How Much Adaptation Tax Are You Paying?

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Rob: I remember I was in a Facebook group.

Rob: It wasn’t one I’d paid for. It was, like when you look at things. They were like, you can earn, I can’t remember what it was, a hundred grand or 10 grand a month or whatever it is selling your knowledge and you don’t have to be an expert. 

Rob: I remember this girl.

Rob: And she was like these people are posting and she’s 22, 23, 24. 

Rob: She go, Oh, I found it. I found my niche. I’ve been on dating apps. I’m going to teach people dating. 

Rob: Next thing is, Yeah, this system works. I’ve had my first sale, it was just before Christmas and she’s given me eight grand in savings.

Rob: She’s gonna clear the rest by January. Yay me! Now I can have a great Christmas. 

Rob: You don’t know what you’re doing. Yeah. That’s crazy. I think there is a lot of, there’s so many people that I think are disenfranchised, disenchanted with corporate work that they want to work for themselves.

Rob: And there’s all these people who are giving them the shovels and going you don’t need to know this. You don’t need to be an expert. You just do this and this. I think there’s a real problem. 

Rob: [00:01:00] There’s a lot of people and I talk to people and you can tell when someone has deep knowledge and when they’re don’t really know what they’re talking about. 

Rob: The typical thing is used to be in relationships is, we were at a breaking point, we sorted it out, now we’re happy, now we’ll teach you how to do it and now in leadership it’s been, I was a failing manager and I turned it around and now I can teach you.

Tony: As if everybody’s in exactly the same situation with the same toolkit, 

Rob: yeah. 

Tony: Doing the same job. It’s it’s crazy. 

Rob: I think it’s very difficult for a company for someone who’s looking for training, how do you know someone who’s good when it’s something because you want someone else in, you can’t really judge.

Rob: I don’t know if you’ve ever read the the art of war. Yeah, I love 

Tony: the art of war here. 

Rob: We’re reading that now for our book club.

Rob: Did Michael suggest it? I think so. I put up four books. I put up the art of war. Is it one of his favorites?

Tony: I’m working with him on my book, right? 

Tony: I told him how inspired I was by it many years ago when I was in football and how I could apply it straight away to different areas of the game that I [00:02:00] was doing.

Tony: So we’ve had dialogue around it. That’s why I’m asking. I know that he’s in the book club with you. 

Rob: Yeah. I put up four books. I put up art of war. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Nietzsche’s Good and Evil Ethics, or whatever it is.

Rob: Can’t remember the last one. No one voted for the last one anyway. Nietzsche got one vote and Art of War got three and Marcus Aurelius got two. So it’s a very short book now, 

I’ve just started to read it again. I think I was a teenager when I first read it. He’s telling the parable, a Chinese parable of a family of doctors and he said he’s the best known doctor.

Rob: He said my oldest brother is a brilliant doctor. He said he can see the spirit of illness before it forms. And so he heals it and no one talks of him. 

Rob: My elder brother is a great doctor. He can see the earliest signs and he can catch it before it’s taken root and he can solve it. 

Rob: Me, I perform surgeries. I sell new potions. So word gets around and everyone thinks I’m great. 

Rob: That sums it up, isn’t it? 

Rob: I remember in mediation training, if they don’t even notice you’re there, that’s when you’ve done a good mediation. 

Rob: But it’s really hard to do that. Cause your [00:03:00] best work no one’s going to recognize it. And if no one’s going to recognize it, it’s really hard.

Tony: I brought that up yesterday with someone which was. When you are selling leadership development, for example, or some sort of training to an organization, especially in the coaching environment. An organization takes you in as an executive coach or a performance coach. HR need to somehow measure the intervention, measure the value of the intervention.

Tony: Of course, sometimes those conversations are so deeply personal that you as the coach and the individual who’s the recipient of the interaction can see the growth and feel it. 

Tony: You’re going through it together. They’re progressing really brilliantly. It doesn’t immediately manifest. As an outcome for the business, but it’s long term value is it’s almost really difficult to manage.

Tony: It’s really critical to have a three way dialogue when you start those types of things. Me, the organization and the the coachees or the trainees or whoever they are, and absolutely agree what the terms of the engagement [00:04:00] are and how it’s going to be measured.

Tony: Because it is one of the hardest things. How do you measure what is to a large degree intangible.,

Tony: I’ve had 10 sessions with this guy and I feel so much better. I am much more, whatever those things might be. We know, and they know that they’re in a better place when they come to work, they’re more robust, they’re more resilient, they’re more focused, whatever it might be.

