Contradictory Truths - a leadership superpower

We started a short series last week on the chaos many businesses are experiencing and how it seems unlikely to ease anytime soon. Leaders need everyday superpowers in the face of such adversity. 

The ability to ‘hold’ more than one seemingly contradictory truth is a superpower. When we can only hold one truth, we sometimes lose sight of what we can control. We also add stress to the situation. 

For many leaders I work with, a current truth is “Our work is hard”. It’s definitely true. Challenges arrive thick and fast. Results matter and often carry consequences. Resources and bandwidth are stretched. Just as one hurdle is cleared, more appear. The list is longer than the hours available.

If "Our work is hard” is the only truth we hold, work is an exhausting grind. People feel there’s only so long they can hold onto the bar. 

More than one truth changes the game. 

How about “Our work is hard. Hard is good. We are great at hard”. 

Hard is good because it drives innovation, progress, and capability. It’s good because it matters — if it didn’t, it probably wouldn’t be hard. And if we are great at hard, then we embrace the important challenges we face, rather than feeling defeated by them. All three can be true at once, even if they feel contradictory. 

Here are some other examples:

So much is out of our control. There are always things we can control that make a genuine difference.

There’s so much rapid change. We adapt just as fast. We relish the pressure.

We care deeply about the results. We hold the results lightly.

We have high expectations. We know when it’s good enough.

This thinking helps leaders and their teams find energy and nuance under pressure. It changes the conversation. If you’d like to apply it to your team, follow these steps:

1.  Identify the complaints you most regularly hear, say, or think. 

2. Identify some contradictory and parallel truths. Discuss them — work out why they are also true.

3. Make sure they are genuine to you/your team; otherwise, it will be short-lived. 

P.S. If they don’t feel genuine to start with, it’s valuable to run a 2-week experiment where you pretend it’s genuinely true. Sometimes you’ll find it really is, sometimes the perspective you gain will work out the kinks and find something more authentic for your situation.

Let me know how you go!

What's Next

I’ve been working with several leadership teams for longer programs (1 - 2 years). Lately, many are making the same observation — The level of chaos they are currently experiencing is incredibly high, and a massive source of stress.

The uncertainty caused is rarely internal to the organisation. It’s the unpredictable and unexpected curveballs like:

• Trump is starting a war

• Fuel prices

• AI implications

• Reforms that fundamentally shift business models

Some are waiting (hoping) for an imagined future period of time where the uncertainty resolves, and there is a period of relative rest/stability.

My crystal ball has got a massive crack in it, so the reliability of my predictions of the future is low — but I reckon a better mindset is to assume the chaos will continue at the same pace, scope, and variety. 

Why is it better? A massive source of stress is when expectations don’t line up with reality, especially when the reality is worse than we expected or hoped for.

If you want to make it even more robust, consider this:

There’s little point in trying to predict the nature of future chaos/uncertainty unless you have some specific expertise or information. There’s a lot of value in broad forecasts (eg, what happens if fuel shortages become a daily reality vs what happens if fuel stays much the same for the foreseeable future vs what happens if things return to normal sooner than expected).

There’s little value in trying to foresee details in domains where we don't have sufficient expertise or information. It is tempting to come up with a prediction as a way of generating certainty, but it actually makes the stress worse if it’s inaccurate (and for most situations, that’s a pretty predictable outcome).

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll talk about what leaders can do to add certainty within their organisations and the superpower of paradoxical thinking.

A Kinder Voice

I’ve written over the years about treating people around you with kindness. It’s a good and powerful way to act. Recently, I’ve been reminded anew about how we treat ourselves — the self-talking-voices-in-our-head that throw self-directed harsh judgement in ways we would never talk to another person. Mine have been noisy of late, and it's been a theme of a few coaching sessions, too. 

What are the loudest voices for you? Mine tend to fall into 4 groups, and I reckon they must be common as they are referred to by lots of people, from ancient philosophers to modern psychologists:

• The Tyrant - holds us to impossible or unreasonable standards. This voice has lots of should, must, right, and wrong. Our efforts, no matter how they go, are never quite good enough.

• The Judge - constantly looks over our shoulder and tells us we are not good enough.

• The Critic - looks at our efforts/outputs and picks holes in every little thing.

• The Cynic - whispers to us that we are likely to fail and keeps reminding us of past situations where we were not our best or something didn’t go well. 

