Every Leadership Team Has a Thinking Problem

In this episode of Executiveland, Elizabeth Freedman explores a hidden leadership blind spot: the assumptions and beliefs that shape how leaders approach problems. Drawing on executive coaching, life coaching, and real-world examples, she explains why the quality of your thinking directly determines the quality of your results.

She introduces “Part X,” a term from Dr. Phil Stutz for the part of us that resists growth, and shows how this resistance shows up inside teams and organizations through beliefs that feel like facts.

Key takeaways:

• Why every leadership team has a thinking problem, and how assumptions quietly limit performance
• How changing the way you think about a strategy can be more powerful than changing the strategy itself
• How thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions, and actions create results, based on Brooke Castillo’s Model
• How enterprise intelligence helps senior leaders separate facts from interpretations and unlock new possibilities

Share this episode with a senior leader who could use a fresh way to think about their toughest problem.

For more tools, insights, and strategies to lead with clarity and credibility, visit Elizabeth’s website, take the C-Suite Readiness Assessment, and subscribe to Executiveland on  Apple Podcasts and Spotify and so you never miss a new chapter of the unwritten playbook!

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• Forbes Column: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethfreedman/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethfreedman
• Twitter X: @‌esuiteleader

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi, and welcome to Executive Land. I'm Elizabeth Friedman, and this is where top leaders go off script to share straight talk and the unwritten playbook about life in the C-suite. For more ideas, visit East SuiteLeader.com. Now let's dive into today's episode. Hi, everybody. It's Elizabeth. Welcome to another episode of Executive Land. This is where we talk about what happens to senior leaders after the promotion, after they get the big job, after they move into an executive role. Then what? That is what we are here to talk about. And I want to give you the perfect example. A few years ago, I was working with a chief operating officer at a large industrial company. So this leader led manufacturing. And he said to me, Elizabeth, I have the worst best job. He had just stepped into the role and he said, it's the worst, best job. It's the worst job because it is problems all day long, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Something's breaking down, somebody quits. I've got geopolitical risk happening in this region. And now I've got to shut down these sites and I've got a supply chain issue. And when you lead over, you know, 150 sites around the world, you can understand why he would say something like that. But he said, you know, it's the best job because there is no other part of the organization than operations that can have a bigger impact on our overall value, our overall performance as a company. We play such a huge role. And so understandably, how this leader and his big organization considered problems became a huge part of how they would ultimately deliver value. In fact, he said this whole job, the success for me and for everybody here is how we think about our problems, how we talk about our problems, and how we solve problems. And, you know, I think that's true for many of the leaders and teams I work with. But, you know, the more I think about this idea, the more I realize how much time organizations spend on the second and third parts of that idea. We spend a lot of time talking about things like communication or collaboration, accountability, execution. I mean, we talk about solving problems in the workplace, but I find we spend surprisingly little time talking about the first part of that idea. How are we thinking about the problem? And that is what I want to talk about today. You know, if you're stepping into a big role, you work with leaders at an executive level, I want you to think about how you think about problems, challenges, goals, things you want to accomplish. And here's what I'll say. I think every leadership team, every single one has a thinking problem. Now, before you think I'm saying every leadership team is dysfunctional or something like that, let me be clear, that is not what I mean. I am not saying teams are broken or have problems, lack talent, nothing like that. On the contrary, but what I am saying is every team's performance is limited by the quality of its thinking. So the question isn't whether your team might have a thinking problem. It's really what is that thinking problem? Because every single team has them. Every team has blind spots, every team has areas where they might say, you know, what's possible, what's not, what's going to work, what isn't. And this is not because uh teams are, I don't know, making this stuff up. They're not imagining that they are dealing with, you know, easy situations. They are dealing with complex businesses, difficult markets, often very high-stakes decisions, but they are also all human beings. And none of us escape the human experience. So to think about thinking, one of the ideas that has influenced me the most comes from Dr. Phil Stutz. Dr. Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist. Um, there's a really great documentary about him on Netflix. You can check out. He's written many wonderful books, and he talks about an idea called Part X. Part X is the part of everyone. Part X exists in every human being. It is the part of every human being that resists growth, even when circumstances have changed, even when the situation requires it. It is the voice that says, hey, we're too busy to do that right now. It's the voice that says, I can't, I don't know how, I need more information. I've tried that before. That doesn't work. They don't listen. It's too risky. Does that any of that sound familiar? I mean, this is something I think that we all have some version of. And, you know, part X is not a character flaw. It is truly part of being human. And the way it's described is that it's just your brain trying to keep you safe. But the challenge is that that same voice, that part X voice that is designed to actually protect, also keeps us from growing. And what I've noticed is it's not just that Part X shows up in an individual leader. Part X shows up in teams and in organizations. And you will hear it everywhere during a transformation, a restructuring, a conversation about pricing, a leadership change. So the reason we care about Part X is it's not just about a mindset. It's not about creating thoughts, it creates performance, it creates results. Now, this brings up another idea that had a profound influence on me. Um, you know, I don't know if I've talked about the fact with you that a few years ago I became certified as a life coach. And, you know, a lot of