Tony: It might not necessarily translate to somebody being able to go, Oh, we’ve had An upturn in 3 percent growth for that reason. So it’s a really difficult one, but it’s a very real challenge is to have some metrics that really get clarity with the organization and the people who are the recipients of the value exchange to try and quantify what good looks like through that service.

Tony: I’ve done a fair bit of work around that. 

Tony: I was reading something before I jumped online. It was Gallup’s latest paper, they’re always researching this, that and the other. And I think the quote was, I’m just trying to find it here. People surveyed across the world, said that hope [00:05:00] was the biggest factor in what they wanted from their leaders. 

Tony: I’m thinking that is such a difficult subjective, impossible to quantify, meaningfully. Like how do you measure? 

Tony: How if you’re on a leadership team, do you create a sense of hope in the people that are there? 

Tony: For me, it immediately says, what the hell’s going on in your organization that people are crying out for a sense of hope? 

Tony: That’s the first thing that it says to me. There’s something about the survey itself which feels a little bit like an intentional misdirection.

Tony: It’s almost like this, these people that are trying to sell to the needy want a solution to sell more of their business. And this person’s got the solution. 

Tony: I think that sells the self selling to people that are not selling. It’s a much easier sell. 

Tony: Going back to this idea of hope, it begs the question, like what’s happening within the work, what problems are going on in there that even a driving somebody to respond like that what’s happening at managerial level that is dysfunctional?

Tony: That people are feeling like that, toxic environments, blah, blah, blah. What are they [00:06:00] doing by measuring somehow in an arbitrary way? We’re going to survey you. I don’t know how they’ve asked the question, but they’ve jumped, they’ve landed on this 60 odd percent of people put hope at the top of what it is they want from their leaders. 

Tony: How do I work with that? It’s not a primary metric, right? 

Tony: How do you turn that subjective, intangible metric into meaningful practice?

Tony: It heartens me to a degree, because that’s the kind of, that sort of wishy washy stuff says what’s the real problem here? 

Tony: Let’s go and actually uncover it. Let’s do some diagnosis. Let’s work out what you want. Do the fundamental Diagnosis at the bottom, not the subjective stuff, more let’s get some data around what’s actually going on. And then see where the gaps are, and work strategically with the organization to say here’s the gaps that have been identified, which is the priority right now, and let’s start to try and close that and let’s do it in this way.

Tony: Let’s do it with these people for this number of things, working on these things, and this is what the upside should be after doing that work. And there might be a little bit of [00:07:00] coaching for person A, B, C, and D who’ve been identified as, whatever it might be, stressed or so on. 

Tony: I’m reading this, on the one hand, getting annoyed about the subjectivity of it, and the fact that I feel like I’m being given some numbers that I can’t quantify, it’s hard for me to and I’m not a mathematician either, so it might just be me not getting it.

Tony: But I’m thinking 60 odd percent of people put hope at the top of the things they want from their leaders. It’s that’s telling me a whole host of things about problems that need to be identified. 

Tony: That the organizations need to get a grip of, and maybe that’s the message. 

Tony: Having just articulated all that out loud, maybe there’s something to address there. And we know there’s a massive addressable market for leadership development. We’ve had that dialogue in the week and last week with Clark, the whole idea of leadership, I think it means different things to different people. So what is it that they see? 

Tony: I see leadership as a skill, not as. a position or a hierarchy. 

Tony: You practice leadership. You can lead at home, you can lead at school, you can lead when you’re out and [00:08:00] about, depending what circumstances you’re faced with. People need some sort of help, you can step in and change the dynamics of what’s going on.

Tony: There’s a ton of stuff around that. 

Rob: My original research when I Studied psychology measuring happiness self esteem, locus of control, extroversion, optimism with happiness. 

Rob: I’ve spent years looking at how do you measure relationships? 

Rob: It is all subjective and that’s the problem. If you went back 50, 60 years, the world was objective because it was a factory you can point to there’s a machine everyone can put everyone knows what a lathe is, a machine is a screwdriver.

Rob: What we’re now dealing with is more abstract things you can’t measure. What is leadership? What is hope? What is happiness? What is a relationship? 

Rob: We have different ideas about them. 

Rob: I think language is quite important not for the words themselves, but there’s a thought, there’s a way that a word has come up. The origin of the word still imbued in the way that we talk about it.

Rob: So manage [00:09:00] was to handle, so that was about handling cattle. Whereas leading is more guiding, which is more humane focused thing. Even though it seems pedantic, my personality type on Myers Briggs is the most logically precise, so I’m quite pedantic about how you think about things.