These voices have a place, but when they get really noisy, they can hold us back and hurt us. Over the years, I've found the best way to treat them is with kindness and a little humour. Notice the voice. Notice what it's saying. See if you can work out what it's trying to do — often it’s about safety or mitigating fear. Ask yourself what a kind and supportive friend would say to you, and listen to that more balanced opinion. 

And when the harsh voices pipe up again, have a little chuckle to yourself. Without that kind humour, the voices can easily pile on with criticism of the voices themselves — a fascinating loop indeed.

Getting Hammered

Have you ever had an emotional response to a set of circumstances that led to a bad decision, which made things worse? I reckon you have — you are human just like me.

Way back in my early 20’s, I was working on the farm. Ploughing a paddock of recently cleared bush. We’d made a mistake by burning it first to make it easier to plough. That left a field of fire hardened, super-sharp spikes everywhere. Tyre Killers!! On the worst day, I spend more time fixing flats than moving forward. I was frustrated beyond belief and getting angry about the situation.

Eventually, I blew my cool and belted a tyre as hard as I could with a big hammer. The recoil nearly broke my wrist, which blew up like a balloon and was sore for days. It was my first conscious insight that emotion rarely helps a decision, and often makes it worse. 

Emotion is important because it tells us a lot about the situation and ourselves. It has to be dealt with. Knowing if we are angry, scared, frustrated, timid, passionate, bored, etc., is useful. Feel the feels, and respect them. Deal with them, don’t bottle them up. And then do your best to keep the emotion out of whatever decision needs to be made.

What circumstances are you in at the moment? How do they make you feel? What impact could that emotion have on your next move?

The Reality Paradox

Simple but not easy. That saying rings so true for me when it comes to accepting challenging realities. Simple, smart, wise — definitely not easy. It can take me ages to arrive at acceptance. And it’s a powerful place to be. I reckon it's hard because it can feel like quitting, or losing hope, or dropping standards (Sometimes all of the above if the reality is challenging enough). Acceptance is none of those things. It simply gets us focused on the right pieces — the pieces where we can make a difference. 

The reality paradox is finding acceptance while holding onto your ability to act meaningfully. Without the paradox, it’s fatalism. We have no say and are pushed where the winds of chance will take us. With the paradox, we get to act on the parts of the experience that make a difference. Sometimes the field of action is small — perhaps only choosing how we will face this adversity. Sometimes it’s vast - deciding on something that changes everything. 

Either way, the faster we can find acceptance, the better. What’s that like for you? I understand the wisdom and it can still take a long time to arrive. And I reckon that's OK — especially if I can accept it with grace.

On Perfection

Last week's article ‘On being right’ drew quite a few responses from readers about how wise it is not to go in hard, and also how challenging it can be to do that in practice. Several people highlighted the parallels with wanting perfect outcomes. 

There’s a pragmatic balancing act when it comes to solving problems. We can easily get bogged down in way too much detail, seeking the perfect outcome. Perfection very often stops us from moving at a sensible pace and sometimes bogs us down completely. 

Getting something done at an acceptably good standard, getting it out and moving on is usually a lot better than fussing over tiny details that will not contribute much in the way of results, but will increase the amount of work to be done. There are few exceptions to this. Notable ones are high-consequence decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse, or high risk situations where controls need to be very carefully implemented - Those scenarios are pretty rare.

Good enough and done will almost always beat perfect, but still polishing. Get after it.

On being right

‘What we are doing carries substantial risks. I’ve got the data to prove it. I’ve been trying to get the decision makers to see it, but the conversations are going nowhere.’

This was the essence of 3 recent coaching conversations with leaders who have significant influence, but they are not the decision makers. All three had been working hard to prove their point and galvanise a decision or action. It’s not going well for any of them. 

Going in hard seldom works - even if you are right and can prove it. It’s inherently adversarial and tends to get various parties digging in on their perspective. When we try to influence like that, we can argue until well after the cows come home. 

Going in hard forgets:

• There may be other factors I can’t see from my position.

• Other parties may have investment (time, money, resources, ideas) in the way things are. If they feel personally attacked, they are likely to dig in.

• Even if I have the problem right, I may not have the solution right.

• Even if I have both the problem and the solution right, I’ll need others to fix it. I need agreement or at least alignment.

• If the perfect solution gets no buy-in, it’s no solution at all. A partial solution with solid buy-in will beat it hands down. 

• There may be an even bigger problem that is the cause of what I can see.

• What else might be missing?

