Month: August 2020

GLS20 Session Notes: Forces That Affect Your Influence

GLS20 Sadie Robertson Huff Article Header Image

The following are notes from Sadie Robertson Huff’s interview with Craig Groeschel at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

Our world is full of those that want to have influence, but if true leadership means we are using our influence to make a positive difference in our world, then Sadie Robertson Huff is a true leader. In this session, Craig Groeschel interviews Sadie drawing out some of the unique ways this entrepreneur has tackled leadership and used her platform for good. She helps gain insight into how to build trust, handle public criticism and continue to grow as a leader.

 

Groeschel: When would you say was one of the first times that you might’ve recognized, “I do have a gift of leadership?

Robertson Huff: It took me longer to recognize.

  • My mom always said, “You’re a leader, you have a natural born leadership.”
  • Actually, my grandma, every day before we went to school, when we spent the night with her, she would say, “Okay, be a good leader. Be an example today.” I heard that every single morning.
  • I think I constantly was prepped, even from that time of a young age to be a good leader and example in what I was doing, but I didn’t really think about it.
  • In seventh grade, middle school started. Girls started to get mean in middle school. And I told my mom, “This is ridiculous. I have got to do something.”
  • Asked the teacher to meet with all the fifth-grade girls and encouraged them to not become mean as they aged into middle school.
  • Insecurities lessened when reading Hebrews 10:35 “Do not forget the confident trust that you have in the Lord, for that will be richly rewarded.”
  • That doesn’t mean I have to be confident in myself, that means I have to be confident in who made me. And through that trust, maybe I could really do something, not because of my power, but because of God’s.

Groeschel: Parents, empower your children to think in a different way.

  • And then you said you didn’t even recognize or realized that you were leading, and I think there may be some people right now you don’t even recognize in this moment, at this time, you are leading and making a difference.
  • Feel the power, or the weight, the responsibility of that–you are a leader.
How you make an impact?

Robertson Huff: I started a ministry called Live Original.

  • I’ve written three books, I have started to tour, I started a clothing company, a podcast.
  • Anything I can do to reach people by the love of Jesus is what I’m doing.
  • Ask, “How can we reach this generation with the love of Jesus?”

Groeschel: What qualities do you look for in those people to assemble the leaders around you?

Robertson Huff: STORY | Assembling Her Team:

  • My team is organically and passionately sourced.
  • Encouraging others to live their passion and pursue their interests.
    • Noticed her team member’s doodles.
    • Hired her full time to create artwork to convey the messages wanting to communicate.
    • Artist now runs the Instagram that has acquired over 200,000 followers.
  • Living the passion God has placed in our lives.
  • Living according to what purpose we are meant to do.

Groeschel: How do you learn to trust your team? And then secondly, how do you create trust with those who are looking to you?

Robertson Huff: This is something I’ve struggled with.

  • Trust is so big for me–it’s so crucial. I’ve asked them (the team) the hard questions, they’ve asked me the hard questions, so we’ve said the hard things, but we’ve also celebrated each other and the high moments of life and the good moments of life.
  • Invest in each other’s life. Some people run companies or churches with hundreds of people, and you can’t do that with everybody. But I think if you can, if you can invest in somebody’s life in the highs and lows, it naturally builds such trust.
  • Leaning into the StrengthsFinders quiz and selecting a strength to base work around to best communicate and cultivate a team and mutual goals/the mission.
  • The team is able to say, “We can trust each other”, “We know where we’re going to go”, and “It’s going to impact people with faith and it’s going to be authentic”.
  • If you’re all on the same page, you can trust people knowing we’re going in the same lane.
  • Hve the relational intelligence to say, “Hey, that was a little off,” or, “That wasn’t your best, but here’s how it can be better.”

Groeschel: What would you say to an emerging leader to help create more of a spirit of authenticity?

Robertson Huff: Whenever you’re authentic and are just real with people and you let people into what you’re going through, it really helps you get to where you’re going faster.

  • Say, “Hey, I feel like we should talk about this subject because I think this generation really needs it. But to be honest, I’m really struggling with this.”
  • Talking points will come from that and end up being in the message.
  • As a leader, it only makes you better to be authentic and to be straight up with people.
  • Young leaders especially in this generation crave authenticity because so many things are fad or fake.

Groeschel: What advice would you have for other leaders that are starting something right now?

Robertson Huff: You can’t know it all.

  • If you fall in public, then you’ll get up twice as fast.
  • If you make a mistake, you’re going to learn twice as fast if it’s in public.
  • You have to have humility.
  • Know that it’s not always going to be perfect and it’s not always going to go right, but you’re going to get to where you’re going through falling a few times.
  • Be a student.
  • Ask, “What could I be better at?”
  • Speak into others.
  • Ask yourself how you can get the most out of your mentors.

Groeschel: How do you get the most out of your mentors?

Robertson Huff: Being authentic, vulnerable and real.

  • Say, “Hey this is what I’m struggling with”.
  • Be willing to listen to their answer.
  • Be willing to do the work.
  • Ask questions.
    • “How did you get past that hump?”
    • “How did you get to where you’re going?”
  • Ask questions and let them speak into you, listening for the answer.

Groeschel: How do you deal with the weight and responsibility of influence knowing that what you say, what you show, what you portray, really does impact people.

Robertson Huff: A lot of prayer.

  • Having real and honest prayers with God.
  • Admitting, “God, I’m really scared, and I think you chose the wrong person.”
  • Allow the Lord to meet you in those moments and places of fear.
  • Get rooted in the Word and rooted in prayer, then stay in it.
  • Let the light of Jesus shine through.
  • Understand it’s just not about me at the end of the day. It’s not for me to gain more followers, it’s not for me to get more likes, it’s not for me to get more attention, it’s for God to get the glory. And in that the weight is lifted because it’s carried by Jesus with you.

CONNECTION | Reminder In Fear:

  • Breathing techniques.
  • Self-reminders: “The Lord did not give us a spirit of fear, he gave us a sound mind.”
  • Saying, “Okay Lord, if you didn’t give me a spirit of fear, then give me a sound mind right now”.
  • Believe you can conquer fear through the power of God when you invite God in.

Groeschel: How do you handle those who shoot at you unfairly?

Robertson Huff: If you’re a leader, you’re just going to get criticism.

  • Grandma would say, “If you’re holding the football, you’re going to get tackled. It’s simple. It’s just how it is.”
  • Mom would say, “Don’t let those people’s opinions be the ones that matter in your life. You have so many people who do love you, who believe in what God’s calling you to, don’t let that one person’s opinion stop you from everything that God’s called you to.”
  • If you’re not careful, in the silent ways, it creates a little insecurity in your heart, but then you don’t realize how that one comment that you read three years ago is still replaying in your head whenever you’re going to do something.
  • It’s super important that you don’t let those things take root in your life and that you actually get them out no matter how silly they might sound. I think it’s important to pay attention to, but it’s super important to not let that drive the ship of your life.

Groeschel: What is it that just keeps you driving and showing back up?

Robertson Huff: Connecting with others who have the same mission- to go and preach the gospel.

  • Connection with husband, Christian.
  • Jesus experiencing criticism in his life–“If they hate you, they hated me first.”
  • Going back to the mission and what Jesus said, “Go and tell. Go into the world. Go and preach the Gospel.”

Groeschel: Could you speak to the leader who is hitting what I might call an insecurity ceiling.

Robertson Huff: If we didn’t feel those things, then the enemy wouldn’t be doing his job.

  • There’s always going to be something that maybe we’re insecure about. And I think it’s important for leaders to listen too.
  • I’ve had so many of those insecure moments.
  • What God’s done in my life God can do in your life, because it’s the same Spirit of Him that brings that confidence.
  • Trust the process.
  • Know, “God’s going to catch me and I’m going to see something I won’t have seen before had I not jumped.”

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: Six Traits Leaders Typically Lack During Crisis

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The following are notes from Dr. Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

During the pandemic there has been a great deal of speculation as to what type of leader is most needed to manage or handle a crisis. Over the past 100 years, there’s been a lot of research comparing the profiles of effective leaders in different circumstances. During this session, organizational psychologist, Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic answered this question and challenged us to develop six critical traits needed to thrive in uncertain times.

 

  • Throughout the history of leadership research, scientists and scholars have shown the success and effectiveness of a leader is partly, and sometimes largely, dependent on the context or situation the leader is in.
  • There are some exceptions—leaders who are amazing in any situation.
  • There are some leaders that seem to be bad in every situation—when changed from one environment into another, they still don’t deliver in a competent way.
  • For the vast majority of people, their leadership effectiveness and success will be dependent on the situation they’re in.
  • It is normal and logical that we ask the question of not just whether the pandemic or a crisis calls for a different type of leadership, but whether we have to throw away and completely revise what we know about leadership in order to accommodate the current circumstances.
STORY |Winston Churchill:
  • He was a great wartime prime minister but useless when peaceful times came.
  • It’s been said in peaceful times, the aggressive or violent man makes war with himself.
  • He was too combative, too blunt, too bold, too aggressive to preside over his country when times were good.
What type of leader is really needed for a crisis?
  • What type of leadership profile, qualities or competencies do we need when the situation is high stakes, unprecedented, or we have to manage a very complex and stressful time?
  • Over the past 100 years, empirical and quantitative research compares the profile of more and less effective leaders in different circumstances.

6 Important Attributes Leaders Need To Have In Order To Manage Or Navigate A Crisis:

1. Intelligence
  • The ability to learn quickly to reason obstructively and to make rational, data driven decisions.
  • More important than ever when leaders cannot rely on their past experience or expertise.
  • A crisis is a time or a period of traumatic transition where the old is not dead yet and the new is not quite ready to move in.
  • Smart leaders tell people and guide others through this traumatic transition—that can only happen if you, as a leader are capable of making smart and logical decisions.
  • You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. When leaders think that they have to be the smartest person in the room or behave as if they were, it typically doesn’t have healthy or successful consequences.
  • Have the intelligence to hire intelligent people and build teams made of people who are smart and data driven with strong mental horsepower.
STORY | David Ogilvy:

David Ogilvy is a marketing and advertising tycoon of the sixties and seventies, who said his only onboarding protocol or ceremony ritual when somebody joined his firm was to give them a Russian doll—a babushka doll—and say, “Look, this is my only advice for you. If you hire people who are smarter than you and bigger than you, at some point, we will become a company of giants. But if you only hire people who are less smart, less competent, less talented than you very quickly we’ll become a company or an organization of dwarfs.”

