Mike Kaufman: From a psychological perspective, what I would say is this sense of overwhelm, the sense of drinking from a fire hose that most leaders have, to me is a symptom of something that’s missing and the key difference between somebody who does that more effectively and less effectively is someone who is driven by a clear sense of purpose.

Lawrie Philpott: Well, for this particular episode of leadership listening, I am really delighted to welcome Mike Kaufman, who comes to us,  from Chicago. I’m in London at the moment, and Mike is gonna introduce himself in a minute and just tell us a little bit about his journey from around about early days in university and so on. And then we’re going to talk about Mike and the psychological view of leadership life. My own perspective is more in the direction of the structural side, what leaders do and how they should do it well, and I’ve always been a big time fan of the importance of the behavioural or psychological side of life.

And the marrying of that with the structural dimensions. And so we’re gonna talk mostly today about the psychological side and welcome Mike. Mike. Take us a little bit from, I think when you first were at Harvard and what happened after that? Sure.

Mike Kaufman: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Lawrie. Lawrie. So your listeners, now we go back.

We’ve had conversations. You and I have had conversations over the years about leadership, about developing a perspective and a set of tools that would be helpful to leaders and aspiring leaders so some of what I share about my background and also some of the conversation today will. Tap into what we’ve discussed, but let’s try to see if we can get to some of the greatest hits that will be relevant to your listeners.

So in terms of my background, I think you and I have covered that extensively. I began my career in business. I worked for a couple of technology companies. I worked on Wall Street. I got my MBA at Harvard and Iwhile I was at another technology company. Afterwards I came to the realization there’s a whole dimension of life and leadership that I had not explored for myself, and that was highly relevant to what I was seeing around me. So it was that point that I made a significant redirection of my career, and I would say more broadly my life and I proceeded to become a clinical psychologist and a researcher. And the show, the central piece of my work as a researcher for many years was this very long longitudinal study that tracked a group of Harvard undergraduates for almost half a century to try to understand how their lives turned out, both professionally and personally, and what outcomes looked better and worse from their own point of view, and what accounts for greater success personally and professionally, and what accounts for less success personally and professionally.

And that is a central piece that informs what I will share in my reactions to your questions today. And it’s also really relevant to leadership and to life. So that’s sort of the animating idea and perspective. And I’ve spent a lot of time consulting and coaching leaders of various types of enterprises, including family businesses and private investment firms and mid-size companies.

And that’s what I do now. I’m a coach and a consultant, and I traverse the scope of issues rather than a typical consultant or a typical coach where there’s a siloing of either the organisational issues or the personal or the career issues and a focus on them. I integrate across those domains and I find it to be very helpful to leaders in thinking about their lives and their leadership holistically.

Lawrie Philpott: No, that’s great. That’s a great introduction because when I’m dealing in the coaching mode with leaders and talking about the structural side, what they should do and how they should do it, inevitably, very often there is a conversation ebbing towards the sort of psychological side of life.

And one of the ways that I kind of move into that is through what I’ve called patterning. In other words, when a child is, say, two years old and is first sentient, They’re surrounded by their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on, and that’s what’s beginning to shape them in the behavioural psychological sense.

They get through to the age of four or five and they first go to school. So another set of patterning begins. With teachers and other pupils and other parents and so on, and that continues right through school until the point when you may well go to college, university, and another set of patterning then comes in.

And it’s interesting to discuss what happens at universities these days that amplifies the preceding patterns from the age of 20 onwards. Then the people go into the world of work and yet another set of patterns begin to form because you’ve got bosses, you’ve got coworkers, and so on and so forth.

And I’ve always found that conversation about patterns intrigues people who are my clients. Because they’ve never had that kind of conversation before and they’re intrigued because it might come in the direction of answering that famous question, why am I the way I am? So I don’t know, Mike, how do you reckon The patterning thing talks to us about leadership in today’s world.

Mike Kaufman: Very rich, meaty topic, spot on, and I’d like to share a couple of observations about it. With some examples. So Lawrie, you just made yourself into a developmental psychologist laying out the kinds of things that people acquire at different phases of their lives, the course of life. Yes. We learn certain patterns when we’re very young.

We learn patterns of relating to caregivers and the emotional reactions we have to situations when we get a little bit older, we start to develop our thinking and our cognition. The patterns with which we make sense of the world. So in my work, I break the world, those cognitive perceptions into a few different buckets.

The patterns of how we typically perceive other people. What are their motivations? What kind of people are they? We do have central tendencies in that, even though there’s a lot of variation in the people that we’ll meet, the kinds of situations that we’ll encounter are these favorable to our purposes?

