Episode 247 - Humility in Action
Transcript:
Jen: Hi, Pete.
Pete: Good day, Jen.
Jen: I recently went to this...I guess we'll call it an event, and I witnessed very extraordinary leadership in action.
Pete: Yes.
Jen: And I think you'll get a kick out of it, because it centers around one of the key traits of leadership that you talk about all the time, which is humility.
Pete: Oh my god. I mean, I love confirmation bias of the things I like talking about, so this should be fun. This is The Long and The Short Of It.
Pete: I love humility. Tell me more.
Jen: Okay, so actually, one of your clients who lives in New York reached out to me, and he's a voice teacher. He invited me to be his guest at something called the ELR, the External Laryngology Rounds. And this is essentially when speech pathologists, ENTs, laryngologists, and voice teachers from all around New York City (and these physicians are representing the different major hospitals in New York), they get together and they share challenging cases that have stumped them or that they made some errors on along the way. It is wild. So, you've got all of these people who are like world-renowned in their field.
Pete: Yes.
Jen: And they take turns getting up and saying, you know, "This is Patient A. This is what happened in their case. These are the interventions we've done so far. Nothing's working. Help me."
Pete: Wow.
Jen: "Tell me how to move forward, or give me your ideas. Even if they're crazy ideas, give them to me." So these experts are displaying such leadership in their willingness to get up in front of a group of other experts and say, "I am stumped." It blew my mind.
Pete: I'm so obsessed with this example. This is the most beautiful example of humility, and why I think it's actually like a superpower. I think people understand what people mean when they talk about the humble leader or having humility. I think a lot of the time when I'm working with a leader, the switch you're trying to flick in them is, "This is actually a good thing. It's actually a superpower." And how you can leverage it as such is in an example like you described, which is a recognition that, "I don't know everything. And I have almost like the courage and the humility to seek support and guidance and feedback from others who I know can help me achieve a better outcome, or in the interest of supporting the people that I'm choosing to support." So, I'm absolutely obsessed.
Jen: Yeah. The thing that was so wonderful to witness...because we hypothesize about this, and you read about this in books, and you know, we see it in certain contexts. But to be in this particular room with such extraordinary people and to witness this was really exciting. The result of watching someone as gifted as these people were, say, "I don't know," immediately created trust, respect, and confidence in them. Like I was actually so eager to hear what they did know, because they were willing to say what they didn't know.
Pete: Isn't that good? That's so wild. The willingness to accept and communicate what I don't know actually makes you trust them more about what they do know. Huh.
Jen: Yes.
Pete: Yeah. Because it's like, "Here's a level of self-awareness that I don't always see." So...I'm like too excited to know where to go, because I have so many thoughts about why this is so important and powerful and helpful. I think it's, to your point, the obvious place it's helpful is for the person who's shared, to then get different perspectives on how they might solve this problem. But then there's all these ancillary benefits of like you actually create more trust, like you mentioned, as the people that are now hearing from this person, "I now trust this person more, so their opinion is more valuable to me." But then there's the like bystanders or the people who, maybe I'm not the person at the front of the room communicating where I'm stuck, maybe in the audience I'm still like, "I don't even know how I would solve that, so I'm going to sit this one out, but I get to learn through all of the other people sharing their ideas on how they might move this situation forward." And so there's like learning even if you're not actively sharing, which I'm absolutely obsessed with. I'm sure I've mentioned this on one of our episodes, but the best example I've seen of this is when I was a head coach at the altMBA. We had a channel on Slack...because everyone worked remotely, we had a channel on Slack that was intended for this exact thing, and it was called "how_are_we_handling". And basically, what we encouraged all of the coaches to do was, "If you get a situation or a student or something comes up that feels really challenging and you feel stuck and you want other perspectives on, please post it in this channel. And then, wait." And what happens is whoever's online based on the timezone, because we had people from right around the world, whoever's online at the time, if they have a moment, they'll share with you, "Oh, here's how I would think about this," or, "Have you thought about this," and ask them questions. And it was so powerful for helping the person who put the challenge in Slack to then get different perspectives, and then it was up to them to be like, "Now I've got all this information, I can now decide how I want to move forward." But it's also helpful for the person that wakes up...this used to happen to me all the time. I'd wake up in the morning, and a whole conversation would've happened overnight in America. And then I get to read it, and I learn from reading it.
Jen: Yeah.
Pete: And so, it's like all of these ancillary benefits that are just so powerful and important. So, yes to the humility. Yes to how_are_we_handling. This is like how_are_we_handling in real life. I feel like there are altMBA coaches out there listening to this, I know, and they're like, "Oh my god, it's how_are_we_handling in real life." Like, it's so good.
Jen: Yes. Because, okay, so there's the humility part.
Pete: Yeah.
Jen: And then, there's the collaboration aspect. Like someone not being so precious with their work that they can't handle feedback, and instead, busting the feedback door open and saying like, "Come on at me." So, that was another component that just blew my mind. But the other thing that it made me think about was, you sometimes talk about assembling the Avengers on your teams and having all these different superpowers. What was so interesting about this assembly of Avengers is that they were all working in the same field, but with totally different expertise. So here you've got a patient struggling with a vocal issue, for example, so you've got the ear, nose, and throat doctor talking about how they would intervene, you have a voice teacher talking about the methods they would use, you have a laryngologist talking about the methods they would use, you have a speech pathologist talking about what they would do. These are all people who are aligned in terms of the general area that they work in, but their area of expertise is completely specialized, and they're all pointing at the exact same target. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is Pete's Avengers metaphor before my eyes in real life."
