Nate Regier II, compassionate accountability

Hello and welcome to the Compassionate Leadership Interview. I'm Chris Whitehead and our guest today is Nate Regier, founder and CEO of NextElement, a global advisory firm specializing in leadership communication, and author of Beyond Drama, Transcending Energy Vampires, and Conflict Without Casualties, a field guide for dealing with compassionate accountability. You can find Nate on Twitter at NextNate. Welcome once again, Nate.

Thank you very much. I feel welcome, and it's great to be here with you, Chris. We last spoke in February 2020 on episode 17 of this podcast. What's been going on at NextElement since then?

Well, I suppose like everyone, surviving and trying to figure out how to thrive during the pandemic was going on. A lot of reinventing, rebuilding, and also realizing new wonderful opportunities for sharing compassionate accountability with the world. In episode 38, I interviewed Michael West about his lockdown project, the book Compassionate Leadership. You're launching a new book in July, Compassionate Accountability, How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results.

Is this your own lockdown project? Interestingly, Chris, a little over a year ago, this was not even in our mind's eye. We were going to do a second edition of my book, Conflict Without Casualties. And then we started seeing what was happening coming out of COVID, the leadership challenges, what was going on in work cultures, the return to work issues, the inclusion, diversity issues.

And we realized we need to change the order and write this book now. We had had most of the material ready. And so we changed plans. We worked very, very fast and produced this book in record time because we felt like it was time and the world needed these resources.

So yeah, this kind of became our COVID project. Okay, tell us a little about the book then, Nate. Well, the words compassion and accountability aren't supposed to go together. And when most people see these, the first response they have is a puzzled look on their face.

And then within a few seconds, they get this sense of hope and enthusiasm, like, wait, if these two words could go together, that would be amazing. And so this book represents, we have been tracking this struggle, the challenge leaders have of how to reconcile paying attention to relationships and getting things done. And prior to COVID, probably up until about 19, 2018, 19, most leaders could get by with choosing one over the other, but they can't anymore. No longer can leaders afford to compromise relationships for results.

And so we felt that it was time to share our methodology and our philosophy for how leaders do both at the same time and achieve kind of breakthrough results. And how has your thinking moved on since you wrote Conflict Without Casualties? You know, the subtitle of Conflict Without Casualties is Leading with Compassionate Accountability. And I would say that our understanding of that concept was in its infancy then.

Since then, we've discovered what we call the compassion mindset, the three switches of the compassion mindset. This is really a visual and also a framework for how leaders can activate the proper mindset and execute the proper behaviors to be able to actually build cultures of compassionate accountability. One concept in the book that intrigues me is the three switches. Where did you get that idea from?

Oh man. Yeah. We are really trying to evolve our methodology to get simple and elegant, yet still powerful. And when we were, when we were reflecting on these dimensions of our existence and how, what does compassion really mean and how does impact behavior?

One of my colleagues had this visual he said you know it like there are switches and they they switches inside of us And when they turned on energy flows and the room lights up relationships light up And when the switches are off energy is blocked and it's dark. And I thought, what a wonderful metaphor, because there's so much energy in the world from diversity, from conflict. We have plenty of it, but how do we use it? And the metaphor of switches means you can choose to turn your switch on.

And when you do that, all of this energy becomes available to power wonderful things, creation, inclusion, solving big problems. And so we actually came up with the three switches and Chris, this is only for you to see, but this is the original three switches that I built at the local hardware store to visualize and represent that we can turn these switches off and block the energy of compassion, or we can turn them on and we can experience the incredible results of compassionate accountability.

And they're labeled responsibility, capability, and value, aren't they? Yeah, there we go. Can you place the book for us in the pantheon of compassionate leadership literature? I've mentioned Michael's book.

Yeah. From the States, you have Warline and Dutton's Awakening Compassionate Work and Tresiak and Mazzarelli's Compassionomics. I would include Amy Edmondson's The Fearless Organization, and then there's Amy Bradley's The Human Moment, among many others. How do you see your book as complementing or challenging what's available already?

