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291: Tap into Performance Science with Carla Fowler
https://youtu.be/Me3XLCOh1iM
Carla Fowler, MD, PhD and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, is driven by a mission to help ambitious leaders perform at their best by applying the principles of performance science.
We explore Carla’s journey from scientist to coach and explore her Performance Framework, a science-based model that guides high achievers through four core areas: strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. Carla explains how strategic clarity and resource prioritization drive focused leadership, and how physiological resilience and mental perspective are essential to long-term success. She also shares how she applies scientific tools to coaching engagements to help leaders build empowered teams and make high-quality decisions under uncertainty.
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Tap into Performance Science with Carla Fowler
Good day, dear listeners, it’s Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Carla Fowler, who is an MD, a PhD, and also the CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, which helps CEOs and executives with clarity, focus, growth, and support using a proprietary process based on performance science. So welcome to the show, Carla.
Thanks so much, Steve. It’s really fun to be here chatting with you.
It’s exciting to have a scientist who is also a coach because I love to combine the two and to have the scientific approach in coaching. I’m trying to do the same thing, but I’m sure I’m not mastering it to the degree that you are. So I’m all ears of how that works. But let’s start with my favorite question for guests, which is, what is your personal “Why” that drives you to do what you’re doing and how are you manifesting it in your practice?
I love that you asked this question, Steve, because I think taking this moment, like there are often a lot of different “Why’s” along the way, but for me, I think in reflection, one big “Why” was that as a young person growing up, I always looked out at the world and saw there were a lot of things you could go do. There were exciting goals that you could set for yourself. And I wanted to figure out how to go do that. That was just a very pure sort of desire that even as a young person I had. And I also was very interested, I mean, I certainly had some talents, but I wanted to know like, what could someone do? What did someone have control over? To have more agency in your life as you were trying to navigate and do all of that.
And so I think for me, how this manifest was number one, an interest in science, like approaching things scientifically, because certainly my coaching practice, I look at performance from a scientific standpoint, which is to say, what are the principles that really guide how we perform and how it is received and what results we get that has nothing to do with our talent? I mean, we get whatever talent we’re born with and we don’t really get to control that. But
when we think about performance scientifically, now we're talking about things that anyone could access that might help them improve their leadership and I really liked that idea.
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Wow. Okay, so let’s dig in and see how that works. So these scientific principles, so how do you connect it to the work at hand? So you’re talking to a CEO or an executive, you’re trying to figure out what they need to do to perform better. How do you apply principles? Like you observe what’s going on and then intuitively some principles flash into your mind and then you say, okay, that would work here or you have a process that you walk people through?
It’s a little bit of both. I think coaching has to be very individualized. I don’t think anyone wants to be sort of run through a bunch of modules that don’t feel like they fit their particular situation. On the other hand, one of the good things about having a process is it means that coaching doesn’t wander into just sort of a coffee chat that feels really good, but that doesn’t get you in there. Part of the way I build some of these principles into coaching is in number one, how I set up how we get started.
So, a great example of this is when I start working with a client, we do a longer form session and you could view it as a bit of discovery about getting to know them and their situation. But
we start out by focusing on one of the first principles right at the start, because I think it’s one of the most important, and I think it really sets us up for success.
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And what I mean by that is saying, Hey, there are lots of things you could do, and there are lots of goals you could go after, but we need to be focused and clear about what few goals are we going after? And also what are the most important priorities that we might invest our resources or our energy in to actually get towards those? So, in coaching, I think this is a very powerful question to start with. And I combine that in a longer session. It’s three hours and we chat and I ask questions, but a lot of the questions I ask are trying to get at what’s most important to that executive, like what are the objectives that really matter in their space or to their business? And then also to try and ask questions to understand what priorities might be most important for their team to be focusing their energy on, or even for that executive to be thinking about or spending more time researching or learning about, or where’s the money most potently spent?
And so we start there and try and get some clarity on those things, because then as we move through coaching and even move through the other buckets of performance science principles, I find that everything we do is more potent and tends to get more of the results that it would get. That’s how we start and that’s a very structured piece.
Okay, so strategy is the start. So I think you call it The Performance Framework or what is the name? The Performance Framework. So you have this Performance Framework. So, okay, what is the strategy? What are we trying to focus on? What is the most important thing to move the needle on? So that’s the first phase of it. So what are the other phases? There are four phases, right?
That’s correct. Yes. So the other phases are strategy. We start there, we will come back to that. It’s not one and done, but the other three buckets are, we have to think a little bit about execution and often it’s how is the team executing, not just how is the individual executing, that’s number two. Number three is we think a lot about mindset because a lot of entrepreneurship and running a business is that it’s a long game. It’s not a sprint. In very few cases, it is a sprint and then you’re done and you exit and everyone throws the party. That’s not the common scenario. And so we really wanna think about mindset. How do you stay in it? How do you feel confident even when you’re having to do something new or if you’re facing a lot of uncertainty, which is almost very prevalent now and is always the case when you’re starting a business or being an entrepreneur, you’re making bets.