Pay attention to other people’s cleverness and intelligence.

STORY | Amos Tversky:

A psychologist in Israel who won the Nobel Prize for economics, Amos Tversky, was reportedly so smart his colleagues and university coined the Tversky Intelligence tests. They said, “When you meet and speak to Tversky, the sooner you realize that Tversky is smarter than you, the smarter you probably are.”

When leaders think they’re the smartest person in the room, they will make avoidable mistakes, underrate and underestimate others’ intelligence—especially when they don’t think like themselves.

2.  Intellectual Curiosity
  • When leaders are not curious, they get stuck in their own ways and become intellectually conservative, doing things in their specific way, stubborn, and arrogant.
  • It’s hard to persuade a leader to change their mind, especially when they combine high intelligence with low curiosity.
  • If you have somebody who isn’t the fastest mind and the fastest learner, but they’re curious, there is more hope that person gets better.
  • Curiosity means having a hungry mind, high levels of learnability, experiencing a sense of discomfort when you know you don’t know something.
  • Being aware of what you don’t know is really important, but it’s also important that the knowledge gap or the gap in the difference between what you know and what you would like to know makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable so you work hard to close it.
  • Not closing the curiosity gap around things that might not be considered, sustainable and nutritious food for your hungry mind, but more fast food.
  • Have a deeper appetite to ask why, to have a critical way to explore problems, to scratch under the surface and understand how things really work.
  • We have a certain baseline of curiosity that tends to cement around the age of 20. Curiosity does continue to change and develop as we grow older. Sadly, for most people, it tends to go down as they grow older.
  • One of the most effective ways to predict whether somebody is made a leader or not is whether they are old enough and more and more, we keep on selecting leaders because of their maturity and experience.
  • The older you are the naturally less curious you become.
  • In order to keep developing your curiosity, you need to go against the default tendency that we have to try to understand the world in a certain way and not question it anymore.
  • Go outside your comfort zone and ask uncomfortable questions.
STORY | Social Media:

Over the last 5 or 10 years we have blamed social media for creating the filter bubble we live in and as if algorithms and artificial intelligence are to blame. The filter bubble exists because humans love to live in a world where everything seems certain and predictable, but that also makes us less curious.

To work on your curiosity is to exit your filter bubble.

  • Hangout with people who don’t think like you.
  • If you’re a leader, that also means not hiring just for culture fit or on your own image, but actually embracing people who are cognitively diverse, who think differently, who can speak up on certain issues and provide a different perspective on things, which is how you avoid groupthink and how you avoid this systemic bias that comes when everyone sees the world in the same way.
  • A lot of organizations simultaneously say they value diversity, but that they love to hire on culture fit.
STORY | Travel:

Before COVID-19, people travelled and enjoyed going places. For those who haven’t, they’ve missed traveling for one very important reason. When you go to a new place, you develop curiosity, and see things from a different culture’s perspective. There is an understanding of what models and routines people follow to understand there are more ways to behave, think and feel.

3. Humility
  • If leaders don’t have humility, it’s very hard that they actually develop some curiosity. If they don’t have curiosity, it’s very hard that they develop expertise and that they become or act in a smarter way.
  • Humility is being aware of your limitations.
  • Humility is being aware you are not as good as you think,
  • You shouldn’t automatically underestimate others and overestimate yourself.
  • We live in a funny world really because we’ve been praising humility especially in leaders for about two decades.
  • If you ask the average person on the street, “is it important that a leader has humility?” They will look at you and say, of course—yet, if you analyze the profile of the typical leader in politics or business, or any organizations, including sports, military, and religious organizations, there are not often found to have a reputation for being very modest and very humble, especially when, what we seem to prefer in a leader is that they have this magnetic, charismatic quality that enables them to entertain, perform and behave in a way that is closer to the self-importance pole of the spectrum than the modest and humility pole.
  • There are cultural differences in this as well.
STORY: Origin
  • I was born and raised in Argentina where they say they seem genetically incapable of humility.
  • They are pre-wired for overconfidence and arrogance—neighbors know this very well.
  • Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, or Brazil, this is not news to you.
  • I moved to the UK to study for my PhD, where an academic career began.
  • Notice if Argentines are genetically pre-wired for arrogance and overconfidence, in the UK, they are culturally predetermined to fake modesty and humility.
  • 7-8 years of living in the USA caused a rewire of models on how to present yourself and think about yourself.
  • In the USA the cultural pressure is to fake confidence and arrogance to the point that you have to believe that you’re amazing even if there is not much data or feedback to back it up.
  • It is important as a leader to cultivate humility.
  • Long term success depends on it and your ability to handle or manage a crisis is largely dependent on how humble you are.
  • A crisis is a complex, unprecedented and difficult situation.
  • If you overestimate your ability to deal with it, and you exude a false sense of optimism and security to others, it’s not good for you or for the group.
  • Know your limitations, and also understand that being aware of your limitations isn’t a weakness. In leadership it’s a true sign of strength.
How Can You Cultivate Humility?
  • You need a little bit to be able to cultivate more of it. If you have none it’s very difficult.
  • People who are deluded to the point of being narcissistic are not coachable and you often do find them in leadership roles.
  • There are ways in which you can cultivate a reputation for showing you are not the hero in your own mind to others, and that as a leader, you don’t think your opinion is the most important thing in the world.
  • Create the conditions around you so others can provide you with negative, critical, constructive feedback on your performance.
STORY | Amy Edmondson

Amy talks about psychological safety—an important construct to show the best ways in which leaders can cultivate their humility and their curiosity is to create their conditions in their teams and organizations for others to provide them with negative feedback.

  • Simple nudges can help you implement critical feedback.
  • If you’ve given a presentation, had a client deal or finished a report, and are asking for feedback from your team, don’t ask them, “Wasn’t I great?” or “Isn’t this amazing?” Ask questions encouraging them to provide critical feedback helping you to improve.
  • What would you have done better?
  • If you could have changed one thing about my report, my presentation, the way it did this, what would that thing be?
  • What are the two or three things that you think I could have done better and why?
  • If you encourage people to do it and don’t punish them for speaking up, but reward them, you will simultaneously become more self-critical and more humble, understanding your limitations.
  • If you don’t understand your limitations and that there is a gap between the person you are and the person you want to be you, you for sure won’t continue developing as a leader.
4. Resilience
  • As leaders you don’t need to be a kind of a Buddhist monk or in Zen like level of emotional coolness, super phlegmatic and non-reaction; work with what you’ve got.
  • All of your emotions are amplified in a crisis.
  • In a crisis, all of your followers, subordinates and direct reports are looking at you for guidance on how they should behave.
  • If you are experiencing anxiety, that’s okay but expressing that anxiety instead of trying to control it or to hide it will make it a cascade onto others and will make it contagious.
  • Resilience is not difficult to develop and cultivate it during a crisis—it’s a muscle that doesn’t get exercise a lot when everything is going well.
  • Exercise that muscle and ensure it doesn’t go passive or dormant.
  • Ensure you have meaning, purpose and a higher sense of calling and that you discipline yourself and engage in routines that actually keep your levels of emotional stability up and your levels of anxiety down.
What are you going to do to cultivate resilience when the crisis is over and times are good?
  • It’s easy to learn from failure. Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted to get. Or good judgment comes from experience, which comes from bad judgment.
  • The hard thing is to learn and become stronger from your successes.
  • Nietzsche says, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” We’re all going to be stronger or strengthened by adversity and a crisis.
  • What are you going to do to ensure that you keep developing and becoming stronger, even when times are good?
5. Empathy
  • Humans are simultaneously capable of logic and rationality, but also influenced by emotions and feelings more than facts.
  • The ideal leader needed for a crisis is somebody who is smart, curious, rational, and capable of making logical and data driven decisions, but doesn’t seem cold, aloof and robotic.
  • Nobody wants to follow a robot, which is why even if artificial intelligence keeps developing fast and more rapidly than it has so far, we will still crave human affection, human validation and empathy in our leaders.
What Is Empathy?
  • The ability to understand and care about what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • As a leader you have the responsibility to develop more and more empathy as part of your leadership development journey.
How Do You Do This?
  • Pay attention to what other people feel and care about their point of view.
  • Understand if you disagree with someone or don’t understand them, it’s probably because you haven’t thought hard about their perspective.
  • Know if you are making decisions that might seem blunt, abrupt, cold and not kind and caring enough, that’s going to be much more damaging to others and your reputation as a leader during a crisis where people need a lot of validation and a lot of reinforcement.
  • The hardest thing for managers to do in this crisis has been to manage via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Hangouts, BlueJeans or video conferencing.
      • For the first time, you totally remove physical and analog interaction between a manager and an employee.
      • We think we can see emotions through Zoom, but it’s an artificial version.
      • If you’re managing remotely check in on people as often as possible and don’t be afraid of seeming kind and caring.
6. Integrity
  • If you don’t have leaders in charge who are honest, ethical and moral, all of the other qualities will be either irrelevant or even backfire.
  • A leader who is smart, who can understand others well and who seems cold and composed, lacking integrity, is a recipe for disaster for everyone else.
  • You have to have the ability to control your short-term temptations, your impulses and make decisions for the benefit of others, other than yourself.
  • Leadership is fundamentally a resource for the group, for the team, for the organization, for society and for the nation.
  • It’s a privilege to be in charge, but as a leader, you have the responsibility to not misuse that power and that responsibility and make decisions that have the interest of the collective at heart.
  • Your reputation for integrity, for being ethical and being moral can be harnessed and has to be harnessed on a daily basis.
How Can You Do This?
  • Ensure you practice what you preach—you put your money where your mouth is. You are consistent, you are clear, transparent and fair about what your moral values and your ethical code of conduct is, and you hold yourself accountable, even when others don’t.
  • You will be remembered long term by whether you were an honest leader or not.
  • People, societies, organizations and cultures are generally better off when their leaders are smart, kind and honest.
  • If we need this crisis to remind us it’s because the majority of leaders don’t have these six qualities.
ASK YOURSELF 3 QUESTIONS:

1. What you could have done differently to prepare your team, your organization and your followers for this crisis and to have ensured that they went into this unexpected and unpredictable crisis being stronger and better prepared?

    • What would you have done differently if you could go back in time and cultivate strength in your team so that they are more resilient and immune to this difficult crisis in time?

