79: End of Bossism: Servant Leadership Comes of Age with David Thomas Guerra , Transformist

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes

In several episodes of The Elephant in the Room podcast I have spoken with CEOs, academics, influencers on what leadership means. This is a part of my own quest to understand leaders and leadership by listening to others and to redefine it through the lens of my own experience.

In this episode of the podcast I speak with @Dave Guerra the author of best seller ‘Super Performance’, a transformist and a proponent of servant leadership.

In this freewheeling conversation we spoke about

👉🏾 Exploring what leadership actually means - is it a position? A set of skills or behaviour?

👉🏾 The relevance of words like powerful, commanding, fearless, bossman in today’s context

👉🏾 Resetting the expectation of/from leaders and leadership

👉🏾 Servant leadership - challenges/risks associated with the idea

👉🏾 Building cohesive cultures in a world in a constant flux

👉🏾 Authentic leadership, Conscious leadership, Ethical/Moral Leadership and Servant Leadership

“And if you look at the planet and the state that the planet is in, I would say, like we discussed in our original conversation, we have too much yang energy, not enough yin energy, too much control, not enough liberation, too much management, not enough leadership. And so the real problem is a paradigm that we are still tethered to, especially in a western society, this paradigm of organisation as machine, a mechanistic paradigm that presupposes that you can engineer an organisation or anything into perfect efficiency, but that's not true.”

Memorable Passages from the podcast

👉🏾 My pleasure Sudha.

👉🏾 Yeah, I thought about this in preparing for this conversation and every time I have to answer that question, I have to think about it again, because I think that's been an inquiry my whole life around who actually am I and what am I really about?

👉🏾 And I think what I've kind of come to is, I'm really a seeker of truth. I am just deeply curious to understand how things work, and in particular I developed a deep curiosity for how is it that business works and what is it that makes business successful very early in my life.

👉🏾 And then I went to college to kind of learn about business and get a business education and then came out of college and I still didn't feel comfortable that I understood business. I guess I would say I had a mechanical appreciation, but I didn't have a practical appreciation of business. And then I went to work for companies and especially very large businesses and that provoked me even more around understanding how business operates.

👉🏾 And I have to confess, I was really confused for many years around how things worked in business, because a lot of what I saw didn't make sense to me Sudha. It kind of left me with this frustration that a lot of what I had set my life up for, my career for, was not really proving out to be very fulfilling or meaningful, or kind of makes sense to me. And so then I stumbled into this territory of quality and it was like I'd been to the promised land and I finally found something I could kind of grab onto that kind of hung together for me, that made sense.

👉🏾 And then I learned a lot from W. Edwards Deming, and then Peter Drucker and many others. I would say in that I formed my company, Corpus Optima, some 27, 28 years ago I kind of generally would fall into the category of a management consultant. But that's kind of a misnomer because it presupposes that if you manage something well, you'll produce a great outcome, but that's not correct.

👉🏾 If you manage something well and you don't lead it, well, then you'll sub-optimise the outcome. So that kind of led me to finally this revelation that I'm not a management consultant, I'm a management and leadership consultant. And so now I see that I'm a transformist, my job, my work is to help people in organisations transform, to become all that they can be, to optimise their performance.

👉🏾 Yeah Sudha, that's a really great question because, as I was sharing, became very consumed with that inquiry around what does managing mean and what does leading mean? And back, let's say 20, 25 years ago, when we talked about management and leadership in business, we used the terms interchangeably like it was the same thing. And then in organisations, we have this kind of generic way of thinking like the leaders are the people at the top and the managers are the people in the middle and everybody are the people that kind of do the work, in colloquial terms, the worker bees. And so the idea is that leadership and management is a location, but that's not true at all.

👉🏾 The truth is that leadership and management are both two sides of one coin, the same way that mind, body, are two sides of one coin, or yin yang are two sides of one coin, or particle-wave duality is two sides of one coin. The work of management is about control, and it is about control of process and the work about leadership is about liberation and the liberation is, liberation of spirit. When you reframe organisations that way, then you see management and leadership as to complementary properties that, exist ideally all the way up and down organisations, in that, everybody's a manager and everybody's a leader.

👉🏾 I remember a reporter asking Colleen Barrett, the sort of the famous Chief Operating Officer of Southwest Airlines once the, kind of the loved airline, "can you tell me a little bit about your leaders, tell me about the leaders at Southwest airlines" and she looked back at the reporter and says "I'm not sure what you mean, everybody's a leader at Southwest airlines. We don't have any job that's not a leader job at Southwest Airlines". And I think when you reframe leadership that way you see it as a way of being as the opposite side of the management work in organisations.