And so
the mindset matters because it is something that we have to bolster over time.
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These are the buckets. So, strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. So it sounds like only half of the buckets are about what you do and the other half are about who you are and what you think.
I love how you broke that down. Yeah, and what’s great is there are different ways to approach any problem. Client could come in with a particular issue and one of the things we can always ask ourselves because we have these principles and this is where in ongoing coaching, I don’t necessarily have a specific like, oh, now we go to this or now we go to this. What I listen for is, given the challenge they’re having or even the opportunity they want to go after, what are all the different principles that could be at play here? And then I can even ask the client, I say, Hey, I can see some different ways we could approach this. Are any of them popping out to you as most resonant or that seem the easiest, like the lowest hanging fruit? Like, okay, let’s start there. Build some momentum. So this is what I love about performance science.
That’s great. So I’m thinking about tennis, which people talk a lot about it’s an individual sport. It’s a professional sport and people take a lot of coaching in tennis. So tennis players often they have different coaches. Often they have a separate coach for serving, for keeping in shape, and then you have a strategy coach. So I’m just thinking about these different areas. Would you say that it is a leadership related thing that these soft areas like minds. Maybe it’s not soft at all, but essentially the thinking piece and the staying in shape piece, that they are so critical or they would be critical for any type of job?
Oh, that’s a great question. I think they matter for any job that these things do come into play. Maybe the reason it comes out more strikingly for leadership is because of the amount of pressure that is typically there, the amount of stretch that leaders are often pushed into or drawn into to do something really challenging. And they’re usually the front person. They are responsible at the end of the day for everything. And also they’re not in control of everything. Not that any of us are, but I think the point is when you lead something that is more than just a single person business, for example, immediately you have other people who are executing and who are carrying out pieces of the business. When you scale that with investors, now you have a whole host of other people that you have to satisfy as well as have ideas and things. So it may just be that because
leaders are often pushed more to the edge, managing all of those categories becomes more important.
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Yeah, it brings to mind, there was an interview with Jeff Bezos, and he talked about how he is not involved in managing his companies anymore. And basically what he said was that his main job each day is to make not more than three decisions, but three good decisions. And he does a lot of work to stay fit, to be rested in order to make those decisions right. So it sounds like he has more than 50% of his buckets or 50% of what he does or what he needs to be in those latter two buckets. So it’s not even a 50-50, maybe it’s a 5-95 distribution. So I wonder whether when someone is moving up the ladder and they go from doing things to leading people and to coming up with a vision and maybe to leading leaders, as you’re elevating the ideas, the communication, the energy projection, and just your being is becoming more important and then you have to put more energy into it. Is this how you see it?
That’s an interesting observation. I think that I suspect, and of course I’m talking out of turn here, I suspect that to make those one to three really good decisions takes a ton of strategic effort and investment in learning and thinking. I might say the execution bucket probably does decrease quite a bit, but the other three buckets still potentially are quite important. And maybe the execution bucket, what that has really become is really good decisions about who your very next line of leadership is. And that even though it may not be that many people, that the decision in who you hire, who you pick, who then of course is going to have much more influence on that execution. That’s a strategic decision, but that impacts the execution bucket. But I might be splitting hairs at this point. I think it’s a really interesting observation, Steve.
Or maybe the execution is the communication. Maybe it’s about being in those meetings and arguing the point and listening to research, to other people’s positions and try to synthesize things. And maybe that’s the execution. It’s not by hand. So how much time do you spend on each of those buckets? Is strategy more an upfront thing and then it becomes less of the time or does it not even matter? How do you share your time between the different buckets with a typical client?
It depends. And it depends both where the client’s strengths are, but also sometimes what the context is that they’re dealing with. So for example, I’ve encountered clients who have kind of a buoyant personality. Their mindset is often in a pretty good place. So in terms of just their sense of optimism, willingness to like keep going on stuff, we don’t necessarily need to bolster that very much versus for a different person where something’s really difficult, like things have been really chaotic. And maybe not through any of their own doing. It’s just the situation they came into. We might have to spend more time there because they’re working really hard and it may be a slow journey to seeing results. And so we have to figure out how to keep them in there.
But I think
one of the interesting things about strategy that I will bring up is you can use strategy as a lens, both they're sort of high-level strategy.
