What Change Exposes in a Consultancy Leader with Richard Jones

Richard Jones is a leadership coach at OLIA. Before founding OLIA, Richard spent nearly eight years as a partner and board member at Moorhouse, where he established and led the firm's health practice and was part of the leadership team that took Moorhouse through a management buyout in 2014. He is a senior accredited practitioner coach, a chartered management consultant, and has trained in psychotherapy and positive psychology.

In this conversation, Craig and Richard explore how leadership has evolved over the last fifty years and why the old model of the leader as custodian of all the answers is firmly a thing of the past, why consultancy attracts insecure overachievers, and the inflection point almost every consultant reaches when the behaviours that got them here stop being the foundation for what comes next. They also dig into why more than 50% of senior hires fail within the first two years, why treating a senior hire as an organisational change event rather than a recruitment decision is what separates the firms that get it right, and what leaders who navigate change well consistently have in common.

This is a thoughtful, reflective conversation with a leadership coach who has sat on both sides of the table, as a partner inside a consultancy going through significant change and as an advisor to the leaders running through it now.

Host: Craig Herd, MD at Consultancy Growth
Guest: Richard Jones, Leadership Coach at OLIA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Consultancy Growth Podcast. I'm Craig Hurd, and in this episode, I'm joined by Richard Jones, leadership coach and board advisor at OLEA. He's a senior accredited practitioner coach and a charted management consultant and has trained in psychotherapy and positive psychology. In this conversation, we get into how leadership has evolved over the last 50 years, why old models of leaders as the custodians of all answers is firmly a thing of the past, why 50% plus of senior hires fail within consultancies within the first two years, and how to succeed at hiring great leaders into your firm. If you get value from this episode, I'd encourage you to subscribe. You get brand new episodes before anyone else. But without further ado, here's my conversation on leadership with Richard Jones. Let's get into it. What does organizational change expose in a leader that periods of stability never do?

SPEAKER_01 0:53

It's a great starting question. So the way I like to think about change is that change is unsettling for all of us. We as humans feel safe when we know what's going on in our context, in our surroundings. And if we don't know, we know the route to somewhere that is safe for us. That's a kind of real primal instinct that we have. And leaders are no different. You know, leaders are also humans, but leaders carry this additional burden of leading. So others look to leaders for that sense of safety, to provide that sense of safety, that sort of sense of it's okay, you know, whilst this may be unsettling and we're going through some kind of change process, actually I know where to get to. And I guess the traditional role of a leader is to have the answers. You know, that's what we'd have expected in the past from our leaders, that they almost in a sort of position of authority, parental, school teacher type way, if we ask them the question, they give us the correct answer. But that's a real thing of the past, I think. And what's really exposing a leader when we're going through change is can they demonstrate a sense of humility which is very different to ignorance, it's different to not knowing, but it's humility that says, have faith in how I'm leading, and has a sort of humility with a sense of strength and resilience, where even though the answer may not be known by the leader, there's a way through that can be found.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Yes. I mean, I'd be interested on your thoughts on that, because it does seem like what we expect of leaders is different than what we used to expect of them. Or perhaps how we describe what leadership is is different than what it's described nowadays, or some version of that. I'm just curious if you think is it that what leaders are now doing is changing, or do you think it's a complex environment, or is this an environment perhaps that just has a whole lot more change to it, or is it more perhaps gone to the days where people were in one company for 40 years and so there's generally a lot more change in business? Like, why has leadership evolved in the last, say, 20 to 50 years?

