Ep. 13: Leadership Teams of the Future Act Like Org Designers
About this episode:
Original Air Date: June 24, 2024The world is changing faster than ever. But leadership teams seem a little… stagnant. Sure, there’s plenty of changeover as one CEO is replaced by another, or as new C-suite roles pop up, but the way leadership teams operate is largely unchanged from the 1950s. That model? It’s antithetical to the change that’s needed for the rest of an organization to become more adaptable and resilient.
In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin explore the ways in which leadership teams are holding their organizations back from the future. They’ll dig into how leaders can shift from defense to offense, set the right expectations for their teams, and recognize what their “real work” actually is.
Mentioned in this episode:
“totchos”
The Ready’s OS Canvas
“zones of the ocean”: The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple, by Gareth Holman
Gareth’s episode: BNW Ep. 5 with Dr. Gareth Holman
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
I would rather see a leader who's spending two hours a day reading than spending two hours a day getting presented to by a team member with a very well-polished PowerPoint deck.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Rodney Evans, and that freshly shorn gentleman is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
I don't think you can say that two episodes in a row. I think last time, you said I was freshly shorn, so now, I am mediumly shorn.
Rodney Evans:
You're mid-shorn? All right, whatever.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Welcome back to At Work With The Ready, where I am corrected by my co-host.
Sam Spurlin:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
It doesn't matter who I put in the chair-
Sam Spurlin:
Within-
Rodney Evans:
That's their entire thing.
Sam Spurlin:
Within the first 10 seconds-
Rodney Evans:
Within the first 10 seconds-
Sam Spurlin:
Ideally.
Rodney Evans:
There's big "...Actually" energy.
Sam Spurlin:
That's how I know it's going to be a good episode.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, good. Oh, terrific. What is this podcast about? It is about modernizing organizations as the future of work collides with the present moment.
Sam Spurlin:
And each episode, we turn our attention to one common organizational pattern or group of patterns in this case, that we think is worth digging into. We pull it apart like nachos, and we propose solutions for what to do instead.
Rodney Evans:
Have you ever had totchos?
Sam Spurlin:
I don't know what a totcho is.
Rodney Evans:
They're tater tot nachos with tater tots instead of nacho chips?
Sam Spurlin:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
They're perfect.
Sam Spurlin:
That sounds pretty good.
Rodney Evans:
It's a perfect food.
Sam Spurlin:
I thought it was going to be taco-related, and then I was like, that's just nachos. That's just broken tacos as nachos.
Rodney Evans:
No, tater tots, my dude. They're very good. This week, we're not talking about that though. Now, I wish we were. We are going to talk about leadership in transformation, which, again, not an episode we've exactly made before surprisingly, so I'm pretty excited to dig into this one. But before we do, we shall, we must, we can check in.
Sam Spurlin:
Yes we can, and yes we shall, and yes we must. Here is our check-in question for today. If we had to get a non-traditional pet, what do you think your co-host should get? By non-traditional, I mean, no cat, no dog.
Rodney Evans:
Chinchilla.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, I was getting ready to explain it more, and then you're-
Rodney Evans:
I get it, chinchilla. Have you ever seen a chinchilla? They're so cute.
Sam Spurlin:
And I didn't include a why in the question, but I-
Rodney Evans:
I don't care.
Sam Spurlin:
Have to ask the follow-up question. You just want me to have a chinchilla, so you can hang out with the chinchilla.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, basically. Because can you imagine if you had a little chinchilla in your hands on this podcast? Oh my God, our YouTube views would be through the roof.
Sam Spurlin:
That's true. I have a project on our internal podcast meeting around marketing moves that we're trying, and I have not yet added, "Get a chinchilla."
Rodney Evans:
Get a fucking chinchilla, Sam. Do you care about this show or not?
Sam Spurlin:
I do care, and I do like... They're very soft. My answer for you is a penguin.
Rodney Evans:
Ooh, why?
Sam Spurlin:
Because it would go swimming with you. And penguins are very good swimmers, and I feel like a particularly intelligent penguin could be a pacer for you. He'll teach you how to swim real good.
Rodney Evans:
Oh my god, I would love to have a little penguin buddy swimming with me. If I could choose, I'd probably rather have a dolphin as my swimming buddy, but a penguin would work.
Sam Spurlin:
Here's the thing, a penguin can hang out with you on dry land. Dolphins, where are you going to keep a dolphin?
Rodney Evans:
So after the swim, the penguin and I can chill on the dock?
Sam Spurlin:
He'd be sitting in that chair right there over your shoulder during this podcast. It's hanging out eating a fish.
Rodney Evans:
He could go in my car, unlike dolphins.
Sam Spurlin:
He could easily, little seatbelt.
Rodney Evans:
This is the cutest check-in round that ever happened. It's just adorable.
Sam Spurlin:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
You know what else is adorable is the reviews that we're getting. We've gotten reviews that are so nice that Jack has been screen shotting them and posting them in Slack so that everyone at The Ready knows that people actually listen to this show, and think it's good.