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You can always ask three questions or spend some time thinking and then ask some three questions as prompts to help you approach things less from a reactive standpoint and much more from a strategic standpoint. So the three questions I like to ask, and these are true for high level strategy as well, are what is it I want to have happen? This is the simplest way, not even what is my goal, but it’s like, what do I want out of this? What is the outcome that is most important? And if there was a sub outcome, maybe what would that be? But like try to not have a list of 20 outcomes you’re trying to achieve because that means we’ve lost our clarity. And then the second question is, what do I think is actually going to be most important in driving towards that outcome? There may be many things that we could do or work on, but what’s probably the most important? You could also view this as sort of that 80-20 rule, that we get 80% of our results from about 20% of our efforts.
And then I think the third question, which is one of my favorites, is what is going to distract us or me? What is the red herring or the emotional button that’s getting pushed that is going to be a total like distraction as I’m trying to navigate this circumstance versus if I can just focus on what is probably needed to encourage the outcome I want. And so this is a tool I use for strategy to just simplify it and also to help people think strategically, even outside those moments when you’re very clearly in your like planning moment, even if you’re just an executive sitting in a meeting listening to what’s happening and trying to decide what your biggest value add could be, is to run through those questions in your head and it will often hone what you say, make it clear to the audience, and also not overstep and get to meddling in what is probably weeds you shouldn’t be in.
Yeah, I love it. These are great questions. And I like to ask the first two questions with my clients, but I haven’t thought about the third one. I think it’s very important. So the way we use the first two questions or something similar to the first two questions, when we figure out who’s doing what in a company, then we figure out the functions that they do, whether it’s sales, marketing, engineering, administration, whatever they are. And then we look for those outcomes. What are those one or two big outcomes? And then how do you drive those outcomes with a weekly activity?
So what’s the KPI that’s going to go and drive the outcome? And it might not drive it, we can then tweak it, but what is that? But I really like the distraction piece because that is what’s preventing some of those activities in happening, the distraction. And as you were explaining it, I was just thinking about myself and my businesses that I have some distractions in my business. I have to remove them. I have to start thinking about removing them to make time, energy for those important activities that will drive the outcome. This is very helpful. Well, thank you. Thank you. So, is this just a strategy piece or in the other buckets that also applies?
I think one can always ask those questions in the other buckets. The buckets aren’t independent. They influence each other. And so certainly you could ask the question like, Hey, when I think about execution, like that sort of falls into like, once you’ve decided what the priorities are, you could also then start to say you define KPIs. That’s a great way of saying, okay, well, in executing this priority, what is actually the activity that is perhaps most important. Or what’s the leading and the lagging indicators that we would want to be looking at measuring tracking.
One of the things I think about a lot, just coming up back to a principle level for that execution buckets. Now we’re moving on to bucket number two, we’ll talk about some tools. That one of the things I like to think about is how do you empower your team to execute efficiently, more effectively? Because once a business grows to a particular size, like again, as the leader, you’re probably not actually doing the execution. And so thinking about your team matters a lot. So there are three pieces. When I think about making a very powerful team, or you could even say cultivating the power of your team is how I put it. There’s three different elements to it that are great for a leader to be thinking about.
One is just capability. So
this idea that if you can have your team growing in their skill and their capability, they are going to produce more for you over time. Like that's, it's an investment that is good for them because as human beings, actually we are motivated when…
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If we know, for example, what our role is and why that matters to the group objectives, why it’s important. But also, for example, if we’re trying to solve a problem and there are moments where the team is actually asked, do you have ideas about this? Like, are we approaching this in the right way? Or is there something we’re missing?
That ability to influence decision-making is very motivating to a team.
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So for example, within a company, you have a particular team and they are known for what they’re able to produce, how well they do it. This could even be your accounting team. An internal service provider. But if they’re known within the company as like great to work with, can get your questions answered, can make things happen. Suddenly your other departments may be talking to them sooner and earlier, and things may be going better because of it. There might be better budgetary planning or fill in the blank.
The goal is that being visible does matter. And that can be both external to the company as well as internal to the company.
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Yeah. I love it. I’ve never thought about it this way. I have experienced people, obviously learning is fun and when people learn and they know they grow, it’s just the learning itself is fun, but it also increases their market value as employees. So they know that they’re in a good place because even though maybe their salary is not rising, but their value is rising and they know that it’s going to have an impact down the road. The influence, yeah, I mean, if we all want to have a meaningful job and if you don’t influence, if you’re not part of a bigger picture and we don’t impact or we don’t know how to impact it, then that’s not motivating. But if you do, that really is. And if it’s visible, then other people know that we are making the impact. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, well, we are running out of time, but what else about the mindset that you might want to talk about? How do we improve the mindset of our team and of ourselves?
This is a great place to finish up because we can wrap in a little bit of physiology here too. So in mindset, I think one of the biggest things that leaders and team members are dealing with is uncertainty. I think uncertainty is one of the hardest things that we can come up against with our mindset these days. When I think about mindset, there are both actions we can take and also perspectives we can take that are helpful.