Are they interesting? Are they fun? Are they threatening? What is the world like at large? Is it a world that has opportunity and hopefulness? Is it one that’s limiting? Is it one that we have to manage carefully? Do we have to be on the defensive? And all importantly, what kind of person are we? That set of

tendencies forms in our young, our childhood and adolescent years, and we end up with this self concept of like who we are and what we’re up to. So let me give you an example of one participant in this longitudinal research who was written about in the business press as a titan of industry. He was a Fortune 500 CEO, and you would never know what his internal world was like and the assumptions that he made about himself and other people based on what you read about him in business week or other reputable magazines.

But in interviews, he showed a profound lack of self-confidence. He described himself as having an inferiority complex. He was driven by a need to prop himself up in his relationships with other people. Those kinds of things played out not only in his leadership style in relating to other people. He was successful for a period of time and was able to fake it and play out his other very strong faculty. He’s a very bright guy, very capable guy. But it definitely affected his personal life, his ability to enter into relationships, his ability to garner trust from other people. Because his stance in relating to those ways that he was patterned early was generally pretty defensive and pretty vulnerable.

So. That’s just one example of how patterning has a long-term consequence for somebody’s life and how they live and their wellbeing, and it also has long-term consequence for how they interact with other people in a leadership role in an organisation and I don’t need to share with your listeners the very common problem of the narcissist who they encounter in others.

Maybe they work for somebody, maybe they’re an aspiring leader and they’re in an organisation where. The CEO or the founder is a control freak and needs to prop him or herself up by putting other people down or getting admiration. We see this. I don’t wanna get derailed by entering into politics, but we see this often among political leaders.

So those kinds of patterns really have a profound effect, not only on your effectiveness, but on the experience of other people of you. How the organisation works. It shapes a whole culture. When you’re at the top and you have some of these patterns.

Lawrie Philpott: I’m interested to know, obviously we can’t talk about the individual in the identifying sense, but what was the kind of trigger for him to come in the direction of your services?

Was there a sudden realization or did something bad happen, or did somebody advise him that he should see somebody like you?

Mike Kaufman: It’s a great question. Actually. He didn’t come into the realm of my services. I wish he had, I encountered him as a research participant.

Lawrie Philpott: Ah, okay.

Mike Kaufman: Actually a lot of people could benefit from including him exploring these patterns and how they affect the assumptions you make about yourself and about the world and about other people and about situations, a lot of people can benefit. That’s one of the great values of having a confidant, and it doesn’t need to be a psychologist. You and I have talked about this. Psychologists are obviously well-trained in this.

Some of them are focused more on mental health issues, but that’s not what we’re talking about for your listeners, we’re talking about a confidant who can help you become more aware of what is driving you and your assumptions about other people so you can be more effective with them. And in fact, you know, you and I have spoken about, I think we should get to, if not at this moment, at some point soon the core challenges from a psychological perspective that I see in the environment right now for leaders, what are they struggling with and what’s missing for them? We kind of have gotten close to it this point with the, this topic of patterning and the awareness that a confidant can provide, whether it’s a coach, a psychologist, or sometimes just a mentor, and a lot of people seek out and wisely cultivate mentors to help them along in their careers.

That stuff is relevant, but I think to identify the core challenges that we see in the lives of leaders, both in their organisations and outside would help your listeners. I’d be happy to move to that now if you’d like.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, one of the core challenges I see is what you and I have sometimes called drinking from a fire hose.

You know, you go into the big job as a CEO and I think I could safely say that. Everybody who goes into that job underestimates the size of the move. They underestimate the size of the solitude. They in the structural sense then have difficulty doing what a chief executive should do. And I have a big argument in play that says chief executives should by and large, do less and focus.

But coming from your point of view, what do you see through your lens?

Mike Kaufman: Yeah, I’m with you, Lawrie. I think you, and I have talked about this quite a few times. You and I converge very substantially in what we see as the problem, and I think I bring a slightly different accounting of the problem. So you have developed what I think is a very thoughtful inventory of the role, responsibilities of a leader.

And it’s an entire page maybe, what is it? 25 items. Very demanding and it’s a fire hose of things that a leader needs to be responsible for and attend to. It’s developing strategy, it’s developing your leadership team. It’s, you can share the list with your listeners or someone if you’d like. But it’s very substantial and it’s, to me, it’s a fragmented list.