SPEAKER_01 3:00

It's a good question. And there are clearly many factors at play there. I think the first thing to say is that leadership has always evolved. Leaders, if you go back centuries, would have been the people with the mightiest sword or the strongest army, and would have been very much a kind of, I'm defending our territory type leadership model. And that would, of course, provide safety for the people around them. We're not in that place right now. But leadership has certainly evolved over the last 40 or 50 years from a sort of originally a sort of military base command and control. I am in charge, here's my hierarchy. I will cascade information communication through the organization, through the hierarchy, through the organization. And that's really a very killer thing in the past. And that's because a leader can't possibly be the person in which all the knowledge sits. And so now the knowledge is much more spread. We can all access knowledge through devices in our pockets, and therefore access to information and knowledge is much more, there I say, democratic, at least easily accessible. So the leader has a very different role in that situation where the leader is no longer the custodian of the knowledge and is much more a how do I surround myself with people who have the ability to kind of pull together and solve problems together in a very kind of multidisciplinary, very kind of collaborative way. And that's quite a different set of leadership skills.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, absolutely. I think that is also reflected in how bringing it to boutique or specialist consultancy, you can see that change in consultancy as well. You know, there's still very much a place for those consultancies where they are very specialist and actually they've been hired because they know an exceptional amount about a certain subject matter, and really nobody else knows more than they do on this thing. But there seems to be a big trend towards consultancy buyers caring less about whether you are the expert in the space and more, you know, I have this result, we have this goal that we want to achieve, and we want to recruit some external supporters from specialism to ultimately help us get to there. So it's bringing in the right people that are going to work with us well to get to a goal rather than you know more than me on this subject matter. You know, it seems about transformation and direction rather than just knowledge. Is that something you've seen?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Yeah, and collaboration, if I would add to that. I think the real strength that boutique consultancies have is their ability to kind of mold alongside clients rather than sort of take away the problem, go away to their own base, do the analysis, produce an answer, and then take it back to the client. It's a much more collaborative style of working together, bring in the particular expertise you need alongside the client's own expertise that boutique consultancies in particular, not exclusively, but particularly have available to them, given their sort of typically size and model and way of working.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, talking a little bit about consultancy leaders, you know, consultancy leaders are often promoted or recognized because they are exceptional at delivery. How often does that same capability become almost a liability when the firm is going through change? And, you know, what does that look like in practice?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

It's a great question. I think there is something particular about consultancy or professional services or kind of knowledge-based industries, as perhaps we could describe consultancy, in that people who are successful in those industries, those professions, tend to have acquired knowledge along the way. Yeah, go back to that point about knowledge. And they've acquired knowledge through working really hard. They probably have been very successful through their academic career as well, through school, through university, on the grad scheme, and kind of found that if they work really hard, they'll get the right answers and they'll succeed. And then they get to a point in their careers when it's no longer about working really hard or finding the answer in a book. And that's a really challenging kind of inflection point that almost every consultant finds in their career. And I think particularly leaders who, again, as as we discussed earlier, almost find themselves in a position of having to know the answer. And when the foundation of our success is based on what we know, then sort of letting go of that foundation for success can be really confronting for any individual and moving into a space where actually what got me here is no longer the source of my success going forward. And that's very confronting, challenging, unsettling, kind of unanchoring space for a leader to find themselves. I find that to be the case in many of the clients I work with who have been incredibly successful and suddenly found themselves in a place where all those behaviors, those instincts, the knowledge that they've acquired over time doesn't really translate into the position they find themselves in.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

That's interesting. Without naming names or talking specifics about clients, I ask you this because you will have observed that in consultancy leaders multiple times. And I've seen it a little bit. You know, I've seen it where I've had one conversation with the leader privately about either the growth of the firm or even in occasions of being a guest on the podcast in a small way, is that they are minutes before they go to speak. You know, the shoulders go back and the helmet goes on and they get ready to speak. As, you know, you want to present confidence and clarity and all those things that we believe leaders should be. Totally makes sense. And no criticism of that at all. But as soon as we click stop or as soon as the audience disappears, there is this kind of deflating shoulders of like, is that okay? Like, you know, and there's a truth behind it where I think my small experience of what you're describing is there's a lot of consultancy leaders who still feel they need to have the answers and they need to be able to predict the future, even though I think there's a part of their brain that also recognizes that's a silly ask, that it's not possible to predict the future. And I think they hold two thoughts. One is they think they should be able to, and also another thought that how the hell am I going to do that? I think they also accept that. But I would love to know just more about that from your perspective. Like, what is the experience you see within leaders about the balance between what they expect of themselves or what they think the world expects of them, and then actually what they need to be doing and focused on? Like, how do they describe it?

