I've got the resin in in my hand and I start stirring it you can actually feel this heat being generated which has got nothing to do with any energy I'm adding to it by stirring. It's actually the catalyst working with the resin and that process of transformation is releasing heat. Heat is often a necessary process, it's a necessary ingredient or condition for transformation to occur whether that's transforming our ideas, transforming our ways of working, transforming the products that we take to our customers, transforming the services that we offer up, whatever it is that we do the only way we get to transformation is often to engage



 with heat. And so leaders need to be able to do this fifth thing and that is regulate heat.



 Catalyst leaders understand that if heat is a necessary condition that at times they need turn the heat up to create the transformation and at times they need to turn the heat down because if there's too much heat it can become damaging and unproductive. The analogy that Marty Linsky from Harvard uses is that of cooking that often what what you're doing in an organization is you're using different ingredients to produce something that's bigger than or more or better than the sum of its parts which is often what we do in cooking we take potatoes and we take stock and we might take some kind of meat and we might take carrots or whatever we put in there and we herbs and we add it all in. If we were to then just leave that on the stovetop without there being any heat applied and we were to then open the lid just a few hours later and attempt to eat it would taste awful. Yet if we apply heat over a period of time enough heat for long enough it transforms those ingredients, ingredients that were previously separate and now combined they're integrated. What's being produced is something which is tasty. This process of transformation requires heat, enough heat over long enough for something to change. As a leader as a consequence as a catalyst leader we need techniques and allow us to turn up the heat. We also need techniques that allow us to regulate the heat down to hold it into our space and or a level which is productive, transformative and but not destructive. So what might some of those skills and techniques be?



 One way is to challenge behavior. So let people know what you've observed that what they're doing is unhelpful or unlikely to produce the outcomes that we're looking for. There might be particular routines or particular norms or particular habits that now people or even groups have that just keep getting in the way of them actually producing something different and just sometimes by observing it, sometimes by naming it, sometimes by bringing their attention to it, that's enough to turn up the heat. Another way that you can do it is by asking people to make a different interpretation about what's going on. Often people will examine a dynamic and they'll say that's just x and it's usually fairly benign, it doesn't, it lets everybody off the hook. But what if we said and asked the question, what if that's just a convenient interpretation? What's what if that's just a convenient story we're telling ourselves? So for example, let's just say sales are coming off, a relatively benign interpretation is well, we're not we're not trying hard enough or the markets there's a temporary blip in the market. What if we were a more systemic change in the market? What if the market was fundamentally shifting to something else? And we as an organization or as a team had failed to acknowledge that. And someone asked the question, yeah, okay, we are telling ourselves it's just a blip. But what if that were just a convenient story we're telling ourselves? What if this were systemic? What if this is something which is the the harbinger of something which is more pernicious and more challenging for us? What would that mean? Those sorts of questions turn up the heat. Those sorts of questions allow us to contemplate something which feels more conflictual, a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more uncomfortable, but ultimately could lead us to a very different outcome. The other important practice for a catalyst leader is to not rescue people. Often other people need to engage with the problem and engage with the challenge which will make them feel uncomfortable but is necessary for progress to be made. And every time we rescue them from it because we're trying to be nice or we're trying to protect them, it's unhelpful. It removes the heat. One of my clients was Sharon example that she encountered the other day where she felt like she'd made really good progress with something. This is an individual client who who's incredibly nice and is very supportive of people.