2. What are you going to do to ensure people, followers, teams, and organizations are going to emerge stronger after this?

    • Two Distinct Phases/Stages In Any Crisis:
      • Shock Absorption: To ensure everyone is fine, healthy, okay and able to resist the initial impact of the crisis.
      • Leverage: Use the crisis to emerge stronger.

There’s no excuse for not building the qualities of team effectiveness that will be needed to emerge stronger in the future short term and long term.

3. What are you going to do to improve and increase your critical six leadership qualities?

    • What are you going to do to grow your intelligence, to improve your curiosity, your humility, your resilience, your empathy and your integrity? What are you going to do to increase it in others?
    • The fundamental goal of leadership is not just to better yourself, but to make others better.
    • Leaders have the potential to not just improve other people but develop these six traits so that next time we have a crisis, we don’t have to ask this question.

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: The Fearless Organization Demands Psychological Safety

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The following are notes from Amy Edmondson’s talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

To succeed in an uncertain, fast-moving world, organizations must be fearless to be agile–which means they must build a psychologically-safe environment in which people can learn and grow. In this session, Dr. Amy Edmondson talked about why psychological safety matters more than ever and how to build it. With so much riding on innovation, creativity and engagement, it is essential to attract, cultivate and retain talented employees–but even more important to ensure they are able to speak up to fully contribute to the enterprise. In this session, Amy helped us understand why engagement and candor are required for success and high standards in today’s knowledge economy—she identified the link between psychological safety and high performance, and how leaders can create psychological safety.

Psychological Safety
  • Psychologists say we are endowed with a general orienting system.
  • We live in a “V.U.C.A.” world—an acronym coined by the U.S. Army War College.
  • Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous—describes the world in which we live.
  • Our brains expect to see a predictable certain world and so we’re in for a lot of unhappy surprises, but all is not lost.
  • Leaders make a difference by helping people show up, helping people really adapt to and adjust to the V.U.C.A. world in which we live.
STORY | Columbia Shuttle Tragedy of 2003:
  • This was Columbia’s final mission.
  • The craft re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, 2003 and combusted, killing the entire crew.
  • Engineer Rodney Rocha, watched the launch via video with concern.
  • Rodney saw a small grainy spec.
  • He talked to his boss and asked for support and help to look into it further.
  • His boss said, “Don’t be Chicken Little. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
  • Rodney pulled engineering friends, and they tried to look into it, but really, they were stymied.
  • They couldn’t look into it without more resources and without more permission.
  • On day 8 of the 16-day mission, there was a mission management team meeting—a high level group of folks who lead the mission, and on their formal agenda there was a line item that said, look into this foam strike issue.
  • They spent two minutes talking about it and dismissed it as a nothing.
  • Rodney remained silent.
  • Fast forward, six months later, an investigation into the accident proved the cause was a foam strike.
  • Rodney was asked by the investigators, “Why didn’t you say anything in that meeting?” And, he said, “I just couldn’t do it.”
  • Why? His hands motioned, “Because she [the mission management team leader] Linda Ham, is way up here and I’m way down here.”
  • “I just couldn’t do it” describes the reality in the workplace for far too many employees like Rodney Rocha, who in that moment, felt disabled—unable to express his voice.
  • Impression management at work is almost second nature.

Why do employees feel unable to express their voice?

  • Most of us would prefer to look smart, capable, helpful and positive, so we’ve learned how to read the tea leaves and to hold back.
  • “If I don’t want to look incompetent, I’m not going to admit a mistake or a weakness.”
  • “I don’t want to look intrusive. I’m not going to offer some half-baked idea that I’m not confident about.”
  • This kind of thing happens every day at work.
Does It Matter?
  • Not all of these moments of holding back lead to catastrophic outcomes, but they lead to small losses day in and day out.
  • They lead to failures.
  • They lead to a lack of innovation.
  • They lead to people not feeling as good about themselves as they might otherwise feel.
  • You can think of this as a state of playing not to lose, of holding back, of not putting your full self into the game instead of going for it and trusting that your colleagues and your leaders will be there for you—that’s the kind of workplace where innovation happens, where good ideas happen, where failures are avoided, where bad failures are avoided.
CONNECTION | INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES:
  • Teddy Roosevelt: “The only man who makes no mistake is the man who never does anything.”
  • Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000.” Imagine that, 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Times I was depended on for that final shot and I missed it. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
  • We understand these kinds of quotes, but how many of us are living them?
  • How many of us are really knowing that it’s okay to go for it, to play to win, to know that yep, sometimes we’re going to trip and fall, but other times we’re going to do something just spectacular with our colleagues?
  • Caring about what people think shouldn’t be in charge—the mission should be.
  • Wake up in the morning hoping to contribute to your work lives.

Psychological Safe Work Environments:

  • A belief that the workplace is safe for interpersonal risk
  • That means I can speak up with a question, with a concern. I would never hold back. I would never be in Rodney Rocha’s shoes because I know that my voice is valued and welcomed, even when I’m wrong, even when my idea is crazy.
  • A sense of permission for candor
  • It’s not saying everything you have to say will be brilliant.
  • It’s not about being nice, it’s not soft.
  • It’s not touchy feely, it’s not a license to whine.
  • People are willing to engage in conflict, they’re willing to debate, they’re willing to disagree.
SURVEY:
  • Developed a robust survey measuring this concept of psychological safety
  • Used in more than 200 studies in global organizations
  • Doctoral student study with Ingrid Nembhard
  • Studied 23 intensive care units in 23 North American hospitals
  • All the intensive care units had active quality improvement projects underway with four or five formal teams trying to make the work a little bit better.
  • Gave everyone a survey and asked about their psychological safety
  • The items said things like, “If you make a mistake on this team, it’s held against you, reverse scored. It’s easy to ask for help when you don’t know what to do, etc.”
  • Data was from 1,100 clinicians in different role categories.
  • All did not have a hierarchy-induced psychological safety gap.
  • The psychological safety levels across role groups were absolutely flat.

Does It Matter?

  • Yes. Three years into this study, the pattern had an 18% improvement in morbidity and mortality, compared to those with the steep pattern.
  • Everybody can see something that others miss.
  • What the respiratory therapists and the nurses are seeing and wondering about really matters.
  • Their quality improvement work was able to yield those performance outcomes.

What Explains The Difference?

  • There are things that leaders can do, that were done in these high-performing units, that you can do as well.
  • Studied an executive team in a global electronics company facing an important strategic decision about whether to acquire another company.
  • Someone on their team was new from another company and industry.
  • He had concerns about the takeover, but he came onto the team when they were halfway through making the investment, so he held back.
  • Six months in and it was a fiasco…a terrible failure.
  • The team got together to review what contributed to this failure. He said “I let you down. I had concerns and I didn’t share them.”
  • “I didn’t want to be the skunk at the picnic.”

Cognitive Frame

  • Something that is wrong for the actual work they were doing
  • The work of strategic decision making is not a picnic.
  • When you have a dissenting view, you’re potentially a lifesaver.
  • Take away those orienting systems leading us to have the wrong frame for the kind of work we do.
STORY | Volkswagen + Google:
  • By 2015, Volkswagen achieved being the largest car company—the most successful profitable car company in the world.
  • In 2008 won the coveted Green Car of the Year Award.
  • It was based on fraud.
  • The Volkswagen engineers, unable to do what senior executives wanted them to do to design a diesel engine that could not only pass emissions, but also be efficient and affordable.
  • They couldn’t tell their bosses that they couldn’t do it.
  • They developed software to cheat the regulators.
  • The Senior Executive said, “there was always a distance of fear or respect. If Winterkorn [who was the CEO of Volkswagen at the time] were going to come and visit you, you would be very anxious, your pulse would go up, and if you presented bad news, God forbid, it could become very unpleasant, very demeaning.”
  • Ambitious goals and closed ears
  • You need to have ambitious goals, open ears and open hearts because nobody ever wants to see that kind of headline.
  • Four years ago, Google released a study in its attempt to find out what was the factor that helped explain why some of its teams were outperforming others.
  • Nothing predicted team performance until they discovered the variable of psychological safety.
  • Julia Rozovsky put psychological safety in the model, with my survey variable, that explained more variance in team performance than anything.
  • People need to feel psychologically safe to do their best work.
Is There A Trade Off Between High Psychological Safety And High-Performance Standards?
  • No
  • As leaders, it is your job to convey high standards and to enable people to reach those high standards. It’s also your job to create a safe environment for people to bring their full self to work.
  • If you don’t do either, well, that’s the apathy zone—where people quit and stay.
  • They’re still coming to work, but that’s all.
  • Most of us want to be put to a good use—to work hard and support the mission of our organization.
  • We’re not seeing many places with the comfort zone anymore.
  • More workplaces are categorized as the anxiety zone.

How Do You Create Psychological Safety?

What does it look like?
  • If you look around, are people talking and speaking up about things that go wrong or about their successes?
  • Are people speaking up to disagree and especially, to disagree with the boss?
  • Are they offering half an idea that someone else might build on and turn into a great idea?
  • Are they speaking up when they need help, when they’re in over their head?
  • If those things are happening, you have psychological safety.
  • If they’re not, it’s not the case that nothing’s going wrong.
  • We live in a V.U.C.A world, you are just not hearing about it.
What are You Going To Do?
  • Recognizing failure is not all bad. It’s how we learn. It’s how we innovate. It’s how we grow.
  • Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Failure Comes In Three Types:

1.Preventable Failure
  • Things where we have a formula, we should have done the training, we didn’t do it right for some reason and we shouldn’t celebrate those.
  • We should learn from them to be sure. We shouldn’t blame people, we shouldn’t point fingers, but they’re not good news.
2. Complex Failures
  • A set of factors that come together in a novel way and produce an unintended consequence, despite being in a reasonably familiar setting like a hospital or a subway system.
3. Intelligent Failure
  • The result of a new foray into new territory
  • Nobody could have known what would happen without trying it.
  • Think of these three categories as essentially mistakes, accidents and discoveries.
  • Internalize the joy of discovery. In the moment, it will feel disappointing because it’s in fact a failure, but it’s a happy failure. It’s an intelligent failure. However, there are criteria. You can’t call anything that happens that’s bad an intelligent failure, you got to follow the rules.

