Liz Wiseman: NY Times bestselling author and executive advisor

In this episode Liz Wiseman, a successful figure in the leadership and personal development space, discusses her career transition from a high-ranking executive at Oracle to a respected author and leadership coach.  

Wiseman, known for her influential work, "Multipliers," shares her insights on how leaders can either amplify or stifle the potential within their teams. The concept of "accidental diminishers" is a focal point, referring to leaders who, despite good intentions, inadvertently dampen their team's energy and capabilities. 

Wiseman stresses the importance of creating an environment that challenges individuals while simultaneously providing them with the support needed to thrive.

Wiseman's philosophy centers on the transformative impact of recognizing and leveraging the collective intelligence of a team. She advocates for leadership that not only challenges but also values each member's contribution, fostering a culture of growth and mutual respect. 

This approach, she argues, is crucial for leaders aiming to unlock and multiply the potential within their organizations. Through her narrative, Wiseman provides a compelling overview of effective leadership practices that encourage innovation and engagement among team members.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Liz Wiseman

(interview blurb)

Liz: I think that’s what good coaches do. They know how to move between these two poles, when to create safety and when to create stretch, when to be big and when to be small and how to move between that in a really fluid way.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an author, coach, and former HR executive at Oracle. She’s a member of the MG100 Coaches group and author of The New York Times bestseller, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Please welcome Liz Wiseman.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Liz.

Liz: Alex, hi, good to be here with you.

Alex: It’s great to have you. Thank you for joining me. Let’s start where we always start Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. It doesn’t have to be coffee, of course. What are we drinking today?

Liz: Well, my drink of choice is Diet Coke. I’m definitely in the fan club of the beverage.

Alex: Yeah, I put it in my little mug here with a little ice. Mine wasn’t nearly as cold as it needed to be. Never drink Diet Coke. The last time I had a Diet Coke was on the first episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee where Marshall Goldsmith wanted to have one so that was the last time I had a Diet Coke.

Liz: I did not know he was a Diet Coke guy. 

Alex: I didn’t know either until our first episode here so it’s nice to — and I know you’re a Marshall Goldsmith MG100 member so we’re seeing the Marshall theme here with Diet Coke and belongingness to that amazing group of coaches.

Liz: I got the wrong color shirt though to be in the Marshall Goldsmith group right now. I should have had a green polo.

Alex: It kind of looks a little green. Maybe it’s gray but maybe it’s just my screen. For those that are going to maybe watch the video at some point, they’ll be able to see that. Liz, it’s so good to have you. Your research is very interesting, your books are amazing, you’re a very well-known coach so we have lots to talk about. So, one of the things we like to do in this podcast is to go back through the journey of the very awesome coaches that I get to talk to. If you would like to take us back to the beginning, that’d be amazing. How did you get started? It’s usually an unusual track. Coaching was not really a thing too long ago so it’s always fascinating to hear people’s journey. 

