The Leader Learner Podcast

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Check-In Question:

• What do you look back and think, "I would never do that again?"

Big Ideas:

• We do our best thinking when are up and moving around
• Gestures help us think through ideas 
• "We use our brains entirely too much."
• Do we use our brains, or does our brain use us?
• Most of our best ideas come when not trying to think through something
• Thinking harder is counter-productive
• Protestant thinking is against fun and all about hard work
• Not wrestle with ideas, but play with them
• What is professional?
• Definitions of seriousness that drive our learning
• Rise of ADHD in the US and the increase in seat time in schools
• 20 minutes in nature was better for ADHD students than the medications
• More productive after micro-breaks
• Think will think better after a break, but think better because of the break
• Don't separate our movement from our work - invite movement into your day
• Walking meetings
• More accurate when walking while thinking (Radiologist study)
• Nietzsche had the best ideas while walking
• Mobile intelligence
• Not separate the mind from the body
• Level of conversation is elevated when we are elevated
• Afraid of chaos - children were "little savages"
• Play time versus work time
• "The opposite of play isn't work, the opposite of play is depression." ~Stuart Brown
• Emotional regulation being improved when spend time outside
• Importance of natural light to working
• The privilege of having access to green spaces
• Bringing nature into built spaces to support productivity
• Awe - the word and the sound
• We are not too different from our environment
• Leaders creating space for movement (modeling)

Resources:

• The RACI Method
• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• Pomodoro Technique

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Check-In Question:

• Do you think the internet is making people more or less social than we used to be?

Big Ideas

• Look at the quality of connections
• Move to virtual was an opportunity for many
• What is remote work?  What do I do in the office? How do I cope with back-to-back calls? Do I have to watch recordings of missed meetings?
• How do we collaborate together in this new transformation?
• When culture does not exist, how do you create it?
• What do we need to do to create great learning experiences where people are engaged?
• Small bites of learning, 15-20 minutes per day
• Community and connection to talk about your learning
• Difference between knowledge/content and skill
• Skill requires connecting with people and comparing your learning
• Transferring knowledge to skill base - learning to assimilate it
• Reading a book in community - learning more than I would alone
• Social constructivism - people construct knowledge together
• Change of scenery, movement, and other people support us to think
• What can you influence yourself?
• Shift expectations for how we attend meetings - listening or presenting
• Trust and safe spaces to help people break the "rules"
• Resistance to do things differently - break the boundaries
• What keeps us in front of our screens?
• Social price to pay for breaking the boundaries - Will people take us seriously?
• Role-modeling is really important
• Showcasing what learning can do for me - keeping my intellectual side
• Not being forced to learn
• Transparent about what learning and why - skill gaps, or curiosity
• Taking time to learn gets me, slow down, be vulnerable
• Craving out time for learning and development - not a one-off, part of the working week
• Following your own curiosity creates momentum
• Mandatory learning can create box checking
• Learn and engage differently when forced to learn something or self-initiate
• "I think a learn-it-all will always be better than a know-it-all in my book." -Microsoft CEO, 
• How do organizations provide the space and the financial means to keep learning?
• Leaders modeling learning and inviting people to learn with them
• Learning being fun
• Leaders helping raise the "power" standing of their employees
• Lead by example and create positive experiences for my team
• Short term satisfaction versus long term gains
• The power of coaching and a learning network

Resources:

• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
• Stephen Covey
• Discover Your Clifton Strengths by Gallup (Don Clifton)
• Clifton's Strengths Finders

You can connect with Lisa Davidian here. 

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Check-In Question:

• What are you attached to?

Big Ideas:

• How does our attachment related to our happiness?
• Relationships have a direct relationship to our health
• What will continue to shift in our relationships as we work in virtual spaces
• Desperate for connection
• Can't escape our need for connection
• A tribe is 150 people
• Are people more afraid of connection because of the pandemic?
• 1 in 3 people around the globe says they are lonely (pre-covid)
• Social media gives us a false sense of connection
• Relying on tools for connection, but it's not true connection
• We say things online we wouldn't say in person
• Comparison of curated lives
• Prioritizing real connections with real people
• Social fitness - an ongoing practice in developing relationships
• How do we develop friendships?
• Cultural differences in how relationships are developed
• Baby steps in building relationships
• Social services as a way to meet new people
• Age not being a defining factor in a friendship
• Shifting from risk aversion to risk affinity
• Relationships take vulnerability. One person has to be the first to be vulnerable.
• Create chance and opportunity 
• Acknowledging risks and the possibilities
• The illusion of control in staying in the known, even if it's uncomfortable
• Peach versus coconut styles of friendships
• Relying on Employee Resources Groups in lonely at work
• Reaching out to people out of curiosity, without an agenda
• Letting people know that you appreciated something that they said, even if you don't know them
• Not taking it personally if people don't respond when we reach