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Yeah, I think what's interesting about how you describe that is there's a few things. So there's this phrase that consultancy attracts insecure overachievers. And there's a huge amount of truth in that. When I first heard that, I got myself quite resistant to that, sort of thinking, I don't recognize that myself, but of course I do. That resistance is where the truth lied. And what that means is there's a sort of, I'm never quite good enough at this. And for many people, that never being quite good enough is a real drive to be good enough. You know, great consultants are people who have this kind of constant drive to be better, to broaden their understanding, their expertise, to please their clients ever more. And that's a real driver, but it can also be a bit of a trap in that from an energy perspective, it is quite exhausting to always be an insecure overachiever. So sort of recognizing that is super important. I think one thing to kind of observe is that many leaders today have kind of grown up professionally observing previous forms of leadership. And again, those previous forms of leadership would have been leaders who knew that they had an answer, or we thought they did. As people who follow leaders, we project onto our leaders what we hope that they are. And we hope they can provide that sense of the safety and stability that we were talking about earlier. And now that those people who grew up observing those leaders are now leaders, they almost want to kind of replicate that and find themselves in a situation where they can't. And so the kind of conversation I'm having with not just clients, but people whom I kind of connected with around I'm not quite sure how to do this. And being a leader is a very exposing, very vulnerable place where it's really hard to say, if ever, I don't know how to do this. You don't want to share with your team that you just don't know how to do something. So yeah, having that space where people can say, look, I'm trying to work this through, I don't know how to do it, but I think I can find a way, but I need some space outside of a board meeting or a leadership meeting, or once I'm not sat at my desk in an open panel office trying to work this through. And typically what once leaders let go of that sense of or the obligation or the requirement to know and then sort of relax and sort of understand that that's not just a feasible thing, and they kind of accept that and they kind of let go of the need or the instinct to want to know, that they typically are very, very capable individuals who haven't got here by accident and kind of can work it through in a sensible, methodical way.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

I think that's right. I've seen it myself, and I've seen it in others where we try and give the best intelligent answer we can to a question we do not know. For all those motivators you're describing, you know, the position we sit in the conversation, like maintaining authority in a conversation. And more often than I think we'd like to admit is the answer that we give is probably not great because it's a guess or it's an estimate or a fairly unfounded, but it's saying anything intelligent to avoid saying I don't know. And I think my first hand experience of it is that when I'm focused on knowing and that I should know, what I'm not doing is spending any mental energy on I don't know, but actually, how might we answer this properly? And I think it's a constant for myself of letting go of the need to say the smart thing and actually just admit I don't know and finding the answer. And I find a lot more progress made when I'm focused much more on just finding the answer rather than being the one that said it. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

And I think you know, when we're in that exposed state where, you know, people are looking at us expectantly, it's very easy to do precisely what you said, say things that are unfounded or have no kind of real source of evidence. You know, we we try and wing it a little bit. And humans have a very finely honed instinct for when things aren't quite as they are said to be. And whether it's kind of blatantly obvious because you've said something is blue when it's green, or whether you're just trying to sort of position or spin something in a way which doesn't quite feel right. You know, we have a very, very highly tuned sense of inauthenticity or being sort of taken for mugs, or whatever it might be. And that really erodes leadership capital. It really erodes faith in a leader. And whilst it may kind of carry a short term over the medium to long term, that leader will be sort of kind of fatally flawed, really.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking about leadership and bringing new leaders into an organization, I had a question really. Research consistently shows that you know, around 50% of senior hires fail within the first two years, and we've all seen that plenty of times. Most leaders treat a senior hire as a recruitment decision. What does it look like when you treat it as an organizational change event instead?