It’s a lot of pieces. It’s very hard to know how to integrate and prioritise them, and you can’t do all of them well. And so the question is, how do you organize yourself to be effective? How do you manage the overwhelm of all the environmental things coming at you? Situations inside your organisation, in the market, in the economy, in general, are constantly coming at you and you have to manage them, and there’s a lot of human interaction.

You have to manage these things in a way that allows you to stay sane and be most effective in your role and accomplish something of value. And how do you do it? I think there’s an answer to that. Before I share with you my answer from a psychological perspective, what I would say is this sense of overwhelm, the sense of drinking from a fire hose, the sense of stress and dis-ease that most leaders have, to me is a symptom, a set of symptoms of something that’s missing.

As opposed to an objective set of realities about the world. It’s true, it’s true about the world, but what I see is tremendous difference in leaders in terms of how effectively they metabolize, they digest and manage through that complexity and that volume of input. And the key difference between somebody who does that more effectively and less effectively is someone who is driven by a clear sense of purpose.

And you hear that concept often, but what I wanna do is unpack it a little bit because I don’t think the common advice that I hear really gets at the origins and the nature of purpose that can be helpful to a person both in leading an organisation and in the life. So here are a couple of fallacies that I frequently encounter.

A couple lessons that lead I would say not just leaders of organisations but the public astray. And I know this from having studied the lives of highly successful people over a long period of time and seeing what really gives them wellbeing and effectiveness and what doesn’t and what society and what the culture and maybe what your friends and colleagues and classmates are telling you is really often not a sound story. It’s not true. And the story often that we take in is that there’s an equivalence, it’s synonymous to be successful and to be happy and successful is defined as. Growing your revenues, growing the organisation’s impact, having a position of high status, making a lot of money.

These are all the common ideas of what you are expected to pursue and taught to pursue as a leader of an organisation. Now, I’m not diminishing the potential value of those things, but that is not the equivalent of feeling successful and being successful. What is being successful and feeling successful is being clear about what your purposes are in your organisation and in your life, and pursuing them, even if they don’t fit the common mould. And I will share with you an example, a recent CEO who I spoke with had a family business and had run into some difficulty and eventually liquidated that business very successfully, actually, whereby it got almost as much value from the liquidation as it would’ve from a sale.

And he was regretful that he hadn’t somehow grown the business more and made it more profitable. And I said to him, yeah, but that’s not really what your main objective was. Your main objective. That was important to you, but your main objective was to create a culture where people were really feeling bought in and felt good about working at the organisation.

And that was sort of a deeper reflection of his value system. And by the way, if you hadn’t done that, the value of that organisation upon liquidation wouldn’t have been nearly as close because customers and employees were ready to help. With the process in a way, they weren’t trying to, they weren’t predating upon an organisation, they were actually trying to preserve its value and preserve the relationships they have with each other and with the leader.

So, you know, people can say, I have a certain set of goals, and those goals may be defined externally less by an awareness of what’s really important to them. And they won’t feel as successful and they may not actually be as successful as someone who really spends some time thinking about, what am I about?

Where you raised the beautiful phrase, where do I get energy in life? What’s important to me? And in this guy’s case, caring about people while leading an organisation that was profitable was important to him and it had real consequences for the organisation. So that’s one area is the defining of purpose.

That conventional metrics of organ, the size of your company or its growth or its profits, while not unimportant, you need those things that are hard facts about a company and its shareholder value and stakeholders. That’s not for most people what drives them. And if you not spending some time reflecting and thinking about what you care about and where you’re invested, you’ll have a lot of dissonance between what you’re doing and how you’re being perceived and how you’re even speaking about yourself and what you want other people to do and what’s actually going on.

So that’s one major area that I think people who are leading companies and aspiring leaders, and I would say more broadly could do much better at, is spend some time and get some tools and resources to help them. Get to that fundamental set of purposes that drive them.

Lawrie Philpott: And you’re not gonna do that without a third party.

And I agree with you, Mike, what you say with pretty well, all of the clients I see in today’s world, it’s as CEO, the unexpected stuff that comes along. The number of fast balls when they come, how big they are, whether they’ve seen them before or not, how good their team is, which is pretty important because there is a very straightforward proposition in my side of coaching, which is you can’t do it alone. It’s a team game. And my mind as you were speaking, went through to the Taleb book, which has got a great title for what you’ve just been talking about, which was fooled by randomness. You know, these days the black swan that comes along and makes life extraordinarily difficult for you is more and more prevalent.

