Silvia Foxe: People are people. Your workforce is your workforce. If you have a brilliant accountant who happens to be maybe a little socially awkward, doesn’t deal well with an overstimulating environment, prefers to be tucked away on their own.

Can’t necessarily specifically tell you how they’re gonna deliver, but always delivers. Let ’em get on with it. Change the way you manage them. There’s always gonna be difference in our group, so we cannot have leaders where one style fits all. 

Lawrie Philpott: Well, today’s leadership listening conversation is one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time with somebody whose name is Silvia.

And Silvia and I know each other from something like 20 years back when she came in my direction as somebody who could possibly work with my corporate clients. In the coaching relationship that I had with them, there was something then that Silvia could add, and there were lots of occasions when I was speaking to very senior people, chief executives or people from the C-Suite.

There were circumstances in their life which were about themselves, time outside the world of work, their relationship with families, and so on and so forth. And they needed somebody who was a specialist in that direction to have a different supplementary, if you like, conversation with them. And Silvia was always the person that I went to in the main, and therefore, the person that you’re gonna hear from this morning is Silvia, who operates in an unusual way in the sense that there is no great public profile, partly because the kind of work that she does is extremely personal, extremely confidential, but in my book, extremely important and very complimentary to the work that I do as a coach in the Chief Executive’s Office or in the C-Suite members office. So Silvia, welcome to Leadership Listing.

We’re gonna talk about our favorite subject. All of those people that you and I have met over the years and the kind of circumstances, obviously anonymously, because confidentiality is hugely important. So, Silvia, tell us a little bit about yourself and you are represented in a degree of anonymity, which is obviously self-evident.

So Silvia, tell us a little bit about your story, first of all. 

Silvia Foxe: Hi Laurie. Thanks for having me. Okay. What can I tell you about me? What can I tell you about me? Well, I grew up outside of the uk, which gave me a perspective on different people, different environments, which was quite interesting. My mother was very corporate.

So I saw quite a lot of leadership from a very early age. Being an only child, I would often get taken into work by her after school and so forth. And I was kind of quite involved in her career as I grew up. I saw an awful lot firsthand, good leadership, bad leadership, and I suppose we came back to the UK probably in my late teens.

So I did my advanced education here, started my first business when I was 23, and this practice was about 10 years later, I guess. And in that time, one of the things that I have probably spent more time than anything else doing is listening. Some people would say more talking, but I still maintain more listening.

And listening is a skill, and also how you listen is important. Not necessarily what you’re listening to, but sometimes the connections between, you know, between what people are saying, what you’re actually hearing. Although I’ve done a lot of training in a formal sense, very extensive, very expensive.

Sorry, did I say expensive? I meant extensive training. But the listening part has been the most impart important part because what it’s done is it’s made me take part everything I trained in and build my own protocol from that. And now I would say simplistically, my job is to look at the core identity of each client that I work with, particularly their relationship with self.

And I guess the easiest way to describe it would be to say I sort of look at it through a sort of a triangular lens. And I would say that the work is really the area of that triangle. And I’m effectively bordering that triangle with education on one side, real time consulting on the other. And although I call the base therapeutic, it’s important to clarify that relates more to broken processes than broken people.

I don’t work with broken people. Give you an idea of what I do yet. 

Lawrie Philpott: Yeah, it does. And it ties in I think, very well with the general purpose, the general practice of coaching that I have with people who are CEOs of banks, law firms, venture capital, commodity broking, expert witness firms, and so on, and all of those kind of individuals have come to you.

But one of the things that I think is important from a general practitioner coach like myself, is that I think it’s impossible for a coach to do everything and therefore, in my own practice, I’ve always taken the view that where I reach the limits of what I think it’s reasonable for a coach to talk about to a client.

Then you’ve gotta look for super expertise if you like a particular kind of expertise. And yours is the expertise that comes to mind when I reach a point in conversation with a person who’s very senior, CEO or C-suite, obviously, but is in some kind of distress about themselves and the kind of person that they are, the kind of questions that they’ve got of themselves, their relationship with others outside of the world of work, and in particular families and so on and so forth.