So one perspective that I think is really important in the face of uncertainty is to understand that the stress that we feel in the face of that, the discomfort we feel, which is very biological, by the way, our brains were built to not like…
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A lot of it has to do with how we think about it. And so, a flip side of a way to think about uncertainty is to say that if we had no uncertainty in our work and our life, we would be bored out of our minds and there would be no growth, there would be no opportunity, and that that would not actually be a very good human state to be in. And it’s helpful to remember that the opposite is a not good place. And then it can be helpful to reframe the uncertainty as like, this is something I don’t know yet, but it actually can be a force for good in terms of my own growth. And also it is probably in service of something I really care about. And it’s just good to have things you care about in your life. It means you are engaged. It means you’re impacting things. So from a mindset standpoint, as a leader, you can help kind of reframe it for your team, but also reframe it for yourself.
The yin and yang, it’s the risk and opportunity thing, right?
Exactly. But frame it. And you’re not trying to say it’s all good. Like no one will believe you if you say that. But I like it how you said it. The yin and the yang. You say this is part of why we have some good is because we are having the risk. And so they come together. And then in terms of actions that you can take that are really helpful, I think number one is you can help your team understand what do you do in the face of uncertainty.
And there's usually two things. Number one, you can spend some time thinking. And number two, you can spend some time learning.
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Because uncertainty often highlights a gap between what we know right now and what we might need to know to be successful in a new context, in a new environment. I think we all, as people, feel better when we have a plan. And so one of the plans you can make in the face of uncertainty is to say, what do we want to learn about? What are the topics we need to think about and maybe think about our values on? And then finally, what experiments could we run? So you get to be a scientist and you can say, well, how could we learn some answers, even though they’re not things we could read in a book or find on the internet? What could we try? And I think that’s very powerful for people to have a plan.
Then the last piece, the physiology, is that uncertainty revs up our fight or flight system. There’s often a lot of adrenaline. And so just a little bit about physiology, This is a wonderful time when things are uncertain to take extra care, to find ways to bring your system back down again. Our systems are capable of handling adrenaline, they were built to handle it, but they do better when we get some rest and recovery and then ramp back up. So things like sleep, a breathing practice or like a meditation, just even like one minute of deep breathing can be really powerful during a stressful day. Going outside or going for a walk, it doesn’t even have to be intense exercise, just moving your body will process some of that. Being outside is very good for us as human beings. So a couple of tips on that physiology front, like how you can help with that.
Yeah, I love it. This is a really good perspective through the scientist’s lens that how do we control, how do we manage our mindset, how do we manage our physiology, how we reframe things. My grandfather always used to say that there’s a kernel of good in every bad, and that I would ask him if someone died, what’s good about that, and kind of put him on the spot. But yeah, I mean, Napoleon here talks about that as well. It’s a great reframe. And yeah, I love it. I love it. It’s all the four buckets and definitely gives a lot to talk about with the CEO who is going through these things. These buckets are pretty deep. So there’s a lot fit in those buckets. So Carla, if someone is really intrigued by this and they would like to either have you talk to them to explore these buckets and their mindset and their strategy and so on, or if they want to learn more about your techniques and what you do, where can they find you and your staff and how can they connect with you?
Yeah, thanks for that, Steve. Well, I love connecting with people and if you’re interested in hearing more about performance science, LinkedIn is a great place to connect and follow along. So I’m at www.linkedin.com/in/carla-fowler. And then if you’re interested in learning more about coaching, my website is a wonderful place to go. You can message me through the site and also there’s a great FAQ page. So that’s at thaxa.com.
So definitely check out thaxa.com by mind or by brain. Very interesting. I asked you during the pre-interview why THAXA and you said that it’s Latin for task, but I should have asked the follow-up questions. Okay, so why are tasks so important?
So I liked it because I think the first performance principle I ever learned in my life was that if you want to do something really big or ambitious, you don’t have to do it all in one step. It’s just a series of lining up the right smaller tasks in a row and stacking them up. A lot of coaching is helping people do that. They’ve got ambitious goals and lots on their plate. So I love just thinking about how do we break this down into the manageable tasks that they can stack up.
Wow. That’s very profound. So I love this metaphor, and James Clear in Atomic Habits, he talks about habit stacking. And I like this idea of habit stacking. And I like to think that when I work with companies that that’s what I want to do with them. So teach them another approach and then ingrain it so that it’s going to be part of their arsenal going forward and kind of habit stack them so that they become more and more powerful as this time goes on. So that’s fascinating. So Carla Fowler, MD and PhD, the scientist of coaching, and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching. Check her out on LinkedIn, check her out on thaxa.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, and if you’re like me, then you probably have. If you like to think about what is behind different concepts and what makes them tick, then stay tuned because we get more and more exciting thought leaders and CEOs come on the show and explain how they make their businesses run. So, thanks for coming, Carla, and thank you for listening.