Instead of going in hard, get curious about what constraints might be present for others. Are there ways to work with them to remove those obstacles? Explore for understanding, not for ‘right’. You’ll likely expand your influence.

Faster than before

Once a team gets clear about what's important, both culturally and transactionally, they can start to build speed. Clarity brings the possibility of mantras… pieces of language that are packed with shared meaning.  

For example Atlassian, a global company founded and headquartered in Australia, has several mantras. One of them is “Be the change you seek”. For them, it means:

• Take initiative rather than seeking/waiting for permission. 

• If there’s a problem, find a way to get involved in the fix.

• If there’s a gap in the market, fill it.

• If the product is not up to standard, change it. 

Smart leaders build mantras with the people around them. Then they find clear examples to reinforce their meaning. Mantras and clarity go hand in hand. Once you have them, you can remind people of what is important and set direction with a few words dense with shared meaning. It takes effort to get to that place, but on the other side of it is speed.

Do you have any mantras? If not, what might they be?

Get the Reps in

If you want to get good at something, repetition is critical:

• Skills - reps

• Strength - reps

• Handling pressure - reps

It’s the same for building culture in a team or organisation. Doing something occasional and expecting it to stick is like lifting a dumbbell once and expecting massive biceps.

It simply won’t work. Get clear on what the guiding principles for your team and work are, and then find ways to get the reps in:

• Discuss success stories and applications to other areas of the work

• Notice when things go less well, and harvest lessons learnt

• Get people to share examples of things that are important and do it often

• Refer to core principles in decisions of consequence

When teams filter everything through what matters to them, alignment and consistency can't help but follow. 

What’s important in your world?
How and where is it reinforced? 

If you can't remember the last time team culture or standards were shaped, or if it only happens once a year, then you are missing lots of low hanging fruit.

Dig Deeper

The Dig Deeper Podcast is a great resource for leaders who want to create lasting impact. Digby Scott hosts a great conversation, and it was a pleasure to be a guest on the show. You can listen to the episode here.

If you enjoy this conversation, keep an eye out for a joint event Digby and I will be running in Perth next month. We'll be inviting leaders to a session on proactive and impactful leadership in a rapidly changing environment. Event details coming soon - if you'd like to be directly updated, send me an email, and I’ll put you on the list.

Making the Leap

There’s a paradox happening among the Not for Profit organisations I work with. On the one hand, they are dealing with the slimmest operational margins ever. On the other, many are experiencing radical growth. Dealing with the duality of that is challenging.

Some of my clients have grown by more than 3X over a 12 - 24 month period. It’s taken them from less than 50 employees to over 150, which represents a radical transformation and an epic challenge for leaders.

When a whole organisation is less than 50 people, culture, purpose, values and standards are easy to lead. Everyone knows enough about each other and the various parts of the business to feel connected to the core purpose. Culture happens in conversations where significant portions of the staff are present. A meeting between 5 people is 10% of all staff. If 20 people get together it's almost half.

At 150, everything changes. Organisations become more reliant on systems to make it work. People know less about the whole. They know less of their colleagues well. And that meeting of 5 is now around 3% of your staff. Leaders who ‘lead by walking around’ no longer have time to meet and greet everyone. Recruitment is more diversified. People get more focussed on the work they are tasked with and have less visibility of the whole.

If leaders don’t make an intentional shift in how they lead, strong culture erodes due to less connection back to purpose. It’s been a great pleasure to work with organisations making the leap. There are some easy shifts leaders can make to continue building a strong and purposeful organisation. It’s definitely challenging with rapid growth, but it can be done.

Going Potty

A leader was telling me about challenges with their team not producing work to a high enough standard. Everyone's a bit frustrated. This seems to be a trend - expecting great results on the first effort.

There’s a leadership legend passed around about a pottery class where students were given the choice of submitting one perfect piece for assessment, or producing as many pots as they could and submit them all for assessment. The best quality pots came from the quantity group, not the quality group. Turns out this never happened in pots, but it did in a photography class. It was written about in a book called Art and Fear, where there were already too many photography examples, so they changed it to pots. The pottery story has since spread like wildfire, and keeps popping up refreshed. Why? Because the principle makes sense.

For many (maybe most) things, we need reps to get good. This is challenging, especially when there are significant consequences that go with getting something wrong - Pilots, Lawyers, Accountants, Soldiers and Surgeons spring to mind. Note - all these professions create opportunities for practice alongside someone who is already accomplished.

How and where could you/your team benefit from reps? How could you set that up for maximum experience/exposure with minimum risk?