As a backdrop to that, there is an awful lot of stress out there with divorces and substance abuse has come across in our practice of one kind or another. So that’s the point at which I think it’s appropriate to steer them in your direction. And of course, the reaction that I get then is, Hmm, is this person a psychologist?

Am I going bad? Is that what you are trying to sort of tell me, Laurie and I say, it isn’t. What I’m steering you towards is understanding some things that you don’t know an awful lot about at the moment, and more than anything, beginning to get in touch with yourself and know yourself so that you strengthen your resilience, your individual personal resilience in that sense.

Does that square with what I then handover to you and what you do next, Silvia? 

Silvia Foxe: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, very often when you’ll refer somebody to me, bear in mind, all of the work that I do is by referral only. And so in your particular case, it’s the majority of the referrals that you’ve handed me have all been corporate, generally speaking, our experiences that you’ll generally send me something to look at, so usually like a 360 and some brief notes to give me an idea of what you are doing with that client. I actually deliberately park that to one side and what I do is I take the interview first because what I really want to do is I want to see how this person presents to me.

So once I’ve kind of gotten to know them, I look and see what it is that they feel it’s important to tell me. I’ll often ask them to tell me what they’re doing with you so I can see what their view is of what they’re doing with you versus what your view is of what they’re doing with you. And then once I’ve had that interview and I can get a sense of what it is that might be underlying, then I will have a look at the 360 notes and see where my take overlaps with what you’ve sent me.

And that’s normally the place that I begin. 

Lawrie Philpott: Okay. And 360 notes. Just to be clear on that, 360 notes is part of the standard process that I go through at my end as a general purpose code. And I get 360 feedback from half a dozen people identified by the CEO or C-suite member, and with their agreement then I make that available to you so you can. Begin to get a flavor from that. 

Silvia Foxe: That’s right. Yeah. And it is, it’s very helpful to have, because obviously, you know, I’m seeing a very subjective view from this person, but ultimately that’s one of the main differences between what you do and what I do and where we overlap, where we intersect in the respect that when we work together.

It’s either with the same client, often with the same organisation. The differences are that where your focus is specifically towards role and organisation overall. Mine is very person specific. In that respect I lean more into towards the person within that role. It’s really all about how they think, how they feel, and how they operate.

So I’m really looking to see what their worldview looks like. Their worldview in terms of how they see what their identity, their self identity, what their existential position is. In other words, what it is that they believe to be true about themselves, their situation, and about the world in general.

Because the behavior that we see, behavior rarely lies. It normally tells the truth, but it’s a very subjective truth because that truth is a reflection of their existential position. And behavior changes when self-identity changes. Often I’m not seeing a client because their behavior is bad. I’m seeing a client because their behavior needs to change significantly because something about that behavior, something about how they’re manifesting, goes back to something they believe to be true about themselves, their situation, or about the world in general, and it is standing in the way of what you are looking to achieve with them and ostensibly what they are looking to achieve within their business trajectory, their career growth, even their personal life. 

Lawrie Philpott: So their model, I often think is something that develops from the point where they’re couple of years old. You know, the first sort of sentient being as a very young child. And that’s affected by mom, dad, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents even.

That changes quite a bit. Then when you get to school, because there are parents and other pupils and teachers and so on that you encounter and you go right through the process of education and the dynamic then changes again when you are say, 20 and you are or thereabouts, and you are getting into the world of work because then the patterning that has been set in place begins to be amplified by a different set of patterns in the world of work. And eventually when they get to me, because they’re a CEO or they’re in the C-suite.They might be 35, 40 at earliest, quite normally, but classically 45, maybe 50 years old, with all of this patterning behind them and the big role that they hold, which is all consuming.

And I very often think that people at that level don’t have the space for themselves. Does that occur to you as something that walks through your door when they come to have conversations with you. They haven’t really got any space for thinking about themselves and who they are and how they should relate to the world?

