Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Rob Lion - Expert in Human Behaviour

Speaker A: Hi and welcome to decodingaq. Helping you to learn the tools, mindsets and actions to thrive in an ever changing world.

Speaker B: Hi and welcome to the next episode of Decoding aq. With me today I have a professor of Human resource development, Idaho State University. In fact I've just learned he's on a sabbatical and he is a dynamic leader and an expert in human behavior. He's got a couple of decades of experience in organizational development, leadership and performance improvement. He's also flying high. He's flying high not only because he's a fan of fly fishing, but I've just also learned that he has closed on a, a, ah, place that may be part of his dreams. A cabin uh, near where he can do his fly fishing. But he has a people first approach and known for being building sustainable human centric systems to drive growth and impact. The founder of Black River Performance Management. Maybe there's something in Black river and fishing. We'll find out. And he's passionate about helping leaders and teams unlock their potential through real world strategies that are grounded in science. So welcome to the show, Rob.

Speaker C: Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here, Ross.

Speaker B: So one thing I ask all the guests in the setup beforehand is what's the one question you'd love to be asked? And I sometimes weave this in sort of halfway through or at the end, but I'm actually going to start us off with it Rob. And um, the question that you wanted to be asked was what is the significance of context before content? So what do you mean by that? And tell me more.

Speaker C: Okay, well to me context is everything. So where I operate in my space, in this world where I consider my contributions is the nuance balances between information and action. So um, leadership is just not a, you know, create a model, follow the model and execute the model and then you're going to have success. There's so much in between the instructions that people tend to provide that we need to learn to navigate. And, and I'll give you a simple example. Um, think about a leadership, uh, book you've read or a self help book you've read or even a conference you attended and you, you've sat in that session and maybe your instructions from your supervis, go find something to bring back that we can use and then let's roll it out here. And uh, the books are wonderful. People's stories are great. I love hearing their examples of how it became real for them. But then you come back home and you realize it's not Working here, I did exactly what they told me to do in that 45 minute session or what I read in that book. And it has a lot to do with context, like what is the context. So their context they're presenting at that workshop is very different than the context you're coming home to. Whether it's home life applications, uh, relationship friendship applications or work applications. You know, the resources are different in all those situations. And I'm just not talking about financial, I'm talking about energy, time, all sorts of things. And so when I look at everything, everything comes across to me as what's the underlying context of the situation? And I'll just give you an example of a conversation I had the other day with someone. They were talking about micromanagement and how micromanagement is such a terrible thing and we need to really get away from that. And I kind of uh, said yeah, it is a rough thing for people that are fully competent, that should be cut loose to be autonomous. But here's the thing, the concept of micromanagement in and of itself is actually, there's some brilliance to it in that that's where your most successful onboarding activities occur in organizations. It's, it's a different form of micromanagement. You know, when you bring someone in just like you were new at some point in some organization, you didn't know the culture, you didn't know the team members, you, you didn't, you didn't even necessarily know the ins and outs of the job, right? You met the minimum qualifications on the job description. And uh, and, and so you come in with kit of your craft. But that, that hands on leadership approach of onboarding you and integrating you through that process to me is very important. And so I, you know, I always like to, to play around with that concept of micromanagement because it is, it's really a negative thing. When your people are fully competent, they deserve autonomy. Cut them loose, get out of their way, open the doors for them, right? And just remove those barriers. But other people need that hands on approach, especially new employees and a new team, new people entering the workforce, right? They've never really been there before, so they need that direct interaction. So I approach this as an example of context, that the context matters to how we deploy our support, our leadership, our management, um, even the nature of our interactions, right? Yours and my interaction will be different than every other person I interact with. And we actually acknowledge that really readily as humans, right? We realize that intimacy and intimate reactions with friends and, and people within our circle, we know those differences, but sometimes we fail to recognize the importance of those nuances in the organization. So as a leader, you know, we try to be fair by handling everyone the same to some extent. Extent. And then, and then what's the expense of that? Right. And so that's kind of where I start with this context. And so I'm a strategist. I, I don't think I would be here today talking to you if I didn't have a strategy for everything I did up to this point in my life. Like this morning, it was like, look at the calendar. I know what I need to get done that's not in there. Let's start building that system. Let's do it. And now I'm here with you, Ross.

