We recently started a series within the larger episodes of the Truly Human Leadership Podcast called the People and Performance Playbook.
These episodes are a little shorter, but packed filled with insight from the experts at Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute, which was founded by our late CEO and Chairman, Bob Chapman, to bring Truly Human Leadership to the world.
On this installment, we hear again from Andrew Barenz and Mike Budden as they expand upon the most recent newsletter article, "What is the Cost of One-Dimensional Leadership in Your Organization?" In the episode, Andrew and Mike talk about the four styes of leadership.
You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman and Co on LinkedIn. Listen to this episode through the link above or through your favorite podcast provider.
Transcript
Andrew Barenz: My name is Andrew Barenz, and I sit on our consulting team here at Chapman & Co. state sides, where you have the luxury of having Mike in from Cape Town, South Africa. So, not as exciting here in Saint Louis, Missouri, but, we're excited to have you on this.
Mike Budden: It is exciting. Yeah, we've been doing some great work. So, I'm Mike Budden, I'm a partner with Chapman & Co Leadership Institute, a leader business in South Africa, and try and take this message of Truly Human leadership into other parts of the world. So, Andrew, you know, as we think about leadership in the world today, we're starting to get a clearer sense of picture of what are some of the attributes or aspects of leadership that make the leaders we consider to be inspiring and how they show up? We're starting to get a sense of what that looks and feels like. So, I thought that would be a good thing for us to explore today a little bit, what that is and how we think about it.
Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think, Mike, what's interesting about that is in our work at Chapman & Co., we've taken tens of thousands of leaders through trainings and workshops, through leadership off-sites together. And it always amazes me how similar that that work can be. What makes a great leader, what teams are trying to accomplish in this work of leadership development, how similar that looks across parts of the world, across different companies, across generations. I think there's a lot of commonalities there in what makes a great leader a great leader.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting thing because we actually ask that question across the world, like, what do great leaders do?
Andrew: It's amazing how consistent the answers are.
Mike: Always. Doesn't matter what industry, what country. And so, you know, for me, the message in that is we all know what great leaders look like. Unfortunately, we don't always experience what great leaders look like. But there's a sense, and I question myself why. Because I think actually those attributes that get called out more often about being human than driving processes and results. And I think we all know what it is to be human at the end of the day.
Andrew: Yes. Yeah.
Mike: You know, as I think of that, why they're not leaders, battling with that, and I think partly it's just how we've all been programmed of our businesses and I'm very encouraged that people are starting to challenge that, including our parent company, Barry-Wehmiller, who wants to really demonstrate that a business can have strong economic growth and at the same time really treat their people humanly and really well.
And we can have human vibrancy. And so, as they continue to proof point that, I'm really encouraged, but there is a sense that we've been programmed there's one way of leadership. And, you know, I think you and I were chatting about the fact that it's a hard place for leaders to be in. It can be a really, really lonely, hard place.
I reflect on how many leaders I coach. They come initially to be coached to want to work through a particular problem or a behavior or challenge they've got. And when we come to the end of the six months, they say, please, can I continue coming? And the reason why they just want a safe place where they can come and just think, you know, have a place for thinking, share things they can't share with their leaders or their team members or their peers.
Which really, you know, I think deepens that. And that's given me the need for leaders to feel connected and help to navigate this real difficult space they often find themselves in.
Andrew Barenz: Mike, I thought you said that well, too, with the focus on human and economic vibrancy, very much the lens through which we view the business world, how we support clients in doing that work, that that is the same work growing a business that thrives from a financial perspective, and it’s people grow and develop, and those aren't mutually exclusive, one in sacrifice of the other.
But both operate and serve a service of each other that that really operates more as a kind of virtuous reinforcing cycle. But I think it's interesting that that is and that's largely been Bob's message as well. Kind of the message that he has brought in to Barry-Wehmiller and to the world, but it can be a question to your point of that lonely space of how do I lean into that?
How do I do that? So, I'm wondering, Mike, if you could walk us through this model of leadership. What does it mean to be a great leader?
Mike: Yeah. And I think that's where it's not any one thing. And I think as we grow in leadership, it can be different things that get emphasized at different places and times.
And we've been working on a lens of saying there are probably two key aspects we want to think about. One is ownership and whether ownership is individual or collective. And I think both are important. We all need to own our own individual selves, and we all are part of a collective. And then the other is this piece that people think is intention often is people and business and the results.
Andrew: People and performance.