Silvia Foxe: loosely speaking, there’s an element of truth about that. But what you were saying before is interesting because to get to that place, they’ve had to prioritize other things. So that comes down to, well, what’s their motivation? So if we go back to the point that you raised earlier about the patterning and where it begins, you know you are absolutely right and the respect that, you know, when we’re very small, we download information from the universe.

And we don’t really have filters. It’s a bit like running a computer with no antivirus software. You’re just downloading absolutely everything up until a certain point, which means you get incorrect information gets filed away as though it were true as well. Then when we get to a certain age around about preschool age, we begin to develop our conscious mind, our cognitive thinking, and anything beyond that point.

The download is processed very differently beyond that point than it did before that watershed, because we’re much more rational. However, seeds that were planted below that watershed, ideas, thoughts, beliefs about ourselves, they’re run in a very different way than anything that was planted after that point if you like.

School isn’t, as you said, is another factor, but as we age, things that early beliefs about ourselves, we either prove them or we disprove them. And if some of those beliefs really stuck when we were younger, perhaps if we got an idea about ourselves that we were perhaps, you know, the less able sibling or we weren’t good at something or we weren’t attractive enough or whatever it was, we weren’t enough of for ourselves by our own view, and sometimes it’s because somebody randomly said that to us and we just took it on board as being accurate forever. Even though it’s long since been disproven, it doesn’t feel disproven. So that brings into question our motivation. And some people, and a lot of the people that you and I have worked with for one reason or another, have demonstrated that they’ve been more driven than ambitious and the difference is that drive is a hand in the smaller of the back is pushing you forward, but it’s actually often powered by a desire to avoid or to secretly or to disprove something we secretly believe might be true about us or we are afraid could be. 

Lawrie Philpott: Let’s distinguish between the driven ambitious, because I think that’s a very interesting point to make. Tell us a little bit more about the difference that you see there. 

Silvia Foxe: Okay, so I think of it like this. If you have two magnets, one of them is a repelling magnet and the other one is an attracting magnet. So drive is a repelling magnet. The attracting magnet is ambition. Ambition is more we know what we want.

We wanna achieve that specifically, and we’re aiming for that because that will give us something. Drive is we wanna be anywhere but here. That looks like it would be good. The difficulty is that when you get people who have more drive than ambition, or don’t necessarily identify the difference between the two, they don’t recognize what their motivation is.

And the word is really important here because, motivation, it means what moves me. And I always tell everybody it’s not called emotion by accident. So ultimately we are. Either being motivated by feel or motivated by desire to some large degree. Often it’s a combination of the two, but where are we heavy weighted? with somebody that’s driven, they are mostly aiming to achieve something that is quite often being powered by a level of anxiety or a level of fear or a lever of avoidance. Whereas with ambition, it’s much more clear sighted. They know exactly what it is they want, specifically what it is they want, and they’re aiming for that. And with that comes a sense of fulfillment because the achievement of something is something earned. We set our laser marker on the target.

We, went after it, we acquired it. It’s in our bag. We now reset our clock on our compass. So quite often we get, you and I, we get to work with very high achievers. Who end up having got to the top of their pyramid, the top of their mountain, the top of their hill, and they still don’t have ‘it’, that unquantifiable ‘it’.

They don’t feel the way they’re supposed to feel. They’ve never had a chance to really own it and as you mentioned, these are people that have very often made little time for themselves because the quest to get to ‘there’, to feel ‘it’ has been so all consuming that they’ve lost sight of the difference between what’s important and what’s urgent.

Lawrie Philpott: So in my language, that’s like sort of moving into a foreign land, which isn’t anything like what you might have expected it to be. It is foreign and difficult to deal with at the level of seniority of C-Suite and Chief Executive Officer. It seems to me, and the other dimension, which I think often occurs is that the kind of person that gets to that level has a certain set of characteristics, which are very similar to the other people around the top table.

High achievers, sharp elbows, A types as sometimes described. In other words, everything is going at pace. Very famous phrase these days. Everything seems to be going at pace if you are listening to the media, and so you are, from what you are saying. I think the individual finds themselves in this sort of foreign land 

Silvia Foxe: in a sense.

