The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 415 - Lessons From Pete’s Mum

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: I was querying Claude Code the other day about some stories that I might have told over the years, that would be useful for an upcoming workshop. And Claude Code reminded me of this story about my mum that I've forgotten about, that I wrote on my blog in 2020. And it serves as a nice little metaphor and reminder for leadership and making change. And I want to share it with you, and get your reaction, and bounce it around.

Jen: I love it when you tell me stories about your mum. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Oh dear. So yes, listeners, I think I mentioned this on a previous episode, I've set up Claude Code to have access to like all my blogs and all of our podcast transcripts. And I use it to go, "Have we talked about something that relates to a topic? I'm sure we have." It's just to try and freshen up some of my stories, so I'm not always telling the same stories. Because, you know, there's lots of different stories that can all articulate some version of the same thing. So I was thrilled that I did because I was reminded of this story, which I've now used in like five workshops in a row. And I love telling it. So I guess the story goes, when I was growing up, we used to go on these big, long road trips...which I'm sure is very relatable to anyone around the world, where you pack yourself and your family into a car and you drive for like two days. If you live in a country the size of Australia or America, you get from, you know, one side of the country to the other or from South to North, in our context. We used to drive to the state of Queensland, living in the state of Victoria. That will mean something to Australians, probably not much to anyone else. The point is we would set off on these road trips that were like two eight hour drives, sometimes three eight hour drives, over the course of multiple days. And every single time, from my memory, we would pack ourselves in, mum and dad in the front and the three of us kids in the back. And ten minutes down the road, you know what would happen? My brother would elbow my sister. My sister would punch me. There would be hair getting pulled. There would be yelling. There would be screaming. It was chaos, absolute chaos. And we're like ten minutes into, you know, sixteen hours worth of driving. And every single time, my mum...I don't know why she didn't start this way, but we always started in that order. And what would happen is my mum would get out of the car. So she'd ask my dad to pull over, obviously, get out of the car, open the door. She wouldn't yell. She wouldn't scream. She wouldn't berate us. Instead, she'd just say to my brother, "Do you want to hop in the front seat?" And my brother would hop in the front seat. My mum would hop in the middle, between my sister and I. And we would carry on driving. And that act alone completely changed what would happen on the drive. Because my sister and I couldn't reach each other. My brother was chuffed because he was in the front. And we would drive in silence or looking out the window, or whatever we used to do back in the day when there were no devices. I guess we'd just stare out the window for hours. And so, I use this as a metaphor with leaders, at the moment, to talk about how sometimes we might not be able to control the destination, i.e. we're still driving to the same place on holiday. Sometimes we might not be able to change the environment, i.e. we're still in the same four walls in the same car. But how can we, as leaders, think about changing the conditions within that environment, through our behavior? And what is your version? What is your equivalent of sitting in the middle of my brother and my sister and I to change the trajectory of that road trip, or that metaphorical road trip if you're working in a company? So, that's the story.

Jen: Wow.

Pete: And that's my mum. That's classic Mum. So, I don't know. What do you take from that story? Is it useful? Should I be still telling it?

Jen: I take so many things. But first of all, props to your mum, because that is exceptional parenting. And parents are leaders. So, I guess that means it's also exceptional leadership. Like, I really admire her ability to keep her cool. I don't know if I have that in me so naturally, the way she does.

Pete: I'm sure there were moments where there was yelling and screaming, but I don't remember it as much as I remember her always sitting in the middle.

Jen: Wow. That's really beautiful.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: It reminds me of a definition of leadership that I'm pretty sure I heard from you.

Pete: Okay.

Jen: Which is: A leader is someone who creates the conditions for people to change their behavior or choose something different.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Am I misquoting you?

Pete: Some version of that is definitely something I would say...creates the conditions for others to lead or creates the conditions for others to choose new actions. I've definitely said versions of that in the past. I think that is a great definition of leadership.

Jen: Yeah. So, the thing that is so remarkable about your mum sitting in the middle seat is that she didn't tell you what to do next. You had agency over changing your own behavior, because she had changed the conditions. Brilliant.

Pete: Yeah. So true. There's no micromanaging in there. There's no, "I'm going to sit in the middle. And you're going to say absolutely nothing, Pete. And Kate, you're going to look out that window and play 'I Spy'. And Matt, you're going to shut up and sit in the front seat." No. She'd just sit in the back and just go, "Keep driving." And we would keep driving.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And we had to choose, or we got to choose, or I guess we did choose how we then reacted and behaved in that context.