Sam Spurlin:
Last night, I read out loud one of the latest reviews we got to my wife, because it was so heartwarming. We had like a moment in the kitchen of like, "We're making a cool thing."
Rodney Evans:
We're making a thing.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And if you don't leave us a review and Jack doesn't screenshot it, then we don't know if we're talking to anyone. I mean, we see data, but it's not the same. It's different when you send us a review and tell us something happened and you did something different and whatever, it's very meaningful. I really appreciate it. And also still follow us on LinkedIn. Follow us on Instagram. People are starting to send us hilarious work memes on Instagram, which we're enjoying very much so get in on the fun. @atworkwiththeready is the handle, which I now know is both the name of the show and our handle on Instagram because I'm a professional.
Sam Spurlin:
Oh, funny how that works.
We’re in a new era, but leadership is still running yesterday’s playbook
Sam Spurlin:
All right, you already teased it and I'm going to do a quick little intro here. Leadership teams, what even are they and what do they do, is kind of the topic here. Where does leadership fit into organizational transformation? What do great leaders of transformation do and don't do? Those are kind of the types of questions that we're going to dig into today. And you have a really, I think, very well articulated take on the overall pattern.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you. It is a little bit more macro as you pointed out than what we usually talk about on this show because it comprises lots of smaller patterns repeated over time at infinitum and so this is the lay of the land as I see it today. The role of leaders in organizations as we know them now, has been shaped by more than a hundred years of history. There were other things that happened before that, but we won't worry about it for our purposes. If you think about the first wave as being post-industrial revolution, when management science came to the fore, that was the time where efficiency became really the watchword in the first principle. The idea around leadership was that you would separate those who think from those who do. The leaders or managers of production lines would sit off to the side or up above an assembly line floor and they would think about process improvement and worker motivation and innovation in order to get more X with Y. And the workers were meant to just do stuff, just execute.
Then we sort of saw a second wave of come with the information age, and this started with the advent of technology in the late 50s, early 60s, that started automating processes. It obviously became exponential with the rise of the internet and a lot of organizations becoming digital first. This is a time where the watchword became more about strategy and innovation than just efficiency. And what we saw was a real trend toward pushing the thinking from the leadership down to the doers, so that the leaders were thinking, but everybody else was thinking and doing. We saw a drumbeat around empowered workforces and why that was important. We would posit that we are now in a third wave that many don't yet recognize that we're in, which actually requires pushing the doing back up.
So we want to see leaders out of the sunshine zone as we've described it on previous episodes exclusively, and with their hands more on the work of the business because with the level of complexity that we are operating in, we can no longer afford to have thinking and judgment and steering and really critical strategic moves separated or divorced from the work of the business. We need both leaders and doers to be both thinking and doing. And we'll talk more about that, but generally the pattern is that's not what's happening. We are generally seeing folks stuck in that second wave where they're still focused down in empowerment and we're like, "Bro, it's a whole new game."
Sam Spurlin:
Nice. Yeah, so this next phase of the podcast, we'll be getting into more specific patterns that fit underneath that pattern that you just described.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, you want to kick us off?
Sam Spurlin:
I want to give Tabea a quick shout out for coming up with this topic-
Rodney Evans:
Beebers!
Sam Spurlin:
-in the first place. Beebers, yes. I have literally never called her in my life.
Rodney Evans:
I called her that by accident on Friday and it just stuck in my brain as being funny.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, I just followed your energy on that one.
Rodney Evans:
I mean, hopefully she doesn't hate it, we'll find out.
Sam Spurlin:
But she'll love this episode. That's just to say if you have other topics you would like us to hear, definitely hit us up with that. And if you are a member of The Ready listening to this, that includes you, obviously.
Rodney Evans:
You'll probably end up with a nickname we didn't ask for.
Traditional leadership is diametrically opposed to most change work
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly. All right, I'm going to grab one of my favorite ones off of here. And I want to give leaders benefit of the doubt just to start, which is the pattern around we start a project in an organization and we have a leader who is super stoked conceptually on everything that we're here to do. That's why they've hired us, that's why we're partnering to do the work. And the way they know how to dig into the work with us is antithetical to what we're actually trying to do in the organization.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
So it looks like unnecessary control, wanting to be really in the weeds on status of how things are going, wanting to see the really well thought through detailed plan that goes six months out and from their point of view they're just thinking, "This is what I do, this is what a leader does. They help get clarity on all of this. They make sure everything is going and happening the right way." And that's one of the first battles, lowercase B, battles, one of those first conversations that we often end up having with a client around this need for really controlling how other people are experiencing the change work is actually antithetical to the thing that we're trying to do.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I mean, I've experienced this so many times. For me it often starts with invite lists, invite lists to meetings-
Sam Spurlin:
Who's going to be there, who's not going to be there?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Or like-
Sam Spurlin:
Send it to me, let me take a look real quick.