They get to. Kind of a lifestyle crisis or a life stage crisis, rather. It’s more sort of achievement linked, though it’s a disconnect between I’m here, is the view what I thought it would look like? Do I feel the way it’s I’m supposed to feel? And if I don’t, then what is it? Because I’ve achieved everything I could conceivably have achieved.

I’ve got the right salary, I’ve got the right house, I’ve got the right car, I’ve got the right, everything is what I decided it should be in my life. But yet. I still feel like me. I still don’t have it. You know, this isn’t the first life crisis we go through. We go through life crises at all stages of our life.

It’s just that this is a different kind. The difference as well with our high achievers is very often by that point, they’re also getting to the recognition that the top of this hill, all the other hills look a lot like this one. So they could jump sideways. There might even be a taller hill, but they’ve come this far and don’t have ‘it’.

So they begin to question whether it’s even possible to get ‘it’. And that comes with a sense of disappointment. It comes with a, a feeling of bewilderment, a little bit of a not being able to find your true north anymore. You know, we really do go through these life crises at all different stages of our lives.

They’re not just the most famous one is midlife, right? But I mean, what is midlife anymore? You know, it moves depending on, you know, who you talk to. The fact is though, that we go through a crisis every time we are required to stop, check the view and ask ourselves whether or not we are where we thought we would be and whether or not it feels the way it was supposed to feel. And that’s because we are looking for information about ourselves. We are trying to draw a conclusion that adds to our sense of who we are and our place in the world. And it once again comes back to existential position. What is this experience telling me about me, about my position and about the world in general?

And is it adding to me? Is it diminishing me? Where do I go from here? What’s next? Because ultimately, we all want to feel fulfilled. On some level, we want to be able to own it. And that word owning it, or those words owning it, are really important because ownership is responsibility. And we’re talking about people here who have taken on a great deal of responsibility, but yet don’t actually own the positive consequences within of all the responsibility they’ve, that they’ve taken on board.

And sometimes the difference can be whether they survive or thrive in that role. 

Lawrie Philpott: And how does then what I understand to be imposter syndrome come into play because it’s something in the general practice coaching sense seems to me to occur quite a lot and I think there are a number of characteristics.

Number one I think, is that it’s very often the case that final move to become a chief executive. Is much, much bigger than most people think, and so they’re metaphorically and perhaps really puffing and panting in the job that they’re doing, and my job is to get them to understand the limits of the job as they should do it.

Far too many of them do far too much, in my opinion. So that imposter syndrome then gets in the way and they say quite often in the privacy of my conversations with them, when are they gonna find me out? You know, when’s it all going to sort of falls to pieces. Does that square with what you are hearing at your end?

Silvia Foxe: Oh yeah. Absolutely. One of the things about imposter syndrome though, is it’s not necessarily invalid, and I mean that as gently as possible, but you know, we have had many conversations about people being over promoted, but that isn’t really where I’m going with this at the moment. What I’m saying is that imposter syndrome is entirely valid.

When you start out anything new because you know you don’t know enough, you know you are new at it, but at what point have you acquired sufficient time in the chair? At what point have you acquired enough skills, done enough work, you know, got enough wear on the tires, so to speak, that you no longer need to consider yourself to still be a newbie?

That’s when imposter syndrome is a problem. It’s when it goes from being appropriate to inappropriate, and that’s the case with an awful lot of things about how we feel. That’s what I mean when I say about upgrading the software. Well, if we go back to what I was saying before about existential position and about beliefs that we might hold about ourselves that we are looking to disprove, at what point have they been disproven yet?

We’ve never upgraded the software. We’re still behaving as though they haven’t been. I can’t tell you the number of chief execs that I’ve dealt with who have been particularly the ladies. Ironically, this is really key. When it comes to women in really high positions. They’re often still scratching at the door.

They’re still talking about how hard it is to get there. And they’ve been there for years, but they’re not owning it. They’re still behaving as though they’re trying to get into that club. And literally the, the name’s been on the door of their office for the last five years, but they’re not owning it.