And I think as we enter into this age of artificial intelligence, AI is gonna bring with it, I was gonna say a tidal wave, a tsunami, I mean, it really is gonna come very fast and very powerfully and have a significant overwhelming effect on leaders. And leaders. therefore, I think in almost obligatory sense, and I don’t say this from a sales point of view because I’ve done my life in the coaching world already, but they need somebody who is an independent, who is skilled, who is a good listener, who has what I call brains and scar tissue, mostly scar tissue, arguably.

In order to take people in the right direction, and even when we, in my coaching practice, have taken a person through the first year or so, and we’ve kind of done a good element of catch up and made good progress. We then enter what we call the consigliere phase, which means that I keep in touch with them on a predetermined basis.

So we’re not gonna let the conversation, the contact go cold and it works the other way when the client, the CEO, can ring at any point and typically often happens. They’ll ring up and they’ll say, I just had such and such happening. It’s share price moving. I haven’t seen it before, so I’m nervous about it to say the least.

I’m surrounded by advice and I dunno who to trust to be plain. I dunno who’s lying to me and could you pop in for a cup of tea? And I think that’s a really good. Role to have, whether your, your background is psychology or the structural side of coaching, so I’m with you 100% of the way. I’m not sure then how we get that message across to people, because I’ve also had clients who say, no, we don’t wanna do any coaching.

Thank you very much. Because the general feeling here is that if a person needs coaching. They’re on the failure list.

Mike Kaufman: That’s interesting that you say that because I know a lot of very successful CEOs, founders who seek out coaches, and it’s one of the most important tools in their toolkit. I mean, I think you could flip on its head that fear of getting a confidant.

And by the way, this doesn’t have to be someone you’re paying. It can be at some point, you’re gonna want the expertise. Of someone who’s been around the block and has a very well developed experience and perspective on the problems you have. Just as you gave that example, Lawrie, but I actually think even people who are like rising in their careers would do very well to seek out mentors and people who are good listeners and who are invested in them, and who create space for them to become more aware of A -what their goals are.

and B – what their patterning and their biases are and their blind spots. And so for your listeners who are afraid or think that this is a signal of weakness, it’s just the opposite. The most effective people understand all of our limitations. Mine, yours, and theirs. And ready to get support and get help.

And try to opt, I mean, they’ll probably be effective and successful to some degree without, but if you really wanna hit a home run for for your God giving gifts and who you are and where you are in the world and what you’re trying to accomplish, I don’t know why you would tie your hand behind your back and not seek out a mentor, a confidant, a coach, a psychologist to really help you bring it home. Yeah. It seems so, so obvious to me. It’s you tap your power that way.

Lawrie Philpott: And if you look at the stats for the dwell time, as it were for CEOs before they fail, it’s really very low these days. It’s coming down to a couple of years, maybe even a little bit lower on average for CEOs.

I often think the metaphor for them. In this day and age is, it’s a bit like life in the food mixer. You know, you get kind of blended every day by circumstances what comes along.

Mike Kaufman: So let me share something here with you that you and I have talked about before, but I think it’d be valuable for your folks to hear, people listening to this.

So you have effectively outlined several fundamental issues that I think predict long-term success and happiness. But I wanna make them explicit for your listeners when you say, when we’re talking about that sense of purpose and the ability to sort of be aware of it and talk to a confidant and realize that it’s an individually driven understanding of your goals, not a given understanding from what people tell you should be doing.

That is one piece of it, and I’m gonna name it in just a minute. The second thing, when you say you have to have a team around you, you can’t do it yourself. That is so obvious. I mean, often the transition from doer to manager to more senior leader is challenging for people because they don’t realize that their radius of influence is continuously expanding and there are ways of influencing the organisation need to shift accordingly.

Beause you can’t, you can’t control everything the way you used to. You’re more focused on the people around you, making sure you have good people, making sure they have the support they need. Making sure the culture is supportive and collaborative and competitive and has a sense of urgency. So that’s the second thing, sort of recognising the people element of leadership and it becomes more and more crucial the higher you go. You won’t succeed as a leader and you frankly, you won’t succeed in realizing your goals in life for most people, unless you’re able to engage with other people productively. And then thirdly, yes, you’re getting hit by a barrage of circumstances.

It’s that tsunami, that fire hose. But what really differentiates people who do better with that is they have a more developed muscle for coping, coping with major setbacks. So those are, let me name those three things in a succinct way now. One is the ability to recognize and act upon your own fundamental goals.

And people may hear me say that and say, oh, I know how to do that. Most people have a difficulty doing that. That is a lot easier, harder done than said. The second thing is the ability to enter into mutually beneficial relationships. Again, a very challenging thing to do if you’re actually paying attention, listening to other people.