Speaker B: It's interesting how, as I listen to you, the thought of context shifting, what we think, how we act and what we behave, and how that's so intertwined, right. The context we think can be one thing and that can be true and accurate. And then it can shift on a dime. You know, something can happen. It can be, um, a situation that suddenly is flipped by a comment, by a thought, by a new person, as you mentioned, you know, onboarding, new person coming in. It shifts the context. And one of the things that fascinated me, I like these very simple phrases, you know, context before content. I like simple things. They can stick in your head and help us understand things. And I remember changing our own training program as a result of, uh, one of the guys in one of the cohorts in the session. His name was Jay Reed. He was Canadian, actually, fellow Canadian. And he was, um, improvised comedy, all these kind of things. And his little ditty was connection before content. And it was fascinating because when you've got loads of stuff and you want to tell people and you want to get, get to the content, you forget connection. And I think that's another thing, isn't it, that maybe connection can help us build a bit more context, build a bit more awareness, uh, and understanding, uh, from that. What's the, you know, perhaps challenges of that where you say, oh, you have a strategy to try. And you mentioned treat everyone the same. If the opposite is we treat everybody individually, know their context, know everything hyper personalized. What's the challenge of that? Or is it all good?

Speaker C: Oh, uh, well, the main challenge or even the shortcoming, that is your resources, right? So when I'm working with teams, so when I work with organizations, I really enter it as a partnership and I want to understand what's truly going on with them. So That I can lean into that and help them identify those solutions. So for a lot of organizations we work with, culture has been a byproduct, not so much purposeful. And they know that that's what they need to be focusing on right now. And so there's a, there's an intense period of learning and development with these people and these teams. And you see the bewilderment just kind of pass over them as they're like, oh, uh, I gotta be aware of that also. And that. And then emotions factor in and then the emotions are firing so frequently, they're changing everything. It's almost like I make the joke like you probably wish you never came here because now you're overwhelmed with what you really don't know. So now you really know what you don't know. But the consequence. So the downside is the time that's required for that. Right. And uh, so there's no better time than today to start the work. It's kind of like self development. No better time than today to start it. Same thing with culture. But, but we have to be mindful that it might be a heavy lift to get started, especially for organizations that really haven't had much attention in that space for who knows how long. But the benefit, the gift at the end is beautiful. It's when people actually have connection and they're supporting each other. And then, you know, I hear often from leaders, I can't even set goals because they're so far out there that I can't, I could barely get through this. And the idea is that we want to create this culture that in my opinion, the groups I work with, we've tried to flatten the organizational structure in that team so that there's not a large gap in power, distance. Right. And so that there's a lot more shared leadership. At the end of the day, the supervisor, the leader still, you know, the buck still stops there. But if we can cultivate these relationships and get to know people better and uh, I'd really not set it up the way you set it up as so extreme that it'd be super overwhelming. But I get your point. The people start to take care of themselves, that they, they advocate for each other, they establish boundaries and barriers where they're healthy ones when they need to. And the supervisor just kind um of, it's not that they move out of, of that relationship, that they don't need to be as hands on in that relationship once they've established that, because it grows and it feeds itself. And then you Find people that might be the outliers in the group that aren't fitting and buying in and the other people are holding them accountable to the point that sometimes they exit the organizations themselves. And we do work with organizations and turn over a lot of staff at times. Not that we're exiting them, but they're self selecting out like this isn't a good fit for me. And so there is that startup cost and we seem to accept startup costs in other areas of our life, like buying a house, buying a car, all these other things. Uh, we need to accept that in our development area too. Because what I find is that that leader then can start to lead more effectively as opposed to almost just managing details. They could step back and now start getting a little bit more further sighted out to determine where that team needs to be to position themselves. So they're not in this kind of reactive cycle. So there is a consequence. It's the heavy lift. But it's uh, like I said, it's a beautiful thing when you don't have to intervene as the, the people are taking care of themselves and you're just resource allocating and removing barriers at that point.