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https://youtu.be/Me3XLCOh1iM
Carla Fowler, MD, PhD and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, is driven by a mission to help ambitious leaders perform at their best by applying the principles of performance science.
We explore Carla’s journey from scientist to coach and explore her Performance Framework, a science-based model that guides high achievers through four core areas: strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. Carla explains how strategic clarity and resource prioritization drive focused leadership, and how physiological resilience and mental perspective are essential to long-term success. She also shares how she applies scientific tools to coaching engagements to help leaders build empowered teams and make high-quality decisions under uncertainty.
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Tap into Performance Science with Carla Fowler
Good day, dear listeners, it’s Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Carla Fowler, who is an MD, a PhD, and also the CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, which helps CEOs and executives with clarity, focus, growth, and support using a proprietary process based on performance science. So welcome to the show, Carla.
Thanks so much, Steve. It’s really fun to be here chatting with you.
It’s exciting to have a scientist who is also a coach because I love to combine the two and to have the scientific approach in coaching. I’m trying to do the same thing, but I’m sure I’m not mastering it to the degree that you are. So I’m all ears of how that works. But let’s start with my favorite question for guests, which is, what is your personal “Why” that drives you to do what you’re doing and how are you manifesting it in your practice?
I love that you asked this question, Steve, because I think taking this moment, like there are often a lot of different “Why’s” along the way, but for me, I think in reflection, one big “Why” was that as a young person growing up, I always looked out at the world and saw there were a lot of things you could go do. There were exciting goals that you could set for yourself. And I wanted to figure out how to go do that. That was just a very pure sort of desire that even as a young person I had. And I also was very interested, I mean, I certainly had some talents, but I wanted to know like, what could someone do? What did someone have control over? To have more agency in your life as you were trying to navigate and do all of that.
And so I think for me, how this manifest was number one, an interest in science, like approaching things scientifically, because certainly my coaching practice, I look at performance from a scientific standpoint, which is to say, what are the principles that really guide how we perform and how it is received and what results we get that has nothing to do with our talent? I mean, we get whatever talent we’re born with and we don’t really get to control that. But
when we think about performance scientifically, now we're talking about things that anyone could access that might help them improve their leadership and I really liked that idea.
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Wow. Okay, so let’s dig in and see how that works. So these scientific principles, so how do you connect it to the work at hand? So you’re talking to a CEO or an executive, you’re trying to figure out what they need to do to perform better. How do you apply principles? Like you observe what’s going on and then intuitively some principles flash into your mind and then you say, okay, that would work here or you have a process that you walk people through?
It’s a little bit of both. I think coaching has to be very individualized. I don’t think anyone wants to be sort of run through a bunch of modules that don’t feel like they fit their particular situation. On the other hand, one of the good things about having a process is it means that coaching doesn’t wander into just sort of a coffee chat that feels really good, but that doesn’t get you in there. Part of the way I build some of these principles into coaching is in number one, how I set up how we get started.
So, a great example of this is when I start working with a client, we do a longer form session and you could view it as a bit of discovery about getting to know them and their situation. But
we start out by focusing on one of the first principles right at the start, because I think it’s one of the most important, and I think it really sets us up for success.
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And what I mean by that is saying, Hey, there are lots of things you could do, and there are lots of goals you could go after, but we need to be focused and clear about what few goals are we going after? And also what are the most important priorities that we might invest our resources or our energy in to actually get towards those? So, in coaching, I think this is a very powerful question to start with. And I combine that in a longer session. It’s three hours and we chat and I ask questions, but a lot of the questions I ask are trying to get at what’s most important to that executive, like what are the objectives that really matter in their space or to their business? And then also to try and ask questions to understand what priorities might be most important for their team to be focusing their energy on, or even for that executive to be thinking about or spending more time researching or learning about, or where’s the money most potently spent?
And so we start there and try and get some clarity on those things, because then as we move through coaching and even move through the other buckets of performance science principles, I find that everything we do is more potent and tends to get more of the results that it would get. That’s how we start and that’s a very structured piece.
Okay, so strategy is the start. So I think you call it The Performance Framework or what is the name? The Performance Framework. So you have this Performance Framework. So, okay, what is the strategy? What are we trying to focus on? What is the most important thing to move the needle on? So that’s the first phase of it. So what are the other phases? There are four phases, right?
That’s correct. Yes. So the other phases are strategy. We start there, we will come back to that. It’s not one and done, but the other three buckets are, we have to think a little bit about execution and often it’s how is the team executing, not just how is the individual executing, that’s number two. Number three is we think a lot about mindset because a lot of entrepreneurship and running a business is that it’s a long game. It’s not a sprint. In very few cases, it is a sprint and then you’re done and you exit and everyone throws the party. That’s not the common scenario. And so we really wanna think about mindset. How do you stay in it? How do you feel confident even when you’re having to do something new or if you’re facing a lot of uncertainty, which is almost very prevalent now and is always the case when you’re starting a business or being an entrepreneur, you’re making bets.