Resources:

• Article: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-the-worlds-longest-study-of-adult-development-finds-the-key-to-happy-living

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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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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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Check-In Question

• Have you given yourself a life mission?

Big Ideas:

• How different industries look at failure and learning
• Not being criminalized for making mistakes
• Can we really trust people? (ie, Body Cams)
• When to be treated as a criminal for a mistake that kills someone and when not to
• The situations that draw us into making life/death decisions
• Does black-boxing situations help us be objective?
• Hold people accountable without blame.
• Is blame the opposite of accountability?
• Blame has a sense of judgment and can be poisonous to culture
• Cultural differences in using blame
• Blame puts us on a pedestal and the other below us
• Blame leads to defensiveness
• Cognitive dissonance - when what we believe goes against the reality of a situation
• The smarter we are or the higher up in the organization, the more likely we are to fabricate evidence
• People not letting go of the idea of being wrong
• Fundamental Attribution Error - responsibility being context specific, or a character trait
• Difference between responsibility and accountability
• Historically, we would ostracize people from the tribe to keep it secure
• Emotional engagement in our own opinions - echo chambers
• Sense of worthiness entrenched into our relationship with being wrong
• "The paradox of success is based on failure."
• Persistence past failure
• If success is based on failure, keep failing again and again
• Blame and guilt assigned to others stops people
• Do we know what failure looks like?
• What are we looking at as our metrics of success or failure?
• How do leaders know if they are being successful or not?
• Subjectivity of success/failure
• When managers don't understand us - asking managers what they need
• Expect managers to have the conversation with us, though we can start the conversation. What do you need? How can I help you?
• Doing your job the way you think you should be doing it, versus how your manager thinks you should be doing it
• "Those who are the most successful are the most vulnerable." 
• Personal vulnerability versus product vulnerability
• Failure is opportunity to learn
• Self-handicapping - when you purposely create an alternative explanation for a possible failure (self-sabotage)
• Using constraints to create creativity
• If willing to accept mistakes more quickly, can be more successful
• Growth and fixed mindset
• Not getting evidence to go against labels of self

Resources:

• Start your Why, Find our Why, and Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
• Black Box Thinking   by Matthew Syed
• No Rules Rules by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings
• Mindset by Carol Dweck

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with Guest, Gwen Stirling-Wilke
Dialogic OD Consultant

Check-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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An episode of questions, all about 2022. How would you answer these?

• What was the best $100/100€ you spent in 2022?
• What compliment did you receive in 2022 that still sticks with you?
• What book did you read in 2022 that was really impactful? 
• What is the nicest thing that someone did for you in 2022?
• What was the best TV show, movie, or series you watched in 2022?
• What is something you had the most fun doing in 2022?
• If you could give 1 piece of advice from your experience in 2022, what advice would you give? 
• Describe a time when you did something reckless or daring in 2022.
• What's something that happened in 2022 that made you really angry?
• What is 1 thing you regret from 2022 as you look back? 
• What is 1 thing you did in 2022, that you would do differently in 2023?
• What does the world need more of in 2023 as you look back on 2023?
• Was there any period in 2022 that was difficult, but ultimately made you a strong or better person? 
• What are you looking forward to in 2023?

Resources Mentioned:

• The Gift of Therapy by Irvin D. Yalom
• Essentialism by Greg McKeown
• The 5 Love Languages 
• Glow (TV Series)
• Severance (TV Series)
• The End of History and the Last Man
• The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink
• Time to Think by Nancy Kline

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Check-In Question:

• Are you the kind of person to make the first step in love? Tell us all about it.