Speaker B: And I guess the promise of technology has always been to do more with less right to do some of these things where we go, okay, I get the strategy, I get the idea. Personalization, good. Um, and we have a challenge with resource allocation and haven't got infinite resources, so how can we do these things? And we digitize them, we give LMSs, you know, we do do all of these things. I'm interested uh, of your thoughts around technology from the, the sense of what are you teaching differently now? What is, you know, um, in the university, how are they thinking differently about human resources as a whole area and division given the context of the world we're now entering in or the unknowingness of the world we're going to be in in two years time or five years time. How do you teach and educate for that?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I do want to kind uh, of clarify something here. So the world I live in is much more human resource development. It's the people aspect of the organization. Because I think the answer for that, that HRM M side, the more true benefits, policy, labor, those are really heavily influenced by technology and the shifts in technologies because they have to, they have to manage a big system with a lot on the line. So for me the space that I occupy is uh, building flexibility, mindsets and flexibility as it relates to what it is we're encountering. So that people are ready for those shifts and changes. And so we do this in a variety of different ways. You know, one of which is looking at personality and dimensions and how some people are more change averse as well, uh, or more faster moving and ready to accept things and run with it. Like we try to help them understand that there's a variety of different constructs or frameworks we can turn to to improve our sensitivity or our understanding of what's out there and how do we lead. Right. So part of this is backing up and recognizing that when you go into your position in an organization, you're often being hired into that position based off of your craft. Right. And when I say craft, I mean whatever that that training or prep was, whether it's, it's hands on or, or some sort of academic training, we rarely see people. You know, when you get promoted into that leadership role, you might have some sort of onboarding going on and some organizations are doing it excellent. But a lot of them, the ones that we're working with, they're not, they' they want it better, they're not necessarily sure how to accomplish this. And so, so, so that's a great lens that I use with my students also that recognizing that they're members of many of these sorts of organizations and they need to have this awareness as it relates to how do we move from here to there to accomplish these tasks. And you know, building in aspects of understanding of ourself is really important. Understand the others, um, uh, flexibility, pieces like that and, and what does that truly mean? Right. So it's not uncommon for us to hear a term such as mindset or flexibility or grit. And because it's all over the place like we are all feeding off the same trough as it relates to leadership development. All of us listening to these same types of podcasts. Right. So we're definitely consuming it. But what does that really, truly look like? Right. Once again coming back to context. So we spend time looking at those things and breaking those down and really is grit and why does this matter? And uh, how does this relate to moving forward as well as just even a refinement of our language and how we talk about these terms to ensure that we're talking about the same thing. So I spend a lot of time in the space of motivation and it's such a sexy term yet so under understood in terms of execution that, that we spend a lot of time growing that and refining the language that people are on the same page or more similar pages. Same thing with our onboarding. Of the culture stuff, right. It's important that we're all speaking some sort of consistent language because before those efforts we come from it, from whatever our lenses you know, give us, right, like whether it makes a, experiences, education, background, um, all those things. And so we spend time really refining what those terms are so that we enter the workforce in those areas that, that we might encounter these shifts, these changes that we need to respond to quickly and we're more adept at doing that. Um, and then part of our program, our academic program, have some great colleagues that spend the time in the tech space as it relates to those, to bring them along. I'm not the one to speak to the tech aspect of that. I'm more of the person to talk to the readiness of that.

Speaker B: And I guess, you know, it's interesting, I've come back from a, uh, event in Lithuania. It was the uh, career Development Roundtable for International Organizations. So it was the majority of UN agencies, you know, from undp, unicef, all the big ones, um, some interesting conversations around, you know, restructures, change and development, you know, how do people develop their careers and what does that look like within, you know, complex big organizations that tend to have a lot of hierarchy in them. And uh, there were two keynotes. I led one and the other one was led by a lady, a Lithuanian lady on motivation, the neuroscience of motivation. She's been named, uh, top 15 scientists in the world, etc for some of her research and what she's doing around motivation. And like you say, it's this sexy term and often there's so many interpretations of, well, what do we actually mean by that and what are the levers that are going to make somebody do something in the context of what our contact is, right? Develop people at work to become, you know, more of who they want to become, you know, what is their future version, future potential of that? What's been some of the, perhaps, um, myths or things that you uh, encounter in your work around motivation when it's related to development? And what are some of the uh, key principles that you think would be helpful for leaders to understand if your work saying, okay, this is the lexicon, this is the understanding we need around motivation. How would you help me understand that, Rob?