Liz: Hmm. Well, I’m now today, I don’t know, 30 something years into my career, I’m finally doing the job that I wanted out of college. That’s kind of my journey is I finally have gotten myself the entry-level job I wanted. I came out of — so it’s kind of a circuitous kind of journey but I went to business school, I came out wanting to teach leadership and sort of naively gunning to get a job teaching leadership and I managed to score myself an interview. I sort of weaseled my way into getting an interview with the president of what was kind of the premier management training firm at the time, Zenger Miller, and I somehow got myself an interview with the president and really announced my intention to go and work for them. And I wanted to teach management and I kind of laid out my case and Ed Musselwhite was the president of the company at the time and he said, “Liz, you seem great and all but if you wanna teach leadership, maybe you should go get some leadership experience,” and I thought this was a terrible idea and I thought he doesn’t understand, this is really — I don’t know, for some reason, I was passionate about it, like I knew what I wanted to do, and I wanted to kind of help leaders be good leaders and so I kind of left that interview sort of tail between my legs, all dejected, and went and took this backup job that honestly I didn’t really want. I wanted to go and work for a management training company and I took this job working for Oracle, which was a young, rapidly growing software company. All my friends from business school thought I went to go work for a toothpaste manufacturer, they’re like, “Oracle?” It wasn’t the company it was today, it was still very much in its adolescence, and I took a job there and it was kind of like wish granted in that I got management experience really quickly and it was young, rapidly growing, and if you had half a brain and a pulse, you just kept getting promoted and I got thrown into managing and leading at a very young age. I think I was a year out of school, a year out of business school, and I’m now managing the training function for the company and this is when we’re growing rapidly, we’re now operating in 120 countries around the world and I’m having to build this training function and I’m now having a big job and multimillion dollar budget and I feel still very much like a child wondering where’s the adult supervision in this company that they put people like me in charge of things and so I’m just trying to figure out how to be a good manager and, really, the short of this journey was I managed the learning function for the company for a decade and a half as this job got bigger and then started to include commercial education and a host of other functions and I got a lot of management experience. Finally, when I felt like I knew what I was doing, the job wasn’t that interesting anymore and so I left the company in many ways, Alex, to go find a job I didn’t know how to do and that’s really what led me to executive coaching as I had had my experience as an executive and watching a lot of executives get it right, get it wrong, and then I kind of hung up a shingle and started to do executive coaching. And I think I knew a little bit how to do this but it was really this green field for me of learning and I had been learning how to lead and now I was learning how to coach others and went off and did the Wharton Executive Coaching Program and found I love helping people learn how to lead and that led to a few observations which led to some research which led to my first book and some people read the book and, honestly, I thought that maybe my mom was good for a few copies and I figured a few people in the tech community might read the book, I had no idea that the book would be read by over a million leaders and executive coaches and it’s kind of like playing pinball, you did that well enough, you get a chance to do it again, and so that really began the work I do today, which is research, write, teach, coach, repeat. And, curiously, I’m now getting to teach and coach leadership, which was what I was trying to do three decades ago but without any real wisdom or insight or evidence. So that’s my full circle journey. And I don’t know that I’m any more qualified today, I just know more about what I don’t know, I suppose.

Alex: Thank you for sharing. What was that initial interest in leadership? What was it about leadership that captivated you and you wanted to go straight into teaching people about it? 

Liz: I don’t really know. I’ve wondered that, like what drew me to this and it’s hard to remember what it was like when you didn’t know something and I’m not sure exactly why other than I think I was probably born bossy. I’ve always been quick to raise my hand when there was a leadership vacuum, quick to say, “Oh, I’ll lead that, I’ll get this conversation going,” so I think I found myself in leadership roles. I was willing but I don’t think I had the skills and the capability and I think it was sometimes my own personal gap that made be curious about this. And then when I was in college, I had this professor of Organizational Behavior 321 was the class and the professor who was adjunct at the university was Kerry Patterson, who was the lead author and researcher for Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations and Change Anything and Influencer, I think, were the four books and he was my professor of organizational behavior. I think I fell in love with this field because I kind of just fell in love with Kerry as this mind and this professor and I think that was what ignited this interest. I watched Kerry work and teach in such a brilliant way that made me just so delighted to be his student that I think it drew me toward it. And Kerry was a really instrumental mentor and very instrumental mentor when it was time for me to write my first book.

Alex: It’s incredible when you find a professor that inspire you so much and opens up a pathway. So many people have great stories about a class like that, a professor like that. I asked the question about leadership because it is so hard to define it. I mean, what good leadership is can be so different in similar situations and, sometimes, something works and, sometimes, something doesn’t work and the situations are parallel. It’s one of the things that I’ve always found fascinating about leadership is just how difficult it is to define what good leadership looks like. I think it’s easy to go back and look at some examples of what bad leadership looks like but to really define what good leadership looks like and to make it ubiquitous and say, “Oh, this would work,” every single time is incredibly challenging, which, for me, makes it a very, very interesting topic. 

