The Leader Learner Podcast

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Check-In:

• Describe a time when you helped a stranger.

Big Ideas:

• sense of ownership
• autonomy as a cop-out for organizational responsibility
• not about changing the fish, but about changing the environment
• When we invite people into our organizations, are we hoping they will be 'unbreakable'?
• the challenge of changing the whole organization
• teaching fish to swim in the toxic water, or changing the water
• Is the entire system toxic?
• lower toxicity with caring and listening
• leadership, history impact how toxic the environment
• treating the symptom rather than the cause
• duty to support the individuals and the leadership
• Is resilience a lever like leadership, or like psychological safety? Is it a result?
• Can we directly impact resilience?
• Resilience as it relates to personal struggle
• Asking "Why me?" versus "What now?"
• The questions we ask determine how resilient we are
• Resilience as a learned experience, not a theoretical one
• Relationship supportive of our resilience
• Causality is difficult to determine
• What? So what? Now what?
• Time spent looking for why - does it matter?
• Does the category help find the solution?
• Do you need to know what is in the ocean to clean it?
• How resources impact how/where we spent our time?
• Where are the resources most impactful?
• If you can clean it, why worry about dirtying it in the first place?
• Apply resources where the leverage is highest
• System and people are complex
• Yes for the system, AND yes for the individual
• How often do we rely on the system to take care of us?
• Moving out of the either/or choices
• Binary bias - when there is no middle ground, we have to choose one or the other
• multiple layers of action - I, We, They
• not looking for reasons, but looking for meaning and actions
• when point 1 finger outward, there are 3 fingers pointing backward

Resources:

• Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Gift by Edith Eger

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Vincent starts off with a story....

Big Ideas:

• Don’t take employees monkeys, or it turns into a zoo
• Employees need to keep their own monkeys
• Leaders and managers are not necessarily the same
• It’s exhausting and unsustainable for a manager to take everyone’s monkeys
• It’s natural for managers to take things off people’s plates. They think it’s their job.
• How are we supporting people’s transition from individual contributor to management?
• What is the role of a manager?
• The shift from owning your work, to overseeing the work of the individual contributors work, without taking it on
• Role of the manager is to make obstacles go away (organization, finances, resources, team dynamics, psychological safety, recruiting, etc)
• Manager to focus on the conditions - preparing the space by removing obstacles, and putting things in
• Creating the conditions for competencies to be built
• Should we let employees fail?
• The relationship between failure and trust.
• Creating the culture and context for failure is important
• Not taking on the failures of individual contributors as our own failures - accountability infection
• Fail fast, fail early, fail often
• People are already failing. Are they doing something with it?
• As leaders, help them through the failure.
• The emotional response to the words we use, including fail
• How are leaders talking about failure?
• Naming emotions and experiences so that we can have power over it
• Looking at our fail points ahead of time, so we can pivot sooner
• How we keep persisting on to avoid failure even when it’s the wrong path
• Looking at our fail points allows us to know whether the risk is worth it
• Doing more of the same strategy doesn’t work if it’s the wrong strategy
• Test, Assess, Act
• Agile working, sprints, and retrospectives
• Using the scientific method and testing hypotheses
• What have I done? What will I do? What are my obstacles?
• Agile working - product management and scrum master

References:

• The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard
• The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan
• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
• Taking Smart Risks by Doug Sundheim
• Trust Matters by Ken Blanchard

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Dave Mills Bio:
With over 25 years experience in the learning and development industry. In that time he has facilitated internationally and covered a wide number of subjects from driver training on forklift trucks to facilitating senior leaders to flourish through change.
He is currently a senior consultant and SME in the People Development and Effectiveness Centre of Expertise for Kantar (the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company).
In his many previous lives he trained as a horticulturist, spent years as a night club and mobile DJ, built a career in retail manager, was a charity and corporate event MC and compere and is a trained hypnotherapist.
He lives in Leamington Spa in the Uk with his wife. He has 2 children, is a ‘born-again’ gardener, has recently started writing poetry, still DJs occasionally, loves reading and wants to be an archaeologist when he retires!
Check-In Question:

• Have you ever won a contest or competition?