And that comes down to. How do they see themselves? Are they, how their feet are squarely planted? Because you know, this podcast is Leadership Listening, right? One of the things you and I spend an awful lot of time having conversations about is about leadership, but you can’t lead. You can’t lead well if you’re not confident about who you are, because leadership is about how you as an individual lead.

And to do that, you have to start within, you have to be confidently leading yourself and you know, to kind of go down a traditional psychology type route. If you think of yourself as a set of Russian dolls, then you know your many versions of you. And the outside of the outside version is actually the one that is leading all of the others.

Those others all represent at some point different ages at which you acquired skills and acquired, you know, positives and negatives. And those are all impacting on the outside doll. But that outside doll is the leader. And all of the others go quiet when the outside doll is on it. And what if it doesn’t work on the inside?

It doesn’t work on the outside. If it doesn’t work on the outside. Doesn’t work on the inside, which is why, you know, leaders that lead by fear are often people who have been led by fear. And leaders that lead differently, constructively, are often much more well balanced within themselves. 

Lawrie Philpott: So what we are talking about then is leaders and as early as possible in their leadership ascendancy, getting to know self, the dimensions of self, the subtleties of self. 

Silvia Foxe: Getting good with themselves.

Lawrie Philpott: Getting good with themselves. Yeah. And part of that, you know, in the sort of media scene these days is that we’ve got narcissists and people who are sociopaths and psychopaths and so on and so forth, who very often then do appear, you know, in the leadership levels as chief executives. What are we trying to say to them through your kind of conversations? The narcissist, In particular, which is something we’re hearing more and more of these days. 

Silvia Foxe: Absolutely, and that’s a tough one because to be honest, they don’t usually get past my couch largely because if we’re talking about narcissistic personality disorder, it is what it is.

And actually I would never teach the kind of skills that I teach to a narcissist because they could not help but to use them in a way which would be damaging. So they wouldn’t actually make it past my couch. To some degree the same thing with sociopaths and interestingly narcissists, you know, rarely end up speaking to people in the psychology field very often.

Then very often they’re diagnosed in absentia, so to speak, and it’s the people around them that end up having conversations with, say, somebody like me or going down a more traditional psychology, psychiatry route, because they are the ones that suffer the brunt of this, and they’re normally the ones that find their way to somebody’s couch.

So yeah, I wouldn’t work with a narcissistic or a sociopathic leader. They wouldn’t get onto my couch because some of the skills that I teach would be dangerous in their hands. They are all based on improving all the different kinds of intelligences, but at the moment. Very importantly, everybody’s talking about emotional intelligence.

Interesting. If we’re gonna talk about intelligence, let’s just go here. Years and years ago, and I can’t remember ’cause I’m really not great with dates, but Harvard Business School did an interesting study looking at IQ. And they discovered that actually the people who did the best as leaders. In, in the business arena, were not people whose IQ was the highest.

Although the study was for high iq, we were talking about a bunch of delegates, all who had an IQ in excess of 130. Quite a few of them had an in excess of 140, making them in the genius levels. But what they discovered was that when they tested for their eye, it was the people that were the most successful leaders were the ones whose verbal intelligence was the highest of the three that they tested.

Normally, it’s numeric intelligence, Vizios spatial intelligence, and verbal intelligence that they test for an IQ score. It was the people whose verbal intelligence was easily the highest, and this is because verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate is the most key thing. Now, this is important internally as well as externally.

In other words, dealing with our relationship with ourselves as well as dealing with our relationship with other people. But verbal intelligence is the key to unlocking the use this the effective use of emotional intelligence, and most importantly, social intelligence, not just political intelligence, which is what we see a lot of in our leaders.

Political intelligence can be defined as the ability to get things done through others. Social intelligence, the ability to create win-win outcomes where everybody wins. A rising tide that floats all the boats. And emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately determine where you are at in terms of how you feel.

And when you get good with that, you with the right skills are also able to determine where somebody else is at. And that includes knowing how best to motivate them. And that is how leaders bring out the best out of their teams. 