And trying to find ways to work collaboratively. So what you do together is benefiting them as well as yourself, and this is in your personal life as well as professionally. And the third is the ability to cope with major setbacks and I’m not talking about small things. I’m talking about major things.

And by the way, that first thing, the ability to recognize and act on your own goals. Well, when that CEO that I mentioned to you earlier had a major challenge in the business that led to the business decision to liquidate the company. That was a major setback. However, the ability to cope with it and find a way through, it was much better set up and easier to carry out because the goals that were important to him were already very much enacted in that organisation.

So those are the three things that predict whether somebody is going to be literally over 50 years in my research, from the time that they’re teenagers and young adults until the time that they’re approaching retirement or in retirement, those three things predict how good they feel about themselves and their lives and how effective they assess themselves to have been, both professionally and personally.

It’s a very profound set of predictors, and so when you’re working with somebody, those are the three areas. There’s tactical and practical tools to work on them. But those are the three areas that I think the stronger you can be, the more practice you can get in developing those three muscles, those competencies, the better off you’re gonna be.

Lawrie Philpott: And that was a very rigorous longitudinal study, Mike, I think, because there was a lot of baseline written information, but that was then I think a lot of face-to-face interviews to check people out as their lives proceeded.

Mike Kaufman: Just so that those who are familiar with other studies of this kind, there aren’t a lot of other very long-term longitudinal studies of development adult development.

Your listeners may be familiar with a couple of prominent public intellectuals, like. Arthur Brooks, who often synthesizes happiness research findings, or Bob Waldinger and his colleague Schultz, who came out with a book about another Harvard longitudinal study that has been going on for 80 years.

What I’m talking about is a very different study, even though it looks at the same timeframe. The study that I direct at began at Harvard in the 1960s and I directed it while I was at the University of Chicago, is rare in that it has captured life histories of people that are equivalent for each participant of an entire biography about five, 600 pages of transcribed interviews across the life course from the time that they’re around 18 years old, and then following up with them around in their late fifties and sixties. And so in addition to all the typical methodologies that come out when, I mean, I think the field that Arthur Brooks is synthesizing and is so effective in communicating about, is really driven by a lot of surveys.

And I would say that this other study, this Waldinger study, which says relationships are really important, it kind of converges with that one element that I’ve said. It’s really focused more on tracking through surveys, but you don’t get a lot of studies that have 35, 40,000 transcribed pages of interviews along with that rigorous survey data and telling a story of what matters.

And that’s what I’m synthesizing.

Lawrie Philpott: It’s interesting because you know from our previous conversations that there’s a dimension that I’m very attracted to, which is looking at organisations the other way up. In other words, the people who are led by leaders who aren’t necessarily leaders with the full deck of either behavioural skills or the structural skills, let’s face it. We wouldn’t get into a Boeing 747 where the captain wasn’t the right kind of structural person and the right kind of psychological person. And when there’s the going is rough in an airplane, they all sound the same. Because they have been selected and trained and so on and so forth, because they’re doing a very important job.

I’m not sure we do the same thing in corporate organisational life and therefore, you know, I have this phrase. The people in an organisation, let’s call them the 90% of people in an organisation, or some similar percentage that are the ones who are led, have a right to be well led. And of course, in the democratic sense, if that right isn’t being well delivered, then they,  quite often do leave an organisation, which makes for difficulty because there’s discontinuity, there’s replacement time and cost, and so on and so forth. So the right to be well led I think is something that probably needs to come onto the agenda a bit more in the future.

Mike Kaufman: Lawrie, you have coined this phrase, the right to be well led.

I think it’s a great phrase. I don’t hear it spoken of often, and it makes you think as a follower or a team member of an organisation, what should I be looking for in a leader in either an immediate boss or in the CEO of the company? And I think the answer to that can be made very concrete because you know, just as you are as an interview candidate or an outsider who’s exploring entering a company, you’re a little bit unknown, an unknown quantity to the people you’ll be working with.

The same is true in the other direction. You don’t really know who you’re going to work with or what their experiences and competencies are until you’re actually working with them and you experience them firsthand. I think it would be helpful to synthesise very succinctly a list. And the first thing I think that is clear is if you’re not dealing with your blind spots, if you’re not thinking through complicated decisions and how to prioritise your time in your limited energy with a confidant, you’re not gonna be as effective.

I would want a leader who does that, who has a confidant who, whether it’s a coach, a psychologist, a consultant, but secondly often you will find that you will hear or notice, and this is for people who are more senior and have more interaction with the CEO or the most senior leadership, you will hear that someone has a coach, but what kind of person are they?