Rodney Evans:
The leader or sponsor being like, "I should see how you're thinking about the breakout groups and who's in....", you know?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Like a very like, I need to sort of puppeteer this thing. And the thing is, there's a lot about that that is not great in terms of starting to practice the principles of adaptability and agility that we're there to install, but to me the most nefarious part of it is just actually that it's a huge distraction. Because it lets people feel like they're doing something that's part of transformation, and I'm like, every minute that I spend engaged in this is a minute that I'm not spending on something that matters. And the fact that I am feeding that beast and propping up the assumption that this is the work isn't good. It's not good for us, it's not good for them, it's not good for the overall transformation and yet it can be quite difficult to get out of that pattern.
Because to a leader they're like, "What's the big deal of me weighing in on a meeting invite?" And to me, I'm like, "Well, the big deal is that it's going to take three times as long to have the meeting as if you would just let me take a swag at it and get going tomorrow." But it's like these are the disconnects early on in projects that can feel quite spicy. Sorry, Travis. Spicy.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Also Travis, your wife agrees with me on spicy. I'm just saying.
Sam Spurlin:
Spicy's great.
Rodney Evans:
Thank you, Sam.
Sam Spurlin:
The thing that is, I like getting the inside scoop on stuff in an organization. There are versions where like, "Oh, it's useful to know that these two people on the team have this really long history and they don't get along."
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Sam Spurlin:
Cool, I can do something with that information...maybe. So there is something that is potentially useful there, but the thing that this pattern, the sub-pattern really gets at is that it is basically replacing the important problems that we have not yet uncovered by getting into the work with the known fake problems of how to manage, how this is going to go, who's going to be in the meeting, how the meeting's going to go? As long as we can get 80% of the way there on the meeting and it allows us to move forward and we start to uncover the real sorts of problems-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
Like let's direct our attention at those things and just get through that first wave of "problems" which aren't really problems, they're just logistics.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Well, and I think to just nerd out for a second, because there's a lot in here that relates to how traditional change management is done and a lot of leaders feeling like they need to build a lot of support before making a move. And I would say that we just fundamentally tend to lean more into let's just get started and show people what's different. Let's just give people a different experience and just get real momentum created to get us unstuck. And I understand that for leaders who have been trained and incentivized and promoted along traditional lines, that feels irresponsible. They're just like, "No, first you win hearts and minds and you explain to everyone what we're going to do and why they're in this meeting and why they're not in this meeting and what's going to happen in that?" And I understand that they immediately feel not only quite threatened and a lot of control is being taken away, but also quite challenged in terms of what they believe the right way to do this is and that's hard, but also life in a big city. I don't know.
Sam Spurlin:
And it's not to say that our approach, what we're not doing is saying like, "If you just get started, there won't be problems."
Rodney Evans:
Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
What we're saying is there are absolutely going to be problems. Someone's going to be mad they weren't there.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Someone else going to be like, "Why am I here?"
Rodney Evans:
So much tension.
Sam Spurlin:
And what we're saying is that we can handle that. Those are conversations that can happen. Those are not irrecoverable mistakes or moments, they're just things that are part of the work. So we shouldn't be surprised when they happen and we shouldn't spend a ton of time making sure they don't happen.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's just our belief that we can deal with or triage or steer based on things that have actually gone down and would prefer to do that than trying to avoid anything ever going down. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Rodney Evans:
It's so easy for someone to go, "I wanted to be in that meeting, why wasn't I?" And for me to be like, "I don't know, I do the next one."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, exactly. And it's a very not a big deal.
Rodney Evans:
Good to know.
Avoiding all discomfort because they’re out of practice at being uncomfortbale
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Before you actually get started in something. It is super easy to wind yourself up about how high stakes it is, how catastrophic it'll be if it goes wrong. And that is an exercise in creative thinking that anybody can do and I think humans are actually naturally wired to do it, so let's not stay in that place too long.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Let's not give ourselves the opportunity to just let our brain start spinning up about how this is going to go poorly. Let's get it safe to try and actually start rolling out so that we can start responding to real things, not the made up things in our heads.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And there's also like, maybe you know the psychology of this because there's also midnight zone stuff that shows up in this, the sort of invisible personal layer. I think when something is changing, whatever it is, whether it is a meeting rhythm, whether it's the structure of an organization, whether it's the strategy, whether it's a comp thing, whatever it is. People have real midnight zone shit that immediately comes into the twilight zone, actual visible working arena. And I often think that the perception of change is much scarier than the reality of change. And that so much of it I think is related to people who have been fired or had their role reduced or ended up like a lot of my own change trauma is about getting reorged under terrible bosses and just getting passed from one to another. And being like, "What fresh hell will this org chart bring? Let's wait till Monday when they just tell me where to move my shit."