Lawrie Philpott: And a couple of things to throw in there. I often say to my clients, more or less, everyone, actually, I’ve never yet met an orgnisation that over communicates.

Silvia Foxe: Yep.

Lawrie Philpott: I think there’s a very interesting piece of our conversation around listening, which you mentioned a little bit earlier on, and the nice way to put that is you’ve got two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion. Very often people don’t, and the communication piece I think is hugely missed in most organisations.

And as I say, I’ve never met an organisation. That over communicates particularly from the senior levels. 

Silvia Foxe: Yeah, I would agree a hundred percent with that. I actually often find myself reminding the people that we work with, that actually if you remove all of the human beings from your building, what you’re left with is bricks and IT you don’t have a business.

The real value in your business. It travels up and down in the lifts. It goes up and down on the escalators, you know, so your main resource is a human resource, and people are sentient beings. You know when they feel better, when they feel good, when they feel invested in, when they’re motivated, well, you will open up their potential and it will only have a better effect on your business. So you know, that comes back down to leading. You know, are you leading by fear or are you leading by desire? Are you motivating the right way? Well, how are you being motivated 

Lawrie Philpott: What is it? Do you think, from the conversations that you have with leaders that is really giving them the most difficulty? They’ve got this very senior job. They’ve got a particular number of hours in the year that they can work. And by the way, they never know what that number of hours is. ’cause I ask them quite often, and they don’t. Being very specific and clear, but the elements of work that make up a chief executive’s role, the core elements and how good they then need to be at each one of those core subjects.

When they come to you, they’re not necessarily dealing with that structural side. They’re dealing with the kind of questions that they’ve got of themselves, their self-belief, their communication skills, the imposter syndrome, and so on and so forth. But what are the biggest things that occur on your radar? 

Silvia Foxe: Wow. I mean, that’s a wide net.

It really does depend on the individual, to be honest. And I don’t have a process that is, you know, one size fits all. When somebody comes to see me, we eventually will, we’ll end up unpacking a little to see where we’re at, but I don’t really deal with symptomology. I deal with what lies beneath that. In a sense, what I’m really doing is rehabilitating somebody’s relationship with themselves.

And in doing that, if you think of it as like having. I don’t know, like a Billy bookcase full of these little pigeonholes. Some of those pigeonholes have got a bunch of rubbish in, and as we empty those pigeonholes, it’s dangerous to leave them empty. So I pile in skills to fill them instead. ’cause it’s all very well to just snap your fingers, remove a problem, but then you have this vacancy, this, and the universe hates a vacuum as we know something is gonna fill it eventually.

So I prefer to curate what’s going in there. So a lot of the conversations about leadership that I have with leaders give me a view of how they see the world. It also tells me what they may be lacking because when we go down a path. A developmental path of our own. Sometimes we miss certain doorways because we don’t have a reason to go in those rooms.

It’s a bit like playing PlayStation when you’re a kid. You know? There are different paths to get somewhere. Sometimes it means we don’t get to pick up all the possible prizes we could have done. So these conversations about how people got to where they’re at in life, they’re very often tell me. Which doors they didn’t go in as well, and therefore, which skills are missing.

So as I rehabilitate the person to a better relationship with themselves, I’m able to add in some of those skills or direct them or signpost them down a route where they will be able to acquire those. And a big part of that is what we talked about before, which is the ability to communicate. And that changes because very often what people are telling themselves.

Is how they communicate outwards, we feel like we’re, we think we’re looking into a window, but actually we are looking into a mirror. There’s this great quote by an artist called Anaïs Nin and it’s been kind of misattributed to so many different people. But actually she once said, we do not see the world as it is.We see the world as we are.

So when somebody changes the way they see the world, they are able to change the way they deal with it. So by rehabilitating somebody’s relationship with themselves, that gets rid of a lot of stuff that’s been getting in their way. And in clearing some of those pigeonholes, I’m then able to put in specific skills that they will now be in a position to be able to use Well, which takes us back to why I said I wouldn’t work with a narcissist or the sociopathic leader because any of the skills that I were going to give them would be dangerous in their hands, they would use them for abuse in a sense. Because they are skills that have power.