 She had one team member, one of her managers who was not operating at the level that they needed to and that individual's team was not operating at the level that they needed to. There was a fundamental practice that they weren't engaging with. She had however another team member whose team was operating at the level. They were doing that other thing really well and she had a kind of roundabout conversation with that first team leader and sort of said, "Oh I was wondering whether you should go and have a conversation with the other team leader because they're doing some interesting stuff." My client told me that that conversation led to nothing. It led to nothing. In fact, it created confusion and she realized what she hadn't done is she actually hadn't turned the heat up. The way that she introduced that idea in the conversation hadn't turned the heat up on



 that first team leader. So she went and had another conversation with the team leader



 and she said straight up, "In this area, this one area, you're not getting the results that you need. Your team are not getting the results that we need. Something needs to change and you're the only person who can change this." She said in that moment it felt uncomfortable for her because it was a state that felt very conflictual to her. It wasn't something that she normally did but she said by doing that and holding that person responsible for the outcomes, holding them accountable in a really direct and candid way was transformative because this person said to her, "Thank you, I now understand what it is that I need to do," and then went and did it. Often we try and protect people from what we think will make them uncomfortable but the truth is we're protecting ourselves from something that will make us uncomfortable. It's our own conflict avoidance that means that we are unable to hold others in that space of heat which would allow something different to show up, something transformative to occur. This story I just shared is a great example of a leader learning to lead and leading in order to learn. This is the sixth practice of catalyst leaders. They lead in order to learn and they learn in order to lead. What's rather problematic about leadership is we think that often we only get to become leaders when we have all the answers and that is as untrue and unhelpful a belief as any I could ever come across in leadership. Often the act of leadership is the act in which we are engaging in something which produces a whole bunch of observable data from which we can learn. The example I gave you before about my client who tried something different in the conversation with her team leader,



 with she got to see this person's reaction, a different reaction to the one which she would normally get. So she would normally go up in this kind of very soft consultative indirect way and she never had any idea that this leader was capable of receiving direct and candid feedback and doing something with it. The only way she learned that that individual was capable of dealing with that approach was to change her approach and to turn up in a candid direct way. And by doing so she learned something incredibly important about the other person and she also learned something incredibly important about herself. The problem is that when we continue to do what we've always done, nothing new emerges. The dance that we do in the system around us and the dance that we do with others doesn't change. We keep dancing in the way we do, they keep responding in the way they always have and so we learn nothing new. We just keep getting presented with the same information, the same responses. Often the only way that we will learn is to do something different, to do something a little bit more courageous.



 And that act of courage, that choice to act and to do something is an act of leadership.



 I've made the case, I think pretty clearly in other episodes of this podcast, that



 when we take up leadership we often hold leadership in our minds as a relatively safe act to make everything okay. Sometimes our job is to provoke, sometimes our job is to provocate, sometimes our job is to do something different, sometimes our job is to push and to challenge. And when we do that it might feel a little bit dangerous to us because it's not what we normally do and we can't predict what the outcomes are going to be. But that is actually a necessary part of leadership. The moment we do it, the consequence of our action will produce new observable data, new things in the system around us, new things within us. And that's all information that lends us to then learn something new about the other person and the system around us and the system that is us. My client learned that she could hold herself in that space of what felt like conflict. She could give a candid direct bit of feedback and she could feel okay about it, that she would survive that and that the other person would survive that. And her brain therefore learned, ah, there is a different way of showing up and doing and being. It just means that she could expand her repertoire. She could continue to show up where it was helpful as that kind and considerate and high warmth individual. But there were also, she learned that there are times where she could turn up her strength or not lose her strength and that that would be more helpful to what she was trying to achieve with and through other people. And it's often only by these acts of leadership that we get the opportunity to learn, provided we are prepared to take the time to reflect on what happened as a consequence of that leadership act. And that through that learning, through that experimentation, we can then become more effective as leaders.



 It was John F. Kennedy, American president, who said, "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." And I'd encourage you to continue to do that work of leading in order to learn and learning in order to lead. I hope these six practices of catalyst leaders have been helpful in expanding your thinking, perhaps challenging your thinking, perhaps there's one thing in there that you could take away and try and play with, or maybe in coaching other leaders as an idea in there that might be helpful to you in helping them. If there has been, try, experiment, learn, innovate your leadership. And in the next episode, we'll do some deeper work and understand what are some of the things that we need to adapt or shift in our thinking about ourselves in the deepest part of ourselves in order to perhaps make progress with some of these practices.

But in the meantime, take care, lead well.