Speaker C: Oh, that's such a great question because I love this space. So um, let's start out with the language. What is motivational? What does it mean? And I subscribe and this is what I teach and this is what I bring to organizations. A needs based approach to motivation which, which right out of the Gate doesn't sound like a whole lot, but I'm talking about human functioning basic needs. Because we see, just to your point, we see a lot of motivation frameworks out there. There's a lot of motivation assessments, right, to evaluate am I more commanding or I'm more collaborative. Do I prefer, um, you know, uh, more resource intensive framework that money's important or, or is it about the experience, all these different things. And, and I set that stuff aside so I approach it. If we could back up for a moment, and you remember learning styles, learning preferences, we talked about that a lot before in the past. And you know, what we arrived at is uh, that it's not a learning style, it's a learning preference. We, we possess the ability to learn in all those different domains. And so let's handle those preferences and not cut anyone too short. So what I do right off the bat is I say, look, anything outside of these basic needs I'm going to talk to you about, let's handle them as preferences. Because if I buy my assessment results say I'm more collaborative than commanding, doesn't mean I can't be commanding. It just might mean I just don't love to live in that space. So we set those aside. And what I try to help people understand is that look, there's three basic psychological needs, um, humans possess and these are the foundational aspects. So if you actually look at Maslow's hierarchy, let's, let's put another bar underneath those physiological needs because without these three basic psychological needs, we couldn't accomplish those, those physiological needs. And those are competence, autonomy and relatedness. And people present them in a variety of different ways. We, we put them in that order because we have a, uh, nice little dashboard, the car dashboard, and we use it as, as a kind of a mnemonic test with our clients, say hey, did you, did you check their car? How are they doing when we're talking about motivation? So, um, so I think one of the things we struggle with is that we present motivation in a binary either or type of framework. Right? People are either intrinsic or extrinsically motivated. And what we know from the science is that those aren't our only two options. But we rarely hear about that in the workplace place, right? So we often hear people even during interviews. How do you motivate people? Well, let's start with this basic assumption that you can't motivate people. Let's, let's, let's just be really, and this is my opinion that that motivation is a purely intrinsic internalized process. Ross, you can cultivate events and experiences as my leader that, that nurtures those developments of that intrinsic motivation within me. But you can't really do anything that, that, that really is sustainable. Right. So the abundance of research shows that externalized rewards, extrinsic motivators are not sustainable over time but for the greater population. So we start with that, we try to understand that. So, so when we look at motivation, there's a couple different things here. So in order to have high quality internalized or intrinsic motivation, we need to have the presence of those three basic psychological needs. The competence, autonomy, relatedness. And so when those things are absent or deficient at any significant level, they throw us off and they erode our ability to maybe concentrate and focus. Right. If you think about going back to Maslow, some of those foundational elements are food and shelter. So if I'm brought in to do a workshop and uh, an employee is concerned about how to feed their family or their homes being foreclosed, their, their, their foundational needs are being threatened, I don't expect that that person's going to pay attention to me right now. Like, and that's something that we back up and talk to our, our leaders about in the workplace. If you people have some instability at these real foundational needs based levels, they're going to struggle. And that's usually where we see a lot of performance related things stemming from. Is, is um, is this disruption at these basic psychological needs level. So let's just juxtapose this against some of the other popular motivation frameworks that are based on you know, I'm motivated out of money, out of um, my environment, out of um, how I accomplish my work or the type of work I do. Those things are great and, and they're important. But, but if we don't address the root cause, we never get to those things. And too often when we handle those other things, um, we're not addressing the root cause. And so we're leaving. We're underserving people. Another way to think about it is think about all this work right now that's around purpose, you know, purpose of myself, purpose as me as a human in this world, purpose as me as a part of this organization. It's a great concept, but there's a certain luxury that goes along with that that you've made it through some foundational needs of your development. Get to that point, you're comfortable enough, you're satisfied enough, you're looking for more, you're starting to work towards that self actualization level. A lot of people aren't there. A lot of people are still navigating the space. And so I've had people come to us say hey, we'd like to do some purpose workshops with our people. Okay, well let's do an analysis of where your people are as it relates to that. Because if m, they're not ready for that conversation, if they haven't taken care of those more fundamental foundational pieces, then we're not going to serve them well here it might work well for you as the leader who happens to be at a different point in your own development, but your people, maybe it's just a uh, maybe it's a self selection sign up development session instead of an all staff. Now if we're doing it as it relates to mission and vision and strategic planning, that's a different conversation in of self. So what I've done is taken the two basic factors of motivation and let's just talk about those again. Extrinsic and intrinsic. So people, many leaders don't have the ability to pull the, pull the reward systems or give bonuses or have discretion over granting more benefits or these things that are really considered external rewards. Right. So right out of the gate, if we're using this two two factor motivation framework, most leaders can't incentivize performance because it's just not within their wheelhouse of responsibility. And go back to the science, it's not sustainable. So then we talk about intrinsic and one of the interesting things when we do motivation workshops, so I'll ask a group of leaders say so what motivates you? Um, and, and it's a very beautiful process because they're like oh, ah, servicing others. The challenge, making a difference in people's lives. You know, they get the really deep into their own internalized intrinsic motivations and then we pause, give them a breather and say so now let's talk about your staff. What motivates your staff? And it's very common for the group to start saying they're motivated by pay, by benefits by the time off we offer the perks. Uh, and what they've done is they've just made the shift from recognizing that their motivation is internally oriented to attributing their people's uh, motivation to external factors. And so that's part of that context, getting to know people so that we improve in that. And so we spend a lot of time looking at that increasing self awareness. But then we factor in two other pieces between the two paradigms. And I think this is where we get our most mileage out of it. So on the one end we have intrinsic motivation, the other end we have extrinsic motivation. And so what we're trying to do is move our people more towards the intrinsic motivation. How do I cultivate that in people? Well, uh, there's two other factors I've laid into our model, and so they are alignment and imposition. And so imposition is not as severe in terms of its impact on the psychology of the individual as extrinsic. So I have a diagram that shows this, which doesn't come across well through a podcast. But we're trying to move from external to truly internal. And so imposition is an example of maybe something we might have grown up with, with a parent telling us, you ought to go to a good college and get a good job so you can maintain this lifestyle. Or don't cut your hair, don't pierce your ears, don't hang out with those people. Right. Those are impositions. And we grew up in that environment and we as leaders have often adopt that as some of our own style in leading others, usually because of an absence of time. Like, it's easier for me to tell Ross, I need you to do this as opposed to moving into the next category, aligning you to the reason why we're doing this. And alignment is that much closer to pure intrinsic motivation. It has one foot in intrinsic motivation and one foot, uh, in this low level extrinsic. I don't quite know why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I'm not quite intrinsically motivated to do this yet. But my supervisor spends a couple moments to explain what's the relationship of, say, the task to my purpose or my, my role. And then the organization's overall ambitions. I start to build a little bit more alignment with that. Oh, once you explain it that way, I see why you need me to come in on Saturday. I get it now. And I have a vested interest in this. So it's this process that we use to help people understand that this is a way to improve the quality of the conversations with the people that they're supervising or living with or leading. And, um, we found really great results with it. So as I mentioned, this check your car piece. So when now coach or do business advising with some leaders, they reach out to me and say, hey, I'm having a problem with this person. I'm not sure what to do. Say, well, did you check their car? Let's start there. That's our, that's our foundational Assessment is, have you checked their car? And it usually comes back to a factor of either confidence, autonomy or relatedness at work. Or if we clear work, it's from home. And then we see this time and time again. So we had a situation. Can I share this with you? I think this is a great assessment. So I had a leader once that said, I don't know what to do with this person. You know, she's been here for two years, she was an excellent employee. Six months in, she was doing everything correct. But now she's not. She's really struggling. Team's falling behind because of her. Said, well, did you check her car? She said, yeah, I checked her car and she's no longer competent. Well, wait, wait, wait. No longer competent? Like you unlearn, um, how to ride a bike, right? You know, like, so once she was competent, she's always going to be competent. Unless there's a couple different scenarios. One, we change the system. So now you think about software rolling in a new software. I used to know that other stuff. I used to be an expert, now I'm new, okay? My competence diminishes or some sort of more serious like traumatic head event that, that has affected that. So that's a real but. So for all intents and purposes, she's competent. She always, she has been and so she still is. Something else is in the way. So let's talk about her autonomy. You know, is she have a new manager? Is that person micromanaging her? Right? Hovering over her and diminishing that? And said, no, everything's still the same. I said, well, how about the last one? Relatedness? What's the nature of the relationships between the work team? Are there new employees, maybe some new drama? She's like, no, they're all the same. For whatever reason, she's not performing. And I don't understand, said, well, okay, did you check her car at home? And this was interesting too. The leader's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't talk about home life. I was like, oh my goodness, here we go, right? Because these people are giving m more time to their job than they are giving to their families, their friends, their own well being, right? So I said, no, we need to talk about, we need to check her car at home. She's like, no, I'm not comfortable doing this. Please just, just open the door, just inquire because you've been having these ongoing conversations about your performance is not meeting the market performance. So maybe we change that, that conversation a bit. Invite her to be vulnerable if she needs to share what's going on with your life. Is everything okay? And at that moment the, the, my client called me then right after and said rob, I opened the door and she just stepped right in. She told me everything that she now, her live at home daughter is now pregnant. So arguably maybe eroding some senses of competence as a mother, um, her relationship with her husband is on the rocks. So some relatedness there might be a factor. And then her mother in law is moving in. All this is happening in the same time. Right. So it's, it's a, I, I like sharing that example. It's a real example of how people struggle. We're all at different points challenged in our life. But how that flows into the workplace. Right? You just can't leave that stuff at home. Check it at the door. Good luck. That's, that's a, you know, it's a nice concept, but it's a lot more difficult than.

