The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 386 - Physio

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: So I've just come from the physio, where I go once in a while to do some work on certain parts of my body...which, is totally not the point. The point is, I had this really interesting conversation with the physio, who asked some great questions about leadership, who asked some interesting questions about the work I do. And in doing so, what we realized is there's actually a lot of commonality in being a physiotherapist and being a leader or a coach. And I just want to share this with you and get your perspective, because I think you, too, will find that there's some similarities in all these disciplines.

Jen: Ooh, I'm fascinated. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: So, the physio and I catch up fairly frequently. We both know, obviously, a little bit about what each other get up to in our professional lives. And he was asking me...he's the owner of this physio clinic, so he has a team of people. And so, he's particularly curious about managing people, and how to sort of guide and coach and empower. And he knows that that's sort of what I do in the corporate world. And he was asking a series of questions around like, "What do you think are some of the fundamentals of great leaders in corporates?" And I was kind of going...I was just answering, I mean, while I've got a needle in my shoulder. I'm trying to answer, and I'm like, "Well, ultimately, I think so much of the skill that's required to be a good leader is to have curiosity and empathy for the people that we're leading. Like, can we understand who it is we're leading, and how they like feedback, and how they like to be coached and guided, so that we can coach and guide them and give them appropriate feedback? And that really requires curiosity and empathy." (Things that we've talked about on this podcast ad nauseum.) And as I was saying it, I was thinking about his context as a physio, and what it must be like to manage a team of physios. And I was thinking, "Oh, this kind of sounds like it could be the similar skill set of what makes a good physio." And he said to me, "Oh, that sounds a lot like how I think about being a good physio. Right? Like a good physiotherapist, just like a good doctor, asks curious questions, understands the patient and their goals and their hopes and their dreams and their aspirations and their fears. Like, someone's afraid of getting back pain because they watch their partner get really severe back pain. It's not actually that they have back pain. It's that they're afraid of getting it. So, you treat that person differently." And so, all of this to say, the conversations that he has with his team of physiotherapists around bedside manner, and asking great questions, and understanding people and empathizing with them enables him to be and them to be better physiotherapists. And I was like, "Oh, that's fascinating, because that's exactly the same in the corporate world."

Jen: Yes. Wow. And the other thing that you just described is parenting and coaching.

Pete: Right.

Jen: So this is making me wonder, is a leader just a person who cares for others? Is that what it is? Like, you have people in your care. Is that what a leader is?

Pete: Yeah, I think it might be. I think, I mean, there's many different ways you could cut the definition of what makes a leader a leader. I think about it as you're creating the conditions for other people to thrive or creating the conditions for other people to lead. But in order to create the conditions, you need to understand them.

Jen: Right.

Pete: And that, to your point, is like there's some level of care or responsibility that you must have to understand them. And the same is true, again, in this physiotherapist example. In order for me to create the conditions for you to heal / fix parts of your body, I need to understand you, and what motivates you, and what keeps you up at night about this injury, so that I can try and help you solve it.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: I mean, I don't even really know what to say about this other than that anecdote. And it just reminded and reiterated to me that this is what we mean, or I mean, when we talk about the fact that leadership skills are less tactical and technical, and so much more human and real. That in order to be able to lead a team effectively or treat a patient effectively, we need to be able to ask questions. We need to be able to listen. We need to be able to respond. We need to be able to have difficult conversations. We need to be able to tell stories. We need to be able to enroll the people in where we're going. Like, in the physio example, he's enrolling me in the change of changing my running cadence, which we talked about in a previous episode, in order to be the kind of person who runs more efficiently and doesn't get injured.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: All of these are real human skills that are required for us to be good at what we do. And I think that applies in your context, too.

Jen: It really does. The thing that I love about this example is that because all of us, everyone who's listening, has been on the other end of a care provider and the person who's providing care to you relationship (you know, we all go to the doctor, we all go to the dentist), it's kind of an easy metaphor to use to demonstrate leadership gone wrong. Like for example, if I go in to see...we don't call them "physios" here, but I like the word.

Pete: They're just therapists, right? They're just therapists.

Jen: We call them physical therapists, PT.

Pete: Physical therapists. Okay, so funny. Same thing.

Jen: Right. So if I go in to my PT because I'm dealing with knee pain, and I walk in and the PT says, "Now, let me take a look at that elbow," I'm like, "You don't even understand what I'm doing here. You could start by saying, 'Where does it hurt?'"