SPEAKER_01 13:44

I think it's a really great way to see it, actually. And I think your observation that people recruiting senior leaders see it as a straight recruitment decision, as they might, you know, a more junior colleague, misses the point. And I think seeing it as an organizational change event, which is not quite how I've thought about it before, but I think it makes perfect sense, is absolutely right. So you could think of a senior hire as an organizational change event engineered by the incumbent leadership team. So why hire a senior leader? And it's typically because the incumbent leadership team, for either reasons of internal ambition or perhaps reasons of external kind of drivers, want to do something different. So typically they would seek to hire a leader that does something different to the way they do things right now, whether that is to access a different market, whether it's to bring in a different type of expertise, or whether it's just a different kind of approach. So they're looking to bring in something different. And that in itself, exactly as you described, creates an organizational change event. And if you think about it like that, then you can think about okay, so how do we become ready for that change event? How do we navigate the change event as it progresses? Change is not a moment in time. It's not a today's Monday, the change is done, but it happens over weeks in the case of seeing hires, months. Thinking about it as a change event is absolutely right.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

I'll tell you where that came from, and it's just something I've seen a few times, specifically an example to bounce off. It was late last year where a decent size, multiple million pound consultancy, and for the longest time, three people had really built that business in terms of signing of new revenue, which isn't uncommon. And one of those three was the founder, and the founder decided actually I shouldn't really be part of signing clients anymore. I've been going for 20 years. This needs to be a business that exists without myself. So that idea of the founder or CEO moving away from the growth of the business specifically, I think an ambition of many consultancy leaders. And so their solution was we're going to bring in a chief growth officer, and that person is going to lead the charge on growing the consultancy. And so they brought in that person. But that was the tip of the iceberg because the complexity was, well, what you're saying to the organization is, you'll call him John Smith, founder John Smith is no longer going to be leading the charge on growth. James Smythe is. But it also meant is, well, what's his remit? What does he do? Who looks to whom within the organization for what? You know, there was all this disruptive change from the top down, which was necessary change, but it was a statement about what the future was going to look like for the organization and how they were going to bring about business. It wasn't just, I've hired this person in to do this job. It was we're moving into a new phase of consultancy. And I think the more senior, the higher, the more the people within the consultancy will look to the leadership to say, not just do I like this new person or not, or do I think they're capable or whatever, but instead they go, what does this mean for the future? You know, hiring this person, bringing in this person, now assigning this role. What does the future now look like for the rest of the company? How does this affect me? You know, when we're talking 20 to 50 to 100 people companies, as we are, they're not enormous companies. People will know the leadership and people will look to the leadership to explain how they see the future through their hires and actions, I think is the way I see that. So I'm just curious if you've seen that a few times where you know the hiring of leaders has really had that impact or that directional change on the company overall.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