Speaker B: And um, uh, what I like about what you just shared in terms of linking motivation to a subconscious need, what is that need driving it? Whether it's achieving goals, protecting your assets, you know, mitigating some form of risk, whether it's upholding some ethics of what I believe in or you know, my, my personal ideals, wherever it may be, in those needs that manifest then in decisions, some explicit and we can see them, some we don't. You know, we might just see that they're frustrated or they're afraid or they're angry or they're anxious. And we might see the emotional response of a off track to that need that then is linked to, oh, they're motivated or not, or that's not happening. If they're on track. Well, yeah, we see them confident or they're productive or they feel worthy or they're proud. I think one of the challenges, often when we have a framework, we open a door, we get some awareness, both self and for others. It's what next. So at that point right now, you know, uh, this person, you know, Rob encouraged me to do this. Check the car at home. I now understand this. Now what, now what do I do as a leader, as a colleague, as a peer, when someone has shared something like that, how do we create a, uh, roadmap, strategies, you know, pathways for things that are not necessarily in our own experience or wheelhouse. Um, because I think I'm seeing this a lot with leaders at the moment. They've gone from an ability to whatever their team are facing, it's been faced before by them or other team members. So they've got the playbook and they kind of configure it out and help them. What I think many are seeing right now is the compounding effect. You mentioned three things. Relationship on the rocks, um, you know, mother in law moving in and living, daughter, you know, pregnant. We're seeing these things compound at the same time in shortened time frames that look very different and are things that we don't have experience. How do leaders navigate that or how might they m. Approach?