Big Ideas:

• 8 different dimensions of culture that show up in work:
  • Communication (low context or high context)
  • Evaluating (indirect negative or direct)
  • Persuading (why or how)
  • Leading (Egalitarian or Hierarchical
  • Deciding (Consensus or. Top Down)
  • Trust (Task-based or Relationship-based)
  • Disagreeing (Confrontational or Avoidant)
  • Scheduling (Flexible or Linear)
• Is seeing person by culture stereotyping?
• Talking to the person versus talking to the country they come from
• The culture sets a range
• We need to look at culture and personality
• Crossing legs so people see the bottom of your shoe is a faux pas in Japan
• Difference between cultural sensitivity and using culture as predictors
• Stereotyping and prototyping
• Assume you will do "stupid stuff" in new cultures and apologize in advance
• Humility of saying "I don't really know."
• Learning a few words in the language
• One of the best ways to ingratiating yourself in a new culture is to be a bit self-deprecating in your own culture
• What we think is "normal" in the new culture
• The US being more task-based than European culture
• Trust always start as task-based, then moves to relationship based once people finish the tasks
• Task based is more controlling and has more cost
• Differences in perception of "wasting time"
• Making assumptions and using the book to check assumptions
• Creating hypothesis about people and then test it, not using stereotypes as the ultimate truth
• How historical context affects cultural communication
• How religion affects culture
• One-on-one meetings focus more on the person and really listen
• Sandwich style feedback taught in the US
• Downplaying negative feedback - "Maybe you should"
• Not wanting to hurt people's feelings
• When people tell you what you are doing well, and don't mention what you aren't doing well. 
•  Creating mentor schemes
• Peach cultures (soft on the outside, hard in the middle) versus Coconut cultures (hard on the outside, soft)
• Different cultures within the same country
• How are we stereotyping people and is that the best way of building relationship?
• Intent versus impact when feedback - managing the gaps
• Not hearing feedback and not being receptive to it (in denial)
• Living and experiencing different cultures can help us be better humans, even within our own culture
• Incorrect assumptions about our own cultures
• Clarifying intentions
• Traveling and being mindful of others cultures - being an ethnographer/anthropologist
• Culture being a test bed of human differences and to be a better person
• How much we believe that what we do is normal
• Continually exposing ourselves to other cultures and not get entrenched

Resources Mentioned:

• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• INSEAD Business School
• No Rules Rules by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings
• Hofstede Culture Research

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Check-In Question:

• How do you define intelligence?

Big Ideas:

• Is charismatic leadership over-rated? 
• Likeability versus leadership. They aren't mutually exclusive.
• Melencholic leaders are more affective
• Power over (positional), versus power with (relational)
• What emotions can be shown at work, and by whom?
• Leadership struggles for Theresa come from trying to be the strong, even in the face of hard emotions
• Sharing emotions can build trust
• Holding down the balloon underwater isn't sustainable
• Big life changes are okay at work, but the little stresses accumulate and can't always been shown, shared at work
• Do leaders have to be likeable?
• Does leadership matter for executives? Do we overvalue it?
• How do you define leadership?
• An executive is merely someone who makes decisions who affect the company
• Leadership is about non-organizational skills, but people skills (not process, strategy, etc.)
• Leadership is multifaceted
• Leadership is defined by how you face adversity
• Adversity sets leaders apart
• Leaders because of who you are, and "leaders" who have a position/title only
• Don't know our ability to lead until after a crisis happens
• Testament to leadership - do you have other people's back and do they have yours?
• Everybody can be a leader
• Challenge to understand ourselves well enough to serve others
• Leadership for ego, and leadership for change
• Not here to only serve ourselves, we are here to serve people and solve problems through our businesses
• How do you need to be a leader in the face of "evil" or "bad" people in the world?
• How does culture influence who we want as a leader? 
• Vulnerability isn't the only key to being a good leader
• The importance of knowing who you are as part of any leadership program
• Tell someone who/how to be, or allow people the chance to experience it themselves
• Can't buy leadership on the shelf
• Serving others from internal or external motivation
• What are you serving others for?
• Leadership comes from the backend of a crisis.
• We can all look like great leaders when it's rosy

Resources:

• HBR Must Reads on Leadership
• Bittersweet by Susan Cain
• Brené Brown
• Band of Brothers 
• The Circle Way
• The Conscious Creator by Kelly Small
• The Prince -Machiavelli
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

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