So it's like we all have that stuff, but I do think that particularly for leaders who are trying to steward a change, we have a responsibility to be aware of what our stuff is and to stay in the present of like, "Am I actually under threat right now or could I wait a little while? Could I be a little patient?" I used to know a guy who was a very successful investor and whenever he was getting pitched, his tagline to his team was, "Can you suspend your judgment for just 10 minutes?" And I think a lot of us would do well when we're trying to hold space for any kind of change to suspend our judgment for just 10 minutes.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally. Well, and this is the type of thing that you can build comfort in by doing it consistently. So in these examples that I'm thinking of with leaders who may be initially showed up in this kind of controlling way, they got through it pretty quickly with us-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Because they saw that we could just do things and respond to what's happening and everything's okay and we can pretty quickly adapt to that as well.
No clarity on their shared work as a team
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I will say, I think this relates to another point that you wrote down which is, I think because a lot of leaders and particularly leadership teams don't have a lot of written record of what their shared work is, what the purpose of their team is, what their shared accountabilities are, what their clarified authority is, that is problematic for transformation in ways that you can talk about. But I think related to this other point, because that is generally true, they feel the call to insert and control very quickly because the rules of the game aren't clarified.
The rules of the game for a leadership team who is stewarding and sponsoring transformation is often quite murky. And so a lot of times, because it's not articulated that's like we are going to give this six months and this much money and this much time and this much resource and this much guidance and whatever to really see what kind of haste we can make here, because that's not often contracted and agreed to. I think everybody brings their control moves to bear as soon as something starts to shift they're just like, "Uh-Oh. No, thank you."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. It's like an immediately, everybody claim your territory-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
In this murky land and then get ready to defend it from each other.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. No, this whole thing about leadership teams rarely having done the work to articulate their shared work. This is so, so common. I'm living this right now with a couple of clients and I've had many conversations with leadership teams where they want to fight me on this initially, they're like, "What are you are talking about? We're not a team. We meet every week. We're called the LT." I'm like, "Okay, well you can call yourselves anything and you can meet whenever you want. That doesn't necessarily make you a team. Do you have shared work? Describe to me what you all are doing together. Not the fact that you describe and report out on your function and you report out on your function and you report out in your function." There is no shared work there and that may be some important work that we all are aware of our own areas, but that does not make you a team that makes you a group of peers who meet periodically.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
A team has stuff that they do together. And the stuff when we are working with these leadership teams is the OS work, it's the building of the OS-
Rodney Evans:
I know.
Sam Spurlin:
It's the building of the organization. I was literally in a session with a team yesterday where the closing round, there was a great comment that I love which is, you have a leader who said, "That in the beginning of this meeting I was grumpy because I thought this was going to be fluffy. And then by the time we got to the end of it, I could much more clearly see what the work is that we need to do." And that made my heart sing and that is my job-
Rodney Evans:
And you're like, "Nailed it!"
Sam Spurlin:
–is done. No, actually my job has just begun because we're starting to build a backlog of what's the shit that only you all can do, and what does it mean? What does it actually look like? Who is going to do it? What sub team? Which three of you're going to go work on this thing and which two of you're going to go work on this thing with somebody from this function? That is the really exciting work that I love to do with leadership teams. Because now you've got a group of people who are sweating how stuff gets done in the organization.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Wait, random related aside, I feel like earlier in my career, this was a point that would emerge naturally when I was working with leadership teams that we would just sort stumble eventually into the fact that their job was basically, their shared work was basically organizational design. Now I understand why that kept happening. But I still feel like this sometimes. Sometimes I feel like leadership teams will be like, "Well, of course you think that that's my job because that's your job."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Like my agenda is that they become org designers, which I mean not no, but also true, right?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Should I be insecure about this?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I don't think so. I just like getting them to articulate, "How do you want your organization to be?"
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And they'll have a great time writing about all of the things, how things would be if everything was working perfectly.
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Sam Spurlin:
Like, "Oh, that's awesome, that's cool, it's cool, it's cool." And then the question is, "All right, cool. How? Who? And how?"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And the dawning realization that like, no, it's not literally everything that we just brainstormed is the sole responsibility of the leadership team. I'm not asking you as the ELT to go get into the microweeds about what tools we're going to use to communicate, but there may be work that has to be owned at that leadership team level around saying, "Hey, actually we're going to prioritize figuring out our tech stack because it's a shit show."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
So we're going to allocate some money, we're going to support a team to go do that. We're going to articulate what our principles are, but what we believe about how we should be using tools, what kind of tools we want. That is the type of work that lives at the leadership level, not reviewing vendor RFPs or anything like that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And it's so much of the wiring and plumbing of an organization can't be touched by just anybody for good reason. But to your point, I do feel like the best projects that I've worked on, the leadership team I worked with were the kind who once they understood what they were trying to create in their OS were very like, "Well, we got to look at compensation. Well, we got to look at this tooling thing. Well, we got to look at our strategy. Well, the way that we do budgeting now is just not supporting the kind of adaptability that we need." The best leadership teams weren't like, "Well, we work on the Titanic and this is how the Titanic goes. So do your best." The best leadership teams were like, "Oh, it's our job to change out the old wiring, which is the hardest part of the job actually."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
But our job is to create a house where these things can happen and where people can live and do great work. And a lot of the way that that happens is quite, or get riddled and quite unseen and quite unglamorous, but the best leadership teams I've worked with are like, "Yeah, we got to rethink sales comp because these organizations will never collaborate if we leave the incentives this way."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I love that. And I think another good example that I'm living right now is something bad happens. Like something breaks, somebody drops a ball, multiple people drop a ball, something bad happens and you can retro the thing and fix that specific thing that happened like, "Ah, here's what happened. All right, we're going to fix it and make sure that doesn't happen again." And I think a leadership team that is really on top of its game will take that example of a thing that happened and be able to abstract it one level higher and say, "What is it about our OS that made this thing happen?"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
"What is it about how we do something, how we communicate that this thing fell between two functions and nobody felt the responsibility to track down what is actually happening here until it blew up in our face."