Rob: S or N? I N T P. N, yeah. 

Yeah. 

Rob: Going back to looking at, I think in terms of performance I was looking at all kinds of ways, how do you do performance? And then I said surely it’s going to be like a return on investment type thing. 

Rob: I was looking into that and I found that companies do use that return on the cost of the people, in performance terms, but it’s a backward measure, isn’t it? 

Tony: Yeah. It’s a lag indicator because the there’s market forces as well that can have a bigger impact than any work that you’re doing internally.

Tony: Lag indicators make sense. People that look for results. It’s like football, the team lost. Therefore we all feel bad. The coach needs to be fired. That’s on one day. Next week we beat somebody in the crowds, happy, optimistic, and feeling great about the future. And we’re all cheering for the manager again.

Tony: It’s [00:10:00] like none of it factors in the reality of what’s actually going on. That reality is not just on a sort of macro level, it’s honed right into the individual. So on any given day, you could have 10 people just turn up and just not feeling at it. You can be prepared the best you possibly can and just turn up feeling, call it biorhythms, call it what you want.

Tony: You just feeling off your legs, feel heavy. There’s no reason. You’re as fit as you’ve ever been. You just not, you don’t have the mental clarity. There’s something just out of balance, which may be in that moment is really hard even for the individual to understand. It’s where’s my legs today?

Tony: All of that stuff happened to me, I’m managing a women’s team. We’re going really well. On the weekend. We had one of those shock results where we were beaten 1 0. They had one chance at the opposition in the whole game. We dominated the game. But the behavior of the team the lack of composed, the lack of normalcy about what I was observing was an indicator that way more than half of the people were just having an off day and [00:11:00] that, people say, Oh, where’s the leaders?

Tony: You hear all these pundits saying, where’s the leadership on the pitch? All of my leaders were on the pitch, but they just couldn’t find it in themselves to do it. That’s life. That is life. 

Rob: That’s my biggest takeaway from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, was about regression to the mean.

Rob: I remember playing golf. I was winning by quite a bit and I was playing someone who was much better than me and we were having banter and I was like, the longer it goes on, the more it’s going to, it’s going to level out. And Kahneman was talking about how people misread statistics.

Rob: He was saying, basically all the people in the city. Most of them, despite their huge bonuses and statistically it’s been proven that there are no more than if you had a monkey for just picking out randomly and he said this to he was talking to a manager.

Rob: He said you don’t have to give them that bonuses like that. And he’s oh yeah we need talent. And he just completely misread the statistics. 

Rob: Regression to the mean I had never thought of it, so someone like Man United, they buy someone like Alexis [00:12:00] Sanchez done brilliantly, or someone’s had a great season, they pay top price for them, they never perform like that again, because they were having a random outlier season, and then they regressed to the average.

Rob: Just to go back to the hope I found that article and I haven’t read it obviously, but I think that goes to what you say leadership is. 

Rob: That leadership is creating capacity. Because then I think that’s what people are hoping for. 

Tony: That’s a great insight. I love it when there’s different perceptions of the same piece of information.

Tony: If I think about, if you go back to your analogy of. Everybody knew 60 years ago what the job was, they were putting a peg in a hole on a fixed sequence as many times as possible to be as productive as they could be. And they had somebody like monitoring that and keeping them to time and task and so forth.

Tony: The managers were militantly going about their business. So that’s not leadership, right? 

Tony: That’s just do your job, you know how to do it. Do your job, do it to the best of your ability, blah, blah, blah. 

Tony: Easy [00:13:00] to measure, tangible, technical, simple, and not always simple. Like a surgeon is the same thing, just on a more life and death.

Tony: But again, it’s not leadership, just a highly skilled guy doing open heart surgery. 

Tony: It’s not leading the team. They’re all highly skilled as well. He’s just really focused on getting this thing done. It’s when you’ve got a group of people who’ve come together to, it might be a sales team to hit a new target 20 percent increase on last year, which had never been done before.

Tony: So they’ve got some historical data that says this is our ideal customer. But then they’re going out to new market, maybe with new product. And they’re trying to hit a somewhat irrational growth target because no one’s ever done it before that requires leadership because in the face of that, you’ve got people’s hopes.

Tony: You’ve got people’s ambitions. You’ve got people’s needs. You’ve got people’s motivations and for each of those people in the sales team who are going to be a part of this growth towards something that they’ve never achieved before. 