Mike: Yeah. And us trying to understand how we pull that all together. And so, the framework of leadership we've been thinking about is to start seeing it as not attention at all. Actually, it's an interwoven thing of where we see great leaders coming together. And so we start at the point of, personal ownership, as each getting more reflective about and self-aware about how we show up for the people around us.
And I think that's a life skill, not only a leadership. We lead in so many different facets in our lives. So, how do I get better at, just knowing how I show up? What triggers me? Where are my strengths? What can I be bringing to this world? What's my purpose? Those are the things that I think help a leader stand out, you know.
As I reflect on a leader, when they challenged me and said, Mike, if you want to become a great leader, you've got to go through personal transformation. And he said to me one day, Mike, what do you want? What do you want me to transform into? What's the perfect leader? And the penny dropped for me in that moment to say that the most inspiring leaders are the ones who are authentically themselves and do the work of taking off all those onion layers we put around us to cope and showing up as themselves.
And we often think of the greats and Nelson Mandela from our own part of the world. Mother Teresa, like they were their own human beings. They had flaws. Their lives weren’t perfect, but they were their own human beings. And I think that is where it starts for an aspiring leader. And then we know that our first entry into leadership is often operational management.
So, I’d love to hear a little bit of your thoughts on the operational leadership piece of it or management part of it.
Andrew: Yeah, I think this is probably the area most of our listeners are familiar or comfortable with. I think this has been the approach to leadership or management for many years. But I think what's interesting about this area, Mike, operational management, is that it's a critical leadership skill set. It's a critical part of being a leader.
And I think there's a bit of a notion that older styles of leadership or management were bad. And I think certainly there are command and control. There are top-down hierarchical approaches that maybe are less effective in our world today. But the core of how do I run an efficient business is still a very important part of this.
And I think that was a key part we wanted to keep in this model, or this way of thinking about leadership, is it's not just the focus on the human side. It also very much has the business focus of it as well.
Mike: It actually strikes me that the less positive ways of us experiencing operational management has largely been driven because of people who have got into management and still feel they need to either control to get it done. And behind that, my experience has been that that's often our own fears. And when we operate from a place of fear, then there's all those limiting sort of beliefs and values that come through, and then the hierarchy serve me because I could hide behind the title or the bureaucracy served me because the rule could be the thing.
And that's why that personal ownership is such an important part is if one develops in that then one brings a different frame of stepping into that operational management. And as you say, we still need our will to go around, still need processes, things to work really well together. But it's not the what, it's the how.
Which I think then leads us to where this framework starts hanging together is we can't look at any of these things in isolation. And so, the other important piece we've identified is the people leadership, people of it. So, share a little bit with us around the thinking on people leadership.
Andrew: Yeah, I think people leadership is really about how do I accomplish more than I could by myself. How do I lead people, lead a team in a way that allows us all to accomplish more than I can as an individual person, and that comes with a number of skill sets. I have to understand people. I have to take the time, slow down to understand people.
What inspires them? What do they want out of work? What are their skills? What do they want to get out of their career? And I think that's really the starting point of people leadership or relational leadership is understanding other people, and being able to show up in a way that allows them to bring their best self to work, that unlocks the potential of people.
Earlier, I had mentioned this idea of discretionary effort. I think that's really where relational or people leadership has an unlock as the ability to unlock discretionary effort. Because, today, in our economy today, most of us are not just working on an assembly line, pulling a machine kind of more in the industrial evolution that we saw in our business.
We have tremendous potential to contribute to to our work, to the businesses that we work for. And I think people leadership is really about unlocking the human potential in business.
Mike: It reminds me of what Bob used to share with us. You know, serving the people in our span of care and seeing them as somebody else's most important person. You know, whether it's your child or a brother or sister, mother, father. Like, what do we want for them? I often think, like, what I want for my kids?
I'd love them to go and work in a place where they can have a great leader that's going to nurture them and grow them and help them, and maybe at times have to give them some good feedback as well to get better. But we all want that. Like and that was Bob's deep conviction that if we can only see that that's our responsibility as a leader to honor that wish of those parents or brother or sister.
And that has been such a helpful framing for me, and I think for many leaders in our ecosystem. But I think as you marry that together with that operational leadership, management as well, the other lens he helped us with was turn that pyramid upside down of the hierarchy. And I always think if we all focused on helping the people that we serve in our span of care be the best they can be, that front line is going to be the best they can be in the front line of the people that touch our customers and the world out there.
They're our bread. At the end of the day, they actually are the most important people in our business. It just takes a mindset shift to start thinking about that differently.