Do they really have the skillset? And I think there’s a whole conversation we could have around how to be effective as a coach. I know you want your listeners to be aware of how they should source their coaches, and maybe some of them are coaches themselves. I do think there’s a skillset. Coaches don’t have a great deal of training.

Often they just hang on a shingle after operating in some role themselves. Maybe they were very effective in that role, but I will tell you, being effective in one role doesn’t make you effective as a coach and it actually can impede your effectiveness as a coach ’cause you’re just not aware of a variety of situations and how somebody else is different.

So second thing is that leader spending some time reflecting whether it’s with a coach or by themselves, on what’s the most important goals that they should be pursuing in this organisation, and they should be thinking about that for their personal lives. I think you can’t be effective long term unless you’re doing that.

I mean, fundamental purpose is the driver to all success. So if you’re not investing some time in that, the time for reflection, is one of the items in your leader role inventory. I think it’s spot on. I would say thirdly, as a follower and as a colleague, what I notice is if somebody’s actually listening to me, when I’m speaking, are they listening with a third ear? Are they perceiving what I’m feeling? Are they understanding where I’m coming from? Are they giving me space to speak? And then are they responding to it appropriately? Are they thinking about it and giving it some time? And some thought, are they quickly rushing me through or are they listening with the intent to respond and not really open to what I’m saying.

You feel that from somebody, and I frankly don’t know how someone is gonna lead a senior leadership team unless they’re tapped in and they have skills of empathy and listening. c

Crucial. So that’s the third thing I would put on the list. And then Fourthly, is this person getting regular feedback, systematic feedback, a 360, asking others whom they work with, what they’re experiencing in that person’s leadership and behaviour.

I mean, that’s another way you get feedback in addition to confidant, and I think it’s crucial. And then I think. Ultimately there’s a gut sense. I mean, one of the things that leaders don’t do enough of is they don’t listen to their own emotional signals

Lawrie Philpott: because they don’t know how to. Mike, I think.

Mike Kaufman: I’m not even sure.

I mean like I was initially, before I became a psychologist, if I had asked you the question, what if I’d been asked, what is an emotion and can you identify main emotions that you experience? I’m not sure I could have answered that question well. There’s an entire field that’s of psychology that’s focused on the development of empathy and the development of emotional awareness.

And that is central to the kind of reflection that a leader needs to cultivate.

And it happens even in our conversation, Lawrie, there’s. There’s a concept called the observing ego. It’s like when you’re communicating with someone else, are you paying attention to what’s going back and forth, like a tennis match, like you’re saying something and I’m saying something, and what is happening emotionally between the two of us?

That’s a way of listening with attention to emotions. So leaders and many people are not offered the opportunity to develop a sensitivity to the emotions that they themselves are experiencing and how it’s informing, and this is related to patterning, how it’s informing their assumptions about other people.

The one emotion that seems to me to be, well, you know, proliferated in the business world is anger. People are comfortable with recognising and speaking about anger, but shame, fear, sadness, joy, love.

Lawrie Philpott:Loneliness, right?

Mike Kaufman: Loneliness at the top is a big one.

Frustration, excitement. There’s a whole range of them. And what is your palette and how facile are you with recognising what is being painted on the canvas of the situation that you’re in? That’s a really crucial muscle that leaders should have in their toolkit and should continue to work on. And I think 360 degree feedback a confidant can bring into your awareness and help you be more effective at acting on those emotions that are informing both you as well as someone else. So as a follower, I want a leader who’s gonna be paying attention to those things because otherwise I’m dealing with a technocrat.

And that is a huge bias inside organisations. Earlier I said there’s. I think two main fallacies. I didn’t get a chance to get to the second one. The first one is people equate their own sense of success with these sort of objective markers that they’re told are important, whether it’s company size, wealth, status, those things.

But the second is there’s way over emphasis on the technical aspects of products and services and organisations and how you enact results through whatever. You know, business plans and strategy development and blah, blah, blah, and way too little emphasis and focus on what, to me is the lifeblood of behaviour, which is how people are feeling.

And how they’re thinking about their experiences of interacting with each other and inside organisations and on teams, we know that people who feel excited and engaged are far better contributors to a team than people who are disengaged or who feel alienated, feel upset, resentful.

So there’s a whole pallet of emotions that I think leaders really need to tap into. And it starts with yourself. And so if you are in an organisation where somebody is, let’s say, coming at problems very technocratically. Giving enough space for the human dimension of that organisation and the people and yourself, and you’re feeling it in your interactions with that person, then I think that’s a red flag.