Tony: The sales manager [00:14:00] he’s dealing with all of those hidden things, he’s dealing with values, whenever we talk about values or shared sense of purpose or motivation, or, things that are on the inside of all of these different people, that’s fine if they’re just doing a job to get what they know how to do done. But if it requires new capacity, if we’re going to have to grow together through this towards something bigger, I think then a leader needs to come in because that quest towards something that’s never been done before. 

Tony: You start the football season. You think we’re going to be mid table team. The stretch might be, can we get into Europe? Let’s say it’s never been done before. It needs a lot of leadership to understand everybody’s intent towards that goal. The person in charge might go, I’ve got a vision for getting into the, into Europe, or I’ve got a vision for me in this sales target. And for me personally, it means I get a huge bonus and my family can go on holiday or whatever it might be.

Tony: But for everybody, then it’s about what do they want? That’s different from what I want in how we go after this. What’s important to them in the way that we do it that I [00:15:00] need to be aware of to to ensure I can create the optimal environment for them to be successful.

Tony: There’s nothing fixed about any of that. It comes back to the relationships that you’re talking about, really understanding the people, meeting them where they’re at. So if I think that my leadership style is autocratic or democratic or whatever. I’ve given myself this box, I’ve done some sort of survey that says this is the type of leader that I am.

Tony: That’s okay on a two dimensional piece of paper, accept that’s the start line. That’s maybe where I’m most naturally suited, but it’s way more granular than that. So then we start working together. I need to start shifting. I need to start dialing up the heat sometimes to create a bit of conflict or mitigate conflict before it happens or diffuse conflict when it’s blown up because nobody saw it coming.

Tony: So I need to start turning these and that’s what score does. It gives you these five dials that you can start to intentionally Adjust in small amounts to be able to [00:16:00] move, to play with, move towards you to make sure We’re doing it together. And he’ll also say, here’s the peg in the ground for the group.

Tony: So if we’re going on this big innovation journey and the team really is only moderately wired for innovation as a start point, we might need to recruit someone, we might need to take periods of time where we dial up our intentional. process to, to innovate, which is going to be draining and challenging for us, but let’s do it.

Tony: Let’s set time aside to do it. Let’s give ourselves time to recover from it. It’s those types of things. So when you’re building new capacity and you’re asking people to stretch outside their comfort zone to grow, then that’s going to have an impact on them. They’ll be fearful of it. Sometimes there’ll be resistant to it. Sometimes there’ll be overly enthusiastic sometimes. 

Tony: Leadership happens when all these things are starting and everybody’s doing it differently. It’s complicated and I think that’s where we’re at this growth when people are growing towards something that they’ve never achieved before, it needs leadership.

Tony: So it’s even the leader saying I’ve not done it either. We’re in this together, but I’m going to try [00:17:00] and navigate. I’ll take accountability for this. And in doing so. I need to be bloody good at connecting with people and helping them on that journey, because I need to grow as well.

Rob: That’s interesting because I come from a completely opposite end of things. I come from the individual. So for me it’s, It started with happiness. Yeah, understand people. What do people need? And most of that is relationships. Then it’s people need relationships.

Rob: People need and this is what we were talking about last week. And where Clark was saying that people need to be better followers. In a sense, but I don’t think people should follow blindly. I think people in order to be happy, you have to have something to contribute to.

Rob: It’s like Emmanuel Kant said, what was it? Someone to love, something to hope for and something to do. 

Rob: If you start with an individual needs to grow. So they need to grow personally. There’s a point where we have to join with another. We join romantically because we want to be more. [00:18:00] And our identity shifts from being Us to be from being me as an individual to being us as a unit. 

Rob: That’s Is the shift of that identity where when you stop being an individual and you start Seeing yourself as the team. That’s when the team build. So that’s where I got into that. This is where the link from if you’re going to be in a relationship, you need to join as a team.

Rob: You are still the individual, but then it’s a bigger circle that you are an individual, you are the relationship, you are the team. All of that is about the relationship. But the key to the relationship is keeping communication going. And the key to keeping communication going is to manage conflict.

Rob: Being able to disagree without having a drama, as I call it. And then when I looked at it leaders. often don’t have confidence because they’re scared of conflict or often because of the relationships because they don’t feel worthy. And I feel that they need to have people behind them.

Rob: And I think that’s where you build the relationship. But it’s not just about having good [00:19:00] one to one relationships. It’s building an identity for the team. 

Rob: It’s building a culture that people come in, if you look at Manchester United It’s the best example of a worse culture.

Rob: You get great players go there and be average because something happens in that whole culture that lowers everyone. So I think it’s when you can build that communication when you can build the relationship so everyone individually feels they’ve got more to gain from being part of the team than from being an individual.