The Rules Of Intelligent Failure:

Pursuing something meaningful
  • The outcome of the test, of the pursuit, will be informative—you will learn from it and you’ve thought about the assumptions going into it, and the cost and scope of the experiment are as small as they can be and still be informative.
Promote intelligent failures
  • Have more of them, try to help people do more smart experiments so that you can discover more and innovate more and make a better project or product together.
  • Something you can talk about together and start to exercise that leadership role of helping people make these important discernments in their work

What You Can Do To Create Psychological Safety:

  1. Framing the work
  2. Inviting engagement
  3. Responding productively
1. Framing The Work:
  • As leaders, help people reframe the work so it’s more productive for them to do the work they need to do.
  • David Kelley, who leads the world’s most celebrated innovation consultancy is known for going around to his teams and saying, “Hey, fail often to succeed sooner.”
  • He is not saying, “Please go ahead and do lousy work”.
  • He’s saying, “I’m sorry, but there’s no way to be brilliant and successful in innovation work unless you’re willing to fail along the way.”
  • Christa Quarles, CEO of OpenTable says, “Early off and ugly, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t wait until it’s perfect because you know why? It’ll be too late. The competitors will be there already. Just give me something good enough. Let’s get it out there. And guess what? We can learn as we go from how customers interact with it.”
  • Julie Morath, who was Chief Operating Officer at Children’s Minnesota for over a decade, says “Healthcare, by its very nature, is a complex error-prone system.” She’s saying, when things go wrong, and they will, speak up quickly so we can catch and correct before anyone is harmed.

Frames To Kick Out Of Your Brain:

  • Employees are self-interested and not trustworthy.
  • Top management are the ones who know best about everything.

Replacement Frames:

  • Employees are trustworthy and well-intentioned.
2. Inviting Engagement:
  • Do it proactively. Don’t just say, “Hey, dissent is fine.” That means insisting on dissent.
  • Alfred Sloan was one of the great business leaders of the 20th century, and his top team at General Motors was considering acquiring another company. He said, “Gentlemen, I take it we’re in complete agreement on this decision. You can almost feel the joy in the room”.
  • But he said, “That’s not good enough. Well, then I propose that we postpone further discussion on this matter. Why? To give ourselves time to develop disagreement.”
  • He is essentially saying, “If you guys were any good at your jobs, you would have brought something to the table. It is not a place to come in and agree. It’s a place to come in and debate and get to the bottom of it.” That’s what strategic decision making is all about—insisting on dissent.
  • Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, says, “As leaders, we have got to be willing to go first. We got to talk about our own mistakes because that’s what makes it safe for others to do the same.”
  • The most important tool that you can have for creating psychological safety is the good question.

What’s a good question?

A good question is one that helps us not miss something.

  • What do others think?
  • What other options could we consider?
  • What are we missing?
  • Who has a different perspective?
  • The other kind of good question is the kind that helps us go deeper.
  • What leads you to think so?
  • What are the concerns you have?
  • If we did that, what might happen there?
  • Encourage people to do better thinking.
  • The essence of a good question is that it focuses us together on something that matters so we can think aloud together, so that we aren’t vulnerable to holding back or to group think.
  • Good questions make silence awkward.
3. Responding Productively
  • The essence of a productive response is twofold.
  • One, appreciative—thank you
  • Two, forward-looking—where do we go from here?
  • Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford said, “Listen, everybody, I want you to color code your reports for us. Red for problems. Yellow for caution. Green for good news.”
  • Mulally says to the team, “Listen, everybody, we are on track to lose 17 billion, that’s with a B, dollars this year. What is not going well?”
  • Mark Fields, head of Americas, raised his hand and he proceeded to describe a very serious problem with a Ford model Edge launch.
  • Everybody thought Mark Fields would get fired for speaking up.
  • Mulally put his hands together and he started to applaud, then he said, “Mark, thank you for that clear line of sight. How can we help?”
  • That is a productive response. Thank you and forward-looking.
  • There will be time later, and this can be important work to look into how this happened, not now. Now is the moment to figure out how we can help.
  • They had it solved within a couple of weeks.

Make honest feedback a positive experience.

  • Leadership that builds psychological safety starts with humility.

Framing the work in a V.U.C.A. world:

  1. Say “We don’t know all the answers, we need to hear from you.”
  2. Be curious when saying “Tell me, what are you thinking? What are you seeing?”
  3. Be empathetic, saying “Thank you for that clear line of sight. How can we help?”

NEXT STEPS:

Make work psychologically safe for your teams so they can innovate so they can help you pursue the important missions that you’re all working on today.

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: The Leadership of a Legendary Athlete

Kaka will be joining the faculty at The Global Leadership Summit 2020.

The following are notes from Kakás’ talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit. 

Three and a half billion people are watching your every move—waiting for you to make a mistake or cheering you on for the goal of your career! The pressure and criticism could break the strongest soul—so what would it take to thrive under this kind of uncertainly and stress? In this candid interview session, Claudia Tenório draws out ways in which Kaká has managed public scrutiny and praise, overcome setbacks, developed resilience and mental toughness, lead those around him and leaned into his faith for strength.

CONNECTION | One Of The Greatest Football Players In The World 
  • Key moments in his career
    • 2007 Athens—pressure of the game
    • 2005 Champions league against Liverpool and Istanbul—hardest and most historic games played. Being on the losing side was a great lesson.
    • 2006 was a year of overcoming things
    • 2007 was a familiar position as 2005, resulting in anxiety—5 minutes before the end of the game, Liverpool scored, and the 2005 game came back to him. The team withstood the pressure and they won the game.

A captain leads the team forward—not just on the field, but in the business behind the scenes.

Motivation and Inspiration 
  • Motivation is something that comes from outside.
  • Inspiration comes from within and is connected to goals, purposes and values.
STORY | About Kaká’s Journey: 
  • Started playing when he was 8 years old.
  • At 15, he decided to play professionally.
How Were You Able To Maintain That Momentum During Your Career?  
  • Motivation and inspiration
  • Love of the sport and dedication
  • The community aspect to play with friends and kids helped me to stay focused and disciplined
  • The love of the game helped to stay focused on track
What Is The Importance Of Humility In Leadership? 
  • Humility is an essential function in leadership.
  • The best humility example in leadership is through Jesus.
  • You have to be willing to serve others and prioritize that in your leadership.
  • Humility isn’t diminishing yourself but knowing who you are and positioning yourself in relation to that—not being better or less than anyone.
  • Humility is about having a clear identity.
  • Listen, admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.
The Impact of Faith In His Career: 
  • Can’t separate faith from who he is.
  • When you have media exposure, you have to decide what criticism you will let bother you.
  • Business leaders and church leaders—it’s no different than being a famous athlete. You get to decide what you’re going to be exposed to and criticized for, and which battles to fight.
How Do You Deal With Criticism? 
  • Of course, it can bother you, but see the criticism in a different way.
  • Sometimes what bothers us the most turns out to be true.
  • Learn from the possible truth in criticism and how it can help you improve.
  • If the criticism is a personal attack and a response is given, the attacker gains more visibility.
  • Rely on your team and trusted advisors to help answer in a wise way.
How To Deal With Negative Feedback From Coaches/ Other Leaders: 

Understand where the leader is coming from and where they base their leadership from.
One of the main roles of a leader is to cultivate the interests of the entire team and put it together to best serve everyone.

Two Types Of Leadership: 

  • Fear/ Authoritative
    • If you don’t perform well, this type of leader creates the fight—the unhealthy tension where the team walks on eggshells.
    • The team is scared to not perform well.
    • This isn’t sustainable long term as it creates a hostile environment.
    • Fear is a motivator, but the team isn’t willing to sacrifice for the team and leader when the time comes/ when asked to.
  • Love
    • You might not always agree with the decision this leader makes, but know the leader is always concerned with the human beings affected.
    • Puts the emotions and consideration for the other team members above their own decisions and ideas.
    • Caring enough to ask your team about their personal life.
    • A love-based leadership approach motivates the team to try harder and to find a solution amongst themselves.
What Does Poor Leadership Look Like? 
  • Lack of communication
  • Lack of focus
  • Failure
  • Lost direction—the team isn’t sure where the business or team is going and what the common goal is.

Understand the various cultures and techniques to find enrichment and leading to respect.

It is essential to respect everyone—even if you disagree.

NEXT STEPS: 
  • It doesn’t matter if you have an “official” leadership role, you are a leader of yourself, leading your own life.
  • Listen to motivations around you. These help you to take action and make decisions.
  • Make your choices in the best way possible and know your identity.

 
 

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GLS20 Session Notes: Beth Comstock: Imagine It Forward

GLS20 Beth Comstock Faculty Spotlight

The following are notes from Beth Comstock’s talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

Accelerating growth and innovation is one of the most challenging tasks of a leader. In this interview, Paula Faris draws out some of the ways in which Beth Comstock has thrived in her ability to continue to innovate both in business and in life. Beth helps us understand specific ways we can re-capture the joy and art of discovery, find the courage to be a permission granter, and get comfortable with experimentation and failure.

 

Faris: Your book’s all about innovation and change. Why is it so important for organizations to change?

Comstock: We’ve seen it over and over again when companies don’t innovate, they die.

  • Came into GE from NBC but it was a different world.
  • Look at a company like GE going through change—that’s a sign of resilience.
  • Change is a test of longevity.

Faris: You open the book and right away you mention your time working with the CIA and talk about failure of imagination, which ultimately led to GE’s response to 9/11. How did GE respond?

Comstock: I was invited to lecture there and what I liked about the CIA at the time was they were bringing in outsiders to give them different perspectives. Whereas what had happened leading up to 9/11, they stuck with the same playbook and missed that terrorism had gone on a grassroots level. They realized they were indicted, if you will, for a failure of imagination to imagine something different. I liked that they were bringing in outsiders who could challenge them. I was at GE and 9/11 happened, for all of us in business we couldn’t imagine there would be terrorism attacks—that business would literally stop. Now, in COVID-19 we’re experiencing this again, but it caused us to rethink what happens when your business totally stops. Airplanes can’t fly, what do we do?

The good thing about change is it forces us to confront things that otherwise we might not.

Faris: You took a leap of faith getting a lot of pushback. What brought that?

Comstock: Post- 9/11 America was in shock. Business had stopped. People were feeling incredibly vulnerable, lives were lost which was the worst tragedy of it all. GE said, “we need to do something.” The team I worked with had this crazy idea, “Let’s do an ad.