people, maybe who listen to this, you know me because of my focus more, let's say, in the executive readiness or performance space. But you know, becoming a life coach was a big deal for me. And I say that because it fundamentally changed how I think about leadership and performance. I really approach it very differently now. And I learned a really valuable tool, many actually, from a life coach named Brooke Castillo. Uh, she's just a real leader in the space, and she developed something called the model. So, at its simplest, here's the model. Think of the model as what kind of what the human operating system. And it says facts do not directly create results. It's our thoughts about facts that do that matter. Why? Because a thought creates a feeling, feelings influence actions, and actions create results. So simple to understand, but hard to put into practice, particularly when you're trying to create a result that is significant across a team, across a company. But whether we are talking about an individual or an organization, this same chain of events applies. And that is a problem sometimes in organizations because I see a lot of companies focus on action, on behavior, on what people are doing. And that makes a lot of sense. We have to have actions that create the right outcomes for us. And, you know, sometimes organizations also focus on how people are feeling. Certainly the good ones do. They care a lot about culture, belonging, engagement, you know, all of that, again, is highly valuable and important. But rarely do I see organizations really deeply examine the thoughts that are sitting upstream from everything else to a significant degree. But, you know, that is the significant part because this is where the chain begins. It's where the story begins. And I really do see this as a blind spot inside companies. Why? So think about what's happening right now inside your organization. Think about the team maybe that you're on or that you lead. I would bet there's some kind of change you're trying to drive. Maybe you have a performance challenge and you've got to make some moves in terms of bringing new leaders on or moving some leaders out. Maybe you've got a process or a system that you need people to use and adopt, and you're not seeing it. You're trying to improve execution. And so, whatever the case may be, what I see companies do is look, we we make the case for why we need people to do it. We may create incentives for them to. We create a lot of other things to get people to behave in a certain way. We'll create a scorecard. We'll talk about their compensation, we'll have new kinds of reporting or meetings, accountability. It's not that those things aren't needed sometimes. I mean, they can help, but rarely do we stop and ask, hold on. Before we put all this new process in place, are we really clear on what people are actually thinking? Not what they should be thinking, not what they we want them to think. But really, what do they think? Why have we gone deep enough there? And you know, this is never what people say publicly. We we know that. It's what they're actually thinking because that is what is actually driving the behavior and the results. So let me give you an example of this. A few years ago, I was working with a commercial team and they were planning to raise prices. They sold, let's say, a range of products to consumers around the world. And there were some strong reasons to do this. The economics supported it. The board leadership was in full support, felt it was very necessary. They had a good strategy, everything that went behind a raise in price, the marketing, and so on. There was huge resistance to do this from the commercial leaders themselves. The commercial organization was slow to introduce new pricing, slow to talk about it with customers. The dominant thought was no way will our customers pay for that, or some version of that. You know, our customers won't do it. If we stick to these higher prices, we will lose so many customers. They will go to our competitors, we're gonna lose business, we're gonna lose market share. All of us are gonna, you know, we're gonna lose our salespeople, they're all gonna leave because we're not gonna be able to make their numbers. And here's what's interesting: nobody was treating those statements as thoughts. If you spoke to the commercial organization at that time, they would have sworn to you those were facts. They had all kinds of data and research to support the facts. But you know what? Not all of those thoughts were facts. Many of them were beliefs, which is really just a thought you think a lot. They were sentences. They were sentences in employees' minds, but those sentences drove behavior. Salespeople, as I said, they were really hesitating to roll out new pricing. They kept going back to the kind of default legacy pricing. You started to see their sales managers pushing back. Finally, had a commercial starts questioning the strategy and going back to his CEO. And, you know, confirmation bias started to set in. People were really finding evidence that confirmed those concerns. And while it seems like the wrong place to really look at the strategy or the performance, rather, how could it possibly start with a thought? That company lost millions because of sentences like these. So they proved themselves right. How do I know this? Here's what made the situation really fascinating. Their competitor had already successfully raised pricing while selling what I would argue was a nearly identical product. So somebody else had successfully done it. It was possible. The market did accept it, customers had accepted it. So was the pricing strategy the problem? No. The thinking about the strategy was the problem. And I think this happens in organizations far more often than we realize. Now, to the team's credit, once they started to see evidence that challenged their assumptions, they were willing to acknowledge they had been wrong. They noticed that, you know what? Um we don't have to change our strategy, we don't have to change our marketing, we don't have to change our customers, we have to change our thinking. And when the thinking changed, the behavior across a commercial organization started to change, which did lead to different results. And so I think it's important to go back to the idea that a thought is just a sentence, it is a sentence in your mind. So you just want to be careful. Am I treating those sentences like they are reality? You know, just because you think something, you know, is it true? And by the way, even if it is true, is it helpful to you? Is it helping you to think that strategy is never going to work? Is it helpful to think, I don't trust them? Is it helpful to think, I don't know how to do that? Is it helpful to think, we need more resources for that? Even if it's true, if it's helpful, keep it. But if it isn't, maybe try on a different thought. And you know, how about that? I mean, what if we treated thoughts like you kind of treat going