Rob: That’s when they’re united. That’s what I call being a unifier. When you can articulate that, then you have the authority to hold people accountable for their performance, for their standards, for their values. The natural next step is that you then have to look at Now, by that level what you’re already doing should be easy.

Rob: You should be able to do it in half the time or a quarter of the time, because you’ve removed the friction points, now you’ve got capacity and now you should be looking at what’s the bigger challenge for, how can we do more? 

Tony: I don’t think we are coming at it from a different end.

Tony: I think we’re just using [00:20:00] different language to articulate it. So everything starts with the individual. That’s why I think profiling has its value. Where I think profiling fails is when it’s too rudimentary or it’s too low resolution, so if you think about a four box matrix that a quarter of the population fits in one of those boxes, it’s not new. It’s not granular enough. 

Tony: The real world is dynamic. It shifts all the time. So if I’m a high D in disc or I’m an ENFP, extroverted feeling, enthusiastic type. So help me understand how. Because I put myself in this team and I put myself in this team over here. 

Tony: I still that type of person, if you like, but it’s going to be different. And I need to understand how to play differently. There’s an adaptation tax. If I’m too far out of my comfort zone for too long, I’m paying too much tax. I’m getting stressed. Burning energy. We need to teach people how to understand the tax they’re going to have to pay to go and achieve something, to go and work with someone. It’s difficult to work with this person over here. 

Tony: [00:21:00] So if I’m the manager or the leader of that situation or that relationship, I have to move first. I have to learn to move, make those adjustments in order to build that relationship. My job as the leader is to help that person. I want them to come with me, but there’s a friction there, there’s a tension there.

Tony: I own that. I have to make the first move. If they’re the stronger leader, they can make the first move. They can try and make the reparations. That’s okay too. So I think we are coming at it from the same place. It’s that understanding that for each of these, I think about a model and you would have researched this a lot with all the work around happiness and stuff.

Tony: So we talk about a strength based culture where everybody’s playing to their Strengths. It just makes sense, right? We go to work, it’s effortless, we could do it all day, we’re doing things that we love because we’re in our natural habitat. Now the chances of that being perfect for most people, most of the time, is zero.

Tony: Chances are there’s going to be, in any given day, you’re going to be Pulled around a little bit off because of the environments that [00:22:00] we’re in is constant change, fast moving demands are going through the roof. Costs are going up, external to work, all of that sort of stuff, new job opportunities.

Tony: It’s a moving feast. So in spite of all that, how do we ground ourselves in this thing with that shared sense of purpose that you’re talking about. I’ve got friction with this guy, how do I understand what a day in their life looks like? So what’s genuine empathy?

Tony: It might not be natural for me to do that, but if I want to help, if I want to understand them, I need to be able to do it. And then it’s about the frequent high quality conversations that we’re going to have to grow that. 

Tony: So when you were talking about that once the friction has been flattened, then the team’s got new capacity. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I think to be able to lead people towards this thing to grow. So that is growing together in my world. It is and it happens in public. It happens because we’re in shared spaces. where people’s underperformance is exposed and how the manager speaks to that person.

Tony: Is it appropriate or not? 

Tony: Is it [00:23:00] safe? 

Tony: Are we working in a place where we can express ourselves and be open to failure and failing quickly and moving on from it? 

Tony: Or, is the person in charge not allowing that? 

Tony: Because. They haven’t found that within themselves yet to do it. Lots of problems, whether it’s the person in charge is lack of confidence or lack of vulnerability or lack of being able to create those spaces that are absolutely critical to unity as you will call it.

Tony: That’s where I think leadership development becomes massively valuable to an organization, and it’s not about are you a situational leader or are you a transformational leader? It’s bollocks, really. If you love process and you like action and you like perfectionism and you like to do that.

Tony: Okay, that’s fine. That’s great. To what degree? 

Tony: How much are you able to express that on a day to day basis? 

Tony: So you’re basically assessing. Are you more stressed than you could be? 

Tony: Do we need to change, what is it? Job environment fit? Do we need to make some tweaks to your environment in order to allow you to play more at home, more of the time, but that was a [00:24:00] million things, but I do think we’re on the same frequency.

Tony: I just think we’re coming at it with different language and from different experiences. 

Rob: What I mean is that I think you started with, here’s this team. How do I get them to work together? 

Rob: Yeah. Whereas I started with, here’s this individual, it started with, how do they, how do we get them to go to the gym regularly, what’s stopping them?