  • Most advertising had stopped except print newspapers.
  • “We can go forward from here.'”
  • First of all, the agency hated the idea, most of the team hated the idea.

Faris: Did you believe in the idea?

Comstock: I believed it because part of our job in change is to appreciate the zeitgeist and people felt vulnerable.

  • Wanted to send a message of hope.
  • We pored through the artwork of the agency, producing Lady Liberty rolling up her sleeves and turning it into an ad.
  • The ad wasn’t about GE, it was brought to you by GE.
  • The head of the company Jeff Immelt resonated with it and employees were proud.
  • With change, you have to find a story that gives people hope of where the future is going to be.

Faris: For those individuals and the organizations that are listening to this, what do you tell them? What tools do you put in their hand to take those first steps to innovate and to change?

Comstock: The most critical thing is giving yourself permission. I love this idea of permission granted. You have to say, “okay, I’m going to give myself permission.”

Came up with a habit, sharing with colleagues of writing a self- permission slip.

Stepping Out Of Your Comfort Zone:

  • Asking a question in a team meeting
  • Pitching an idea to somebody who you think is receptive.

Comstock: You can’t have all the answers. Use your curiosity as the lead.

What you’re doing is creating a path of discovery, which is a critical step in that permission granting, risk-taking—getting out and discovering new ideas.

Faris: How do we take the steps to counteract what is rooted into fear?

Comstock: Fear is a basic human instinct. It motivates us more than we want to admit. It’s centered in our amygdala, in our brain, it’s the reptilian brain if you will, the kind of fight or flight for survival.

  • Recognize it’s a natural reaction.
  • At times say, “let’s admit we’re afraid.”
  • Leaders, very now and then to say, “we’re in COVID-19, I don’t know how to deal with a pandemic. You’re here, we’re here together to figure it out but we don’t know.”
  • That is a bit of a way to get rid of the fear. “Here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t.

Faris: GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, at the time tapped you to lead marketing. What was it about you that people were willing to take a chance on at that point?

Comstock: I was willing to bring outsiders in who provoked us. I took on a pretty aggressive effort to rebrand the company. We ask all kinds of tough questions. We did things I think he thought were very unusual and got good results.

  • One of the things I did is I brought in a cultural anthropologist early on who did not come from our culture.
  • He asked tough questions and helped us get to the core of what we were trying to understand “what’s our story? What’s our strategy?”

Faris: Was that person what you would define a spark?

Comstock: A spark is somebody you’re bringing in to spark a new perspective.

  • As simple as a team of marketers bringing an engineer from inside your company.
  • Someone from the outside who challenges you.
  • Looking for somebody with expertise not just a troublemaker to come in and bring a perspective.
  • Ask “what questions make us feel uncomfortable with what they’re asking? What perspectives must we focus on and what doesn’t make sense?” And so, it’s really a way to provoke a different perspective.

Faris: You’re a self-proclaimed introvert. You don’t love change, your book’s all about innovation and change. How have you been able to develop the skills that are necessary to go into the unknown and to get your ideas and to get your voice heard?

Comstock: That notion of discovery to me it’s a joy of life, it’s a joy of work and it’s often counterintuitive to what we do at work. That’s what’s really propelled me to get out and discover.

  • Go into situations needing to learn.
  • Go to places that are seemingly weird.
  • What’s an example? When I was doing digital at NBC, a group of us went to South Korea to understand what we’re doing, and we judged boy band competitions.
  • Just to get a sense I went with a group to understand the Israeli Military, to understand non-hierarchical learning. It doesn’t have to be that grand, it could be if you’re in New York City go to another neighborhood and see what you see.
  • First, you need a notebook, or I keep a folder on my phone of interest.
  • You’re learning about it and you’re understanding what the facts are versus what’s the hypothesis. And you’re saying to yourself, “How can I speed up my learning on this so I can get smarter on it?” And I really believe speed to learn is a competitive advantage especially now. The faster you learn, the faster you can serve your customer, the faster you can do well in your job.

Faris: You talk about getting comfortable with some level of maybe, how do we get comfortable with just some level of maybe?

Comstock: Most of us I think we want certainty. Especially in the world today we assume we’re going to have certainty. And so, it’s a fallacy I think many of us have grown up with, we don’t learn it in school. And so, for me it became this getting comfortable with just living in hypothesis. I mean, my biology background science helped a little bit in that.

  • The scientific training is what’s your hypothesis? You’re not saying we have to have the definitive answer. What’s your hypothesis? What can we go and do to test that?
  • You’re saying, “we’re going to move forward on this side of assumptions until we learn something different and then we’re going to reserve the right to change it.”
  • Did anyone imagine COVID-19 affecting their revenue in 2020 the way it is? No. You need contingencies, you need hypotheses that get you through some of that.
  • It’s a tension between both.

Faris: You talked about mental grazing and trendspotting and you didn’t mention trendspotting, but can you elaborate on mental grazing?

Comstock: Mental grazing is I think this notion of just getting out when you’re out in your discovery mode, which we talked about.

  • You’re grazing a cow or something. You’re just picking up, eating little bits and pieces, taking it in, just to try to see if you can start to build some of those patterns we talked about.
  • It’s how you build up your recognition of things that are different.
  • Right now, we’re in a really tough time with most people being siloed in their homes, they’re only now being able to return to work in some areas.
  • It’s harder to get out and mental graze physically in the world. But you certainly can do it digitally, you certainly can ask people what they’re reading.
  • Read different sources than you are used to reading. I don’t just mean politically, I mean, read a book on physics if you’re a designer.
  • Ask yourself different sets of questions and how might this impact me, the work I do.

Faris: How do you balance that?

Comstock: Everyone has to imagine it forward. Just like I think everyone’s job right now is changing, whether you know it or not that’s in your job description. And what do we mean by imagining it forward?

  • Have a vision for where the world’s going and how you’re going to get there.
  • Notion of thinking in two speeds, operating in two speeds.
  • You have your now and your what’s next.
  • Your now, is where we mostly are—where we live, focus, it’s where your investors are expecting repeatable earnings. They’re expecting some predictability as much as you can predict.
  • This is the area where you feel really peak confidence.
  • Not to say change won’t happen, but let’s say most of your resources, your time, your energy goes into now, but you must create the second lane.
  • Call it your imagination lane, your what’s next, maybe it’s 10% of your time and resources in a good year, maybe it’s only five.
  • This is where you’re starting to do the discovery.
  • “Can we think of something different?
  • Can we carve out a couple of hours a week, even a month to go and discover and try these things?”
  • The secret to success and made us have better jobs.
  • We didn’t need the permission as long as we met the numbers, we were able to discover things.
  • People started to see that it was working. They’d ask, “how did you get permission to do that?” “Oh, we didn’t need permission, we just tested it on a small scale.”

Faris: Ecomagination is one of your crowning achievements at GE, it happened under your watch, under your tenure. How did you come up with Ecomagination? What was the discovery process for that?

Comstock: Ecomagination was about looking at the world saying cleantech is the future and it’s coming to an industry. We had the idea; it just came out of the ether we got out in the world. We heard from our customers. They were saying whether it was a rail customer, an airline customer, a power company customer, they were saying, “Help us. We need technology that’s going to make us greener but not make us go broke.”

  • Right there was our platform, ecological and economical. We spent a year in discovery, talking to them. One of the interesting things we did is we talked to our critics. Up until that point GE had really been at war with environmentalists. We changed that. We said, let’s ask environmentalist’s, “How could we do something that would be meaningful? How would you hold us accountable? Can you help?”
  • They were skeptical for good reason. And it was a very unnerving thing to go to a critic and go, “We want to change, can you help? They didn’t believe us at first, but we started to feel good that we knew we could do this with partners. The other thing you start to realize is that some of this you’re already doing that you don’t know so we started to take an inventory inside the company. And there were certain things, technologies we had or were developing that were greener. And we actually had that capability, so it wasn’t such a far leap.

Faris: How can a leader when you’re trying to encourage innovation—how can you also establish feedback loops and circle of trust so to speak, transparency and honesty?

Comstock: One of the most critical things are feedback loops. We’re in a digital age where we have never had so much data and exhaust if you will, so it’s a bit overwhelming.

  • There are some basic questions that you need to ask because you’re trying to get feedback. Again, if your speed to learning is your competitive advantage today, the faster you get feedback the better you should be able to learn, it’s that premise. How quickly can I get feedback?
  • The simplest thing you can do is ask this question, “tell me one thing I don’t want to hear.”
  • You need to ask that regularly of your team, of your customers.
  • You want all the answers and you come into a room with everything fully done and we’re asking ourselves, ‘Why are we here?'”

Faris: But when you’re not in control of it that’s when it can be difficult. And when you left GE you weren’t in control of that fate. What did you learn about yourself?

Comstock: I was leaving GE; I knew at some point there’d be a new leadership change but the company hit a tough spot and the leadership team was out.

  • I got a call from the new CEO saying, “we don’t have a place for you.”
  • I had to renew my story.
  • I spent a lot more time in personal discovery trying to be more creative. I’m doing a lot of writing, reflecting, finding time for spirituality, things that frankly I had excuses for not doing in business because I just didn’t have time. But things that were calling to me I just didn’t necessarily listen to them.

Faris: How do you embrace that lane when it’s not really your choice?

Comstock: You don’t always embrace it at first.

  • Give yourself that space and then just go, “okay, I’m going to create an experiment lane for myself. I’m going to try things.”
  • Just do some things to get you to another level.

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: How the Best Leaders Build Resilience

GLS20 Marcus Buckingham Faculty Spotlight Article Header

The following are notes from Marcus Buckingham’s talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

What can the best leaders do to build resilience during challenging times? Marcus Buckingham leads the ADP Research Institute which, among other things, focuses on identifying the core components of critical aspects of people at work, such as resilience. Drawing from a recent 25-country study, 1,000 workers per country, we can now identify and measure the components of resilience, and what you can do to cultivate it in yourself and in those you lead. What we have learned is that resilience is made up of two sets of feelings: (1) How you feel about yourself and your working world (2) How you feel about the behavior of your own team leader and leader of leaders.