Yeah, these are wonderful books. Many of them have influenced our work and many of those authors and thought leaders. One thing you'll notice is none of those titles have the word accountability in them. and you can also find a whole list of books about accountability, radical candor, accountability in organizations.

Our premise is that you can't talk about compassion without talking about accountability. And if you try to do compassion without accountability, you get nowhere. But if you try to do accountability without compassion, you get alienated. the real breakthrough comes when we recognize an evolved definition of compassion that actually includes accountability.

We went back to the Latin root of the word compassion. Compassion means with suffer, struggle with. So there's a lot of other kinds of struggle, but struggling with is a very unique proposition. It's a very leadership specific way of thinking about compassion that includes accountability.

And I think that's the unique, that's the unique contribution. Okay, so you've just said compassion and accountability are complementary. Would you like to impact that for us? This does go back to a bigger definition of compassion.

If compassion means to struggle with, what does that actually look like when we struggle with other people, particularly during challenging, difficult situations, during conflict? we went back to the drawing board and revamped our working definition of compassion. So we define compassion as the practice of demonstrating that people are valuable, capable, and responsible in every interaction. Those three components make our definition of compassion include accountability.

Also, what it says is that, yes, human beings are valuable, But if we just stop at altruism and empathy and just treating everyone as wonderful, we neglect the whole part of our humanity, which is that we are creators. We are problem solvers and creators. So we must also affirm human capability. But if we stop there, we also miss the most important part of humanity, which is we live in communities, which means we are accountable to each other and our behaviors matter.

We cannot practice compassion without acknowledging the responsibility that we have as human beings. So our definition includes value, capability, and responsibility. And that working definition helps illustrate why accountability is so part of compassion. Another model that makes a fleeting appearance in part two of your book, but I thought was insightful is the relationship between people organizational culture and your brand There so much written about brand management but not much that tracks it back to interaction between colleagues Can you say You know culture and brand are such squishy concepts They're so difficult to measure, so difficult to get a finger on.

But we know great brands and we know great cultures when we feel them. One of my good friends, Bobby Herrera, he runs a very large staffing agency. And I love the way he said it. He said, brand is a lagging indicator of the quality of your culture.

And what that means is your brand is not something you can just manufacture. You can't hire a brand firm that's going to create a nice logo and a new website and great new products. And you're going to magically have a great brand. Your culture drives the brand.

So if the culture stinks, so will the brand. That begs the question then, what is culture? Yeah, I have a couple of different definitions in the book, but it all boils down to culture is really just the sum of every interaction between your people. It's how we do things.

So how often do we focus on individual interactions at the people level as the primary driver of brand? That's a very important part of our company at NextElement is we focus on every single interaction being something that will drive our brand, reflect our brand, and reinforce our brand. Part three of your book is about implementation. And this was my favorite part of the book.

I'm an engineer, so I like a good process. And it seems to me that what you have here is well thought through. Can you take us through the process of building the culture of compassionate accountability? Thank you.

I appreciate you saying that. And I'm glad an engineer can see value there Because what we see a lot of books about culture, about compassion, they either goes right down to just the granular interactions between people, but they neglect systems and processes. Or they're so theoretical around systems that they don't really address how do you actually talk to each other. And we've tried to do both in this book.

And so, yes, that last section is really about what we have learned to truly implement this in a culture. And it's like implementing anything. You have to address common systems and processes that reinforce behavior throughout. So we start with how to build behavior norms.

How do you establish what are going to be our behaviors that reflect compassionate accountability? And then I identify six areas of an organization, typical common areas like talent recruitment and development, performance management, mission, vision, and values. And I offer a lens for how should we evaluate and update those to reflect a compassion mindset. We've also offered an assessment.

There's an assessment that organizations can use to assess the presence or absence of the compassion mindset in their culture. Yeah, I read that and I found it quite helpful. One of the case studies in part three attracted my attention. Chapter eight relates to a regional healthcare system.