For sure. Almost without exception, every time a senior leader is hired into an organization, and we and we are talking about sort of small, medium-sized consultancies, where let's say anywhere between, as you say, kind of three or four partners or leaders through to even up to about 50, and every additional hire in that is both probably infrequent. It probably doesn't happen externally that often, pretty high profile. Everybody can see it's happening. The hiring team, the people in the organization, the client base, et cetera, et cetera, it's a high stakes decision to bring in someone senior. And then if you sort of deconstruct where are the changes happening, and you can start right at the top, that leadership team. So if you bring someone into a small leadership team, whether it's three or whether it's 15, that leadership team has to change in some way. There has to be space created around the table, literally, for that new person to come in. And if you think about in practical terms, what that actually means, it means that I, as an incumbent leader, probably need to give something up. I probably need to give up maybe a bit of my voice around the table, maybe some very specific concrete responsibilities that I have, maybe things that I have set up in the business and now need to hand over. And depending on where I am in my own sort of transition journey, if you like, that may be straightforward or not. So there's a sort of how do we as a team collectively agree that the moment is right and that we are ready to bring in that senior person? And then if you sort of go broader than that, across the whole organization, so the whole consulting body, in smaller consultancies of the scale size that you just talked about, anywhere between 25 consultants up to 125 consultants, most of those people have joined that organization for more than just a kind of career decision. It's been about I am aligning myself as a person with this organization in some way. And I may have kind of grown up in this organization over the last five, six, seven, ten years and actually have a very, very strong set of network and relationships with this organization, particularly with most senior people. And I also have in my mind a very clear template for what a leader in this organization is and how they behave and how they interact. So bringing in someone who is deliberately different to that causes a bit of a not even a change, but perhaps a rupture in how the consulting body sees the leader. And unless that's managed well, and perhaps we can talk about that, but unless that's managed well, then there's a sort of risk of tissue rejection of that new leader, which in the first instance might be a sort of emotional response, which is, you know, something inside me says this person doesn't quite fit right in this organization, but that emotional response, initial response, then finds a kind of rational route, like a I don't like how they do their slides, I don't like how they manage the client meeting or whatever it might be, but actually it's a kind of emotional source for that rational route, if you like. So is there's a risk that that senior leader, because a senior leader can only be a leader if it has people in the organization who kind of want to follow them, can be rejected by the consulting body. And then the sort of final part of that organizational change sort of event resulting from a new leader being hired, is that the organization is now doing different things. It could be branching out into a new market, it could be bringing a different set of expertise in. So the organization, by definition, has had some kind of perhaps structural, perhaps market-facing, perhaps approach change that it needs to sort of absorb and accept and to really kind of get hold of and own collectively.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

I mean, you've kind of alluded to it there, and actually maybe you've almost answered it. But you know, when a senior hire fails, which happens a decent amount of the time, the individuals and the organization almost always have different accounts of why. What does the gap between those two stories reveal about how the firm was operating?

SPEAKER_01 20:53

I think there were two parts to that. One is how ready was that organization for change. So if an organization says we need a new leader for the reasons that we discussed, you know, new market, new expertise, new approach, whatever it might be, that organization is seeing itself as an organization that's dynamic, that it's seeking to grow, that's seeking to do something different. If the consulting body doesn't see that and actually says, this is just a really great place to work, and I can see my career developing and I can be a partner to or director to in this organization, then they risk rejecting that person coming in. So there's something about readiness for change. And for me, that is, it could be something as simple as a senior partner in the organization communicating to the organization, saying, we agree that we all see ourselves as a dynamic growing organization. An integral part of being a dynamic, innovative, growing organization is bringing in new knowledge, new ideas, new thoughts, new stimulus. And therefore, we will hire externally at the most senior levels, as well as promote rate people through into the organization. So there's a kind of expectation built in, particularly amongst those people who have grown up in the organization, that we will be hiring in senior people. And that's That is a necessary and integral part of us being a dynamic organization. That kind of change readiness way before the new person arrives to say this is just part of who we are. So expect to see this. I think then when the new person arrives, there's a sort of second part to where the kind of gap, as you put it, between the two stories might emerge. And that is how we define the value of that senior hire. And there are aspects of value which are very explicit. So, you know, we expect of our senior leaders to do these things in these ways, these kind of metrics, these kind of KPIs, you know, written down, you know, unambiguous over a period of time, whatever it might be. But then there's a kind of whole load of implicit assumptions around value. And you sort of had to think about where has this individual come from? You know, they've come from an organization where presumably they were having a degree of success. That's why you've hired them. They've had a track record of doing things really, really well, whatever those things might be. Typically at senior end of consultancies, it's about building revenue, building client base, et cetera. And they've been hired for that track record. You sort of, you as a hurry organization have been convinced of that track record. And the person who's moved across is pretty clear that that's the foundation of my success. And so they come across a new organization and it's a sort of implied assumption that they bring that behavioral pattern, that set of ways of working, different approaches, whatever it might be, into this new organization. Sure, I need to kind of listen and learn and think about how my apply here, but I've been hired for this and I'll bring this and do this here. And of course, you know, it's very, very rare that someone integrate into an organization in exactly the same way they used to work in a previous organization. So there's a sort of jarring or a series of kind of clunky firsts where the new leader and the incumbent organization find out things about each other in a way that they weren't perhaps expecting because you can't possibly know everything when you move. And in that kind of implied set of assumptions about what you're expecting from me and what I'm expecting from you sits that gap as you refer to it. And in that gap, unless that gap can be resolved fairly quickly, then it starts to kind of grow. And doubts and questions grow on both sides of the equation that can contribute towards that 50% statistic.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