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, let's understand the OS sort of cause for this and then let's explore what we can do at an OS level so this flavor of thing never happens again. That is exactly the same and nothing that kind of falls in that same category either.
Leaders get stuck playing defense when they should be playing offense
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And this is another point that I wanted to raise is just this sort of playing offense versus playing defense idea. I think a lot of leaders, again because of that sort of second wave of management and leadership trend line thing that I talked about, the information age vibe was so much about empowering and servant leadership and all of this other stuff. It put leaders I think into a posture that is unhelpful because power became a dirty word and exercising power became controversial in a lot of organizations that were trying to be more progressive or be seen as more empowering. And the long tail of that, the consequence of that, is leaders ending up being quite responsive to what breaks in the OS and to what people are dissatisfied with, and to what a competitor is doing rather than being like, "My organization is designed to do what it's doing. What do I want it to do instead? What do I need to change in order for it to do that thing?"
And I'm just like, raise your gaze to be paying attention to the results that you get and what to do about your OS to change them rather than getting sucked into the muck of this person got a competing offer and this competitor is using our languaging and this lawsuit is now going to drag me down to the river sticks. It's like, guys look up, look up and pay attention because the defensive moves, and I've been in this role and it took a member of source being like, "I need you somewhere else." The defensive moves will keep you distracted and exhausted and they are compounding. The more attention you give to triaging every individual fracture in the OS, the more those fractures will end up on your desk to solve. You will just become a hammer and every person will hand you nails until you retire. So you got to start paying attention to a different altitude that to your point, you have to start designing the system that takes care of those things so that you're not the one taking care of every one of those things.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. The way I sometimes talk about it with leaders is that I'll say the statement that everybody seems to be playing at one level lower than they should be in this organization.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. True.
Sam Spurlin:
So you've got VPs acting like directors, you've got directors acting like managers, you've got managers acting like individual contributors and you've got really pissed-off individual contributors being micromanaged-
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
We need everybody to level up one higher and care about the things that only you can do at that level.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And that's the hard thing about that though, is the stuff that you're doing one level down is comfortable and knowable-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Even if it's frustrating-
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Chances are you were probably good at it, which is why you got promoted.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
So it's so easy to convince yourself that, "This is the work, I'm doing it, here's the punch list, here's the backlog, and I can do these things." Meanwhile, the whole realm of thinking and guiding and all of the other accountabilities that truly live at that level of the organization are either not being done or they're being done by the level above you in a not particularly optimal way.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. Totally. I mean when I went through this personal crisis coming up on two years ago, the analogy that stuck in my mind when I was really fucking this up for myself was that I was like, I want to be an architect, not a handyman. And I was like, I cannot be The Ready's janitor as my entire job because we'll never get anywhere. We'll never get anywhere if the people who are supposed to be working at the next level up are working at the level down from where they are in terms of their scope of impact and their vision for the thing and their ambition.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And that's not to say that architects can't occasionally pick up a hammer and go help-
Rodney Evans:
Of course.
Sam Spurlin:
But it's not their default mode. And if the architect work isn't getting done, we know to go talk to the architect about coming back and doing some architect stuff and put the hammer down for a little bit.
Leaders need to start doing “real” work
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is bringing me to another thing that I wanted to talk to you about, which is what real work is?
Sam Spurlin:
This is quite philosophical.
Rodney Evans:
What is-
Sam Spurlin:
What is work?
Rodney Evans:
–work?
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, it is the second word in our podcast, but what even is work?
Rodney Evans:
What even do we mean by work? Okay, but for real, when I say the third wave of management philosophy here means pushing the doing back up. I'm sure there are plenty of leaders out there who are like, "I work hard, I do stuff all day." And I am like, "Kind of." You kind of do stuff.
Sam Spurlin:
I thought you were going to say something nicer about that than that.
Rodney Evans:
No, I'm not. I'm really not. And look, again, like everything else in organizational design, I am not going to blame the human beings who are doing what the system is telling the, is expected of them, is paying them to do, is rating them based on doing. It's like I get why you're doing a made up job because literally it's what you're hired and told to do. But again, if you think about the most expensive people in the building whose time should be the most valuable and therefore applied to the most valuable things, I think I see a lot of leaders spending a lot of time judging the work of people that report into them. And by judging I mean giving feedback, asking probing questions, being presented to, and then a lot of work influencing across with their peers and then a lot of work managing up to keep the right kind of attention on them in their organization. And to me, none of those three moves are the kind of work that I want to see the most valuable people in the building doing.