And Stephen Treziak, who I interviewed in episode 28, comes at Compassion from the clinician side. Your case study concerns the senior management team. Would you like to describe what they did? Yes, Treziak's amazing.

And his work has been so seminal, I think so important. I can't recommend it enough. We were engaged by a large regional health system coming out of COVID in 21, 22, because they were tired. They were worn out.

They were beat up, and they really needed to reinvest in leadership culture. And they knew, like most of the literature suggests, that a strong leadership culture can drive a lot of things. So they engaged us to first assess compassionate accountability in their leadership culture and then start to systematically train the behaviors and apply the principles in a lot of areas. In the book, I share an example of how they embedded that into their principles and processes.

They have a document about here's how we are, here's what matters to us, and here's how we're going to conduct ourselves. And they completely revamped that document to reflect their commitment to the organization and to each other around compassionate accountability One of the points you make in your case studies is don try to implement large scale behavior change until leaders are consistently modeling the change they want to see Once you've reached this point, though, what's next?

Then we have to talk about things like every system and process in that particular organization. One of the big challenges now is performance review and how they approach annual or regular performance reviews, how they apply promotions, how they apply benefits. And all of those things need to be aligned with reinforcing the behaviors of compassionate accountability. So that's an area where they're focusing.

Another area is onboarding. So what happens when new people come on board? There needs to be a process to get them up to speed and trained. And then there's just ongoing practice because things fade over time and people need regular reminders.

And so we actually certified and trained several facilitators within their organization that are conducting practice groups and coaching sessions and helping to keep the materials alive. Later on in your book, you have a section entitled Overcoming Barriers to Compassion, which struck me as a helpful development of the King's Fund article by Michael West and Susie Bailey, Five Myths of Compassionate Leadership. If you had to offer just one insight into how we can overcome barriers to compassionate accountability, what would it be?

Yes, great question. And we used to call them myths, actually. And we decided to call them barriers because we want to invite people to come on board with these concepts. But everyone's different.

Everyone comes from a different place and it's not easy. So we wanted to acknowledge that sometimes our myths, sometimes our understandings can create barriers for us, but we have the ability to break those down. If you were to ask which of the barriers is most significant challenge for the people we work with, I would say it's the one that believes compassion is soft. And if I practice compassion, people will think I'm weak and they will take advantage of me and then nobody will do anything and it will be a free-for-all in our organization.

Also, people are afraid. People that are used to being tough are afraid to get vulnerable and open. So it takes some work, it takes some support, but that's one of the biggest barriers and where they get the most benefit when they can make that change. Like Michael West and myself, you believe compassionate accountability can change the world.

Give me your take on that. Let's end on a positive note. I do. I really do.

It changes the individual lives and organizations we work with every day, but I want to go bigger. I've mapped out my vision for compassionate accountability in four different areas. Right now, I'm really in the thick of thinking about how this applies to inclusion because I think compassionate accountability is the next evolution of inclusion. And in fact, it's a foundation.

We can't really do good inclusion without it because so many inclusion efforts focus on human value, maybe capability a little bit, but we don't want to talk about responsibility. If we try to have a conversation around behavior, we can easily be emotionally hijacked. We need a way to break through and really have rich conversations. I'm actually interviewing someone who's in the DEI space about this here next week.

But I think that's one of the areas we could make the biggest change and benefit. Well, that's it. It's a wrap for this episode and it's a wrap for this series of interviews. After 50 interviews with some fascinating Compassionate Leaders, I've decided to rest my case.

I'm thrilled that over the past four years, 9,000 unique listeners have tuned into this series. I hope we've provided you with some inspiration for your own leadership journeys. My very best wishes to each and every one of you. You can order Compassionate Leadership, the book on Amazon and I'm available for seminars on the subject.

This episode was recorded by Zoom and the music was brought to you by 96Pak on CPE Records.