Lawrie Philpott: And can we add another piece to the palette then, Mike? Because leadership and the references I put are CEOs, the relationship then with the followers who have a right to be well led, we then need to add into the mix governance. Because you’ve got another team there, another set, another kind of leadership.

And to be honest, quite often when I have been in the boardroom with boards, you’ve got a whole slew of things which are not working as well as they might. Chair chairing skills. Picking the right non-executive members of the team, the relationship between the non-execs themselves, the relationship between the non-execs and the one or two executives who might be on the board and so on.

And their ability to operate in that mode and their ability then to relate from the board governance level to the executive organisation and how that’s doing. So we’ve got yet another movable piece, which adds to the complexity and the difficulty.

Mike Kaufman: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think so much originates with governance and the chief executive has a huge influence, obviously over how in organisations are governed.

So do the other members of the board. But what I would say is all the things that we’re talking about, leadership pertain as well to directors.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah.

Mike Kaufman: And if you think about a board as a group, there are dynamics that get enacted in a group and some boards are effective and some aren’t effective.

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah.

Mike Kaufman: And there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a whole field of family systems psychology in which the patterns that you learned in your family growing up you tend unaware to bring with you to your role in other groups.

And you’ll see people, some, like some people are strong and sort of eliciting feedback or tolerating tension or being the glue that holds the group together and others are provocateurs. They often learn, this is patterning by the way, they often learn these things in families. So if you look at a board as a family system, a system of people and their psychologies interacting with one another, then these issues of who the players are and how they relate to one another and how effective they do the work of a board and, and provide governance for an organisation that comes into sharper, sharper focus.

And I think, you know, governance has not done well.

Lawrie Philpott: I agree.

Mike Kaufman: There are a lot of boards who are very dysfunctional or very ineffective or the people are checked out or they’re not exercising their fiduciary responsibility to reign in on things that they don’t understand or question or are obligated to, to focus on, but they don’t do it.

Lawrie Philpott: And then there’s this dimension, Mike, which I encounter quite a lot, which is denial. And whilst I’m not a psychologist, I think sometimes it’s conscious denial and sometimes it’s unconscious denial. It’s kind of this can’t be happening, it isn’t true. And we have a phrase. In my business, which is that clients, if they’re gonna work with us, they have to stand in reality and sometimes that’s very difficult for people than the power of denial comes into play.

Mike Kaufman: It’s the name of the game. In any relationship, if you don’t have a shared reality, enough of a shared reality with that other person, you aren’t gonna get along. And whatever you may think you’re able to do in terms of promoting a positive interaction with that person.

If they see red and you see blue, you are not, it’s gonna cause both of you to sort of regress to the most frustrated places in your world, and you will start to see that person and behave towards that person in a less productive way. So this issue of reality. What is real, what is true? We all have our own slice of that in a situation.

None of us has the totality of the answer of what’s going on. Even in this conversation. Lawrie, I could give you an account of what we’ve been doing together in the last whatever, 45, 50 minutes, but you might have a slightly different account. Hopefully we have enough overlap so we can keep talking and relating to one another.

But what kills off relationships, and I worry about this too when I take on a client to make sure that there’s a sound basis for a productive relationship. What kills off relationships is if the two people do not share a common understanding of the problem, of what is transpiring, of what they’re working on.

And often, let me take this a little deeper, psychologically, often these blind spots you talk about conscious denial and unconscious denial. I mean, I don’t think it matters ultimately, whether it’s conscious or unconscious. The point is it’s a propensity to exclude from their conversation or their consideration, real facts that are going on, like it’s blue, not red, and it makes it maddening and impossible to do productive work together and to accomplish things and to feel good together.

So if someone is engaging in denial. Which is very common. We all do it. You want someone else at your side to help challenge you in a non-threatening way to reconsider the way you’re looking at things. And so bringing it back, for example, to boards, you want some conflict and some dissonance on a board, you want some competing or contrarian perspectives.

Can you tolerate that? If you’re the chair of the board and you’re shutting down the board conversation about a topic because it feels wrong to you or somehow threatening to you and you are exercising, and that kind of denial, it’s not gonna help the group and it’s not gonna help you perform your responsibilities.

So this issue of denial is profound. There’s a whole bunch of psychological defenses that people employ to limit what they let in because it’s too hard for them to process or digest. Yeah. And that is central to the limitations of just being a human being. So we have to compensate for that and try to support ourselves through a broadening.

If you don’t do that, you’re gonna limit yourself.