Pete: I'm coming to New York, I want to go to this. This is too good. It's too good. It's so cool. So, I'm realizing I sort of lived a version of this last week. Last week I was in Adelaide, facilitating for four days, a group of ten CEOs and founders of not-for-profits and social change organizations. And we had, over the course of four days, so many conversations about, "What are the challenges you're facing? And how might we solve that?" Like, we did these little versions of how_are_we_handling that I didn't actually even intentionally go in thinking, "I'm going to create how_are_we_handling." But inevitably, it happens through the conversations because a lot of trust was built and because people were willing to share. And one of the reflections at the end of the week (we had each person go around and reflect), was that they all are working in social change, which is a very broad field, and that often the story they tell themselves is that someone who's working on a different aspect of social change wouldn't necessarily understand the challenge of what they're going through. So, you know, we have a lady who's running an amazing company called Taboo which is helping to fight period poverty, and then there's another gentleman who's trying to help new refugees in Australia get employment. And you might look at those two things and go, "Yeah, they're linked in the sense that they're social change-related organizations. But how could they possibly help each other?" And it was wild how frequently those two could help one another.
Jen: Yeah.
Pete: Just through problem solving, through talking to donors, and raising funding, and like how to lead a team, like there are all these universal leadership kind of principles or challenges of running a social change organization, of trying to help people, that different perspectives can help you solve. So, that was another example. It was just, it was so cool to see.
Jen: Yeah, it is so useful when people work together. You know, over the summer I do this coaching program at my studio called The Reboot. (We're about to kick it off in the next couple weeks.) And over the years, I've had these very stark extreme ends of the spectrum experiences with my clients who are working with agents and managers. Sometimes the agent and/or the manager really don't want to even know about what we're talking about in our coachings, like it just feels like overstepping that they would be working with someone else on their career, and it's very siloed. And by the way, like very very hard on the client to try to keep straight the conversations they're having with all these different people who are all working to try to help them move forward. And on the other extreme end of the spectrum, I have clients whose agents and managers want to actually sit down and like, we talk as a team. Because we are, just like I was expressing about this particular event, we're all working in generally the same area, but we have different areas of expertise. So, the client is the thing that we're all pointing at.
Pete: Yeah.
Jen: I'm coming at it from a craft perspective and also from like, I've been in the trenches, like I know how to build an acting career from the actor's perspective. And then we've got the agent, who's handling a certain aspect of the career building, opening doors to opportunities. We've got the manager, who's got the big vision for the future. And we're all working together, and the client benefits. And the client feels taken care of, and seen, and cared for, and like everything is making sense. So, it's those silos that can be just so detrimental to any momentum.
Pete: So, so true. Yeah. One of the things I've observed a lot in corporates at the moment, working with a bunch of leadership teams and executive teams, is, gosh, that word "silos" comes up all the time in workshops. Where, I'll be trying to create a conversation that is a version of what we've talked about, which is like, "Everyone identify what your biggest challenge is right now and let's like share it as a group, just to kick things off, to get like the sort of ideas flowing, almost like as an icebreaker." And what's wild is like, I'm working with teams who've worked together for years and they'll often say, "I didn't know that was your challenge." And I think one of the things that happened as a result of COVID and everyone working remotely is it's so much easier to silo yourself.
Jen: Yeah.
Pete: Because you are literally sitting at home on your own, bouncing between meetings on Zoom or Teams or Google Meets, and usually those meetings are with the people in your team. So you're literally so siloed to just your team, just your challenge, just your house. There's no colleagues walking past, and so the silos have become even more pronounced. And I'm recognizing that, more and more, a lot of the work I'm doing and a lot of the benefit that people are getting from it is actually just trying to break down those silos by starting like cross-functional conversations. Which doesn't feel at all like rocket science (and isn't), but is so underappreciated. And I think your beautiful example of this is another great example of how and why it's so important.
Jen: Okay. And then, I just had one other little humility seed to plant. Or...I don't even know if it qualifies as a seed...but I was struck by the fact that nobody in the room was fazed by my observing this session.
Pete: Mmm. I was thinking that.
Jen: Yeah. I mean, a bunch of people throughout the night came over introduce themselves. "Who are you? What do you do? Oh, we're so glad you're here. Come back any time. Oh, this must be really fascinating for you," or some of them were like, "This must be very boring for you." I'm like, "No, no, no. This is...this is what I live for. I'm geeking out in the best way. I'm loving this." But knowing that this outsider, this stranger was going to be watching them present these challenging cases, they didn't even blink an eye. And I thought, "Wow. That is true confidence and humility."
Pete: Yeah. And I think you could almost put the two together. I think Bob Iger has written about this in his book Ride of a Lifetime, the CEO of Walt Disney. He talks about confident humility, which is like a recognition of what I'm good at, but also a confidence in recognizing that I don't know a bunch of stuff and that's okay. And as a result, if I can confidently recognize I don't know everything, then I can confidently share the things I don't know so that I can get better feedback or ways to solve said problems. So, I totally agree. There's this like intersection between humility and confidence that's really interesting.
Jen: Mmm-hmm. You know, it makes me wonder how people in completely different industries, fields, etc., could borrow this model of getting the brightest minds from...I don't know if competing institutions is the right way to describe it...but you've got someone from Mount Sinai Hospital and someone from NYU Hospital together in the room, you know, sharing their ideas. How might other industries borrow this model and bring experts from different organizations together into a room to talk about not what went right, but talk about what went wrong.
Pete: Yeah. And I think, to link it back to it an episode we did recently around bringing it back to a place of collaboration as opposed to competition, even if you're in seemingly "competitive" industries or hospitals or worlds or companies, it's, "Can we put that aside for a second and have the humility to recognize that together, we can collaborate and come up with better outcomes for our clients and for our patients? And that's ultimately what we're all in this work for."
Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.