Big Ideas:

• Fortitude in the face of adversity
• You do have control over how you respond to situations, even if you don't have control of the situation itself
• Are you freeing yourself or oppressing yourself?
• Critique of stoicism as the philosophy of the powerful people
• You can't make people do things, you can only empathize with their heart
• Don't worry about what people think
• Polarization exists because we aren't listening to one another
• Time and energy spent trying to control what we can't
• Accepting the reality doesn't mean that we don't want to change
• The space between stimulus and response
• Amygdala hijack is a metaphor, not a fact
• We can only do what we can do
• Not being pulled like a puppy, mastering your control
• Why don't we go to the source - the original philosophers?
• Urgent/Important Matrix (The Eisenhower Matrix)
• Leaders need to have a philosophical mindset and create meaning for employees
• Philosophy is hiding in blind sight in today's leadership
• The power in going to the original source
• How much gets lost from the original source
• Philosophy is the search for knowledge and wisdom
• Trust the process - follow what's in one book to find your next book
• Read it well and go back and read it again
• Build your map around the terrain of each book
• There is no behind other than the one you sit on

Resources:

• Enchiridion by Epictetus
• Courage Under Fire, James Stockdale
• Jordon Peterson
• Ken Blanchard
• Stephen Covey
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Ryan Holiday
• Nietzsche
• The Nature of Things
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving and F*ck and Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson
• Brené Brown
• Seneca
• Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
• Theory U by Otto Scharmer
• Viktor Frankl
• The Biography of Cato the Younger

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with Guest, Gwen Stirling-WilkeDialogic OD ConsultantCheck-In Question

• One powerful moment in a virtual space

Big Ideas:

• The Check-in Question
  • Check in questions brings about shifts in the relational space and creates
  • Liminal space can help people transition from one space to another.
  • It's a punctuation and allows for recalibration
  • Questions can be adapted to the time, the people, etc.
  • Prepares people to the relationship part of the work
  • Creates the relational glue around people
• Transition from in-person to online was both exciting and terrifying. Created a lot of new learning opportunities
• Design had to shift from in-person to online
• Bonuses to working online
• Sessions online must be shorter to accommodate fatigue
• Shared meaning making happens together, but stretch the learning before and afterward
• Preparation is part of the intervention
• Be careful about your intentions
• Expectations shifted at the beginning of pandemic to possibility
• How do we configure people - face to face, hybrid, online. When is which the best answer?
• How to create an inclusive space when hybrid
• Asymmetry when some are in-person and others are online
• Designing an event for the bigger purpose and desired outcomes
• Trust within a team determines how to hold the space
• Creating the conditions online that would otherwise organically develop face to face
• Harmony between the connection time and the content time
• How can quickly can I get people from sitting and receiving to participating?
• Using "waiting rooms" to warm people up with a soft question
• Get people involved right away
• Individual time to think about something before connecting with others

Resources:

• From Physical Space to Virtual Space by Gwen Stirling-Wilke
• Healing Circles Global
• Dr. Mee-Yan Cheung Judge

To see what Gwen's up to next, head here.

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Check-In Question:

• Would you tell people if you won the lottery, would you tell people or keep it a secret?

Big Ideas:

• Exercise:
  • Draw a meeting on a paper.
    • Color code. RED- people talking too much. GREEN - people talking too little. ORANGE - people speaking in a toxic way
    • What do you notice?
• Share of voice
• When is interrupting others okay?
• Cultural differences between share of voice, and adapting to how others communicate
• How can we encourage green people to talk more, besides simply "Speak up"?
  • Wait time.
  • Eye contact
  • Moderate conversation more
• Does everyone's voice need to be heard?
• Are we using breakout rooms to create engagement
• 1-2-4-ALL Giving people the opportunities to write first, then share with a pair, then the whole group
• Turn to your neighbor
• Brainstorming are often more geared for extroverted people. Extend the brainstorm
• When we don't hear from others, we don't hear opposition
• Power has nothing to do with performance at times.
• Certain situations when collective intelligence is not appropriate
• Hearing from the experts, credible, valuable contributors?
• Wisdom of the LOUD, doesn't necessarily incorporate the most credible people
• Context matters
• Collective intelligence - more people sharing, focus on social sensitivity
• More social sensitivity when there are women in the room
• Swap out the moderators of a meeting, to shift the share of voice
• Connection between empowering people and burnout - some people aren't ready to be empowered
• Entrepreneurship training versus leadership training
• Front load the sharing to equate share of voice
• Bring awareness to people
• ONE BREATH SHARE - keeps sharing limited
• What's the purpose of the meeting?
• Who's really making the decision?

Resources:

• Leadership is Language by L. David Marquet
• 1-2-4-ALL, Liberating Structures
• Nominal Group Technique
• Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

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