Speaker C: Sure. The people I work with, we, we then look at activating our humanity and, and what are those compassionate pieces of, of our humanity? Right. Like so it's, it's, it's talking about what is ego and how is that impacting some of our decision making in our, in our leadership and just almost fleshing the ropes and, and being vulnerable in and of itself. Right. You know, one of our tenants is vulnerability does not equal weakness. Right. And we've been taught for so long to be not vulnerable because it's a strength and we know better. We know that's how relationships and trust are formed is when we're, we open ourselves up and we make, make ourselves vulnerable. So we start to go through some of these more in my opinion, humanistic, um, concepts of, of what you need because it's too hard to say what do your people need? In many instances it's a jump. Right. So to your point, that's one of the limiting factors of models is now we're trying to jump to understand other people. So our best lessons are we gain our best lessons when we think about our own experiences and self and that what is it that we want to experience? What is it that we value? What does that look like? All these different pieces that are, you know, generally who you are. And then we talk about, so what about that person? Do you think they possess any of these? They're not going to be the exact same. They're like values. Your values might be different than my values. But what we're trying to get to, um, and we had kind of an eye opener in a workshop last month. We're talking about values. A bunch of them stated the same values. But one of the reasons why I was at that organization is because they weren't living according to those values. So how is it that you have these values yet you're violating them consistently? Well, it's because people don't necessarily have the skills to live by their values. They never thought about that. So part of our goal is how do we build that bridge to move from an Abstract concept to, to being helpful to someone. And in my opinion, the best we can do that is to really learn what moves us as people. And that's why we anchor on this motivation framework these basic psychological needs is because we're trying to get, we put all things aside, culture, beliefs, values. At the end of the day, we're people and our uh, needs are relatively consistent across different groups. And so we want to help people get in touch with that. So does that bring a certain type of person, does that draw a certain type of person to us? Yeah, absolutely. We're not for everyone in the sense of. When I talk about love and compassion of your employees and your team and your community, some people are like, I'm m out. You know, I don't want a part of that. But, but what we're trying to do is, is really nurture that in the people that have those beliefs and ambitions, but they just don't necessarily have the skills or the language to accomplish those things. So we try to slow it down. But once again, to your point way back earlier, doing all the work to develop the culture and get to know people takes time. Well, in order for us to, I think, hit our long term targets, we need to slow things down and we need to reflect and we need to think and we need to process and we need to better understand pieces and come together as a team to make plans to move forward. And some organizations once again do those very well and then others just feel so timestrapped.

Speaker B: So I know several organizations that know their values, find it easy to live by those values when things are good, when it's difficult and when it's inconvenient because of circumstance to live by those values, it becomes a bit more shaky. Yeah, and that can be, you know, big, uh, contract loss, you know, with a client that they have and that affects things. It could be, you know, shifts, um, in the workforce. Uh, you mentioned about competency. It can be just because the roles changed and the roles have changed because they've now adopted something else. A new market market, new proposition, new business model or a new piece of technology. And so when organizations are facing living their values when it's hard to live them, uh, we care about our people, but we no longer have a valuable role for those people. For example, we care about our people, we're under financial pressure so we can't, you know, reward them so they're, their underlying needs aren't being met of, you know, to live the life they want to live, whether that pay the bills or whatever. It may be. How do organizations, in your opinion, who's doing it? Well, uh, to deal with that when it's difficult, what is the process? What's the framework? Is it collaborative? Is it this? What's the way of overcoming those challenges when it's very difficult to act against the answer that the value would give them when they. It seems opposed that they could really get to that result, that, that outcome.

Speaker C: Yeah. So the hierarchical nature of organizations really complicates that. Right. Like that power, distance is a, uh, is a factor in and of itself that complicates how people and organizations handle those things. Now, very flat organizations can, can still have the same problems and still not do it well. But, um, when we're looking at really large organizations, it's. It's difficult to navigate that space. Uh, what we've done, and I've always been a fan of. Well, think about it this way. What happens in your life when you get a shakeup like that? All right. Like when things really shake us up personally, hopefully we seek some sort of counsel. Right. And. And there's a process that I believe in, and that is, that is. That is preparing and walking us through that change process. We know the change is imminent. Uh, it's here, it's been here. We got to figure out how to move forward. Well, let's actually debrief a little bit of what's going on, what that means for us. Let's open the room to have these conversations. But where are these stressors right now? Where are the risks? What are we potentially up against? So that people could almost err some of their grievances as it relates to those things, because you think about it, a decision way, uh, up the, the food chain that, you know, big, big clients lost someone several rungs down. They're. They're paying for it. Right. They might lose their job over it, and they might not have had anything to do with that. Right. So you could see how a person's

Speaker B: like, you can see it. That's the harsh reality, you know, of our, uh, commercial, corporate world, you know, of business. It might have nothing to do with you. And that results in a. A tap on the back of well done, or a tap on the back, sorry, this is happening. That's the reality.