TEAM FOCUS

What is resilience?
  • Is it a trait you’re born with, or is it a state?
  • Is it something that you can cultivate?
  • Is it even a set of skills that you could build in yourself or your team?
  • Engagement is all about whether or not you’re ready to give of your very best.
  • Resilience is when the world hits you, the challenges hit you and you get blown back. Can you withstand it?
  • If you can’t—can you get back up and bounce back?
  • To see the team’s technical report, go to hbr.org or adpi.org.
STUDY
  • Took a stratified random sample of all of the different workers and worker types in 25 different countries
  • Asked questions on resilience, looking to see which questions were most closely related to resilient outcomes like accidents on the job, lost workdays or first year voluntary turnover
  • Finding out what items or the questions that predict those actual resilience sort of behaviors
  • Ended with 10 questions
If you want to know what resilience is, know how to measure it:
  1. I have all the freedom I need to decide how to get my work done.
  2. No matter what else is going on around me, I can stay focused on getting my work done.
  3. In the last week I felt excited to work every day.
  4. I always believe things are going to work out for the best.
  5. My team leader tells me what I need to know before I need to know it.
  6. I trust my team leader.
  7. I’m encouraged to take risks.
  8. Senior leaders are one step ahead of events.
  9. Senior leaders always do what they say they’re going to do.
  10. I completely trust my company/organization’s senior leaders.

Evaluation:

  • The top four questions deal with yourself—how you feel about your own work, your own choices, your own feelings about the way that the world of work is going to play out.
  • The next three questions deal with how you view your team leader—the person who’s directly responsible for the team.
  • Lastly, the remaining three deal with how you view the behavior and the choices of your senior leaders.
Resilience isn’t a trait. It’s a capacity built through this combination of three distinct sources:
  1. How you feel about yourself
  2. How you feel about your team leaders
  3. How you feel about your leaders of leaders, of leaders

Specific Things Senior Leaders Can Do To Build Resilience In A Team:

Vivid Foresight

CONNECTION | Ritualizing Death:

  • Why do we ritualize death? Because we fear the unknown.
  • The problem as a leader is that conversations are about the unknown.
  • Leaders are supposed to be dragging us into some better future that you see so clearly. So, the challenge is how to take people’s really legitimate anxiety about the future and turn it into confidence, turn into spiritedness. How did you do that? Vividness.
Visible Follow Through
  • Current challenges leaders are facing is saying too much about what they’re going to do, and then not doing it.
  • The team’s confidence dissipates and resilience bleeds.
  • Senior leaders, pick a few things that very publicly you say you’re going to do, and then do them.
  • Shine a spotlight on the fact that you’ve done them.
  • Each one doesn’t have to affect every single employee.
  • Pick something you’re doing that’s just going to affect this cadre of employees, but when you do that, and you follow through, and you actually execute it, shine a spotlight on it.
  • People need to see constant ongoing evidence that you’re the kind of senior leader that only makes a commitment to do something when he or she could follow through and do it.
  • People need you to show yourself to be someone who visibly follows through.
What People Need:
  • I trust my team leader.
  • I’m encouraged to take risks.
  • Tell me what I need to know before I need to know it.

What does that suggest that you can cultivate as skills?

Anticipatory Communication
  • Check in with your people every week one-on-one.
  • This really says, “my team leader tells me, not us, me.”
  • Weekly check-ins for 15 minutes to ask simple questions
  • What are my priorities this coming week and how can I help you?
  • Questions about the upcoming week—not about the past
  • If you’re going to check in, don’t give a bunch of feedback.
  • Meetings are short-term future-oriented
  • More quality frequency of touch base, frequency of check-in creates resilience.

Result: employees are constantly being told something about next week they didn’t know they need to know.

Psychological Safety
  • Team leaders have the ability to make people feel either like they need to watch their back or like they can take risks.
  • During times of challenge all of us are going to have to come up with new ways to serve a customer, new ways to deliver a product, new ways to collaborate internally inside organizations.
  • What people need to see from leaders is the willingness to let them experiment and try.
Patience
  • Keep the confidences.
  • Give a bit more rope.
  • Risk and resilience are intricately linked.
  • If you let people risk and you don’t chop them off, they’ll do it again.

What can you do as an individual?

Not as a team leader, not as a leader of leaders—but as an individual to cultivate more resilience in your life?

Agency
  • People will only feel resilient when they understand which parts of their world they can control.
  • What are they?
  • The more you can identify what you can control—the rhythms, the routines, how you do your work, the more you can understand what you can control the more resilient you feel.

Connection | Virtualization

  • Almost everybody has been affected by going to the office less and doing things more remotely.
  • This is a challenge because the natural breaks between home and work are gone.
  • Establish new breaks, new rhythms at home.
  • Life is a series of sprints.
Compartmentalization
  • Different parts of our life have different feelings and different outcomes.
  • The most resilient people seem to understand that we’ve got many different lanes in our life.
  • The most resilient people understand this is just one lane.
  • Cultivate compartmentalization
Strengths & Work
  • Resilient people figured out how to use life to fill them up.
  • How do you use the activities you fill your week with to strengthen you?
  • Each one of us draws strength, love, or joy, whatever word you want to use from different situations and different activities.

CONNECTION | BOOK:

  • There are 5 Love Languages—learn how to speak yours.
  • What are the particular activities, situations, context, and people in your week that you love? Use that invigorate you.
  • Your ability to be resilient depends hugely on whether you can figure out which activities in your week actually invigorate you.
  • The Mayo Clinics: fill 20% of the work week with these activities.
  • You know what strengthens you better than anyone else does.
  • There is power in knowing specifically what you love.

NEXT STEP:

Take the “StandOut” strengths assessment by StrengthsFinder.

  • Will help with figuring out how to draw strength in work
  • Resilience is being able to sway in the face of the vicissitudes of life, the challenges of life, sway and, if you do fall beneath the surface, which you will, you don’t berate yourself for it.
  • The question isn’t, “Will I fall and be submerged?”
ASK:

“How quickly can I bounce back?”
 

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GLS20 Session Notes: Safe is Insufficient

GLS20 Nona Jones Faculty Spotlight Article Header

The following are notes from Nona Jones’ talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

Nona Jones shares why—when it comes to leadership—safe is insufficient. During times of difficulty, it is human nature to try to find a place of safety and security, but progress cannot be made in the places that bring us comfort. Progress can only be made in the places that make us grow. This session provokes conviction to lead from a place of discomfort and provides the practical insights needed to identify the root of your discomfort, how to harness the courage to lead through it and how to invite others on the journey with you, even when they are uncomfortable too.

CONNECTION | GEORGE FLOYD:

  • George Floyd took his last breath beneath the knee of an officer who kneeled on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while George begged for his mother and said, “I can’t breathe”.
  • Racial injustice conversations are difficult.
  • When we talk about injustice, it’s a difficult conversation and it’s uncomfortable.
  • Uncomfortable for the people who are subjected to injustice.
  • Uncomfortable for the people who benefit from injustice.
  • Injustice by definition is never neutral—it requires diminishing the humanity of one population of people for the benefit of another population of people.
  • That population of people are often completely unaware and uninvolved with designing the system of injustice that they benefit from.
  • This is what makes conversations about injustice so difficult, because inevitably the conversation finds a way to wind its path to the doorstep of those who have benefited from injustice but weren’t involved in designing it and therefore don’t want to confront it.
  • People took to social media to denounce what happened, to denounce injustice, to denounce racism.
  • From CEOs to megachurch pastors, people descended on social media and said this isn’t right.
  • I thought, “We’re finally going to do it. We’re finally going to have the uncomfortable, difficult, but necessary conversation about racism in America. We’re finally going to open that door and look down on the doorstep and we’re going to see the package with our name on it. And we’re going to open up that package and we’re going to look inside and we’re going to explore its contents to understand what part we may individually be playing to perpetuate injustice.”
  • Leaders who had major platforms and impressive followers were inviting their friends into conversations about race.
  • Having conversations with people who certainly would not characterize them as being part of the problem, because they wouldn’t want to make their friend feel uncomfortable.
  • Having conversations with people who would speak abstractly and hypothetically, because they wouldn’t want to make their friend feel unsafe.
Leading Through Discomfort
  • Leadership means that you cannot make lasting impact while also feeling safe, because feeling safe and making impact are diametrically opposed states of being.
  • Impact requires feeling unsafe because we need the conditions that will force us to confront our areas of weakness in order to grow.

Safe Is Insufficient

  • The challenge placed before leaders is an observation that Albert Einstein made: “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”
  • The challenge with safety is when we allow ourselves to occupy places that make us feel safe, we abdicate the opportunity to grow.
  • The opportunity to grow comes wrapped in an affront to how great we think we are.
  • Being not racist is not good enough if neutrality comes with a cost.
CONNECTION: LEADER OBSERVATION
  • Watched leaders having uncomfortable conversations in the comfort of their friendship relationships.
  • Realized many leaders were retreating into one of two psychological safe zones.
  • Safety and impact are diametrically opposed states of being.

Safety Zones Leaders Retreat To:

1. Fear
  • Arises out of a perceived risk of loss.
  • It could be real, or it could be perceived.
  • At the extreme ends of fear, we find the risk of losing our livelihood or our life.
  • That rationale is actually just a pretext for the real fear.
  • Those who have accumulated influence and status, who fear losing customers, members or followers because if they leave, what would that make them?
  • “If we did not have those adjectives, what would we be?”
  • As leaders, it is not our job to ignore fear or to deny fear.
  • Fear is real.
  • Our job as leaders is to explore what fear is trying to teach us.
  • Fear is a thermometer telling us there is something that we value that we risk losing.

CHALLENGE:

Don’t act like fear does not exist. When you find yourself retreating into the safe zone of fear, see fear as an invitation to preparation.