That's really right. Because I remember when I was younger, is there was a specific role that came to mind as you were telling me that. We just went our separate ways. But the reason for that is very quickly on the way out, that was the conversation. You know, they said, you know, we were kind of really hoping that you would bring this, this, this, this. And I was going, wow. You know, I had no idea that was the value you saw in myself. Because if that's the value, you know, I I probably would have told you weeks ago or months ago. I don't know if I kind of expected the same of you. So funny thing was never said aloud the purpose of the hire. And it was a fairly harmless lesson learned, low impact lesson. But I do see that of there seems to be a moment where an opportunity, say, where the consultancy can say to its consultants, its people, look, we're looking to bring in a person for this reason. And what happens often enough is they say, we're bringing in this person, John Smith. And the reason we're bringing them in is because he or she's done this, this, this, this, this. But they sell the person to the rest of the consultants as here's why this person's great. And I think there's a missed opportunity of like, well, no, by bringing in this person, it's a decision to move in this direction, which is part of the show you're working or part of the vulnerability that I think leaders often don't want to show. You know, like we are hiring for this reason to get to here.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah. And I think it's there's a couple of things in there. I think the purpose of hiring someone can change. When I talk about the value of a leader, the value that leader brings is different on day one to day 365. And the circumstances and the context also change in an organization from the moment they say, right, we want to be doing something different, you know, whether it's new market, new expertise, new approach, and the day that person arrives. So when they identify the need, there's a sort of person-shaped hole in the organization they've identified. But it takes time. There's a lead time associated with finding a senior person. It could be, you know, a recruitment process, there's an interview process, there's a notice period from their current role. It could be 12, 18 months. And in 12, 18 months, lots can change. There's a great example, you know, someone was hired that the person-shaped whole was to deliberately access a new market that an organization was not currently in. And they didn't have the expertise in-house and they didn't have the connections in-house. And the accelerator for that would be to hire someone to access that new market. When they arrived, this organization was like on an exponential growth curve. And the last thing they needed was more business at that moment. So whilst the kind of longer-term objective was still to enter a new market, that the highest value thing that person can do on day one was to provide like a senior sponsorship role over the recruitment process and bring in 10 people a month for a year. And that was a high value activity that also kind of gave the new leader a sense of currency and confidence in a new organization. And if that's communicated very clearly to the organization, this new leader's arriving, the ultimate goal is to move into market X, but you will see them leading this thing because this is our one of our highest priorities and their skill and attention and leadership on that will be highly valued by us. That's what you'll see them doing. So that kind of purpose question, what are they here to do and what is value, there can be a the more contextual flexibility and thought about that for when they arrive, the better.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

And I'd love to talk a little bit more about what you've learned from working with all the clients that you have. You listen to what clients tell you and what they don't tell you. For a consultancy leader who considers themselves to be self-aware, what are they most reliably not telling themselves when their firm is going through change? That's the thing that really jumps out.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