And so
the mindset matters because it is something that we have to bolster over time.
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These are the buckets. So, strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. So it sounds like only half of the buckets are about what you do and the other half are about who you are and what you think.
I love how you broke that down. Yeah, and what’s great is there are different ways to approach any problem. Client could come in with a particular issue and one of the things we can always ask ourselves because we have these principles and this is where in ongoing coaching, I don’t necessarily have a specific like, oh, now we go to this or now we go to this. What I listen for is, given the challenge they’re having or even the opportunity they want to go after, what are all the different principles that could be at play here? And then I can even ask the client, I say, Hey, I can see some different ways we could approach this. Are any of them popping out to you as most resonant or that seem the easiest, like the lowest hanging fruit? Like, okay, let’s start there. Build some momentum. So this is what I love about performance science.
That’s great. So I’m thinking about tennis, which people talk a lot about it’s an individual sport. It’s a professional sport and people take a lot of coaching in tennis. So tennis players often they have different coaches. Often they have a separate coach for serving, for keeping in shape, and then you have a strategy coach. So I’m just thinking about these different areas. Would you say that it is a leadership related thing that these soft areas like minds. Maybe it’s not soft at all, but essentially the thinking piece and the staying in shape piece, that they are so critical or they would be critical for any type of job?
Oh, that’s a great question. I think they matter for any job that these things do come into play. Maybe the reason it comes out more strikingly for leadership is because of the amount of pressure that is typically there, the amount of stretch that leaders are often pushed into or drawn into to do something really challenging. And they’re usually the front person. They are responsible at the end of the day for everything. And also they’re not in control of everything. Not that any of us are, but I think the point is when you lead something that is more than just a single person business, for example, immediately you have other people who are executing and who are carrying out pieces of the business. When you scale that with investors, now you have a whole host of other people that you have to satisfy as well as have ideas and things. So it may just be that because
leaders are often pushed more to the edge, managing all of those categories becomes more important.
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Yeah, it brings to mind, there was an interview with Jeff Bezos, and he talked about how he is not involved in managing his companies anymore. And basically what he said was that his main job each day is to make not more than three decisions, but three good decisions. And he does a lot of work to stay fit, to be rested in order to make those decisions right. So it sounds like he has more than 50% of his buckets or 50% of what he does or what he needs to be in those latter two buckets. So it’s not even a 50-50, maybe it’s a 5-95 distribution. So I wonder whether when someone is moving up the ladder and they go from doing things to leading people and to coming up with a vision and maybe to leading leaders, as you’re elevating the ideas, the communication, the energy projection, and just your being is becoming more important and then you have to put more energy into it. Is this how you see it?
That’s an interesting observation. I think that I suspect, and of course I’m talking out of turn here, I suspect that to make those one to three really good decisions takes a ton of strategic effort and investment in learning and thinking. I might say the execution bucket probably does decrease quite a bit, but the other three buckets still potentially are quite important. And maybe the execution bucket, what that has really become is really good decisions about who your very next line of leadership is. And that even though it may not be that many people, that the decision in who you hire, who you pick, who then of course is going to have much more influence on that execution. That’s a strategic decision, but that impacts the execution bucket. But I might be splitting hairs at this point. I think it’s a really interesting observation, Steve.
Or maybe the execution is the communication. Maybe it’s about being in those meetings and arguing the point and listening to research, to other people’s positions and try to synthesize things. And maybe that’s the execution. It’s not by hand. So how much time do you spend on each of those buckets? Is strategy more an upfront thing and then it becomes less of the time or does it not even matter? How do you share your time between the different buckets with a typical client?
It depends. And it depends both where the client’s strengths are, but also sometimes what the context is that they’re dealing with. So for example, I’ve encountered clients who have kind of a buoyant personality. Their mindset is often in a pretty good place. So in terms of just their sense of optimism, willingness to like keep going on stuff, we don’t necessarily need to bolster that very much versus for a different person where something’s really difficult, like things have been really chaotic. And maybe not through any of their own doing. It’s just the situation they came into. We might have to spend more time there because they’re working really hard and it may be a slow journey to seeing results. And so we have to figure out how to keep them in there.
But I think
one of the interesting things about strategy that I will bring up is you can use strategy as a lens, both they're sort of high-level strategy.