Sam Spurlin:
What do you want to see them doing instead?
Rodney Evans:
Well, lots of things. If you think about the sunshine zone as being where all of the assets that get created in an organization are, and you think about a lot of leaders like spending a lot of time reviewing and moving pixels around on PowerPoint decks, I really want to see leaders out of the sunshine zone either up or down. I want to see them both paying attention to the external environment and the landscape and noticing where their organization is situated in the broader environment, what kind of trends, environmental, socioeconomic, are likely to be impacting their business or impacting their competitors or creating opportunities. I want them sort of in the sky zone being like, "What's the weather up here that we should be paying attention to?" Which means I would rather see a leader who's spending two hours a day reading than spending two hours a day getting presented to by a team member with a very well-polished PowerPoint deck.
I'd rather that someone has a curated X feed and is spending two hours a day clicking into articles about things related to what the core of their business is than those two hours having someone be like, "And if you could turn to slide 17," which also says nothing. So that's the up move and then the down move is get into the twilight zone and pay attention to ways of working. So it's like be the person who's like, "What around here actually needs fixing, changing?" Be the person who is digging into the tech stack, the resourcing, whether we have the right talent and why not, etc, etc, etc. Be the org designer.
Sam Spurlin:
Exactly. And if you think about it, who else is going to do that? Everybody else is doing their job in the system and because of how we tend to build organizations probably don't have a whole lot of slack in the system for changing it. You theoretically, I know you don't feel like you have Slack senior leader, but you have more ability to job craft yourself into a situation where you have Slack to go be the org designer-
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Than the individual contributor answering customer service calls all day.
Rodney Evans:
100%.
Sam Spurlin:
They're being measured very, very minutely on how many of those they finished and chances are you're not being measured that way or anything approaching that way. So make that time, go roaming around and see what you can actually suss out and be the catalyst for changing.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
One other thing I just wanted to add into what you said is, I agree 99% with everything you just said, and the one thing I would add to it is do something to synthesize everything that you have read and understood and share it back into-
Rodney Evans:
Oh, I love that.
Sam Spurlin:
-the organization. Write stuff, make short videos. There's so many ways that you can use your experience that you have as a senior leader in an organization to provide value that is useful for people back into the organization. And there's definitely all sorts of interesting stuff around feeling insecure about whether you're going to, if your take is right or wrong or... Like there's things to work through in the midnight zone around that. But I think it's a really valuable thing that I don't see enough senior leaders in organizations doing.
Rodney Evans:
I mean, as someone who has worked on this a lot myself, it does feel quite vulnerable. It is hard to get started, because there's not really a template for it, the way that there's a template for how to create strategy or how to do budgeting or something like that, and it's not something that anyone's going to ask you for specifically. As someone who professionally talks about shit, even I have had the moment where I'm like, "Does anyone want to read this Slack post about what I think about AI and our category?" I don't know. It feels like I put a lot of time and thought into synthesizing the conversations I have and the things that I'm learning and then I'm like, "Nobody asked for this and I don't know if anybody is interested in it."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
But you kind of have to do it anyway.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And you have to keep doing it even if it doesn't necessarily get the response that you're hoping for.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
If you don't have 20 responses and cycling, "Oh my God, Rodney, this is so smart," but a few people have read it and you're doing it for your own edification as well.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Sam Spurlin:
You're externalizing your own understanding and growth.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
And if there are some people who are finding it valuable, I would say it's probably worth doing. And I think it's really interesting you said nobody's going to be asking for these, except that The Ready we have now created an OS where if you didn't write a Source ship for three months, people would be like, "What the fuck? What are you doing? Where's the thing?"
Rodney Evans:
I mean, I get a lot of emojis, which is nice, but I don't know if anybody would be like, "This is missing."
Sam Spurlin:
I absolutely guarantee people would say it's missing. Not everybody, but I would be one of them. I have my list of all the ships that I expect to see every month and I'm excited to read them. And I would totally extend you all the grace in the world if you skipped for a month or two. But if it just disappeared with no commentary, I'd be like, "Where did it go and why aren't we doing it anymore?"
Rodney Evans:
Interesting. See, real-time data folks it's worth doing it even if you don't know if anyone cares. I mean look, I think this is sort of going back to the beginning of our conversation. It's really easy if you are a leader of anything. And certainly my leadership considering I don't directly manage people looks very different than a lot of our clients. But the principle is the same, which is like you got to try some stuff and get out of your own brain and it's a lot easier if you're willing. It's a lot easier to do this work of being like, "My job is actively learning and modeling that for the organization, staying ahead for myself and for the organization, synthesizing and sharing what I am learning with the organization." And just keeping at it, even though learning is not in and of itself something that someone tells you is the job, it kind of is the job.