Andrew: I think the other mindset shift that you alluded to earlier, Mike, is some of the challenges of people, leaders who might be stuck in that operational management bucket, is when I try and use some of the skills that I've refined in one area, how do I clarify roles, run an efficient business, design process workflows? When I start to apply those in another dimension or another area of leadership, when I apply that to people, where we see a breakdown there. Most of our listeners are probably familiar with the phrase you manage work and you lead people.
And I think this view of leadership brings those very much together as it's not one or the other; it's both. But we need to have the right mindset and apply those in the right areas that I'm not applying the skills that we've learned in operational management to our people.
Mike: Yeah, I love that. I love that thinking because I think what we've historically allowed is our systems and our processes to actually manage, which has meant people haven't. And I'll say people who step into leadership haven't been able to lead from a place of their own values and their own being, which I think is one of the big shifts we're thinking about and wanting to make. Systems and processes are enablers; they’re not our managers and controllers.
If we can rise above that and say, hey, we lead people and our systems enable us just to manage processes better. So, I love that thought of yours. So, we have got these operational operations, we've got to manage, we've got all these people that come into our work and every day they end of the day we a collective, and I think some of the most inspiring leaders are the ones that can help us see vision and see something that we aspire to be.
And there's hope beyond all this hard stuff in our, in our, in our daily lives of and, and that's something we've started to frame collective stewardship. How do you understand that?
Andrew: Yeah. I think the way that that we've started to think about visionary stewardship or collective stewardship has a couple elements to your point is that the collective is greater than the individual parts. And I need to, as a leader, step in to think about the business as a whole, from an enterprise, from a systems level. I think the other key element there is the longer-term focus of it in our world today.
And I think this very much is just a part of our wiring as humans from an evolutionary perspective, as we're very focused on the here and the now, and our brains are wired for safety and protection here and now. So, thinking longer term, thinking out into the future is biologically difficult for us as humans. Not to layer in the complexity of us as a group of humans trying to work together, but just as an individual that can be very challenging to do.
But I think those to me are two of the big pieces there is moving from focused on myself as an individual, my function, the team that I lead and the business to focused on. How do I think about the business as a whole and how it all works together for the greater good, the greater success of the business?
And thinking about that in the long term, how that operates to be able to navigate change, to be resilient as a, as a business and thrive in and grow into the future. Yeah, but what are your thoughts on that?
Mike: I was interested that you brought up the piece of we're not biologically wired necessarily to be thinking about that long term future. And it's about the here and now. Which leads me to another piece that I've been thinking about. We are neuro biologically wired for survival. And to think about not only the hear and now, but, how do I make the hear and now really safe. And I think in this world where we've got so much uncertainty, we are not neuro biologically wired to actually deal with that.
And, we are the generation that have seen the most overwhelm ever. And I sort of say the world hasn't been through bigger changes that we have because we have, but we all know about it and we can see it in an instant. And and for us, ability to deal with that overwhelm. And so what's the implication for leadership?
I think that takes me back from that collective stewardship, straight back to personal again ownership, because I think what's called on for leaders in this time is how do we help people feel grounded, safe, which means I've got to do work on myself as a leader to stay grounded, coherent, not get panicky. Because that's when the fear kicks in, and then that's when all of the more limiting behaviors of leadership kick in.
So it's this whole combination of things which ends up being the great leaders around us, I think start understanding how to integrate all.
Andrew: Of that together as well.
So maybe, Mike, you could, explain to us then that idea of the messy middle and that integration, how do all these parts and pieces work together? We've walked through four from personal ownership, operational management, people leadership and visionary stewardship. But how do those work together?
Mike: Yeah. So and it does feel messy and it does feel like, oh my word, how do I hold all of that and do all of that. And and it is I mean, I think that's why leadership isn't something that's just we born with or easy. We have a firm belief that leaders are grown and we can all grow to be leaders and depends whether we want to be or not.
But I think I think about this a little bit like habits, like, what do I default? I have that's you know, we all have default habits. Some of them are good at some of the not so good. I think in business we've become habituated to go to operational management. That's what if we need to fix something, go and fix the process.
Fix the system. And that means that we lose sight of the other three easily. And so we talk about what's the work of leadership. And the work of leadership is not really the operational management. We would refer to that as doing the work in the business, solving people's problems, being the approval authorities. Just being in the busyness of that business and to me, that's not leadership. That’s business management, but that's what everybody does.
So, what differentiates leaders in how to bring that messy middle in is I've got to think intentionally about work on myself. Like if I want to show up as a great leader, I've got to spend time learning more about what that looks like, being reminded often of what it looks like, because I don't think it's rocket science.