Don’t expect awesome if there’s been no practice.

Ferocious Heart

Some of the high performance environments I have been exposed to burn people at the altar of success. It’s always felt unnecessarily harsh to me - that performance often costs humanity, humility and health. People pushing for a result at the cost and exclusion of all else. Some heavy hitters claim it’s the only way. Musk has achieved more than many and asserts that, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy”. As if care prevents success and progress.

So it’s been great reading Gilbert Enoka’s book “Become Unstoppable”. Gilbert was the mindset coach for the New Zealand All Blacks during their most dominant era. High performance. Highly competitive with people head-to-head on a weekly basis for selection. Ferocious on the field. Unyielding standards. Enoka clearly lays out a recipe for success which has at its heart Care, Belonging and Vulnerability. Not words that immediately spring to mind in elite sport. But essential to building the culture the All Blacks are famous for, on and off the field.

The book is rich with insights that can be applied to many endeavours. And if you happen to be a rugby or sport fan it’s an intimate look into the detail behind one of the most successful teams of all time. Well worth a read.

Can I trust them?

“Can I trust them?” is one of the most asked questions when I am coaching leaders about delegation. When we delegate stuff, often it remains our responsibility - If it doesn’t work out we may be the person who will be held responsible.

In many environments there is a regulatory responsibility too - if something you delegate goes wrong, your ‘licence to operate’ may be on the line. Potentially you’ll face regulatory penalties of some kind. This is true whether you are a board delegating to a CEO, or a frontline nurse manager, delegating to a team of nurses. It applies in many settings and at many levels.

So how can you trust someone to do what you have delegated properly - trust them enough to not be constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure it's OK? Especially if what they are doing is complex and/or complicated.

It takes time. How much time will depend on the person's prior experience, their confidence and their skill. It’s useful to have a system for handing skill sets on (We’ll talk about that next time). It’s also useful to consider what you will need to see from them to be satisfied that they know what they are doing.

Be transparent about how long you will be watching and what you are watching for. Explain the risks/consequences if it goes wrong and the incentives for getting it right. By doing so you are creating an environment where trust can develop and delegation will be successful.

Back and Beyond

This week is a short fictional piece reflecting on a pattern that seems as old as time. What do you long for in the past and dream of in the future? How can you make more of that part of your today?

Back and Beyond (by Mike House, who is considerably older than a digital native)

They called us digital natives. Born into a connected world. Now  old, I gaze on youth around me, and lament. In my day we wrote our own messages. Connected instantly with the world. Did our own research. These kids barely think! Pushed, prodded and prompted by the latest machine. No original ideas. Surely we regress.

Worried, I  join the ancestral line dwelling on better days and better ways. Wish we could go back. Back before touch screens, before mobile, before internet and email. Back before flight, before steam. Back to the days before the wheel, before fire. It was surely better then. Yearning for a past that never truly was, do we sacrifice the future? One foot back, one beyond, never really here. But beyond fire and wheel and all our ingenuity, each lamented generation has found a way to bring something new, seeking ease, solutions and comfort for those they care about.

Maybe this unthinking generation will find yet another evolution.  Maybe this time the doom tellers will be right. I guess they must be some time.

What is High Performance?

I'm reading a great book called “The Fourth Pillar - Modern Stoicism and the Philosophy of High Performance” by Harry Moffitt. Harry is a former special forces soldier and corporate psychologist. He’s worked with all manner of high performance individuals and cultures. He poses a fascinating question - What is high performance?

There are some obvious examples like Serena Williams or Michael Jordan (and their equivalents outside sport). But it gets murky when you consider people who excel in one area of life but are far from exemplary elsewhere (OJ Simpson, Keith Richards were examples he gave). And what of examples that are normally not even considered like the parent who never misses a game or performance involving their kids, or the addict who finds a way out, or the low profile person that delivers the detail on someone else's high profile vision. How about the farmer who slowly restores the salt affected land on his farm, or the Aboriginal Elder holding culture in a particular place, maybe the kid who scored below average but shifted their own personal best by a monumental amount, or the couple who maintain the passion in their relationship.

I agree with his premise - I reckon the things we note as high performance are too narrow. It’s made me think about the people I know and observe in a different light. Some of the examples above are Moffitt’s, the rest are mine. They are all real people.

What does high performance look like to you? What does recognising it do for the ‘performer’ and the observer?