to a store and trying on clothes? You try on clothes in a store, some fit, some are comfortable, some don't. And so, same idea here. I mean, you are not obligated to keep every thought you have, and some of us need to try on new thoughts. You know, Part X, we know, tends to think thoughts that are mostly repetitive and negative. That's what the research tells us. And so imagine how different some of the conversations across your team, some of the performance would be if we approach them through this lens of a different sentence. So instead of, yes, we've tried that before, is there a thought like, okay, we've tried some things before, those things didn't work. What will we try now? Instead of our customers would never pay for that higher price. What about a thought like, it's possible they might? Or even it's unlikely they might, but I suppose it's possible. So here's the thing: this is not about positive thinking. It is not about pretending challenges don't exist or blind optimism. It is just simply becoming far more aware of the thinking that is already driving your decisions, your outcomes, your performance. You know, I've often said to teams, it's not like you need a perfect roadmap. You don't need a perfect strategy. You can have an okay strategy. The question is, what do you think about the strategy? It's not the strategy, it's what you think about the strategy. And so this idea of how we think about our problems becomes so important at those senior levels. And, you know, at those senior levels, performance, it does start in the mind. And there are different kinds of intelligence that we talk about at that level. And we've talked about this on the podcast before. We've talked about the kind of intelligence that is often described as rational. This is your subject matter expertise. It's the information that you've learned over years, it's kind of the domain intelligence you have. And that's important, but as we know at that very senior level, it's not enough. Then there's the kind of intelligence we might call emotional intelligence. Now, we often talk about emotional intelligence, like being aware of other people's feelings, being sensitive to you know how our choices and decisions impact others. But I'm talking about the emotional intelligence you might have about your own feelings. If thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions, your own emotional intelligence becomes important. But the most important type of intelligence at those senior levels, that type of thinking, let's call it enterprise intelligence. Seeing the whole system, looking at your judgment, discernment, making trade-offs, being able to prioritize, but also separating fact from interpretation, challenging the thoughts that have become accepted as fact, as truth inside your organization. That's the kind of intelligence we want to grow, we want to expand, we want to become really outstanding at senior levels. Because, you know, the best leaders I think I've worked with, it's not like they're the most brilliant people. They don't always have the better answers, but I'll tell you, I think they have much greater awareness of how they are thinking. They notice the part X. They question those assumptions. I find they are curious for longer. They really ask good questions. They dig in, they will challenge a conclusion that you've made and even that they've made, they do not automatically believe every thought that they have. It is a huge advantage for them. You know, I think a lot of leaders unfortunately adopt a view whether or not they realize it, of I'll believe it when I see it. And you know, that hurts us. It even hurts our careers. You know, we don't want to take a risk because we're not sure how it will work. We'll believe it when we see it, but you and I know, I mean, like, that's not how the world really works. I think the superpower is that mindset of when I believe it's possible, then I'll see it. I have to believe we can do it first. I have to believe in that vision. I have to believe we can get that pricing. Then I'll see the result. That's the mindset. And again, it's not because they're ignoring reality or they're naive, but I do think the best leaders really do understand that what we believe really does influence who we are, what we notice, what we are willing to try, to risk, to attempt, to learn, and ultimately what we achieve. Being exceptional comes down to how you think about problems, how you talk about problems, and how you solve problems. And so I want to leave you with three three questions to consider. First of all, I want to ask you, what does your Part X sound like in you? What are those sentences, those thoughts that show up over and over again? And then next, what is the impact? How is that thinking influencing decisions for you, for your team? Is it preventing an opportunity? Is it creating behaviors, good, bad, or otherwise? And then finally, what is something new you can try on? Is there a new thought that you can try on in the store, a better way to think about the situation? Again, not a fantasy, not wishful thinking, just a thought that can open up a possibility. You know, you have heard me say before the first sale you make is to yourself. Long before you ever convince a client, your board, your CEO, a team, you have to convince yourself of something first. You've already convinced yourself of something. That's the sale. You've convinced yourself of what's actually possible or impossible, what can work or won't work. And that is why paying attention to your thoughts is so important. Not letting them run on autopilot, not assuming, of course, thoughts really are true, really starting to listen to part X and do not let Part X make decisions on your behalf. That's really the key, the lever, the aspect of performance that makes the biggest difference. Because, you know, the leaders I work with, as I said, it's not like they're necessarily more experienced or working harder, but they really do pay attention to the stories they tell themselves, that their leaders tell. And before all of that, they have decided to become the boss of their brain, to be the one in charge, to not let their part X run the show and really have the thoughts that create the kind of life, the business, the performance. They really want. I want to hear what you think about this one. Let me know. Send me a note, share a review on iTunes or Spotify. I always like to know what you think. And I want to thank you for joining me for another week in Executive Land. Hey everyone, I'll see you next time. Thanks. Well, that's all for today in Executive Land. Thanks for listening. And if you're looking for more, check out my website, eastweetleader.com, where you'll see all kinds of free resources and take the free executive readiness assessment. It shows you exactly where you're strong and where to focus next in your own leadership. And don't forget, subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I'll see you next time in Executive Plan.