The podcast by project managers for project managers. Constance Dierickx lays out a new paradigm for leadership that offers a way to synthesize thinking, emotion, and behavior. Meta-leadership goes beyond conventional leadership attributes, emphasizing not only the possession of knowledge and skills but also a keen sense of observation and discernment.

Table of Contents

02:29 … Meta-Leadership04:42 … Adopting a Meta-Leadership Strategy07:24 … Meta-Leadership Enables Decision-Making10:12 … Factors that Drive our Decisions14:36 … A Tension between Certainty and Uncertainty18:45 … Dealing with Unprofessional Behavior24:35 … Meta-Level Awareness26:16 … Kevin & Kyle27:22 … The Courage to Fail32:23 … Listen, Learn, and be Curious36:55 … Connect with Constance38:42 … Closing

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  And I can't stress the importance of showing sincere interest in other people.  Don't say it.  Don't say, “I'm a people person.”  No one believes you.  Don't say, “People are our greatest asset.”  No one believes you.  Public relations, vanilla pudding.  Do not spew the typical stuff.  Say things that are sincere and memorable and uniquely yours.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I'm Wendy Grounds.  In the studio with me is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We're so excited you're joining us today.  We're talking with Constance Dierickx, and she is the author of a book that we have read called “Meta-Leadership:  How to See What Others Don't and Make Great Decisions.”  Constance is really fun to talk to and has excellent advice.  I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

She earned her PhD in clinical psychology focusing on decision science and crisis intervention.  She's an internationally recognized expert in high-stakes decision-making, and she has advised leaders and delivered speeches in more than 20 countries.  She's the founder and president of CD Consulting Group.  And we're going to be looking at her book “Meta-Leadership.”  One of the things that comes out of her book that I thought was really interesting was good leaders become great in part because they recognize that their own thinking, emotions, and habits of behavior can be a source of error.  So this is time for a lot of introspection.  We're going to be looking at ourselves, looking a little deeper and how are we being meta-leaders?

BILL YATES:  Even to decision-making.  And here's an example of how Constance applies this idea of meta-leadership.  Let's say I'm contemplating a significant decision.  Here are questions that I should answer.  Who am I trying to please?  Or who do I not want to disappoint or annoy?  What pressures am I experiencing to make one decision or another?  Are there opinions that I am minimizing or dismissing because I don't like that person that they're coming from?  Am I being closed-minded?  Those are some of the questions that we're going to be prompted to consider as we look at this topic and discuss it further with Constance.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Constance.  Welcome to Manage This.

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  Thank you, Wendy.  It's delightful to see you and Bill on my screen.

Meta-Leadership

WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you describe for our audience what you mean by meta-leadership?

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  Yes, yes.  So “meta” is a prefix from the Greek.  Someone needs to tell Mark Zuckerberg that it's not a word unto itself, although I doubt he'll listen.  “Meta” means above or beyond.  And so we think about metacognition, which means thinking about your thinking, which I write about in the book.  I have a whole section on thinking.  We think about meta-analysis.  So researchers will sometimes take a group of studies that have something in common.  Maybe they're all studying the effects of a new antidepressant, and they collapse the data and do what's called the “meta-analysis.”  And so you get the “meta‑study.”

I have worked with boards and CEOs for 25 years.  And I always ask myself two questions.  One is why do these smart people do things that don't look so smart, which has haunted me for decades.  But the other question is what do great leaders do differently?  And I've been so lucky to work with a number of extraordinary leaders.  What I've found that they do is that they think above and beyond, and they're synthesizers.  So meta-leadership really lays out a new paradigm for leadership that offers leaders a way to synthesize thinking, emotion and behavior. 

And looking at what we gain by overlapping, what is the overlap when you have metacognition, awareness of emotion, and the ability to observe habits of behavior?  You get a really powerful combination that leads to insights.  And generally in great leaders, it also surprisingly leads to empathy, not only for others, but for themselves.  Anne Morriss and Francis Frei, researchers and consultants like to say leadership is imperfect humans leading imperfect humans.  And we sometimes forget that.