Speaker C: And, and I think the worst thing we can do is not talk about that. The worst thing we can do is not at least give the people that feel afraid, frustrated of voice. You know, it's, um, it's therapeutic. It's bring it out of them, let them Talk about them, let them share their stressors. Because if we don't do this in a healthy, constructive manner under a guided process, whether with some key leaders or some outside facilitator coming in, you know, they're going to have their grievances together in small pots. And that never serves anyone well because you can't manage some of the spin that comes out of that and the, you know, they start sharing the beliefs and they can be very wrong in some instances. So how can we bring that in, have some listening sessions, transition those people to be more ready for the changes coming up. Right. Change success is based on buy and sometimes that just never happens because we don't learn about it. The same thing happens with hiring key stakeholders. We have, we have key stakeholders leave organizations a mess and those, those people are hurt, they're damaged and too often we're too quick just to find a new person to fix the problem. At that point, uh, our belief is that we need to slow that down while they're running that search and looking for those solutions. We need to have this process where we facilitate this out and identify some underlying factors, things like that, so that the organization understands what the people are really experiencing.

Speaker B: It's so common, complex, isn't it? Because absolutely, we, we need to develop whilst in motion. Right, we need to replace the tires on the car whilst in motion, yet we need to slow it down to be able to do it versus, oh, let's put it on a transporter so that it can still move along whilst we do the replacement. And you know, all of these sort of stories and analogies that yes, it's complex and I had a little aha, uh, moment Rob, as you were talking there around, whilst it might not change the actual decision, um, because that might not be changeable in certain situations.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: It might make us feel differently about that decision. And so that shift from oh, this has happened to me to happen for me, that that is then felt and it's felt that then can manifest from this victimhood of, you know, I feel bad because it, it's happened to me. So I need to push harder or I, I fret over things or I might intimidate people if I'm angry about something or you know, punish myself and feel guilty or I go in a dark room to how might I have a more positive response, irrelevant of what the change was or the outcome is and you know, to get, uh, how can I make sure I'm better at contingency planning? How can I look for different ways to achieve that goal through different, different, you know, mechanism, different mediums. How might I, you know, give forgiveness, offer forgiveness? You know, how can I think maybe slightly differently to adapt the, the framework of change? Because I think one of the, you know, things that I'm seeing more and more of is, yes, an appetite and a realization that change is accelerating and speeding up. How we deal with that, ah, in a humane way of slowing down to speed up, of listening well and having the tools to do that is unnerving for many, um, areas that go beyond our capability. And how do we then say help? I need some help in this. Especially for leaders who've been rewarded for their competency, been rewarded for having their answers to now suddenly be faced with situations that go into personal stuff, go into emotion, go into things that might not be stuff they've been familiar with of those things. So in your view of, as you sit at this sort of balance between education, academia, science, real world, what are some of the, the techniques that we should be shifting? I know you've written before about some of the difference between showers and growers and how we're building based cultures. Just give us a few. As we come to the sort of twilight period of this episode. Some. Yeah, you know, you've given us some great examples of car as a check in some other frameworks. If you're working with organizations that are facing a difficult decision, you know, they're now going to talk about it and do things, what else would be helpful for those leaders?

Speaker C: Sure. One thing that really comes to mind that is essential and once again ask this question, what happens? Like, where do we turn when things are bad and outside of work? What, what is our safety net when things happen locally? Totally. It's the quality and the nature of the community that's around us. Right. And to me, as much as we use the words culture, I think community is uh, an aspiration for organizations. Building those communities create support, trust, resilience. And just as we see in the world around us our communities. And so I would recommend that we give some attention to those pieces is because when we look at our community and it's funny how we just to look at work as very transactional and then we go to our bowling league after work or something and we have these great relationships with people. You know, it's, it's not that you have to have both in both places, but, but it's that, it's that, uh, nurturing the elements of community that, that grow the support around the people that are in there so that there's support some resilience so that those organizational units can bounce back quicker because those elements of trust and reliability that they can turn to their people and say, look, I spend the most time of my life with you. Um, and, and you have my back. And I know that's true. And, and I espouse for that belief for our leaders. We really want them to have that opinion that their leaders have their back.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, it's a key point. It comes out in our data as well, Rob, in terms of. Of, you know, our model of a third of it focusing on the environment, the context, the psychological safety, the team support. We know that that's one of the key buffers against setbacks. It improves people's resilience, it reduces work stress. You know, it gets better outcomes when we have the ability to share something that is a different opinion, not get reprimanded from it, maybe even get from, you know, a reward for those things that is offering different views, different thoughts than the echo chamber that's in there. And it's, uh, as I keep coming back to this, it's easy when. It's easy when things are going well, when, you know, we're growing, when we're developing that. Yeah, we can, we can bring on the different thoughts, you know, have the different ideas, uh, you know, deal with mental flexibility of two, you know, the paradoxes, all of those things. Can we do it when we're under pressure? Under pressure, time, money, you know, fretted relationships. And um, that I think the, the key piece I'm taking away of to not lose the humanity, not you lose the humanity for the pursuit of survival, of growth, you know, and uh, of development, that it needs to remain humane. So one of the questions I've asked every guest, Rob, is um, linked, in fact, uh, elements of unlearning. So another dimension that we measure in these, uh, areas and also linked to curiosity. And the question is, when was the last time you did something for the first time and what was it?