Lawrie Philpott: and Mike as we draw towards the close of this conversation, and I hope there will be more on leadership listening. Our door is open to you. The thing that occurs to me very often when I’m in this coaching mode with, in my case, over 300 one-to-one people and over a hundred leadership teams, is this.The degree, particularly in the individual CEO, the degree of frailty.

Immediately below the surface, which doesn’t come out at the first meeting might do, but very often at the second or third meeting as the confidence of the relationship grows. And that frailty at first was quite a surprise to me. Even a shock. Yeah. Because here’s somebody who is supposed to be the full deal as much as anybody can be the full deal here. And I often think that people, which is the subject, I think of another episode of leadership listening. People come into leadership positions by accident, kind of by default. You know, there was nobody else. It was Buggin’s turn, you are next. But the frailty beneath the surface is there more than most people would think.

Mike Kaufman: I’m with you, and it’s, I don’t judge it. I think it’s human frailty. What’s striking though is the external posturing that’s actually almost necessitated by the culture, what we expect of our leaders and you don’t wanna be too transparent as a leader, but so much is done to craft your story and to present yourself in this powerful, effective way that you don’t wanna be starting to believe your own press.

And you and I both know that there’s a soft underbelly, there’s a backstory behind that social presentation. And unless you’re working, that’s another way to summarize everything that we’re talking about. Unless you’re working at that level with that backstory, I think you’re missing 90% of what’s going on in your behaviour.

And it’s not that you’re tricking other people. You’re just tricking yourself. ’cause other people know it when you’re speaking convoluted about. Do A, but you don’t do A or do X and you don’t do X. Or when you’re stating what your values and goals are, and it’s twisted, it’s not the way you’re behaving.

They know that when your behaviour or is incongruous with your stated values or goals, other people see it. They smell that kind of frailty and confusion, and you’re just handicapping yourself by not spending time and dwelling in your own backstory and what’s really going on for you emotionally, and it’s not an indicator of weakness.

Yes, there’s frailty, but we’re all frail behind the social presentation, Lawrie and I am too, and I think you are too. So let’s be honest about it and let’s invite people to authentically get at what’s going on and to do it effectively and to not have to fake. That they’re all put together and they have everything figured out ’cause they don’t.

Lawrie Philpott: doing what you and I do in life is all part of executives, people in the C-suite, chief executives becoming match fit.

Because the big match is there today, and it’s becoming even bigger in the days to come. Mike, before we close, three little questions coming in your direction, which we put to everybody. What’s your pet hate?

Mike Kaufman: What’s my pet hate? Okay. Ask me three questions and I’ll answer them all at once. What are the other, okay,

Lawrie Philpott: the second one is secret passion.

Thing that you like doing and not many people know it or see it, and the advice to your 20-year-old self.

Mike Kaufman: those are fantastic questions. My pet hate, I would have to say are know-it-alls people who talk a lot and act like they know everything, when in fact nobody does. They wanna have the last word on everything.

What’s my secret passion? You know this about me, Lawrie, my work as a social scientist, as a psychologist, and as an Advisor has taken me to various places in the world. I’ve taught in the Middle East, and most recently I spent a couple years in East Africa. So my secret passion is immersive experiences in other cultures, and learning about the people there just absolutely fascinates me so much to be talked about that. And then thirdly, what was the third question? Your 20-year-old self, what would you say to yourself? I would tell, I mean, I’m trying to be as congruous in what I share with you and your listeners as I would be with myself. My whole life is organized by a desire for authenticity and understanding, true understanding. And so everything that I shared with you, I would share in this conversation. I would share with my 20-year-old self, I would say act on your goals and spend some time figuring ’em out. I, it took me a while to get traction in life. And then I would say relationships are really profound in shaping whether you get outta life the richness and the opportunities and the experiences you want, and work on developing mutually rewarding ones and hang in there.

Everyone’s gonna have major setbacks. It’s a fantasy to believe that you won’t. So it’s what you do with them. Get up, navigate through it, hang in there. And to me those are three crucial lessons that at age 60, now I can share with other people and I would certainly advise my 20-year-old self on them.

Lawrie Philpott: Mike, that’s been a great conversation. Um, and I’m absolutely sure there are more conversations for leadership listening between the two of us. Thank you so much for today.

Mike Kaufman: Thank you, Lawrie. It’s been a pleasure and keep up the good work. I think this podcast series that you’ve launched will help so many people by your bringing in other perspectives that they may not have heard and sharing your own.

It’s a really lovely idea and I think it’s a high, high offering, high value proposition, so good luck with you. 

Lawrie Philpott: Great. Thanks Mike.