Jen: Wow. Okay. So, I think you can take this and apply it in so many different ways. I'm thinking about the actual vehicle right now, as being this container. That sometimes, we see our circumstance as a real prison. That we are so confined, there's no freedom there. But what your mom actually did was show you that you actually had some freedom, within that context. So, I'm thinking of this as people who are assigned to work with people they maybe wouldn't have chosen for themselves. That team is the vehicle. I'm looking at this through the actor lens. I have a lot of actors who report to me that as they're waiting outside an audition room, people come out of the room and give a report on what it's like in there.

Pete: Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. I can imagine how stressful that must be.

Jen: Right? Oh my gosh, it's so stressful. And you can either go in with the expectation that that's what you are assigned, or you can go in to change the conditions of the room. I can see this being useful. Well, like your mom did in family scenarios, I could see this being useful when there's a real status hierarchy at play. There's just so many opportunities to remember this story and go, "Oh yes, let me channel Pete's mum right now."

Pete: Yeah. I think about it as it relates to constraints, to your point around containers. That one of our favorite books (I speak for you, but I know it's true) is A Beautiful Constraint.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: It's a book I talk about so much in the work that I do. The punchline is the title. We so often think about the constraints of a car (in this example), or the constraints of the team I've been forced to work with, or the constraints of the audition room I'm standing at the front of, and we think about that as something to try and get rid of, or eliminate, or something that's holding us back. The book puts forward, and I think what my mom chose to lean into, was this idea that the constraints are the point. They're the thing to leverage off of. If you go, "If this is the constraint, if these are the given circumstances, how am I then going to show up and navigate this?" Not, "I'm going to stand around and lament the constraints." Mum could have sat in the front seat and gone, "Oh, if only we had a bigger car or three cars, or if you two could drive your own cars. And I'll just get frustrated and annoyed and sit in the front seat about the fact that this is a condition that we find ourselves in, because of the constraint." Or she could go, "Hmm. How can I leverage this constraint to change something?" That's what she did. I think about it a lot as it relates to constraints. Am I constrained by the people I'm working with? The way other people respond? Am I constrained by resources? Budgets? All these things are very real constraints, that we have collectively. How do we think about leveraging them and using them, rather than getting annoyed about them? One of my favorite stories from that book is about the founders of Google, Sergey and Larry. And how, when they first designed the Google homepage, they were constrained by their ability to code, which was essentially almost non-existent. And the only thing they could figure out how to do was create one search bar and two buttons, "Google it" and "I'm feeling lucky". They whipped up that as their landing page, because they had no idea how to do anything else. At the time, listeners might remember, Yahoo was the most popular website on the planet. And Yahoo had a thousand million hyperlinks on the homepage. It was the exact opposite of what Google did. But they didn't know how to do that. They just went, "Well, our constraint is leading to this as being our product to start with. Let's see what happens." And hey, Google worked out just okay.

Jen: It's iconic.

Pete: It is, because of its simplicity. The simplicity wasn't even because they thought, "Let's be super simple." It was, "This is the constraint."

Jen: It was, "We have to be simple, because we don't know how to be complicated."

Pete: "We don't...," exactly. Exactly.

Jen: Do you know your mother well enough to play her for a moment? If you were to ask your mother...

Pete: I'm channeling her right now. She's going to listen to this, I'm sure. I'm channeling her right now.

Jen: Because my guess is that she wasn't going, "You know, this reminds me of leadership skills."

Pete: No.

Jen: "I'm seeking to be a change agent in this moment."

Pete: No way.

Jen: How did she come up with this simple solution to this problem?

Pete: I think she is one to appreciate harmony. This is me talking as my mum, but I also 100% see this in myself. For me, I would describe it as I'm a people pleaser. For mum, I think she (as most mums do) wants a family that is happy and harmonious with one another. And so, I think she saw this as an easy way to do that. That my brother can't annoy my sister if they're not in the same seat. And so, I'll just put myself between them and create harmony that way.

Jen: You know, Pete, I have never met your mum, but I think of her a lot. Because I have a friend who invites me for these early morning swims, like early morning. And every time I get the text that says, "Swim tomorrow," my first impulse is to be like, "No." But then, I remember your mum. And I think, "You'll never regret a swim." So, I say yes.