Liz: Yeah, and I don’t know that I know how to define it behaviorally, even after researching it and writing and kind of putting a framework out there. I don’t know that the behaviors are what are important. I think, what I’ve learned to do is look at it through the lens of energy. Like, to me, leadership is about creating energy flow and I think my first piece of research into this field was understanding what leaders did that shut down energy flow and intelligence flow. I wasn’t fascinated by what the leaders did, I was fascinated by the effect that they had on others. That’s what’s observable and that’s what I found to be universal and I don’t know who originated this definition. I think I first heard it from Jim Collins years ago that a leader is someone that you follow when you don’t have to, someone you choose to follow and, to me, what’s behind that is energy, is they’re people we give our energy to. It’s like it’s what we do voluntarily. So it’s something about creating that dynamic and I think that’s what I was fascinated in. It wasn’t about, “Gee, good leaders check all these boxes.” I still don’t think it’s that case. I think it manifests itself differently in different national cultures and different organizational cultures.

Alex: Yeah, and times too. Times change, right? Energy is so — it shifts so what could be effective at some point may not be as effective at another point and what people would follow will change. And you see it with politics, right? You have the rise of nationalist sometimes so people are directing their energies towards certain types of rhetoric. And in other times, you’re a politician saying the same thing, no one’s paying attention. So that flow of energy at work is so interesting and I love your definition. It is really an energetic exchange. I mean, much of what you see in organizations at different levels, whether you’re working in a small group or you’re thinking more in the context of larger organization, there’s all these people that go in and use that energy to create something and to be able to be a catalyst for people as a leader is a really interesting frame and way to think about it. I think this is really leading us to think about your book and — were you going to say something, Liz?

Liz: Well, I was because, Alex, what you just said kind of stopped me in my tracks for a moment because it made me realize, yeah, that energy exchange and being a catalyst for energy is an awesome responsibility. And leaders can capitalize on anger and use rhetoric and I think one of the things I’ve learned through my research or my teaching, through my coaching, my experience is that being a leader is almost — I kind of see it as a sacred responsibility because you have so much ability to do good but you have so much ability to do damage, culture, maybe in a market, but on people, you have this power, I suppose, to create traumatic experiences for people, experiences that can follow them throughout the remainder of their career or you have this power to activate and I think this is part of what drew me to this. And I don’t know, I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this to anyone but like somehow confess this is there’s something my mom said to me when I think I was like a senior in high school or maybe a freshman in college, and she said, “Elizabeth,” actually, she calls me Elizabeth, she would never call me Liz, like, “Elizabeth, you have this ability to sway your influence.” I think she had just seen it with my friends, and she said, “Make sure you always use that for good.”

Alex: That’s powerful. 

Liz: Now, I’m not sure I was — I don’t think she was saying like you’re going down the Mean Girl path, I don’t think that was the case, and I think that’s always really stuck with me and I’ve seen how leaders can use their influence in a way that creates these really positive energies, incredible work experience and team dynamics, and I’ve seen leaders use the charisma, their whatever in ways that really destroy. And so that’s, to me, part of the work. It’s part of why I stay at it, it’s part of why I care. 

Alex: Yeah, a responsibility is so important. We live in an age where so much of our interactions oftentimes are — you see, I don’t go on Twitter a lot but it seems like people troll each other and it’s like the lack of responsibility that comes from being a handle name, a user name there, no one knows who you are, that anonymity in a way kind of leads to these conversations that are not super productive. I think when you have to show up and be yourself and take responsibility for your actions, maybe you come across differently. I guess I went to Twitter because we’re going through some tumultuous times in the world and there’s all these conversations and it’s very hard to find the middle ground or it’s hard to find — sometimes the best doesn’t come out and sometimes it does and I think that taking it back to what you were saying about responsibility with the way you’re able to impact people’s energy flow and their ability to give that energy to a shared cause, it is so important. And throughout history, you see leaders that are able to be magnetic and connect with people and draw the best in them or the opposite. And leadership, I think all of us that are in this kind of position and work and we focus on people development, we oftentimes think about how we can influence for good but it’s not embedded in any definition of leadership that it is for good, right? I love your focus on energy. It’s like if you’re going to be able to direct people’s energy, well, that’s one thing, whether you’re going to do it for good or not for good is another thing. And there’s another layer in the world that we live in today which is this kind of nonlinear, complex, fast-paced environment in which even if you have the right intentions, the outcome might not actually be a good one. And I think we’re still learning how to deal with that kind of dynamic when it comes to leadership. How do you align your intentions with the outcome when there’s a nonlinear relationship between your actions and potentially the cascading effects of that? 