Extreme Rehearsal

Once upon a time I used to run tours into caves. We’d abseil groups into caves via tight vertical holes in the limestone. I don’t believe in monsters, but if I did, those holes are where they would live. We’d explore underground before climbing back out.

The activity was low risk if well managed, but also very unforgiving of mistakes or accidents. We would rehearse rescue scenarios in extreme. The logic was if we could train for almost inconceivable rescue scenarios, then anything we actually encountered would be comparatively easy. It also meant people understood their equipment really well, and could adapt its use under pressure.

We never had to deploy those skills for real, but the practice was worthwhile all the same, even if it just made us very conscious of the challenging environment we were in.

I recently watched an Australian Story’s account of a dramatic rescue on the Franklin river in Tassie. It highlights some of the challenges rescue teams can face, and just how extreme the situation can become.

The rehearsals we did were the practical outworking of forecasting - taking the scenarios we could envisage and then working out how we would actually respond. It’s not as easy to do in a less tangible environment, however the practice is still good.

Whether it's a desktop exercise, a brainstorming session, or a physical rehearsal of some kind - like the annual fire drill, it’s well worth doing. How could you consider and practice for the extremes you might encounter in business or life?

Two forecasting fails

Fail One

Only envisaging one potential outcome. As a realist with an optimistic bias, I catch myself with this one more often than I would like. I only picture the successful outcome. The positivity sometimes serves me well, but it also makes for a bigger/slower adjustment if things don't go as anticipated. ‘Foreseeing’ only a good outcome can be like “she’ll be right” - it works well if it goes well. A better version is to forecast 3 versions. Ideal, Worst Case, Something in between. Considering each version gives a more robust ‘Plan A’ that will handle a broader range of possibilities.

Fail Two

Over-thinking it. Some people go down a rabbit hole of trying to envisage every possible outcome. The endless “what if” leads to second guessing your chosen path of action. There's lots of research highlighting the many negative aspects of too many options - over forecasting has the same effect. Forecasting is about considering what might be possible or at risk. It’s not about trying to accurately catalogue all eventualities.

Bonus Fail

Freaking ourselves out. Some leaders ask me what the most dire forecast is that we should consider. I reckon it depends on what you can handle as an individual or a team. If you can discuss a really dire, worst case scenario, and treat it as just a thought experiment, that’s useful. But if going there will cause sleepless nights and endless tilting at windmills (origins) (epic sounds), don’t go. That’s exactly the opposite of what the exercise intends. Go as far down the rabbit hole as is useful, but don’t get stuck down there with an overdue rabbit.

Fear of Forecasting?

Breakfast. A leader I admire. Deep conversation about the state of the world. Great way to start the day. The best leaders I know are unafraid to forecast. They are not trying to predict the future, instead thinking about various possibilities and how they might respond in the face of them. Last week, one such conversation turned to how Western Australia has been relatively immune to several large global crises.

GFC - Mining economy shielded us

COVID - distance and sparse population shielded us

Energy Crisis - Abundant natural resources shielded us

Each of these, and other crises have had an impact here, but not like elsewhere. Sometimes we seem to think we are a bit bombproof. The conversation over breakfast explored a number of current global and local factors that could impact us in bigger ways.

Solid leaders play out many eventualities. Not as a glass half empty. Not as fear mongering. As a way of being prepared for more than one possibility.

Forecasts are rarely 100% (just watch the weather) but that’s not the point. Pre-thinking about many possibilities makes it more likely you’ll handle the ones that arise.

No Match!

My legs burned as I slogged through the dusty, energy-sucking sand. All we had seen for hours were the straight depressing rows of plantation pine. Monotonous and hard! It’s never an appealing combination.

The problem was not the walk itself, it was a mismatch between expectations and reality. My friend had told me it was mostly single lane walking through unspoilt banksia forest with magnificent sweeping views. There were short sections that matched his description and then more grinding through plantations.

Expectations are the thief of joy. I’ve heard the statement attributed to Theodore Roosevelt or Buddhism. Whoever said it, it has a ring of truth. When we expect something different from reality, the mismatch causes disappointment. The problem is, our expectations are often not even clear to us. We experience disappointment, but usually take aim at the situation we are in, not the expectations we hold. And it shows up in traffic, in teams, in delegation, in customer service, in relationships. Kinda everywhere!

We could guard against disappointment by never having expectations. But there’s a human superpower in expectations.

George Bernard Shaw said “The reasonable person adapts themselves to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

When have you been disappointed by expectation?