  • Assume the worst that could possibly happen is highly probable.
  • If you know it’s the right thing to do, prepare.
  • Prepare for the worst while working for the best.
  • In the case of racial injustice, if you say, “You know what? We’re going to take a firm stand. And we believe that 80% of our customers may walk away from us.” That gives you a signal that perhaps that’s an opportunity to shift resources, to reallocate resources, to acquire more customers that could potentially help to bolster the loss to your baseline, to the loss of your bottom line during that period of attrition.
  • Fear is not paralytic.
  • It may feel like it in the moment. And if it’s left unaddressed, it will eventually immobilize you.
  • When you accept fear’s invitation to prepare, you shift fear from being an immobilizer to being a motivator.
  • As a leader, make fear become the servant of the difficult thing that you know you have to do.
  • Safe is insufficient.
2. Inadequacy
  • When looking at the sheer size and enormity of a challenge and allowing ourselves to feel that we are incapable of fixing the problem.
  • Saying we don’t have the capacity or the capability.
  • When we tell ourselves that we are incapable, we are inadequate and therefore we do nothing.
  • Inadequacy requires false equivalency.
  • Inadequacy causes you to believe the lie that somebody else is better equipped to do what you were assigned to do.
  • How Do You Address The Safe Zone Of Inadequacy?
  • Determine what you can change and change it.
  • We are not called to change the entire world by ourselves.
  • We are called to change that part of the world our influence touches.
  • Inadequacy will make you look at the size of the challenge and walk away from it when you are exactly the person who is needed for your part of the world that you influence.
How Do You Do This?
  • Quantum physics—the idea that anything is possible.
  • Apply constraints within your control in order to make it probable.
Why Does This Matter?
  • Until what’s possible becomes what’s probable, it is not achievable.
  • Many leaders fail and falter because they haven’t taken the time to think about what the constraints within their control is, and applying them to the situation, will increase the probability that things will work out the way envisioned.
When difficult times come, that is not the time for us to retreat into inadequacy.
  • Discover the power that lies within.
  • Whatever degree of power it is, is the power that we need to contribute to the challenge.
STORY | WEIGHT GAIN:

7.5 years ago, she was 100 pounds heavier.

Tried so many things to lose weight but nothing worked.

Realized the set of constraints she had not applied to the challenge.

Eating right and working out regularly

She applied them.

After doing that consistently month after month she lost weight.

Some of us are looking at the social unrest around us, and feel we are incapable and incompetent to impact the situation.

You don’t have to have all the power.

Recognize the power you have and apply it to that situation to increase the probability that you will make an impact.

3. Encourage
  • Genesis 2:18, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper for him.”
  • God is saying it is not best that man be alone. He didn’t say that it’s impossible. He said it’s not best.
  • Oftentimes leaders will retreat into isolation.
  • Build your pack in order to build your power.
  • We were created to be in community with other people, so that when things get difficult, when things get challenging, when we want to quit, we have a pack of people who won’t let us give up on what they know is within us.
  • The pack knows what’s within you and will speak to your potential.
STORY | MARRIAGE:
  • Married over 16 years.
  • Married a month out of college.
  • Many times in the marriage she wasn’t sure they were going to make it.
  • She would call her pack and tell them.
  • The pack would challenge, “let’s figure out how to turn this around for the good.”

NEXT STEPS:

  • Identify 3 people you can invite to be in your pack to encourage you when things get difficult.
  • The problem with some leaders is our so-called pack has the same safe zone triggers we do.
  • You need people to speak to the highest possible potential for you.
STORY | Aesop Fable:
  • A fox was walking into the forest and happened to look up.
  • He saw a bunch of grapes hanging in a tree.
  • He began trying to get the grapes.
  • He kept jumping up and jumping up.
  • The birds, squirrels, other foxes, and deer were watching and making fun of him.
  • He heard these voices in his mind.
  • After another he jumped, he stopped.
  • He looked up at the grapes and he said, “They’re probably just sour anyway. I never wanted them.” And he walked off.
How Many Of Us Do That?
  • When we see difficulty ahead, we get exhausted.
  • We hear the voices of people telling us we made a mistake.
  • We allow them to activate fear, to activate feelings of inadequacy.

NEXT STEPS:

  • Realize safe is insufficient.
  • Leaders are called to go first.
  • When there is difficulty, leaders are called to go first.
  • When there’s a challenge, leaders are called to go first.
  • When there is injustice, leaders are called to go first.
  • Courage is not the absence of fear.
  • Courage is simply fear in the forward direction.

 

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Ignite Transformation Globally With Your Donation to the GLN

Youth attending GLS19 in Nigeria

We at the Global Leadership Network are so grateful that you have taken up the charge to use your leadership and influence to bring positive transformation to our world. You are the real heroes who give us reason to host The Global Leadership Summit each year.

You are the real heroes who give us reason to host The Global Leadership Summit each year.

But we need your help to share this experience beyond the two days of the Summit here in the U.S. in August!

After the GLS in August, bringing this event to another 123 countries in 2020 requires a lot of translation work, training and resources, especially in regions where poverty and corruption are an everyday reality. With your donation, the Summit audience comes together to inspire vision and ignite transformation, reaching hundreds of thousands of people through the GLS this year, including thousands of incarcerated men and women watching from prison!

 

Your donation provides:
  • Translation of the 2020 GLS into 60+ languages
  • Scholarships for those with limited resources
  • Reduced ticket rates for youth
  • Safe event venues, equipment and technology training
  • Start-up costs to hold the GLS in new cities

 

Ways to Give to the Global Leadership Development Fund:
  1. Online at theglsn.org/Give
    You’ll receive your receipt automatically via email and reduce our data entry cost!
  2. By Mail
    Send checks payable to the Global Leadership Network by mail to P.O. Box 3188 Barrington, IL 60011

 

The Global Impact

Your donation helps bring the 2020 GLS to places like U.S. prisons, homeless shelters, crisis centers, trafficking survivors, at risk youth, and countries like Liberia, Venezuela and another 123 countries this season.

 

You see us as Christ sees us—valuable.

 

GLS in Prison

One thing that has me in awe about The Global Leadership Summit is the outlook you carry—that including us prisoners in your mission is of great importance. Labeled as outcasts and menaces to society, you show by your efforts in making the events available to us that you see us as Christ sees us—valuable.

– Alejandro, GLS attendee at Heritage Trails Correctional Facility, U.S.

 

 

I saw my life in a different way.

 

This is the author headshot for Hannah Gronowski.

It’s easy to go to a leadership conference and write yourself off saying, I don’t fit in because I’m not leading an organization, or I’m only 13. But because I heard that message over and over—everyone has influence—I saw my life in a different way. I realized my life isn’t just about me. If everyone really has influence, leadership development matters, even as a 13-year-old.

– Hannah Gronowski, GLS attendee, U.S.

 

 

The ripple effect is creating a better world.

 

Dr. Katurah York CooperThe GLS is critical. In many areas of the world, there are multiple avenues people can pursue to fine-tune their leadership ability. But this is not true in countries like mine. Having done this for about 9 years, the GLS has now become a household word. And the result is transformation. Inevitably it’s creating a better country. It’s creating better opportunities for young people. And because we are so global, the ripple effect is creating a better world.

– Dr. Katurah Cooper, GLS attendee, Liberia

 

 

Summit attendees view themselves as representatives of hope…

 

Pastor Alvaro - Military Guatemala - What-Does-It-Look-For-the-GLS-to-Ignite-Transformation-Globally-Part-2We believe that the church is the hope for a country like Venezuela. By fortifying the leadership within both the church and business, this will help spur on reconstruction that is to come. Doing that which is right in the eyes of God, coupled with using the abilities He has given us, will allow us to have a better tomorrow. Through the GLS, the church has realized it is playing a massive role in the crucial moment our country finds itself in. Summit attendees view themselves as representatives of hope and capable of doing something for their country.

– Alvaro Rea, GLS attendee, Venezuela

 

Imagine what could happen if each person who attended The Global Leadership Summit committed to stewarding their leadership to ignite positive transformation within their sphere of influence?

That’s tens of thousands of people in the U.S. multiplied by at least ten lives impacted. Now imagine the global audience of hundreds of thousands of people being inspired by the GLS in 2020? That’s millions of lives impacted!

But we can’t do this alone. Please join us to continue to share this experience in places across the globe that are desperate for leadership that ignites positive transformation.

Give today >>

 

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: Leading Through the Dip

GLS20 Craig Groeschel Faculty Spotlight Article Header

The following are notes from Craig Groeschel’s talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

In this session, Craig Groeschel talks about leading through the dip.  There will be times you hit a ceiling when what you have done in the past isn’t working, and you have to take a risk knowing there might be a downturn in productivity or efficiency to have an upturn.  In this talk, Craig helps us understand the power of unmaking promises, leading with confident uncertainty, obsessing with the why, and having the courage to do some things that may feel like a step backwards so that we can take several steps forward.     

 

  • Leadership always matters.
  • Our world needs humble, confident, bold, and integrity infused leadership
  • Leading is never easy but leadership is always important
  • Leadership isn’t dependent on a title.
  • Leadership at its core is influence—trust rather than a title.
  • Everybody wins when the leader gets better.

Because the world has changed, we too need to change.

Leading Through The Dip:
  • Every major crisis creates unexpected problems.
  • Every major crisis creates unprecedented opportunities.
  • Developmental dip
    • Things may become worse before they become really good
  • Efficiency dip
  • Attendance dip
How Do You Lead Through The Dip?
1. Change How You Think About Change
  • People don’t hate change.
  • They hate the way we try to change them.
  • Great leaders don’t cast blame.
  • Great leaders take responsibility.
  • You can make excuses, or you can make progress, but you can’t make both.
  • Your desire to hold the fort may lead you to lose the war.
  • Don’t fight to guard the old way when you can find a new and better way.
2. Have The Courage To Unmake Promises
  • If you’re not careful, your boldest declarations could become your greatest limitations.
  • When an old mindset is limiting your future, have the courage to unmake a promise.
  • Have you made any personal promises limiting your leadership potential?
  • You cannot correct what you cannot confront.
3. Obsess Over The Why
  • We change over desperation.
  • We change over inspiration.
  • The critics will always be the loudest
  • The loudest are going to be from the cheapest seats
  • Just because they’re the loudest, doesn’t mean they’re the most important.
4. Lead With Confident Uncertainty
  • You are most vulnerable when you are most confident.
  • Feel the fear and lead anyway.
ASK YOURSELF:
  1. What is no longer working and needs to be changed?
  2. What’s one promise you need to un-make?
  3. What’s one risk you need to take even if you feel afraid?

 

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GLS20 Session Notes: The Metrics of Migrative Leadership

GLS20 TD Jakes Faculty Spotlight Article Header

The following are notes from Bishop T.D. Jakes’ talk at #GLS20. Use them to help you apply the content you learned at the Summit.

Most people with influence survive by living within their element—staying in their zone, doing what they do—talking to people like them, who think like them, who vote like them, who dress like them, who walk like them, who talk like them.

Moving away from this space feels vulnerable because we might not have the power and the influence we have when we are on our own turf. In this session, Bishop T.D. Jakes helped us learn to migrate in our thinking—to navigate our current, rapidly changing world and the conundrum we find ourselves in. We can no longer ignore the people we can’t understand or control.