Pete: Yeah, there's that. And then, there's even, you could even get to the point, "Well, it hurts at my knee." "Oh, this is how you fix all knee pain ever." It's like, "Well, do you understand my context at all? Not really."

Jen: Right.

Pete: And so, I agree with you. Everyone can think about an example where they didn't feel seen or heard or understood by a clinician, be it a doctor, be it a dentist, be it a physiotherapist or a PT, as it were. It's funny, PT here is personal trainer.

Jen: Oh, interesting.

Pete: Which is different to a physiotherapist... anyway, that's an aside. So, everyone has had the experience of not feeling heard and seen. And that's what I'm talking about, and I think what we're talking about when we think about being the kind of leader that doesn't do that. Being the kind of leader that makes people feel seen and heard and like they belong as part of a team requires the skills that we're talking about, of like understanding, diagnosing, being curious, empathy.

Jen: Right. And so, I wonder if, for those of us in leadership roles, whether those roles are at work or at home, if we try this metaphor on for size, how might it improve our interactions? So like, if I go home tonight and I find a cranky child, instead of me saying, "Well, you're cranky. That means you're tired. You should go to bed."

Pete: "You need food."

Jen: Yeah, right. I could go, "Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, let me treat myself like I'm the physio and she is a new patient." Right? I could say, "What's going on? How did the crankiness come about?" You know?

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: It feels like such an accessible metaphor.

Pete: Yeah. Understand the context.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: I could talk about this metaphor all day, because I think it's a good one for leadership. But then if I continue on that, at some point, once the physio has enough context, they provide physical treatment, but also like exercises that I can do in between sessions, to solve the problem I'm trying to solve. So, there's an empowerment piece that comes from being a physio. And there's this reality of being a physio (which is the same reality of being a leader) which some people struggle with, which is, you can't control and change every single thing about this person that you're treating or leading. You can't be the person holding their hand during every single exercise routine they need to do between now and then, or every single meeting they have to attend between your one-on-ones. Instead, you have to try and empower and equip them as best you can, to be the kind of person that navigates the situation or solves the problem they need to solve themselves.

Jen: Right.

Pete: This is why I like the idea that leaders create the conditions for others to lead, because it does require you, in my context in the physio example, I need to lead myself in between sessions by doing my strength exercises, by doing my mobility. That's on me. I'm responsible for that.

Jen: Right. I'm just having this aha moment, that we do talk about leading our life. That's a pretty common phrase. "What kind of life do you want to lead?"

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: That's so interesting. The other thing that seems important about this is part of the role of a leader is, with enough context, being able to make decisions, so people understand where we're headed. So if you went to the physio, you gave all of the information and the physio understands where you're at, and then, they say to you, "So what exercise do you think you should do?"

Pete: Yeah. "How do you think you should solve this problem?" That's such a good point.

Jen: Oh my gosh, I literally did this to my daughter last night. She brought a problem to me. And I was weighing all the options. And I said, "Well, what do you think you should do?" And she was like, "Mom, this is one of those situations where I need you to tell me what to do." "Thank you for that clarity. Thank you so much. I was trying to give you some agency, but you actually needed direction. Got it."

Pete: That's interesting and a little challenging for me, because I spend so much of my time trying to help leaders ask the question that you asked Cate. I spend so much of my time trying to help leaders say...you don't have to give the solution straight up. Instead, you can say, "How do you think you could solve this problem?" And I see the tension of leadership, one of the many tensions, as being knowing or discovering in your context, your example, when is the time to coach and ask a question, and when is the time to just give direction? And that, there is a time and a place for both. And what you'll find as a leader is, you'll have moments like you just described. You'll go, "Oh, I know, I need to ask a curious question." And sometimes, that'll go great. And they'll go, "Oh, I think we should do this, this, and this." And you go, "Amazing. You should go and do that." And other times, they'll go, "Listen, just give me some freakin' direction, because I need some freakin' direction right now." So that's a tension, yeah.