And to me, this was a thing that we created when I was at MG, but if there were two skills that we found through a lot of interviewing and research to be the most predictive of someone who is seen as an adaptive leader, it was continuous learning and self awareness. Because it's just like, "The awareness to know what you don't know, the muscle to fill it. The awareness to know what you don't know, the muscle to fill it." And it's just like, if you really develop those two moves, you're pretty golden. And most leaders that we work with in large organizations, were not taught that, do not have time for that and are not incentivized or told or asked to do either of those things with any regularity.
How Rodney and Sam’s view on leaders have changed over their careers
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Before we move into talking about what works instead. I have a question for you that's not on the board, but I think would be maybe an interesting little convo and if it's not, Jack will get rid of it.
Rodney Evans:
Great.
Sam Spurlin:
How has your thinking about the role of leaders and leadership teams changed over the course of your career doing organizational transformation work? You made the point that, I don't know how many episodes there's been of this podcast and we hadn't necessarily done one on leaders in leadership yet. And I think when I think back to the early days of The Ready, I don't know that we spent a whole lot of time talking specifically about how do we engage with leadership teams, what's their role? So I'm just curious what comes up for you when I ask that?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. The TL;DR is like, "I think I used to be more in the head of the leadership team just needs to not become a blocker and to be sure that there is space wherever transformation is happening for it to happen." And basically their jobs were to clear hurdles, write checks, provide air cover, et cetera.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Now because of the projects that I have been involved in with really engaged org design-oriented leaders, I just understand what the limitation is if they themselves are not modeling the end state that they're aiming for.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I think that tracks to my own thinking on it as well. And I think lots of great work can happen in these huge organizations without CEO buy-in-
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Sam Spurlin:
There's a lot of green field usually where we can start making things happen. So I have not swung so hard to the other direction where I'm like, "We have to make sure everyone, all the leaders are on board before we even do anything," that would be pretty antithetical to what we're trying to do.
Rodney Evans:
100%.
Sam Spurlin:
But there is a moment, there is a ceiling of impact that you get to if you don't have leaders really onboard and doing the work with you.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
And I've really tried over the last couple of years to totally shift my thinking and instead think about leadership teams are a potential force multiplier for the work that we are doing. If we're going to be existing and doing this work in a hierarchical system, let's use the hierarchy to our advantage. If there is centralized power in some way, well let's go and use that power in a productive, wholesome complexity-conscious people positive way rather than kind of hiding from it like the Eye of Sauron, kind of looking for us and making sure it can't see us, don't put the ring on or-
Rodney Evans:
I don't what any of these nerd references mean, but you go off.
Sam Spurlin:
Some people do and they're very impressed with my metaphor right now.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
But I have really started to enjoy explicitly working with leadership teams in partnership with them in the other transformation work that is happening within their orgs.
Rodney Evans:
Cool. I love it.
Tip 1: Leaders need to be doing their own self-work
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Why don't you go first this time.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
What's one of yours?
Rodney Evans:
Great. Here's the thing. When you are part of a leadership team that is stewarding a transformation of any kind, of any shape, whether it is evolutionary or revolutionary, whether it is an incremental, you're running your first cross-functional mission-based team or it is an overhaul of the op model, shit is going to be messy. And I've said this on this show before, but one of the lines that I say to people in source regularly is like, 50% of the people will be mad at you 100% of the time. That's the gig. And I think anytime that you are someone who is stewarding any kind of change, that is going to be true to some extent.
And I think that in order to become the kind of org designer that we're talking about, someone who is really working it in the twilight zone, leading the retrofitting of new pipes and new wires in the house, you're going to have to know why you're making certain choices. And you're going to have to get really clear on what the principles are that you are designing for and toward, and know that and know that with your team. Because it's going to be really easy to negotiate away from those things when someone is angry or when someone threatens to leave or when someone who's very important is angry about their new boss or their comp or this meeting or this whatever, there's going to be choppy water. And I think you have to as a leadership team understand what you're trying to do and why in order to weather those storms.
And in addition to that, I don't think that any modern leader can actually do what we are doing right now or what we're talking about without some external support. I think if you do not have a coach, a therapist, an advisor, a whatever, you almost inevitably will bring your midnight zone shit to the team to deal with.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And I think it is all of our responsibility as stewards of organizations and transformations in particular to be doing our own work so that we're not unwittingly burdening our teammates with the work that we haven't done for ourselves. And so, the why is really important and then the way that you're able to navigate when it gets hard and it inevitably will is really important.
Tip 2: Identify the shared work of your leadership team
Sam Spurlin:
I love that. Speaking of the work, my idea is around a different type of the work, which is defining that shared work that you all have as a leadership team. So talking to a leader and their team here, get around a table with an OS Canvas and fill it out in terms of what is true right now in our organization as it relates across these 12 fields of the Canvas. What's working really well, what's not working as well. Let's start to develop a lens through which we can look at our organization and start to see and better understand it. And then let's do a similar exercise, but instead talk about the ideal future that we would like to be in. It'll help us see where we have potentially at odds descriptions of an ideal future that happened yesterday in a session.