It's we forget it. We get so caught up in the busyness, come back to intentionally set aside time for myself, whether it's mindfulness or reflection, my own well-being, whether it's eating well or sleeping well, because all of those things impact how I show up as a leader. So that's a key part for me. And then the work on my team.
And, as much as we say, hey, we love people, we want to see them grow. It doesn't happen by accident. We get to, like, spend time intentionally with the one on ones. Your growth, how you how are you finding things. And right now what's frustrating you? What can I be doing to help you better? Better? We don't naturally do that.
And so that's why companies have put in place performance management in growth conversations and development conversations. They've had to make it a discipline because we just don't do it naturally. Wouldn't be great if we were all leaders who just did it frequently, regularly without having to have all the operations around it in some way. So that's the work on my team.
And then there's the work on my business, which is the time I take, to reflect, step back, look at the big picture, look at the long term, how we positioning ourselves for that. And again, if we get trapped in that work in the business all the time, we're just not getting to that. And we all know that, like we all know it's that big thing I need to get to and the project I've got to get on to.
We wake up at the end of the week and say, like, all of that is just capturing all the demands around me. And so I come back to saying those things have to be intentional. We've got a schedule and we're going to make time for them when we ask leaders about that, where you spend your average week across the four things, most will say in the business, and most would report out that the one that gets sacrificed the most is work on self.
And then maybe I'll do a little bit on my team and are working on the business, probably demands a little bit more. So I think as we try to deal with the messy middle, is we have to we have to be intentional if we want to show up as a great leader. And that also then needs to be complemented with me exploring ways I can develop those attributes, develop the skills.
And I think that's, one of the things Bob said early on in our journey. His greatest fear was that, his way of being, his culture, the leadership he was trying to cultivate would die. But once he left, in whichever way he left it, like he wanted it to live beyond him. And so I've been so inspired by how, he and the (Barry-Wehmiller) team at that point put in place ways to develop our leaders and to inculcate that culture in those values. And the way we show up so that it's embedded now.
The other day, (before his death, Bob) was talking to a group of leaders in South Africa, to the Penn Bev team, and he, he's been incredibly generous to them. And we've helped them set up a leadership university similar to the Barry-Wehmiller University for leaders. And, he said, we've invested in this, we've given it to you, but if you don't use it, well, I'm going to come back and haunt you. And like, okay, you can let come back, you know, it's.
Andrew: Sounds like Bob.
Mike: Yeah, but I think, you know, for me, that is part of part of the messy middle. And are we going to have to pull it together?
Andrew: Yeah. The thing I love about that, Mike, the messy middle is I think it's it's very real. It's easy to create a model around leadership, a framework of how to think about leadership, which is helpful in its own, in its own right. I think we started this off with the complexity and the change that's happening in our world. Having a way to think about leadership is helpful, and I think that's the intent of these four dimensions of leadership or skill sets of leadership. But the messy middle, I think, is the very real reality that leaders operate in, that they live in day to day, is I don't sit in a strategy session with the senior team in visionary stewardship and go to a one on one in relational leadership and walk the floor in operational management.
The messy middle is this reality that day to day leaders sit in the middle of all of that, and they're constantly navigating the tension, the push and pull between different priorities. And how do I make trade off decisions between different things? And I think that is truly the work of leadership is developing in those four different areas that you walked us through, and the ability to navigate between them successfully.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's going to take I mean, I love that we're having these conversations and we're not the only ones seeing this happening in the world. This is a movement. And and I think. The other big important part for me in navigating this and thinking about what leadership is going to do, is creating collectives of other leaders, to engage in this, and us collectively helping each other think about what leadership is going to look like into the future. Yeah. So a big topic. Fascinating. We could go on for hours, I'm sure, talking about it.
But, yeah, I've just loved the conversation and thinking. Thank you for bringing your perspective. I think for us to be hearing from different spaces in the world, different generations in the world, like, and just realizing at the end of the day, we all want to be human.
Andrew: Yeah. And maybe I could could leave our listeners with something you said the other day that really stood out to me. And it was this notion that leaders aren't born. They develop with a great sense of intentionality and a lot of hard work. And I think that really summarizes this well of the work of leadership isn't that not everyone is born naturally being gifted in all these areas or, being able to, to flex into them.
And I think that is the work of leadership is having the intention making the choice to grow and develop, and putting the work in to grow and develop. So that stood out to me. Maybe, that's a way to leave our listeners with that reflection of, how do they, lean into that intentionality and the work of leadership.