 

Concepts inform our decisions and cause us to be able to make the kinds of decisions that lead us into more effectiveness and more soul.

  • Metrics are absolutely everything.
  • Metrics help us evaluate, “What does success look like?”
Relevance Of Migrative Metrics:
  • When adding the word “migrative” to metrics, it suggests a move—a change—to think differently in order to be effective.
Questions To Ask Yourself:
  • Am I comfortable with the journey?
  • Am I going outside of my element? Because most people with influence survive by living within their element.

What Happens When We Don’t Migrate:

  • We stay in our zone—we talk to people like us—who think like us, who vote like us, who dress like us, who walk like us and who talk like us.
  • People don’t always feel so good about having to move someplace because moving means I might be vulnerable—moving means I might not have the power and the influence I have when I’m on my own turf.
STORY | Social Media Comment:

Jakes read the comments of his social media page one day—something he tries not to do. On this particular day a young man commented and cursed him out. The commenter wrote how Jakes has it easy and doesn’t know what it’s like living in the world. The commenter accused Jakes of being out of touch as the commenter lived in the hood while Jakes lives in the inner city, is a rich pastor with a nice house in an affluent neighborhood. The man accused him of not understanding what it was like to struggle and be like him. Jakes was outraged when he read the comment.

Story of How TD Jakes Grew Up:
  • Ragged house in the hills of West Virginia on a corner of a cliff hanging off a rock.
  • No grass in his front yard and thought only rich people had doorbells.
  • Knew what it was like to be broke.
  • Ate government cheese and cut coupons from newspaper clippings.
  • Understood what it meant for his mother to have “Top Value Stamps”.

1. Recognize Reality Is Different Than Our Own

Jakes was able to pause to digest the words of the man on his social media page and began to understand. He thought maybe this is the way the man speaks and isn’t cursing him out.

  • Look at the truth behind what is said.
  • Admit when the other person’s reality might be right or “kind of” right.
  • Recognize how we share similarities, but we do not always share the same experience.

Even though Jakes and the man share the same skin color, ancestry and heritage, they did not share the same experience. Jakes began to analyze that how we see the world is a reflection of our worldview and past experiences.

  • Leadership & authority positions produce willful blindness.
Willful Blindness

Willful Blindness is seldom required to have to think about what the world looks like for somebody else.

  • Having the benefit to choose/see/ignore those around us because we live in the cubicles of our own control.
  • In that controlled environment, we control the music played, atmosphere, height of the desk, etc.
  • “Everything around us is in a controlled environment except we are living in a time that cannot be controlled.”
  • We cannot control a pandemic.
  • We cannot control racial turbulence.
  • We cannot control movements like Black Lives Matter.
  • Questions arise for those in any kind of leadership organization.
You Cannot Afford To Be Ignorant Of Someone Else’s Language:
  • Businesses exist under the reality that our truths are migrating.
  • Stats are migrating.
  • Our world is migrating.
  • Influence is migrating.

You Can’t Assume That Your Client Is You.

If you own a restaurant, you can’t design the menu around what you like to eat because your client may not like to eat what you like to eat.

What Do We Do When…
  1. We are making decisions that affect people we don’t know
  2. We offend people that we don’t know
  3. We alienate people that we don’t know
  4. Can we really afford to spend all of our resources on cleanup and inviting PR people do damage control over the blind spots that we had because we don’t have migrative thinking?
STORY | Reflecting on the Social Media Comment:

It occurred to Jakes when listening to the young man, as he stepped past the way in which he talked and gravitated into a deeper understanding of reverse reflection to see the world through his eyes. Jakes understood what it looked like to him—what he accused Jakes of despite not being that. jakes shared the truths of the falsifications listed earlier.

Migrate thinking into a world that is uncomfortable in order to be relevant outside of the universe of one’s own influence.

Reverse Reflection:
  • Trying to understand the world through the eyes of another.
CHALLENGE:

Think outside of the box because the box you’re in is too small for the world that you have.

  • Don’t rely on this for creativity—turn the box all the way around to think as if you were the other person.
  • Not just so that you might have empathy toward them, but so that you might prepare your future with them in mind.
  • You cannot think like you and prepare your future with them in mind.
STORY | Pastoral Role Insight:

Jakes shared his role as a Pastor includes speaking, preaching, teaching, ministering, counseling and marital counseling. He makes a living breaking up fights—a spiritual referee.

  • When a husband and a wife come into his office, they’re in dire straits. They don’t come in the early stages—they wait until all hell is breaking loose.
  • As a last resort, on the way to the courthouse, they stop by his office because they read that Jesus walked on water and they think he ought to be able to raise their marriage from the dead.
  • The truth of the matter is Jakes cannot raise marriages from the dead.
  • “But what I can do is interpret people who are talking over each other and not really hearing each other. What I can do is train the husband to think from his wife’s perspective. What I can do is talk to the wife so that she might begin to understand what that looks like and what that sounds like for him.”

2. See Someone Else’s Perspective:

  • When we begin to see from someone else’s perspective, we expand.
  • We build influence. We form unlikely alliances. We gain an ability to connect with a global audience rather than a community of thought.
  • Your whole world is shown in who you talk to. It’s right there in your contact list on your cell phone.
  • Your world is not the world.
  • Understand others because we are better together than we are apart.
  • It is hard to get different types of people to come together because we come with the baggage of our background and our perspective and our viewpoints.
  • Many of us lack the imagination or exposure to begin to understand backgrounds inform a truth but that truth may not be the truth. And consequently, you walk away with an absolute that is really an abstraction.
  • Because your absolute is an abstraction, eventually somebody’s going to challenge it.
  • You’re not going to know what to do because you never learned the language and the ability to measure yourself by your ability to migrate.
Intellectual Quotient “IQ”
  • Measurable and understandable
  • People hire by this measurement
Emotional Quotient “EQ”
  • Measurable
  • We can ask if someone is able to stand up under stress and pressure.
  • They might be intelligent, but are they going to fall apart?
  • Are they going to collapse? Are they going to have an emotional breakdown?
  • How strong is their EQ in order to be effective today?
Adaptability Quotient “AQ”
  • How well you can adapt when you’re outside of your environment
  • How you survive for a long time and your long-term understanding of yourself.
  • Starts with leadership.
  • We must be adaptable enough to migrate in our thinking to prepare for a world we can’t control and a world we have not come from.
  • AQ helps us in become empathetic, sympathetic, prepared, develop products and come into alignment with people who come from a different perspective.
CHALLENGE:
  • To not think about AQ from the safety of what you call truth.
  • Have courage to forsake the plumb line of past experiences and migrate into an environment where you are not surrounded by the accruements of your own experience.
  • Come to a place where you have to think about things differently.
  • Women think like men and men think like women.
  • Boomers think like a Millennial and Millennials think like Boomers.
  • If you can do that, you are wiser, and your decisions are smarter.
  • Decisions become more global and less isolated.
  • This is how to avoid increasing irrelevance.

3) Create a Level Playing Floor:

  • Level the playing floor where every person can be heard regardless of their background and be valued.
  • At the beginning of the COVID-19 virus, we noticed people we had not noticed before.
    • Pizza delivery boys.
    • People who came by to bring groceries to us because we were shut in.
    • People who were cleaning up the hospitals at the risk of their lives, risking contracting the virus so that our loved ones could be taken care of.
    • All of a sudden, we had gratitude for people who were slinging hamburgers across the counter to us in the hospital restaurant.
  • We’ve had to have migrative thinking.
  • Coronavirus has forced us out of the box.
  • As America has the most uncomfortable conversations it has ever had before, it is uncomfortable because we have the benefit of living in our silos.
    • Writing the books we read.
    • Choosing the press to watch.
    • We create this false reality then complain about anybody rising up against it.
  • We’re in a conundrum because we can no longer silence the people we can’t control.
  • We must learn how to migrate in our thinking to become a more perfect union—more perfect company, more perfect marriage, more perfect church.
  • CEOs can no longer just talk to CEOs. Talk to spiritual leaders because they’re the gateway to the community.
  • To make an impact on underserved communities, bring people to the table different from us for a 360 perspective.
  • Talk even when you’re afraid you might say the wrong thing.
  • If you can build a demographic that is different from yourself and respect their perspectives, we can have a level playing floor and we can change the world.
STORY: Four Men In The Bible Carrying A Man Sick With Palsy:
  • They carried him to Jesus, and when they couldn’t get in the door, they carried him up the wall.
  • When they got to the top of the wall, they climbed over on the roof.
  • They cut a hole in the roof and they lowered the man down into the finish line of being in the presence of the Lord.
  • Those four prongs are corporate leadership, spiritual leadership, community leadership and elected officials.
  • We’ve never had to work together, but we better do it now.
  • If unreasonable people do not find a way to migrate their thinking, unreasonable people will take over the conversation and we will all suffer the consequences of unreasonable people ruling in our silence.
CHALLENGE:
  • Get out of your comfort zone. Get out of the box.
  • Love enough, care enough and feel enough to be uncomfortable standing shoulder to shoulder with somebody who is good at something completely different than what you’re good at.
  • Make the connection so we can lift those that are fallen and raise those that are hurting.
  • Create a level playing floor where the rules are clear.
  • If we can do that effectively, we can make a big difference in the world.
  • We can make a big difference in our company.
  • We can make a big difference in our lives.
  • Play musical chairs with and switch until you have migrative thinking.

NEXT STEPS:

  1. Build a coalition you can’t control.
    • Purposely put together a coalition of people completely different from you.
    • Have uncomfortable conversations where the “Amens” don’t come easy and you are not the teacher.
  2. Sit down at the table with someone who has a perspective that you can’t teach.
    • The objective is to understand, not to straighten out.
    • Too many times our focus is, “I know how to straighten this out.” No, you don’t even understand this.
    • Find a situation where you become a student again.
  3. Find what connects you rather than what divides you.
    • Be in a situation where the objective is to take different types of people and find out what you have in common rather than focus on where you have distinctions.
    • Bear to admit that you don’t know what you don’t know.
    • You cannot be what you do not see.
    • You cannot change what you do not touch.
    • You cannot heal what you will not lay a hand on.
    • The only hope for our future globally and nationally—for our communities and society is to develop a new metric.
    • Start choosing people—hiring people and moving people up who have the liquidity of thought and the nimbleness of mind to have migrative thinking.

 

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