👉🏾 I think it was Peter Drucker that said famously in his very last book, Leadership Challenges for the 21st century, there's no such thing as managing people, the task with people is to lead. And I thought, well that's a big wake up call because all of every manager I've ever met had this paradigm that part of their job is to manage their people. And the idea of management implies control, which is correct to manage something is to control it. Anybody who ever has to make a recipe or to drive a car or to accomplish anything, knows that there's steps in the process, there's procedures, there's a way of doing this sort of a one best way. But that's different than the joy of doing it, the intrinsic motivation for doing it, the fun of doing it.

👉🏾 And so when you think about things from that view, it's mind-boggling how simple that principle is that the way to think about leadership is around helping people, liberating people, liberating the spirit of people, creating the environment so that people are doing it because they want to and not because they have to.

👉🏾 And so all of that sort of right brain kind of activity, behaviour, way of being, is the antithesis of the left brain kind of control process, structure, order part of things. And it applies to organisations the same way it applies to people, the same way it applies to economies, the same way it applies to governments, the same way it applies to marriages, the same way it applies to everything.

👉🏾 That's really a very good question, Sudha I think it was Warren Bennis that said, most companies are over-managed and under-led. And if you look at the planet and the state that the planet is in, I would say, like we discussed in our original conversation, we have too much yang energy, not enough yin energy, too much control, not enough liberation, too much management, not enough leadership. And so the real problem is a paradigm that we are still tethered to, especially in a western society, this paradigm of organisation as machine, a mechanistic paradigm that presupposes that you can engineer an organisation or anything into perfect efficiency, but that's not true.

👉🏾 Machines don't feel, machines don't have a self-organising nature, machines don't breathe, machines don't evolve and only organisms do. And so the idea of a paradigm for optimisation, that works is a paradigm of organism, not machine. And if you reframe organisations and really everything into this view of left and right brain, or this view of mind, body, this view of the two sides of everything, the tangible and intangible side of everything, then it's so much simpler to operate it in a way that's sort of working smarter and not harder.

👉🏾 And so the words that I would use to describe leadership, it's really easy when I speak with a group of managers or a group of executives around the topic of servant leadership or sort of what is the best leadership. I tell them, you already know what the best leadership is, you already know, and I'm gonna prove it to you. And I ask them to just think about someone in their lives that had been a profound influence on them and their careers or their development or their growth that had maybe a particular that they would call out as the best leader I've ever known, could be a parent, it could be a teacher, it could be a boss, and then give me an adjective from that person that kind of encapsulates who that person was.

👉🏾 And they use words like, listened to me, believed in me, coached me, had compassion for me, was fair, was encouraging, was available, kind of modelled, would always be willing to roll off their shirt sleeves and do the work. They were inspiring and sacrificial, those are words that they came up with.

👉🏾 And then when I show 'em sort of the portrait that they paint, it's like, that's the model of servant leadership, that's what it is. Sudha in my research I'll confess to you that I set out to learn about business because I wanted to be successful. And I had in my mind the idea that to be successful, you have to go learn how business worked, what business success is. And so I set out to sort of investigate what is super performance, who has the best performance. If you look at organisations that outperform over the long term, what kind of animal is that? What are they doing? Is there some simple pattern that they all contain that you can call out that is kind of self-evident. And I tell them I didn't come looking for servant leadership, I came looking for super performance, but everywhere I found super performance, I found that way of being that is contained in all of those words over and over and over again, kind of like groundhog day, that pattern kept repeating itself.

👉🏾 Yeah, I don't think there's ever been a more important time for servant leadership than the time that we live in Sudha. You see it in especially here in this country, in the US, this polarisation that we've experienced in politics, there's just extremism too much left and too much right, and not enough cooperation, and you see the outcome that that's produced is huge disorder and dissension and nobody winning.

And to me the next generation is going to be about the female leadership the integration of a lot more yin into the yang. I think the condition that we're in has come about because of way too much, kind of bossism I call it, or selfish leadership, which I would generalise around the opposite of servant leadership. And the short term thinking that has produced this sort of okay, well now we're really in a pickle.

👉🏾 And so we have that situation with short term thinking is, how can I produce instant pudding and it's really easy to produce instant pudding in an organisation, all you have to do is let a lot of people go. But I call that flash performance, the chickens in ,the flash performance always come home to roost because then you end up with processes that don't work anymore, people that are overworked and over stressed. And then people that will leave. We have this condition of the great resignation where hundreds and thousands of people have left their organisations, because they're not finding meaning well-being or fulfilment from their organisation, and then there's a lot of research that shows that the largest reason that people leave is because of their boss. People don't leave organisations, they leave their boss, they leave their bad boss.