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You can always ask three questions or spend some time thinking and then ask some three questions as prompts to help you approach things less from a reactive standpoint and much more from a strategic standpoint. So the three questions I like to ask, and these are true for high level strategy as well, are what is it I want to have happen? This is the simplest way, not even what is my goal, but it’s like, what do I want out of this? What is the outcome that is most important? And if there was a sub outcome, maybe what would that be? But like try to not have a list of 20 outcomes you’re trying to achieve because that means we’ve lost our clarity. And then the second question is, what do I think is actually going to be most important in driving towards that outcome? There may be many things that we could do or work on, but what’s probably the most important? You could also view this as sort of that 80-20 rule, that we get 80% of our results from about 20% of our efforts.
And then I think the third question, which is one of my favorites, is what is going to distract us or me? What is the red herring or the emotional button that’s getting pushed that is going to be a total like distraction as I’m trying to navigate this circumstance versus if I can just focus on what is probably needed to encourage the outcome I want. And so this is a tool I use for strategy to just simplify it and also to help people think strategically, even outside those moments when you’re very clearly in your like planning moment, even if you’re just an executive sitting in a meeting listening to what’s happening and trying to decide what your biggest value add could be, is to run through those questions in your head and it will often hone what you say, make it clear to the audience, and also not overstep and get to meddling in what is probably weeds you shouldn’t be in.
Yeah, I love it. These are great questions. And I like to ask the first two questions with my clients, but I haven’t thought about the third one. I think it’s very important. So the way we use the first two questions or something similar to the first two questions, when we figure out who’s doing what in a company, then we figure out the functions that they do, whether it’s sales, marketing, engineering, administration, whatever they are. And then we look for those outcomes. What are those one or two big outcomes? And then how do you drive those outcomes with a weekly activity?
So what’s the KPI that’s going to go and drive the outcome? And it might not drive it, we can then tweak it, but what is that? But I really like the distraction piece because that is what’s preventing some of those activities in happening, the distraction. And as you were explaining it, I was just thinking about myself and my businesses that I have some distractions in my business. I have to remove them. I have to start thinking about removing them to make time, energy for those important activities that will drive the outcome. This is very helpful. Well, thank you. Thank you. So, is this just a strategy piece or in the other buckets that also applies?
I think one can always ask those questions in the other buckets. The buckets aren’t independent. They influence each other. And so certainly you could ask the question like, Hey, when I think about execution, like that sort of falls into like, once you’ve decided what the priorities are, you could also then start to say you define KPIs. That’s a great way of saying, okay, well, in executing this priority, what is actually the activity that is perhaps most important. Or what’s the leading and the lagging indicators that we would want to be looking at measuring tracking.
One of the things I think about a lot, just coming up back to a principle level for that execution buckets. Now we’re moving on to bucket number two, we’ll talk about some tools. That one of the things I like to think about is how do you empower your team to execute efficiently, more effectively? Because once a business grows to a particular size, like again, as the leader, you’re probably not actually doing the execution. And so thinking about your team matters a lot. So there are three pieces. When I think about making a very powerful team, or you could even say cultivating the power of your team is how I put it. There’s three different elements to it that are great for a leader to be thinking about.
One is just capability. So
this idea that if you can have your team growing in their skill and their capability, they are going to produce more for you over time. Like that's, it's an investment that is good for them because as human beings, actually we are motivated when…
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If we know, for example, what our role is and why that matters to the group objectives, why it’s important. But also, for example, if we’re trying to solve a problem and there are moments where the team is actually asked, do you have ideas about this? Like, are we approaching this in the right way? Or is there something we’re missing?
That ability to influence decision-making is very motivating to a team.
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So for example, within a company, you have a particular team and they are known for what they’re able to produce, how well they do it. This could even be your accounting team. An internal service provider. But if they’re known within the company as like great to work with, can get your questions answered, can make things happen. Suddenly your other departments may be talking to them sooner and earlier, and things may be going better because of it. There might be better budgetary planning or fill in the blank.
The goal is that being visible does matter. And that can be both external to the company as well as internal to the company.
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Yeah. I love it. I’ve never thought about it this way. I have experienced people, obviously learning is fun and when people learn and they know they grow, it’s just the learning itself is fun, but it also increases their market value as employees. So they know that they’re in a good place because even though maybe their salary is not rising, but their value is rising and they know that it’s going to have an impact down the road. The influence, yeah, I mean, if we all want to have a meaningful job and if you don’t influence, if you’re not part of a bigger picture and we don’t impact or we don’t know how to impact it, then that’s not motivating. But if you do, that really is. And if it’s visible, then other people know that we are making the impact. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, well, we are running out of time, but what else about the mindset that you might want to talk about? How do we improve the mindset of our team and of ourselves?
This is a great place to finish up because we can wrap in a little bit of physiology here too. So in mindset, I think one of the biggest things that leaders and team members are dealing with is uncertainty. I think uncertainty is one of the hardest things that we can come up against with our mindset these days. When I think about mindset, there are both actions we can take and also perspectives we can take that are helpful.