Liz: Well, and absolutely and not so much of what I’ve looked at is this gap between a leader’s intent and their positive intent and the actual impact that they’re having on people. And one of the funny things I’ve learned in this process, and some of it is in the coaching process, not at the research process, is that I thought that leaders had like a diminishing effect on other people because they were bossy, know-it-all, heavy-handed, micromanaging kinds of leaders that sort of squash other people, that they were in some ways power mongers and power hungry. And when you really start to look at it, what I began to see is that most leaders actually massively underestimate their own power. They don’t see what’s happening in their wake and they have positive intentions but they don’t realize it gets translated differently, they don’t realize people take them seriously, that one word like, “Oh, gee, maybe we should do this,” suddenly spawns a task force and projects. And I remember once at Oracle, the president of the company, he’s learned about some initiative that was going on and he’s like, “What is that?” and I’m like, “Well, Ray, remember like a month ago when you said we should da, da, da,” I said, “I think a bunch of people took you seriously and now we’ve got a hundred people working on that,” and he was like, “Oh, I was just — that was just a suggestion.” And I think that’s indicative of how so many people don’t realize, they’re like, “Oh, I’m just like, you know, I’m just the kid from a small town, golly, shucks,” and they don’t realize that their position in the organization, their relationship, their access, all of those things creates this outside influence. Like most leaders, I think, underestimate their influence rather than are clinging to it. 

Alex: Absolutely. And there’s so many larger systems than there used to be too and people willpower that they don’t even maybe too often consciously understand. Also the impact that you have on others, right? You’re thinking about yourself sometimes, you’re connecting that to energy again, you’re putting — the way you’re operating as a leader may lead people to be incredibly loyal and committed to the cause and then you say one thing and it’s almost like you’re Jesus and it’s a commandment and people want to go — I love how you were talking about creating a task force. I mean, I’ve seen that a lot in my work in organizations where one pronouncement by someone, maybe just an idea, suddenly becomes this thing everyone’s railing against and something to keep an eye out for and understanding your impact as a leader, it’s surprising that oftentimes you working with very senior people, they’re still not as aware of the impact they have on others and I find it surprising oftentimes.

Liz: Because part of the definition of leadership is its forward looking. It’s about unexplored terrain, it’s eyes forward, and I think that’s one of the great values of coaching is helping people see what’s happening on the periphery and what’s happening behind them. And the image I always get in my mind is my son, Christian, when he was a toddler, like a little bit bigger than the toddler, this is a kid who’s like was always building something, like always drawn to chaos and danger, but I remember he would, one time in particular, he came into the house with a two by four, like there was a construction project, he was always getting stuff from outside, bringing them in, he was just a little guy and he’s dragging in this two by four and most of this two by four stud, I guess, like the big piece of wood, the lumber, is behind him, not in front of him because it’s heavy and he’s just turning around whacking everything, dings in the wall, things, and he’s like, “What?” because all he can see is like the two-foot piece in front of him and can’t see all the stuff behind him that’s creating kind of havoc in his wake. And I think a lot of leaders are like that. They’re just like, “Hey, we need this two by four and I’m just doing this thing that needs to be done,” and they can’t see all the junk behind them and I think that’s a big part of the coaching role is to help them get that 360 view of their impact and what happens in their wake and their shadow,

Alex: It’s a great example. That’s very visual and kind of charming and very on point.

Liz: It wasn’t charming at the moments, like I was in the wake but, yeah, I’ve always remembered this.

Alex: I figure it’s better to think about it now than when you’re cleaning everything. So, I want to talk about your book Multipliers, that was a tremendous success, How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. It is such an incredible concept and so true in this networked age where we’re all influencing each other so much, we’re talking about responsibility, so what better responsibility for a leader than to make sure that the people around you are getting better. So, love to hear about how this book came about? What in your experience led you to kind of — your experience and your research led you to come up with this, and by the way, very, very catchy title?