Rob: And then it’s about stress and then it’s about how does someone be happy? So I’m looking more from the employee whereas I think most leaders are like you. They’re looking at how do we get this group? And I think that’s unimaginably. complex to look from there.

Tony: Yeah, I think there’s always two sides to it though, Rob. So let’s say you are now the manager of a team. So you’re already the manager of a team. That’s your team. You’ve been going along quite nicely. And there’s a need for new capacity. So you bring in two recruits who are really different.

Tony: So you then work in both sides of that, both ends of that spectrum, where you’ve got this team that’s now ticking along quite nicely. You’re now introducing two new elements to it. Two new egos, two new personalities, two new skill sets, two [00:25:00] new sets of drivers and needs and wants and all of that kind of stuff. And the whole equilibrium that you’ve built is now in a state of flux. 

Tony: So you’ve got two tasks. One is to grow that relationship with these new people and to integrate them into the status quo towards a new capacity because it will be different because there will be tension and there will be more leadership required to get through that as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Rob: Okay. So we talked about, yeah, how you define leadership.

Rob: What element of leadership have you seen managers most struggle with?

Tony: I think there’s a big hole in communications. It’s the thing that needs to happen most frequently. Therefore, there’s more chances to get it wrong because how you speak to one person It’s not necessarily going to be effective with how you speak to another so i’d say communication. 

Tony: I’ve done so much work now with leadership groups. Because they’ve come through the schooling that they’ve had and the training that they’ve done and the education and all of that, I don’t think [00:26:00] any of it’s really served their needs to understand who they really are and therefore they turn up with the persona that they’ve created to, to help themselves get through the day because they haven’t really grounded themselves in their true identity.

Tony: So there’s a gap between the job that they’re doing and the person that they’re being. And they need to close that gap and actually reverse it. Start with who am I being? Because once, once I can define who I’m being in those moments then I can start to become authentic.

Tony: You can become authentic. You’ll feel more confident, but one of those challenges is they’re not okay with being themselves. They’ve got fears and insecurities about who they are, so they quash it down and out comes this ego boss. It might be the over nice guy, it might be the overly vigilant person that’s micromanaging, it might be the the overly demanding one that’s that nothing’s ever good enough all of these things come out which, which might be strengths in the right place. But become massive derailers because they’re not [00:27:00] regulated properly, because they’re not grounded in reality. 

Tony: They’re just the myths that we’ve created for ourselves, that we need to be the person choosing to be because we think that’s what we need to do to get through the day. So none of it works as a consequence.

Tony: There’s a disconnect and people are looking for it. Then we talk about the people that you’re dealing with are also in the same boat. They’re coming to work with the same needs wanting to be met subconsciously. They’re not thinking about it. They’re not all psychologists going to work wondering how they can have the needs met, but we’re all on that. Whether we know it or not, that’s what we’re doing, right? So if the leader and the manager gets a real sense of who they are, they can really start to help people. They can really start to manage themselves through the challenges that they’ve got, but also really help other people.

Tony: And that’s a game changer, right? 

Tony: Really contributing beyond just getting the job done. They’re helping people become more effective and in their own life. 

Tony: So there’s those two things. I think communication at one end, which is at the pointy end. It happens all the time. I did some work once when I first stepped out of football, was working in the rail [00:28:00] depot I was Mancunian working in a Allerton rail depot in Liverpool with all these Evertonian shift workers, so I was way outside my comfort zone. I was doing a standard work project, Completely different world to me.

Tony: I was in there to improve the standard work procedures across five different sets of shift workers. It was my project to qualify as a lead practitioner and the manager was in his office. These guys are all under these diesel trains, putting new brakes on, changing the oil, doing all of that kind of stuff.

Tony: The manager didn’t come out, didn’t ever speak to them. They had boards that had the status of different jobs, red, green and amber, rag, things, whether, how far they were along the process, what parts were missing, all of that kind of stuff. But this need for frequent high quality conversations that we’ve just talked about this wasn’t happening because this guy was sitting in his office.

Tony: Maybe said the door’s always open if anybody needs it, but just didn’t engage, that’s probably the best example of this sense of a lack of certainty about who they are and what, [00:29:00] who they need to be in order to be, to achieve, and this place, Northern Rail were in need of, real leadership.

Rob: That, that reminds me, I was a trainee cinema manager for a while. One of these big cinema multiplexes. You had to do a little bit of everything. And I was doing that and I was then in the office. And I noticed one of the problems they had was poor customer service.

Rob: And I noticed that it was like 16, 17 year olds. And all the managers would be in the office and they would come out now and then, bark at them about something and then go back in. And I’m like, this is wrong. There was a new manager and she was only like 21, 22.