So, what are they not telling themselves? It's interesting. So every one of us has blind spots. A definition of a blind spot is something that others can see in us that we can't see ourselves. That is what a blind spot ultimately is. And a lot of the work I do as a coach working with senior leaders is to help them ultimately to identify what those blind spots are. Shine as much light into those blind spots. And those blind spots are exposed in lots of different ways. They could be exposed through 360-degree sort of feedback, and there's a kind of consistent theme that that leader just hadn't even thought about before. Or it could be in conversations that I'm having with them where there's a lack of congruence between what they're saying and how they're behaving in that conversation. They're sort of saying almost how they would like to be, but actually the behavior is something quite different. Or there's a kind of repeated, a word keeps coming up. And it's like, oh, that's interesting. You're talking about, you know, word X. And they hadn't noticed that in themselves. So when going through change, it can be what they're not telling themselves, or it's just they're not recognizing in themselves. And I think typically the sort of blind spots or the things that they are not telling or recognizing themselves could be things like not letting go of behaviors that no longer serve them. As you go through a change process, there's an implicit requirement to let go of things that no longer serve you or the organization, the other side of that change. And we kind of cling on to those things, you know, going back to the start of this conversation, because they're familiar and they're safe, even though they may not serve us anymore. So leaders is a requirement to let go of behaviors, both for themselves as individuals, as leaders, but also help the organization to let go of those things too. And it could be a particular way of decision making or communicating. Particular way of communicating may have worked when the organization was structured differently, or what was it was a different scale, but now it requires different multiple channels to communicate, or communicating on a different frequency, or whatever it might be. Whereas the way we used to do it, it was once a week and it went like this and it worked really well. So letting go of that is really important. I think the other thing that leaders often don't tell themselves or don't recognize is that when you are going through a change process, there's this period when you're neither one thing nor the other. So you're no longer the thing that the organization once was, that was familiar and recognizable, but you haven't yet become the thing that you're working towards. And you end up in this sort of liminal phase, which is really quite unsettling and quite destabilizing. And it can be, it can be an exciting time, this kind of nervous anticipation about what comes. But in those moments, they can cause us to experience stress. They can cause us to experience in ourselves a sort of emotional instability. And when we are like that, you know, I am like that at times. And everybody experiences moments when they're just a little bit on edge or not sure. And we react to those moments differently. And we may not realize that's what we're doing. So some people may become a bit grumpy, a bit snappy, a bit short in their communications. Others may kind of withdraw into themselves, disengage a bit while they're kind of working things out. You know, working with my clients over a series of conversations or sessions over a period of time, you sort of see those ebbs and flows in behavior and are kind of able to help identify I'm sensing this kind of energy in you right now. It may be not that they're not telling themselves, but they're just not recognizing in themselves that there is something different going on for them. And if if I'm experiencing it in a coaching conversation, then almost certainly the people around them are experiencing that on a day-to-day operating, you know, working base. So it's a way of identifying that these ways of being in an organizational change process are very natural. And it's kind of recognizing what's going on for you as an individual in those moments that others are going to experience of you. And is that okay? Or is it a different way of being?

SPEAKER_00 31:44

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is got to be one of the greatest things that having a coach or advisor at your side can do for you is just share. You know, you have a closed space in person or virtual, but you have a closed room where you can be honest and transparent and speak without filter. And if they can just point out the stuff that is obvious to them, they are there to active listen and understand and seek truth and all the rest. For myself, I'll say that's often the greatest value of that is they go, surely this. And you go, it's just not obvious to you, as the one telling the story or explaining the situation. So with your work then, you work as both a coach and an advisor to leaders. You know, most consultancy leaders reach out for support, I'm sure, you know, will conflate the two. I think if I was to define the two, it might take me a minute to make the distinction. You know, what is the distinction? And what do leaders typically get wrong when they reach out for one or the other?