Pete: Oh my god. Yes. What a great throwback. Another old blog post of mine: You'll never regret a swim.

Jen: Yeah. And it's true.

Pete: It's true. You always feel awesome after a swim. I once wrote an article called You'll Never Regret A Swim, for like a Year Nine English test or exam or something. And it got published in the newspaper. I actually found it. I'll share it in the Box O' Goodies, for those that want to see it.

Jen: Oh, that's so great.

Pete: And actually, it's so funny. I republished it on my blog many years ago. And it's still, to this day, the most popular post on my blog.

Jen: Really?

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so funny. Nothing to do with leadership, really, at all. It's about, "You'll never regret a swim." And people seem to enjoy it. So, there you go.

Jen: There you go.

Pete: Okay. The other thing I like about this or I think about here is as a leader, your behavior is contagious. And specifically in mum's context, your calm is contagious. That the lack of yelling and screaming, the very act of staying calm, I think in the context of us, was contagious for us to do the same thing. And I know that is true in a leadership context, in organizations. That if you are working with a leader who is irate, who is frustrated, who is highly anxious, who is a little bit all over the place, it becomes quite contagious, and the project starts to feel anxious and overwhelming and all over the place. Versus a leader who is super calm, very clear, very composed, that, I think, becomes contagious for the rest of the team. So I think about it as, how might you recognize your energy is contagious? And what does that change about the way you show up?

Jen: Mmm. Behavior contagion. It's a real thing.

Pete: Right. I got this feedback in the early days of my career, when I was a frustrated and disgruntled millennial. I was not built for working on someone else's team. I would sit in these meetings and be so overtly frustrated and grumpy and disgruntled about the thing that we were talking about or the lack of direction this thing had. And someone once said to me, "You know, your energy is contagious." Which I actually appreciated, rather than, "Stop slouching and being a grump." Because the same is true the other way. If you are showing up really energized and engaged and enthused, that too is contagious.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: And so, just be aware of how you're coming across because other people pick up on it, was kind of the point.

Jen: I'm curious to know, when you dig into the details and the learnings from this story in corporate contexts, what comes from the people in the room? Like, how are they talking about applying this in their own work and relationships?

Pete: It's a great question. The thing that comes up the most is people's acknowledgement that there are other people in the backseat with their own hopes and dreams and priorities and work. And so, in the context of a corporate, what might be happening is someone's having a hard time working with someone else, and they're not quite doing what they want them to do or they're not quite getting on board with this initiative that they're getting on board with. In the metaphor, it's they're not quite getting on with being calm and having a nice relaxing road trip. They're carrying on in the backseat. And perhaps what my mom knew, which corporates sort of realize in this workshop, is that's because each of these people have their own context, have their own worldview, have their own priorities, have their own...I mean, in our context, we were kids, so we had our own mental capacity, because I was probably like six or five and I didn't have the cognitive capacity to go, "I'll sit quietly for the next eight hours." So it's just like, your view of the world in the front seat as the leader isn't shared by everyone. And so, how can you remind yourself of that and try and meet people where they're at?

Jen: Pete, this just reminded me of something that I read in a book. And I cannot remember where I read it. So if this sounds familiar to you, will someone please tell me where I read this? It's about a child sitting in the backseat and an adult sitting in the front seat of a car, and them getting into a disagreement about what a red light means. "Red light means stop, green light means go." And the kid is saying, "No. Green light means stop, red light means go." And then, the adult figured out that the kid was looking out the side window, of course, because they're sitting in the backseat, not the front. So, they're seeing the traffic light that's facing the other direction. And you need to take that moment to take the perspective of the other person's...well, in this case, literal point of view. But sometimes, it's a figurative point of view.

Pete: Yeah. And so, back to your question of what this means for leaders and companies. I think the realization a lot of them have is, "Just because I'm in the front seat and I know what I want, doesn't mean the people in the backseat have any idea what you want." And so, if you're trying to lead people, work with people, partner with people, it pays to understand them, their worldview, their preferences, their ideas, their hopes, their dreams, their fears. My mum had a pretty good idea of that because she was my mum. In a work context, often the people in the backseat are total strangers, who someone has asked you to partner with. And so, the reminder of partnership is relational, not transactional. Can you understand the other people in the metaphorical car, so that you can lead them in a way that means something to them and meet them where they're at?

Jen: Wow. Thank you for this, Pete's mum. And that is The Long and The Short Of It.