👉🏾 And how did the boss get bad? Well, the boss kind of learned what the boss before him did and then that boss learned from the boss before him or her. And so that paradigm of this is how you're supposed to do it, is a paradigm that is over a hundred years old and it's sort of way past it's expiration date.

👉🏾 Now we're in the state, I believe, where the millennial generation, I'm gonna call it the heroic generation, that's sort of the first generation that's digitally native, that is making up almost 50% of the workforce today, doesn't want to be led that way, doesn't want to be managed that way. And so it's I think because of the existential backdrop of the world, we live in, people need a work experience that's meaningful that they can give themselves to, that they can believe in and that has some substance that has a more meaningful return than just the economic benefit that it provides for me and my family.

👉🏾 My well-being matters too, and it matters more than being in an environment where I'm come out at the end of the day, just completely, psychologically diminished or worn out, I need something that will energise me. And I think that's a big driver of this shift, but the other hidden driver is, I really believe that enterprise is finally coming to this revelation that, servant leadership is good for business. Deming used to say, does anybody here care about profit? Well then it pays to cooperate, then it pays to work together, it pays to help your people.

👉🏾 Yeah, that's another very, very good question, Sudha, you know, servant leadership has been in all the world's major faiths for thousands of years. We, have it in the Christian tradition in the model of Jesus Christ, we have it and Buddhist tradition in the model of Buddha.

👉🏾I really love the example of Gandhi and the Indian culture and I learned a lot from Swami Vivekananda, I've learned so much studying him, but one of the things he said that I thought was so profound, he said "before you can be fit to be a master, you must learn to be a servant".

👉🏾 So servant leadership has been in all the world's cultures from probably the beginning of time. Maybe we haven't called it that, or maybe we haven't recognised it as sort of one pattern, one distinguishable pattern. But it was Robert Greenleaf who was an operations consultant in AT & T that brought the term to business and he wrote a book called ‘The servant as leader ‘. In the monograph ‘The servant as leader’ he describes the servant leader as someone who's called to serve first, then lead. And he distinguishes servant leadership from the other form of leadership that he said is usually driven by a need for power or ego, or to be the number one guy to be at the top, some sort of personal need to outperform everyone else, versus lead. And where he got his inspiration for that was a book that he read called ‘Journey to the East’ by Herman Hess, and it's a short book, but it's really profound.

👉🏾 And so then he wrote his famous monograph and then it turned into a book and then the Greenleaf society was created and now many, many, many organisations have adopted servant leadership as sort of their way of being. I have interviewed so many CEOs and work with so many amazing organisations that operate from this paradigm.

👉🏾 And yeah, I would say that the best way to approach servant leadership, is to think of yourself as an apprentice. I remember W Edwards Demings sort of the grand old man equality, on his business card said, W Edwards Demings, Apprentice Statistician, and that's just astonishing because and he's well regarded, maybe the most famous statistician in all of industry and all of enterprise.

👉🏾 I met so many people I would put in the category of servant leadership and as great servant leaders and when I point that out to them, they kind of blink and look at me. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you're amazing, everybody loves you, everybody comes to you for advice and everybody trusts you and your performance and your department or your function or your group or your organisation is off the chart. And they're very humble Sudha, they're very much well, I'm just doing, I don't know any other way to do it in this way. It's sort of in their bones, it's in their way of being a practice that's sort of acquired over time. In all of our development work with executives, all of our executive coaching and leadership development work. When we teach these principles, we teach the concept of servant leadership and we examine famous servant leaders throughout history and sort of point to their experiences and kind of how they did it.

👉🏾 I would say for anyone who wants to be a high performer, for anyone who wants to be successful, for anyone who wants to be happy joyful in life, then seek out servant leadership, investigate it and look closely at the companies that you interview for that you become a part of around their philosophy around their values.

👉🏾 I remember again, back to values that who a company is, is not a set of values that you post on the wall. In some groups I would share a company's set of values from a particular company and it said always be good to people, always operate with integrity, always tell the truth, always do all of these wonderful things.

👉🏾 Then I'd ask them guess which company this is they think about and all these great company’s. I said, this is Enron's values, and we see what happens to Enron with the force ranking, this sort of a greedy every man for himself mentality. The whole thing collapsed like a house of cards, and you know, Ken Lay the CEO who was venerated here in Houston, where Ken Lay, you've got a meeting with Ken Lay that's a big deal.

👉🏾 Or if the Enron people came into your meeting, everybody kind of moved and there was almost hushed tones around it. And then he had to hide in the parking lot because he couldn't come out because he was vilified. He went from the very top of the kingdom to the least regarded and I think that we see that pattern repeated over and over and over and...