Rob: She’d come in, been a usher at 16, worked her way up and she was a first time manager. Most of the staff were going off with the other manager to this big new complex and she didn’t want to deal with them. So really bad culture. And I was like, this is wrong.

Rob: So I went to her and I said we’re getting bad customer service because the staff aren’t happy. The staff aren’t being managed. They’re just being able to do [00:30:00] what they want and then they’re being shouted at. 

Rob: Anyway I had to put together a report to the area manager and just got all the staff in the room and just go how do you feel?

Rob: What’s the problem? What do you want? 

Rob: And the others were like, Oh no, this isn’t going to work. You’re they’re going to ask for more money. They’re going to ask for everything. Then they’re just going to be more pissed off. 

Rob: It wasn’t, better uniform they wanted, but they didn’t really actually ask for money, where about 23 things.

Rob: But it was this whole thing of the managers just sitting in the office. And then I became like the outcast. I was still learning. They would try and set me up because I’d upset things. But yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you say because you say it in a different way than I’ve ever thought about it. 

Rob: The adaptations we make there’s a cost to those adaptations. And I think the more we can communicate. 

Rob: My whole idea is that you don’t change, but your identity changes. So you’re still the same person, but it’s just that in order to join with others, we need to be able to resolve the conflict.

Rob: We need to be able to reveal who we [00:31:00] are, which means we have to know who we are and then be able to be vulnerable to explain that and to understand who someone else is. So I see there’s skills of relationships, conflict and, but then there’s the foundation, which is a longer bit of having the character and the strength in order to be able to do that.

Rob: So one is distinguishing between management and leadership. I 

Tony: would equate it to the difference between technical challenges, which have got a known capacity.

Tony: What the job is to be there can be complicated thing, like building an aircraft, really complicated, but it’s got skilled people that know how to build it, managers come in to just make sure it’s getting done to the standard. I guess it’s related to optimizing the way that technical tasks are completed, are they done in the right time?

Tony: Are they done to the right standards? 

Tony: All of that. So I don’t see that as leadership. The job is known, the capacity to do the job is known. Available. Let’s just manage process. There may be some [00:32:00] standard setting. There may be some I don’t know, goal setting or stuff like that, but there’s nothing that requires us to grow together through, through something.

Tony: I’m not articulating it very well, but I see it as getting the job done when we know how to do the job. I see that as management. 

Tony: Whereas leadership, when you’re talking about an adaptive challenge, which is a challenge that we haven’t faced together, where people are looking to someone to when people are saying, how do we do this?

Tony: What are we going to do here? 

Tony: Help me out. Then it requires. Let’s let’s work together. Let’s build some new capacity. Let’s set our stall out for how we’re going to achieve. Let’s be prepared to fail. 

Tony: When you’re a manager, I don’t think you’re in that space of growing capacity. You’re delivering against a set of standards, whereas leadership is the standard hasn’t even been set yet. 

Tony: What is possible here? 

Tony: That’s the visionary side of it. But it’s not just that it’s if there’s a new vision that we’re all starting to point towards, it’s then about mobilizing people to get there and they’ve all got a [00:33:00] different start point. Here’s this new ambitious project that we’re all pointing towards. 

Tony: How do I feel about that? 

Tony: What do I think about that? 

Tony: What do I want against that? 

Tony: Where does it fit into my personal set of values or needs? 

Tony: So the leader has to understand that and has to pull that together, has to redefine how this collective is going to meet this challenge.

Tony: That requires public learning. It requires collaboration. You’re dealing with values, motivations, emotions it’s, and you’re dealing with that. 

Tony: As a manager you’re interacting with it. I don’t want to confuse it, as a manager, you’re having lots of maybe tension and conflict to deal with. But they know how to do the job. It’s just getting the job done. 

Tony: The tension is likely to be misunderstanding or personality clashes or stuff like that. That’s human nature is playing out in all of this stuff, but it’s when we’ve got to grow together where we’ve, none of us have have tackled this before we, it becomes a much different challenge.

Tony: So I’m trying to really get into the shared values to find a purpose to really understand [00:34:00] people get in their shoes. And I might do that as a manager. When I’m showing some leadership characteristics that showing the types of behaviors that lend themselves to good leadership, it’s just that in those situations, they don’t need leading. They just need to do their job. 

Tony: Whereas where I go to be accountable for something that no one’s ever done before. That’s a completely different leap as a manager. I know what the results are that I’m going for and I know that these people can do the job so I can start to manage that and then, whereas this other thing, oh, that’s going to test us all. Let’s work out how we’re going to grow together through this. It’s a completely different mindset. 