So one perspective that I think is really important in the face of uncertainty is to understand that the stress that we feel in the face of that, the discomfort we feel, which is very biological, by the way, our brains were built to not like…
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A lot of it has to do with how we think about it. And so, a flip side of a way to think about uncertainty is to say that if we had no uncertainty in our work and our life, we would be bored out of our minds and there would be no growth, there would be no opportunity, and that that would not actually be a very good human state to be in. And it’s helpful to remember that the opposite is a not good place. And then it can be helpful to reframe the uncertainty as like, this is something I don’t know yet, but it actually can be a force for good in terms of my own growth. And also it is probably in service of something I really care about. And it’s just good to have things you care about in your life. It means you are engaged. It means you’re impacting things. So from a mindset standpoint, as a leader, you can help kind of reframe it for your team, but also reframe it for yourself.
The yin and yang, it’s the risk and opportunity thing, right?
Exactly. But frame it. And you’re not trying to say it’s all good. Like no one will believe you if you say that. But I like it how you said it. The yin and the yang. You say this is part of why we have some good is because we are having the risk. And so they come together. And then in terms of actions that you can take that are really helpful, I think number one is you can help your team understand what do you do in the face of uncertainty.
And there's usually two things. Number one, you can spend some time thinking. And number two, you can spend some time learning.
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Because uncertainty often highlights a gap between what we know right now and what we might need to know to be successful in a new context, in a new environment. I think we all, as people, feel better when we have a plan. And so one of the plans you can make in the face of uncertainty is to say, what do we want to learn about? What are the topics we need to think about and maybe think about our values on? And then finally, what experiments could we run? So you get to be a scientist and you can say, well, how could we learn some answers, even though they’re not things we could read in a book or find on the internet? What could we try? And I think that’s very powerful for people to have a plan.
Then the last piece, the physiology, is that uncertainty revs up our fight or flight system. There’s often a lot of adrenaline. And so just a little bit about physiology, This is a wonderful time when things are uncertain to take extra care, to find ways to bring your system back down again. Our systems are capable of handling adrenaline, they were built to handle it, but they do better when we get some rest and recovery and then ramp back up. So things like sleep, a breathing practice or like a meditation, just even like one minute of deep breathing can be really powerful during a stressful day. Going outside or going for a walk, it doesn’t even have to be intense exercise, just moving your body will process some of that. Being outside is very good for us as human beings. So a couple of tips on that physiology front, like how you can help with that.
Yeah, I love it. This is a really good perspective through the scientist’s lens that how do we control, how do we manage our mindset, how do we manage our physiology, how we reframe things. My grandfather always used to say that there’s a kernel of good in every bad, and that I would ask him if someone died, what’s good about that, and kind of put him on the spot. But yeah, I mean, Napoleon here talks about that as well. It’s a great reframe. And yeah, I love it. I love it. It’s all the four buckets and definitely gives a lot to talk about with the CEO who is going through these things. These buckets are pretty deep. So there’s a lot fit in those buckets. So Carla, if someone is really intrigued by this and they would like to either have you talk to them to explore these buckets and their mindset and their strategy and so on, or if they want to learn more about your techniques and what you do, where can they find you and your staff and how can they connect with you?
Yeah, thanks for that, Steve. Well, I love connecting with people and if you’re interested in hearing more about performance science, LinkedIn is a great place to connect and follow along. So I’m at www.linkedin.com/in/carla-fowler. And then if you’re interested in learning more about coaching, my website is a wonderful place to go. You can message me through the site and also there’s a great FAQ page. So that’s at thaxa.com.
So definitely check out thaxa.com by mind or by brain. Very interesting. I asked you during the pre-interview why THAXA and you said that it’s Latin for task, but I should have asked the follow-up questions. Okay, so why are tasks so important?
So I liked it because I think the first performance principle I ever learned in my life was that if you want to do something really big or ambitious, you don’t have to do it all in one step. It’s just a series of lining up the right smaller tasks in a row and stacking them up. A lot of coaching is helping people do that. They’ve got ambitious goals and lots on their plate. So I love just thinking about how do we break this down into the manageable tasks that they can stack up.
Wow. That’s very profound. So I love this metaphor, and James Clear in Atomic Habits, he talks about habit stacking. And I like this idea of habit stacking. And I like to think that when I work with companies that that’s what I want to do with them. So teach them another approach and then ingrain it so that it’s going to be part of their arsenal going forward and kind of habit stack them so that they become more and more powerful as this time goes on. So that’s fascinating. So Carla Fowler, MD and PhD, the scientist of coaching, and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching. Check her out on LinkedIn, check her out on thaxa.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, and if you’re like me, then you probably have. If you like to think about what is behind different concepts and what makes them tick, then stay tuned because we get more and more exciting thought leaders and CEOs come on the show and explain how they make their businesses run. So, thanks for coming, Carla, and thank you for listening.
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