Speaker C: Sure, I love that question. It's important to be a student, not just, you know, trudging and being a leader and plowing through things. So for me, actually that would. That's really relevant. Uh, I got scuba certified this summer. So I went from something like, I love fish, I love water. And I wanted to exist more within that space. And uh, actually our whole family, the whole four of us went and we, we did all our dive training together. And now we have a plan for. For spring break for the boys and we'll go dive in Mexico. But, but that is it like the took some time for us to, to pursue something that was a joy and that was beautiful.

Speaker B: That's fantastic. You know, this, uh, ability to find things we're curious about, you know, figure out how do we want that to show up in our lives. Needs a bit of courage, needs some commitment and we get some new capabilities and confidence and round we go in that circle to find something new again. To make those commitments, uh, to before we have the capability, needs that courage. You know, my, uh, coach, Dan Sullivan talks about the four Cs of you make the commitment first before you got the capability. You need courage, then you acquire the capability that gives you confidence. You go around in this sort of developmental, positive, uh, you know, circle. As we grow, is there anything that you would have loved to have shared that we haven't done? Um, and alongside that, how do people get in touch with you, Rob, if they're curious about some of your work, they really like, uh, some things that you've shared. How do they best get in touch with you?

Speaker C: Okay, so the thing, one of the things that we didn't cover, which you just alluded to right there with this last question, I think it's important for us as teachers who are trying to instill knowledge in other people to be, continue to be students and, and it might be comforting for us to continue to do self development work in areas that are comfortable but you know, like, but what's outside of that comfort zone to stress us, you know, go back and become a student again, a real legitimate student again to have a better appreciation of what your clients are experiencing. Right. So that's one of the things I keep in mind. How to get in touch with me, uh, our, our website, uh, www.blackriver and then the letter P for performance and the letter m m for management.com or find me on LinkedIn, uh, Robert and last name Leon, but spelled like lion. L, I, O, N. And I'd love to have a conversation with people about any of this stuff. And so there's email addresses on our website to get in touch with us and um, just appreciate the opportunity to share these ideas and just spend some time with you, Ross.

Speaker B: I've loved it. I alluded at the beginning that we might find out whether there was a meaning behind Black River Performance Management. So I'd feel remiss if we didn't close that loop before we say farewell. So is there a story behind the naming of Black River?

Speaker C: It's where I love to spend my time. It's no, no specific river, but in the mountains, along the water. And it's something that brings my wife and me joy. And. And the. The irony is that. Or not the irony so much as. Let's juxtapose this against what else was happening when this was created. Remember when everyone was in this process of creating these names of these companies that have no relative meaning with whatsoever. They're just kind of a. A, uh, letter salad that made a sound like bungle or something like that. I remember branding people saying, hey, you need to do something different. Put a couple extra Ls in there and another A and. And make it something different. I said, this is. This is where we want to be. This is what we like. And hopefully this is good.

Speaker B: Brings you joy. Uh, it's wonderful. I love the word joy. Uh, in fact, at our wedding, uh, my father came up to me after, he said, who's this other person, this joy? Because, you know, we were bringing joy into our, you know, bow was all of these things, and it was just a lovely little. Lovely giggle and lovely moment.

Speaker C: Awesome.

Speaker B: Bring more joy to the world. Rob, it's been an absolute pleasure to hang out on the show. Look forward to, uh, continually following some of your work and looking for opportunities to collaborate in the future. Thanks, Rob.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Thanks, Ross. Have a great day.

Speaker A: Do you have the level of adaptability to survive and thrive the rapid changes ahead? Has your resilience got more comeback than a yo yo? Do you have the ability to unlearn in order to reskill, upskill and break through? Find out today and uncover yourself adaptability profile and score your AQ. Visit Aqai IO to gain your personalized report across 15 scientifically validated dimensions of adaptability. For a limited time, enter code podcast65 for a complimentary AQME assessment. Aqai transforming the way people, teams and organizations navigate change. Thank you for listening to this episode of Decoding aq. Please make sure you subscribe on your favorite podcast directory, and we'd love to hear your feedback. Please do leave a review and be sure to tune in next time for more insights from our amazing guests.