Liz: Well, thank you. The book was a combination of my post Oracle therapy and my early coaching confusion. So I’ve left Oracle and I left very much having watched this dynamic play out in the work world, so Oracle was this wonderful place to land, it was just populated with all of these — well, here’s their hiring profile. They looked for this sort of trifecta of talent. They looked for people who were really smart, kind of this raw intelligence, really driven, achievement oriented, and then nice. That was kind of what they looked for. 

Alex: That’s a nice combination.

Liz: Well, it is a nice combination but, sometimes, you have to compromise. And when there was compromises to be made, I think they compromised on nice. But it was this wonderful — I always felt so lucky to get to work there because I’m surrounded by just brilliant, brilliant, accomplished, driven people but that’s when I started to notice this dynamic of sometimes with these really, really smart, driven, mostly nice people, when they get put into this leadership role, they’re so anchored in their smarts. They’ve been successful because of their intelligence and drive. They’re praised for it, celebrated for it. In many ways, coached, been coached their whole lives to lead with their capability. And what I saw was that some of those people never see beyond their own intelligence and ideas and know-how. They’re still anchored to it that they overlook a lot of the intelligence and capability around them. And they kind of, in short, they’re kind of bummers to work for because they’re amazing that people around them don’t get to be amazing and I saw that dynamic play out with so many leaders. But I also saw these really smart, driven leaders who had this very different effect on other people and I think it was my dear professor and mentor, Kerry Patterson, who was when I was describing the idea to them, he’s like, “Oh, yeah, when these people walk in the room, light bulbs go off over people’s head,” and I could see that people got smarter around them and this was a vague observation and it wasn’t until I left Oracle and started coaching and was working with one particular executive, just absolutely brilliant, Mensa-level intelligence, pedigree education, and he was experiencing the same dynamic on his team. And it was in talking to him, like it was a coaching moment where I’m like, well, some leaders seem to have this kind of contagious intelligence, like their intelligence ignites intelligence in other people, and I’m kind of explaining this dynamic to him and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I kind of get it,” and he’s like, “Amplifiers of intelligence, is that what you’re saying?” I’m like, “Yeah, kind of like multipliers of intelligence,” and then we wrapped up that coaching conversation, which was, I don’t want to say it was an epiphany but it was like framing of something that he was experiencing that I had experienced. And then I went to do what I typically did was, okay, let me go find an HBR article about this so it can reinforce that learning, which was kind of like my MO which is I had a whole series of little articles that you could coach and then they could read, sort of a multidisciplinary way to explore an idea and I can’t find anything. And I go out and I’m Googling and I’m looking in other kinds of journals, like surely someone has studied this because it is so obvious, like how has this not been explored and studied? And that was when I’m like, well, I don’t know, someone needs to do this, and that’s when I took it on, really trying to just understand what’s going on in this, like, in many ways, what are the mindsets and the behaviors that generate this difference in energy, difference in capability, and it’s not just a perception difference in capability, it’s like a real difference, like people literally languish and then weaken their capability around certain leaders and that really was the genesis of this. It came out of a coaching moment.

Alex: I love that. Much of the time that you’ve spent over the last many years originated from that coaching conversation, which is fantastic. So, looking at your body of work, when you think about coaches, what should coaches be aware of? If you were to summarize all that research, all that work you’ve done around thinking about the impact that leaders can have around them, from a coach perspective, what are some good pieces of information to be aware of?