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Aaron Ross Powell There are many ways of describing coaching. I guess to distinguish between coaching and advisory. You know, coaching is working on the person, if you like. It's a person who is looking to develop some kind of behavioral change in themselves. That they have identified that the organization is changing and that they want to change with that organization or something's jarring at the moment and they want to kind of explore that a bit. In my view, I think it takes a huge amount of courage for someone to say, I'd like to work with a coach, because it is quite an exposing place to be where you're identifying behaviors that may have been successful for you that need to adapt, need to change. So coaching is really about working with the person. And then advisory, as I see it, is about working on the organization. So what is it this organization can do differently? Where a client kind of conflates the two sort of goes back to the previous conversation. So, you know, they're saying, well, this organization is not working as it should. I need to get an advisor. Actually, some of the potential for things to change lie in the leader. You know, it's about how the leader is leading the organization rather than issues with the organization itself. So you may hire an advisor to say we need to restructure, we need to do something different, we need to apply a different system in the organization. And actually, it's a bit about the behavioral patterns and the way of thinking of a leader. Or they may hire a leader, may hire a coach, and actually it's a sort of context that the leader's working in that needs to be rethought. So, where I work is that intersect of coaching and advisory. So I work with leaders who are looking to do something different in their organization. They're looking to expand or contract or branch out or whatever it might be, and they recognize that in doing that, it requires something different of themselves. It requires a different approach to leadership, a different way of behaving in the organization to drive that change in the organization. I think what that really gives the individual leader is something crunchy to work with, something mission critical or something which is important to the organization to work with as a really concrete opportunity for them to work on themselves.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

So after working with leaders through some of the most significant transitions consultancy can go through, what do the ones who navigate change well have in common that is not about experience or technical capability?

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Yeah, I think this goes back to earlier parts of our conversation. So for leaders who do it well, I think it's a willingness to be comfortable with not knowing and to sort of relax, if I can put it this way, it's a bit crude, but relax the ego and say it's okay that I don't know, or let go of that model of leadership that they've observed as they were professionally growing up early in their career, where these leaders seemed to know, let go of that. That is not how in today's context consultancies can go through that kind of change. As we discussed, that's a real challenge. You know, for people who have had, you know, knowing the answer as the foundation for their success, letting go of that as a foundation for success and kind of embracing a different kind of humility and not knowing other ones who are successful.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Yeah, that's great. We've covered a whole lot of ground. You know, we've spoken about how leadership used to be perceived or how leaders acted, talked about the change that exists today, talked about what's required of consultancy leaders to really succeed and operate in today's world. You know, we've spoken about senior hires and a myriad of other subjects related to leadership within a consultancy. But for the leaders who are listening to this conversation, you know, bringing it all together a little bit, what is the single most important shift in how they think about their role and they need to make that would really make the biggest difference to themselves, the firm, and the future they're trying to create?

SPEAKER_01 36:13

Yes, it's a great question. So the most important shift, I think it's about recognizing as a leader, it's not about you. I like to think of leaders as you know custodians of their organization. You know, they are passing through this organization. You know, they may be a founder and created it, but one day there will no longer be any organization. That's a simple truth, as long as the organization continues. They may have joined an organization post-founder stage. There was a preceding period. And if you do your job well, there'll be a period that follows. So there's actually a book that I have been rereading recently called Belonging by a guy called Owen Eastwood. He's a New Zealander. He draws on this Maori concept of this unbroken line of people from the start of time to the end of time. And the sun just follows this line down at any one time now. So the sun is shining on us, but there's something before us, there's something after us. And that sense of custodianship and passing this thing on to someone else after my time has concluded. Someone who I'm connected with, I'm part of this long lineage, is, in my view, personal view, is a really healthy way to think about my role in this organization. It's not about me. It's simply that the sun is shining on me at this moment before I pass it on to someone else. And I think for me that creates a set of behavioral instincts, if you like. One, there's a sort of healthy detachment. So it doesn't mean you don't care about the organization, but it's where you don't see yourself as one and the same as the organization. You're not totally intertwined. And I think that's good for the leader and the organization. I think it also creates this sense of responsibility that goes beyond me. It's not just about my career, it's about those people who have come after me. And I think it's also a great opportunity related to that to really kind of nurture the talent in the organization to say, well, at some point I'll be out of here. I want to have a really great next tier of people, potential leaders coming through who will take on and take this organization on beyond where I can take it. So that sense of custodianship, it's not about me, is, in my view, a really healthy way to think about your role as a leader.