Rodney Evans:
Interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
Two leaders had very different takes on what would good even look like in this field of the campus that we should-
Rodney Evans:
Without giving anything away, can you be any more specific on that?
Sam Spurlin:
Basically it was in the authority field-
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
And somebody had written what you would probably expect one of us to write around pushing authority to the edge and fewer decisions coming up to the senior VP level. And then somebody else wrote something which was basically, and I think there's more nuance here, but what the sticky essentially said something around, "We all have a chance to weigh in on every decision," but then the CEO decides. And those are... you can't have both of those. And you can make, I would prefer the former much more than the latter, but the latter is probably better than their current state?
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
So it already started an interesting conversation.
Rodney Evans:
Interesting.
Sam Spurlin:
This whole exercise though is just starting to build the muscle of noticing what the shared work is-
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Sam Spurlin:
And then you can start to get after it in various ways. Building it into your operating rhythm, making sure that you have projects in your action meeting that are related to building the OS. Not just showing up to our weekly ELT meeting and all of us sharing out on our thing and hearing a presentation from somebody else, we're trying to move beyond that.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, that's not it. Cool.
Sam Spurlin:
Not it.
Tip 3: Setting the right expectations for a different way of working
Rodney Evans:
I feel like my ideas are sort of squishy, but they work for me.
Sam Spurlin:
This whole world of work that we are in is quite squishy work, squishy stuff is, what is work even?
Rodney Evans:
What is leadership? A big thing that I have learned is that with very few exceptions, I can count on one hand, I think people will work to the expectation that you set for them. I fundamentally think the people that I work with basically can achieve anything that I believe they can achieve. My belief in them is almost always sufficient for them to realize their own ambitions. And I actually recently, I'm going to hold this up as a shameless plug. The author of this book, which is actually a clinical text, it's called, "Functional Analytic Psychotherapy Made Simple," is written by my coach and friend of the pod, Gareth Holman, who is a genius. And there's a thing in here that I've really been pondering recently, and I'm not going to use Gareth's words because they're very clinical words, but in my own interpretation.
I think about the fact that as leaders, especially in change, we have to balance expectation and support. Our job is to create enough awareness to make a space to do that. But I would say earlier in The Ready's history, I felt very high expectation, not articulated by someone else, just like it was in the air, was just like-
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, freeform high expectation. Freeform impossible to meet expectation.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, so it was not just me. Yeah.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, unclarified amorphous incredibly high standards and not a lot of felt support for achieving them, which I think for a lot of folks kept us in a little bit of a loop of, "Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Is this good enough?" Because it was both unclear what enough was and there was no real support to get there. I say this because also, I think it can swing too far the other way. I think too much support and space holding and coddling without expectation creates a bunch of entitled babies.
So, I do think that if you are a leadership team that is stewarding any kind of change or just designing your org, you have to look really critically at what is the clear expectation that you're setting. Often that will have to do with principles. It'll be like, the clear expectation that we have around compensation is that it is equitable and it is pegged to market, and the support that we are going to give people to live into that or to be part of that looks like an ability to leave, an ability to access support, an ability to participate in learning journeys, an ability to have a mentor, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. I think that it is our job if we want to bring an organization with us in change to constantly be balancing expectation and support.
Sam Spurlin:
I love that. Like everything there are continuums and it is not a binary one or the other choice.
Rodney Evans:
Totes.
Closing round: Reflecting back on the conversation
Sam Spurlin:
Third ways abound. All right, Rodney. I think that's a great place for us to come to a close, which means, no, the episode is not over, it just means it's closing round time.
Rodney Evans:
Closing Round. Closing round.
Sam Spurlin:
Rodney, closing round. What did you notice about this conversation?
Rodney Evans:
I noticed that unlike the meetings episode that we made that felt like it could be about anything and we wanted to talk about everything, and this episode somehow, even though this topic is as wide and deep as the ocean, we managed to find some real essence in the discussion and it felt very organic to me that that happened and it was really fun.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Plus one to that, I have a hypothesis. I noticed this is really bringing people behind the curtain. In our Mural board, we have our structure of how we want to do the meeting, and in the orange section here where we have described the essential thing, why it persists and what it costs, why it's bad, I just kind of treated the whole, those three things as just all the same and we just kind of jumped around where it made sense to connect things as opposed to being like, first we describe, then we talked about why it persists and then we talked about why it's bad.
Rodney Evans:
Cool.
Sam Spurlin:
I think that's where the organic-ness was. So maybe we should play with that more in the future.
Rodney Evans:
I don't see why not.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Well, let's officially wrap now. And as you all know, we're always looking for new topics for the show. So if you have an organizational pattern that you are having trouble changing, shoot us a note at podcast[at]theready[dot]com.
Rodney Evans:
This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin. Hi Taylor. And produced by our favorite person. He really is one of my favorite people, Jack Van Amburg. Our work with The Ready is created by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you so much for listening.