Liz: If there’s a nugget that comes out of this, it’s that there is a gap between leader’s intention and their impact. Now, some leaders, their intention and their impact is very well aligned, either for good or for ill, and I think we see leaders who are very aware and they have closed that gap. There are diminishing leaders who are like, “Oh, no, I meant to do that,” it’s on purpose but most of the diminishing that I observed and we’ve kind of kept track of this indicator, the majority of it, it’s over two-thirds of the diminishing that’s happening is perceived as, described as accidental diminishing, that most leaders have accidental diminisher tendencies, meaning the things they’re doing with the very best of intentions that are causing people to shut down, to shut up, to hold back, to play it safe, to do the minimum, to quiet, like quit and stay in organizations, and the real coaching opportunity is to help people see their impact, how their best intentions can be perceived differently and to be received differently, and help them bring their impact in line with their intentions. And, in many ways, it’s helping leaders see that they might be playing so big, that people around them end up playing small. And that creating this awareness — and for a lot of leaders, this is a big aha for them. Career changing, life changing. I’ve heard that said so many times, like, “Wow, this awareness, it changed me. It changed my team. It’s changed the trajectory of our company.” So that’s, I think, the aha for the leaders and the opportunity for coaches and I think the thing I’ve learned in teaching this and coaching these ideas for someone to see their diminishing effect, there needs to be a lot of safety. And I think that’s what a really good coach does is, in many ways, if I could sum up what multiplier leaders do, in essence, they create an equilibrium between safety and stretch. They create a safe environment, a psychologically safe environment and intellectually safe, physically safe, etc. They create a great place to work where people feel like they belong, they’re included, etc., etc. But they don’t just leave it there, like, “Hey, this is a great place to work, love you, glad you’re on the team,” they then use that safety to create conditions of stretch, high expectations, big questions, big challenges, steep learning curves, but when leaders are all stretched without creating the safety, that creates diminishing, but when leaders are all safety but no stretch, that creates diminishing as well, and I think for leaders to be able to see their diminishing tendencies like this is what a good coach does is they create safety where people can see like, “No, you’re not an evil boss, you’re not trying to hold people back, these are things you’re doing with the best of intentions,” and once that safety is present, then there’s an opportunity to stretch and I think that’s what good coaches do. They know how to move between these two poles, when to create safety and when to create stretch, when to be big and when to be small, and how to move between that in a really fluid way. That was a lot but you asked me kind of like what I’ve learned about coaching. And maybe that’s it.

Alex: No, absolutely, I love that. I mean, that balance between safety and stretch, so important and, oftentimes, it gets lost with just the task orientation that you must have as a leader in an organization where, in the vacuum, it may sound like, “Okay, that’s something I should pay attention to,” but in the day-to-day grind, the attention to your own ability to stretch and how you balance that and your ability to be there for the people that you lead, it’s a completely different thing. And I think that’s where both the coaching style and also professional coaching to support those moments is incredibly important. I mean, I am so excited about where we are today in terms of the understanding and the recognition of coaching as an approach that can really help people navigate through these kind of nonlinear type of times, plus the ability to provide coaching at multiple levels with different focus areas, I think it’s incredible because what you described is so powerful yet is very hard to execute on at multiple levels in an organization, to have it seep through the culture and the way we think about how we look at performance and how we establish the baseline components that will lead to higher performance over long term. So, as you were saying that, I was thinking, wow, how important it is to have coaches that have access to all these people in organization so that you can have these moments to slow down and really think about this impact that is underlying a lot of the interactions that happen in organizations. I mean, in the history of humanity, we’d probably never have as much of a space to enable that as we do now.

Liz: Yeah, Alex, since you’re talking about that, this ability to slow down and to think about it, kind of like where things can kind of come to a stop and get clear and how we need that to navigate in a rapid change in this VUCA world and all this ambiguity and uncertainty, like the image I get there, I guess I tend to think in visuals and images, is I’ve done a lot of skiing and I’m fascinated by how the high speed chair lifts work. They move people so fast up that mountain, you get the quad chairs with like four people or the gondolas that you can put, I don’t know, 20 people in, they come into that loading station and they’re like it’s blazing fast but they come off that track and I really don’t know how the engineering works and sometimes I’m having a hard time, like I looked at all those chairs and I still have a hard time really understanding, they move up that track and then they move very slowly and people load onto them and it’s like this slow, almost surreal kind of process. You kind of casually walk up, put your skis on, get all set, you settle in, brush the snow off, the doors close, and then, man, that thing starts to move and it moves people up the mountain and I think that’s kind of what good coaching does is it, we all kind of know it’s like that executive or leader comes like flying down and they’ve got all this stuff going on and it’s this moment to kind of like slow down, unpack, repack, think it through and then, boom, they’re back up to high speed and I think we need those moments of slow, thoughtful pause now more than ever.