Rob: Put it crudely, it’s business as usual for a manager. It’s maintaining stability, maintaining performance. 

Rob: Whereas leadership is more like pioneering, breaking new ground, conquering new Yeah, and 

Tony: uncertainty as well.

Tony: So a manager might start to show leadership when the ground shifts from underneath them, when the way that they did things is now going to be [00:35:00] different. So they go from managing what was a process and a fixed way of doing things to suddenly the business has changed, has pivoted, said we’re now going to do this.

Tony: We were building aircraft seats. We’re now building aircraft engines. Like now there’s a whole host of new learning to be done. 

I used to know everything about what needed to be done. I could help people through it and help manage the team through it. Now the business has pivoted and now I’m starting to flounder. Then it starts to become A leadership challenge. Because if I’m feeling that what are these guys feeling, then I’m starting to understand what new capacity do we need to build together to meet this new challenge. So it can shift from one to the other.

Tony: I see leadership more as I think I said at the beginning As a practice than as a definition, you’re not either a leader or a manager, you can demonstrate leadership as a practice when there’s a new challenge to be met.

Rob: What comes to mind as you’re talking is as things are changing, for example, like bringing in AI, everything’s changing. So managers [00:36:00] are having to lead more and more as it becomes more volatile. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Who would be a great public example, a great leadership that you’ve seen.

Tony: I’m cheating a bit here. I’ve been delivering a course for Harvard edX for the last couple of years, and they use Martin Luther King and Gandhi as two great examples of leaders where they had no formal authority, and yet they mobilized millions of people towards a new vision for, a big adaptive change. Changing the whole world for the people that they were speaking to.

Tony: They were able to demonstrate great leadership without any authority whatsoever over the people who followed them. So I think they’re really good examples. In terms of, what tends to happen, I think people will look to the great authors, the just trying to think.

Tony: Who are the great manager books? The classics that always get thrown up. Even if you said the Virgin, Richard Branson, for example, right? Richard Branson, clearly a visionary, clearly entrepreneurial, blah, blah, blah, and has [00:37:00] led this growth of a massive company from nothing to pioneering, all of that sort of stuff.

Tony: So somewhere in that there’s got to be great leadership. But I think what tends to happen is people then go Let’s look at all his characteristics and then pull, extrapolate them from the story and define leadership as that or who’s the GE guy? 

Rob: Jack 

Tony: Welsh. Yeah. So Jack Welsh, right? World renowned builder of massive company.

Tony: Lots of mantras and leadership, iconic leadership lessons. Again, extrapolate Jack Welsh out, in this reductive way and go, great leadership is this. 

Tony: I’m not so sure that you can have all those characteristics and not lead. I just don’t think it’s a set of characteristics that those people have achieved great things and probably demonstrated throughout that process, lots of great leadership at times, and probably failed lots too. Yeah, I think the idea of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King, and whether [00:38:00] you like them agree with their politics is irrelevant. They were able to mobilize people with no authority over them whatsoever. And they were able to have such a clear vision and a profound way of articulating that vision and to corral a group of people with a shared set of values and a shared purpose. I think leadership lives in that space where you’re connecting with people at that level.

Tony: That’s not about doing stuff. It’s about who are we being together? Who will we be when we get there? It’s a completely different journey. 

Rob: Yeah. Okay, just one more question. And what advice would you give to a new manager leader?

Tony: Know thyself. 

Tony: And it’s not an easy thing. People talk about soft skills all the time. It’s the hardest thing for people to do because they haven’t really taken the time to do the work to understand themselves. It’s easier for a Guy in his fifties, like me. 

Tony: The process is the same, but if you’re in your mid twenties and you go into management, you’ve only just fully formed as a young man or a young woman I would say don’t fall into the trap of [00:39:00] trying to be be something that someone else says you should be. Try and really get under the skin a little bit more to understand why you’re doing what you do, what are the values that make you who you are.

Tony: And start leading through that and you’ll find yourself in a really good place. Might not be in the job that you’re in at the moment, but you find yourself in a really good place over time. 

Rob: Yeah. That’s such a trap that every time there’s a new book I can remember it was like all the American companies tried to be like , Japanese companies and it’s just transplanting things that worked in one dynamic and thinking they’re going to work in everyone. 

Rob: It’s like Jack Welch, everyone was fire your bottom 10 percent every year and and then when he left the whole thing collapsed because he’d been massaging the figures for years.