Jen: Well, another layer to that is, are we both clear about the objective? So like, in the case of my daughter, the thing we were talking about was how to manage her time in order to be able to succeed at her upcoming midterms. And she had some things on the calendar that could have been moved around. So the objective we were both clear on, which is do well on your midterms. If we had not agreed on what the objective is and I had given her this direction, basically, it could have sent her down the wrong path. Which, my advice was to cancel something that was on her calendar...or my directive, I guess, was to cancel something on her calendar. So, you know, when you're a leader and we know what the objective is that the team is working toward, there are times where you're coaching someone through like, "How do you best get from here to there? And we know what there is."

Pete: Right.

Jen: But when we don't know what there is, we need the leader to say, "There is where we're headed."

Pete: Yeah. There's also something I'm realizing in giving that direction or giving that instruction in a way that is achievable, practical, simple, elegant. Like, this is the reason...I mean, I've seen so many different physios over my life. And there's a lot of funny memes about physios, that they'll give you a, you know, five-page PDF or a 75-minute stretching routine that you're meant to do every single day. And then, you go back and they'll be like, "Did you do it?" And you're like, "No, I didn't do it once." Or you just lie and say, "Yeah, I did it every day." That they make it almost unachievably complex for most people. And it's like, I'm sure that 75-minute routine is great, but I don't have the time or the capacity to do that. The thing I have particularly enjoyed about the physio I'm seeing now is he breaks it down into like, "Do this one thing." Now, again, I referenced an episode that I'll put in the Box O' Goodies about running cadence. That was the only thing I took away from one session. He was like, "Yeah, we could fix about five things in your running technique. But right now, all I want you to do is focus on your cadence. That's it." And you know, today, he gave me one specific thing to focus on. So there's something in, as a leader, the feedback, the direction, the instruction you might be giving, if it gets to that point where you're like, "Oh, I need to give instructional direction," making it so simple and achievable and approachable that they actually do it. And as I'm saying that, I'm like reflecting on me as a facilitator and coach. The exercises, the frameworks, the coaching I give, how do I make it so achievable, so practical, so accessible that people actually do it?

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Because, I mean, we could send people three-hundred-and-eighty-something episodes worth of interesting ideas about being a better leader, but they're not going to listen to them all. What's the one thing? What's the one episode? What's the one takeaway?

Jen: Oh, that just resonates on a lot of levels. You used three words that I don't know that I'd ever heard you put them together before. And so, I want to circle back to them because they feel like, I don't know, it feels like the gold standard. You said: simple, practical, elegant. And I hear "simple" and "practical" a lot, but I'm very drawn to the idea of "elegant".

Pete: Yeah, me too. I like the word "elegant" because in my mind, elegant is kind of the previous two. Elegance requires simplicity. It requires minimalism. It requires not overcomplicating. It's something that does exactly what you think it should do, in the most minimal way possible. At least, that's how I interpret elegance. I'm not sure that's the actual definition of elegance, but I interpret it as, "Oh, it's so elegant. It just does exactly what you think it should do. It helps me in just the right way that I think it should help me."

Jen: It's making me want to go back and look at some of the exercises I use in class, which are all very practical and very simple. And I'm curious which of the things that I'm using already have some degree of elegance, and where I might be able to add some more.

Pete: I love it. Bringing elegance to the work we do. I mean, for whatever reason, it reminds me of being in Zurich with my brother many years ago, and I had to get the train from Zurich train station to the airport. And my brother was like...he'd been there before. He said, "Oh, don't worry. You just go to the train station. There's a train like every six minutes. It's a high speed train. It takes, I don't know, twelve minutes to get to the airport." And we were kind of laughing about how, in Switzerland, things just work. Like, the train works exactly how you would want a train to work. You get there and it gets you to the airport fast, cheap, on time. And in a way, it's really elegant that it does exactly what you hope and want it to do, in a way that is really quite seamless.

Jen: It's just making me laugh. They're making all these updates to the New York subway system, like the entryways, because they're trying to dissuade fare evaders. And they are the most inelegant solutions. They're ugly. They're unwieldy. They're hard to figure out how to operate. Just the worst possible designs. So New York, get it together.

Pete: Be more like Switzerland. I feel like that's what we could all do.

Jen: Yeah, be more like Switzerland. While I'm really excited for you to improve your running cadence so that you avoid future injury, part of me is like, maybe you could find some other reason to have to continue at the physio, so that we can gain more insight. Not to wish you harm or anything, but I feel very inspired by the things you shared today.

Pete: I mean, at six-foot-seven, there's always some sort of injury just looming around the corner. Don't you worry. I'll be back to the physio soon.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.