Alex: Yeah, I like the way you think visually because you convey it very well. I was having, when you were talking about your son, Christian, kind of creating chaos, that was very clear. When you’re thinking about the ski lifts, that is very clear. And it made me think about this concept of self-organization, as people are going through. Somehow it works, right? It slows down a little bit and then it speeds up and, somehow, we make it work. That’s is actually my number one fear when I go skiing because I don’t go skiing as much, although I love it, is that I’m going to fall off the lift, like I’m going to like — whenever you get to the top of the mountain, you’re ready to get off in your skis and then you fall right there and everyone’s looking at you and you’re like, “Oh, my God,” that is like definitely the one thing I think about when I go skiing. But, somehow, we make it work, right? And when you look at birds and how they organize and there’s all this chaos and, somehow, they find a way to create this order within chaos, which is a beautiful thing. In many ways, as humans, we do that. The chairs, the lift is a very clearly organized thing, but there’s this chaos that happens when you getting off and on at the chair and, somehow, we kind of make it work. And there is this kind of tie to the bind or this glue that coaching brings in these otherwise kind of unspoken areas in organizations and I think if we’re going to thrive in this age of acceleration, it is really about getting as good as birds are in finding balance and order within chaos. And if organizations are changing and shifting so quickly, what is the glue? What is the tie to the bind in an organization that can help people move at high speed? And I agree with you, I think coaching is an accelerant for development at different levels, whether it’s individual, group, team, organizational. It’s a new profession, it’s a new area of focus, but it does seem to be one of those things that can enable coordinated movement and understanding at high speeds, which I think makes it an incredible tool. And there’s a reason why I think coaching is becoming more and more popular and I think it’s totally aligned with that. So thank you for that visual, like I’m still there and I’m actually thinking, hmm, it’s almost skiing season, which is kind of fun.

Liz: And you mentioned another metaphor that I find really helpful, the birds and the way birds organize, and I’m fascinated with that V formation that the birds fly in and I read up a little bit about this for some research on some writing I was doing for this last book is that V formation, like, let’s say, Canadian geese or the large birds fly in that V formation, the scientists say it allows the flock to fly 71 percent further than any one bird could fly in solo flight, like it’s this energy conserving model that allows them to deal with rough conditions and migrate in long distances. And that V formation, to me, is, I think, an apt model of leadership for where we are right now and it’s almost like taking the hierarchy, like the corporate pyramid framework where we have leaders on the top and followers and it just drops it onto its side. And in that model, there’s not an alpha bird flies at the front of that V formation, it’s a rotating responsibility that one bird will go to the front and do the hard work of breaking that wind and creating that drag, that efficient formation that allows other birds to all fly in the same direction, of course, but also to take advantage of the drag and there’s this interesting drag that creates this uplift that actually pulls that flock forward, but that bird in the front, that lead bird doesn’t stay there forever until it’s exhausted and drops from the sky or retires from leadership to moves on to another flock or something, it does that work for a time and then it falls back and another bird goes forward and this is what I think the model of leadership we need right now is rather than really seeing it as a position or even a role, to see it more as, well, like an ephemeral role. I am leading my peers right now and I’m going to lead them and I’m going to be the boss and I’m going to do that well and I’m going to do that with full commitment but I can also fall back and let someone else take the lead, and it’s not implying like stepping down from one’s managerial position, it’s about leading by demand rather than by command. Like on a practical level, it’s going into that two o’clock meeting where you’re the leader of this initiative and you are the boss and you are leading it well and then concluding that meeting and walking down the hallway or dropping into another online meeting and, in that one, you are following your colleagues, your peers, you’re following people who work for you and you’re following with the same energy that you led and it’s moving so seamlessly between this and that’s a transition that requires coaching because it breaks — I mean, it’s kind of an obvious thing and, by the way, this is the way we learned to lead when we were in like second and third grade. I mean, remember, there was a list of responsibilities of duties and each child’s name rotated, one week, you were the recess monitor and the next week, you’re passing out the papers, and people look forward to those responsibilities. And I think it’s the temporary nature of leadership responsibilities, like in this model, that forces us to be a good leader, because you’re kind of motivated not to be a jerk boss when you’re following the same people that you’re leading. But I think this transition, it breaks so many of our norms about executive life, executive roles, executive coaching, that I think it does require some guidance to help people operate in this model.