BILL YATES:  Yes, that is so true.  That sounds just like our day-to-day struggles with projects.

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  Yeah, exactly.

Adopting a Meta-Leadership Strategy

 BILL YATES:  We haven't really arrived as a leader and there we are thrust into these projects.  So I love the application of what you've shared in your book and the research that you have with project management and just thinking about how to apply that.  If a project manager were to adopt this meta-leadership strategy, how might that lead to success?

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  Well, it would lead them to utilize, but also be appropriately skeptical of their tactics.  Tactics in project management tend to be well known, well understood, and well practiced.  And there's a lot of training and education in project management.  A lot of it's very good, but it does narrow your aperture.  It sort of closes that lens. 

And I want to say specializing in anything does that.  You know, when you have a PhD in clinical psych, for example, I'll just go with that one since that's what I know best.  It does tend to, you see the world through that particular lens.  And what I've found is extremely beneficial is to be able to switch out your lenses, not throwing in the garbage what you know about project management, but just widening that lens.  And that means being less of a specialist, less of an expert, if you will.

I know in my business practice, in my advisory work, showing up and throwing up on people everything I know is a sure way to be shown the door.  Because first of all, I'm not respecting the context.  Project management is done in a context.  And so we have to respect the context, which means we have to be curious and learn about the context. 

So with consultants, I'm fond of saying to coaches, people that are executive coaches will contact me quite often, and they start telling me what their methodology is.  And they all think it's groundbreakingly special.  It is not.  It is all some version of a procedure, a checklist.  It's not that that's bad.  It's just that people marry it.  We marry Six Sigma.  We marry some stakeholder paradigm.  And what I wanted to do with “Meta-Leadership” was say, this is a paradigm that lets you be aware of all the other paradigms that you're hanging onto.

BILL YATES:  Awareness is one of the biggest takeaways I had from the book, the self-awareness and awareness of the environment.  We'll go deeper into that.  That’s a key word for me.

Meta-Leadership Enables Decision-Making

WENDY GROUNDS:  Another big part of the book is decision-making.  How meta-leadership enables decision making.  And if I just can add a quote that you said, “A common but surprising cause of bad decisions is past success.”  Can you elaborate on that and talk about decision making?

CONSTANCE DIERICKX:  Yes.  It would probably help the listener to sort of imagine, to pick out from their experience an example of a leader who was the, I know it all, large and in charge leader.  They come into your company from XYZ.  We'll just pick on the external hire, right, who comes in at a leadership level, kicks in the door and says, well, when I was at fill-in-the-blank, when I was at GE, when I was at PepsiCo, when I was at P&G, whatever it happens to be. 

That's an example of a failure being born from the seeds of success.  What happened there that worked well, no doubt there are some principles we can extract from that.  But what people tend to do is they apply tactics from situation to situation.  And sometimes the situations look strikingly familiar on the surface.  But again, if you are curious, and you take the time to learn about the context, you will be able to see differences and distinctions as well as similarities.  Then the decisions you make will be much better.

You know, another success trap that leaders have is that they don't realize what decisions they're making.  They don't realize what decisions they've already made or what decisions they're postponing.  So being acutely attuned is really super important.  And it's why an external advisor is so important because internal people are less likely to tell you the truth.  I work with a lot of CEOs, and I always tell them – they say, “Well, I think I know what's going on.”  And I’m like, “Eh, my money's on you don't.  My money's on you know a great portion of what's going on.  My money is also on some of what you think is a two out of 10 is really an eight.”

But here's the good news.  Once you are asking yourself the question, you can engage in a process to find out.  And it's the experimentation, the finding out, and curiosity is a very emotional thing that really distinguishes great, great, great leaders from the “eh, okay” leader.

Factors that Drive our Decisions

BILL YATES:  This brings me to the next question we wanted to discuss with you.