Alex: Absolutely. I mean, a lot of these made me think about self-organization. We had Federic Laloux, one of our guests in this podcast, he wrote Reinventing Organizations, wonderful book, and there is this shift towards more kind of holacratic, self-organizing, flatter organizational systems that change the demands and requirements of leadership. And good leadership, as difficult as it is to define sometimes, good leadership looks different in those kinds of organizations than it does in more hierarchical organizations. And I think, well, what we’ll see over the next century is a recognition that certain types of organizations need to be flatter and they need to move quickly and faster than others. And, for that, you require a different arrangement, both in terms of the leadership structures but also the behaviors and the way people interact within those systems. And then you’ll see some organizations that work and operate more effectively being more hierarchical. And one of the things that I’ve always found interesting with the move towards flatter organizations is almost like we preach that all organizations should be flatter and the reality is that, as we transition to more self or to organizations that are more adept to understand how self-organization might emerge, there will be organizations where that will work better, that will work different, and I think we are in the early stages of an overall recognition that these systems will have to change and I think the 21st century will probably — I am certain that when we look back, maybe not you and I, but when people are looking back at the end of the century, we’ll see a lot of different organizational systems in place and a lot better understanding of when to deploy certain types of organizations and the dynamic that should be embedded at the leadership level and any other level. So, these are some of my most interesting areas of research. When I’m reading a book, I mean, holacracy, all these self-organizing concepts for management I think are fascinating. And, for that, I think it is key to understand how learning happens and how contagious it can be and done right, that’s why I love the title of your book and I love the concept of how a good leader is going to make people better around them. And I think we need more of that and we need people to know, well, I will know that I’m a great leader when there’s all these layers of people that I work with that became better because they were working under this way of operating that I was leading. So, to me, that is such a different way to value and ascribe value to the work that anyone does in an organization. It’s almost like the CEO in the future will be like the Chief People Developer Expert, right?

Liz: Yeah, and in many ways, we might move away from like leadership 360s and measuring really the behavior and the effectiveness of the leader and really we judge a leader by the strength and the capability of the people they lead, like that might be a better measure. 

Alex: Love it. It probably is a much better measure and I’m sure that, over the decades to come, we’ll see some progress in that area. But until now, we can only have these aspirational, inspirational conversations around kind of what the current state is and, in our setting, how coaching can enable organizations and individuals to be more effective, productive, and lead better lives, right? There’s a lot of challenges to be solved and organizations are at the forefront of the impact. If we want to we want to impact global warming, what better way to do it than organizations changing their practices, the way they’re sourcing products, the way they treat their employees. I mean, it’s fascinating, cascading network conversation. Liz, anything else you would want to add before we close out this wonderful episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee?

Liz: Maybe coaching matters and had the experience of being an executive coach, I’ve done a lot of like mass teaching, meaning speaking to large groups, and I think one of the things I’ve learned from all that is like the best learning happens one on one and there’s really no substitute for that. Reading books is great, keynotes and all that, that’s great, but the real hard work of mindset change and behavioral change, it’s best done one on one, maybe where it’s not easier but where it’s where we’re able to create the safe environment where people can really stretch themselves and be stretched by coaches. This work is really important work if we’re going to create workplaces where people can show up wholly.

Alex: I couldn’t agree with you more. Thank you so much for joining me today and I’m looking forward to seeing you in person pretty soon.

Liz: Thank you. Happy ski season to you.

Alex: Likewise. Hopefully, I won’t fall when I’m getting up the lift.