They are skills that are influential. And there’s a big difference between manipulation and influence. The difference between the two is manipulation is purely political intelligence. Influence is socially intelligent. We want influential leaders, not manipulative leaders. And so therefore the skills that you are handing on have got to sit on top of a bedrock that is appropriate for them.

Lawrie Philpott: And, one of the things that seems to me to be coming into this conversation then is the need to be able to have crucial conversations. I still find, particularly in the UK, that people have a great difficulty with having those crucial conversations, particularly when difficult or bad news needs to be delivered to somebody. I see very often a difficult scene between very senior people and their ability to interact with people lower down. They’ll just walk by at the corridor and blank them and not recognize the humanity that is there before them in any way. So these crucial conversations. Seem to me to be important and crucial conversations as well in the C-Suite leadership team room.

The ability therefore to have crucial conversations as CEO, let’s say, when you’ve got eight people round a table. All with different profiles themselves. 

Silvia Foxe: Absolutely true. And crucial conversations are, look, they wouldn’t be crucial if they weren’t absolutely fundamentally necessary. So being able to avoid them is really not an option.

But if you are a person who is anxious or uncomfortable with their communication skills, then you may have to screw your courage to the mast. And it may mean that you have to be a little bit angry or a little bit unemotional to have those conversations. And then those conversations are not gonna land as well.

They’re not gonna be as humane. I mean, if you’ve got to let a lot of the workforce go you can’t afford to break your heart with every single person that you’re sitting down in front of. But at the same time, you do have to remember that. You know, this is a bad day for you.

It’s gonna be a lot more than a bad day for them. So how you manage those conversations, the level of grace that you are able to bring to it, even if you have to do it all day long, is absolutely essential. And it’s very difficult to do that if you do not feel comfortable within yourself. If you do not feel like your feet are screwed to the floor, if you do not feel that you can, you know, give the right amount of genuine emotion without being overly sentimental in which is taking away your ability to do your job. And there’s a level at which crucial conversations become crucial confrontations, and that’s, it’s even more important at that stage that you are able to stay balanced in order to be able to have them.

So one of the most common mistakes I find with people is an inability to separate out the content of the conversation they’re having. Very simply speaking, you can break conversation down to. Factual conversation. You can break it down to, you know, another category, which would be opinion, beliefs, theory. Conclusions. Value judgments is something good or bad. Emotional content, and also wants and needs or whatever comes next. If we’re looking at goal setting, and it’s very easy to sometimes make sweeping statements where you are confusing facts with opinion or citing an opinion as though were a fact.

Or to have a, a buffered value judgment by saying, I feel you’re very judgmental, which is actually, You know, not a feeling at all. It’s a value judgment. So knowing what you are saying, being able to prepare for what you’re saying so that your conversation effectively lands the way that it should.

These are skills, soft skills that are not endemic. They’re not just naturally found in people. Communication is a skill and a lot of us think if we can talk, then we can communicate, and that’s not the case. And I think communication, effective communication, crucial conversations, crucial confrontations are only achievable with communication skills.

And these are the sort of soft skills that very often need to be tweaked, sometimes installed right away from the baseline in leaders. 

Lawrie Philpott: And it often seems to me, in conversation with very senior people who’ve got to have a difficult, crucial conversation that they upscale it and are really fearful of having it, it’s gonna be just extraordinarily difficult when the actuality, when they actually have the conversation is very often much, much easier than they have previously thought it was going to be. 

Silvia Foxe: Yeah. 

Lawrie Philpott: Which not sure often what that is all about. What do you reckon? 

Silvia Foxe: Well, like I say, it’s hard to predict exactly what’s behind that, but generally it’ll come down to whatever that person is telling themselves about themselves, their situation, and about the world in general.

You know, it comes down to our core values and core beliefs. And when we have to sit down and have a conversation like that, if we are imagining that, you know, we are chicken little and that the sky is gonna fall in, we will behave as though that is in fact true. And we’ll go into one of those crucial conversations and we’ll have entirely the wrong way of dealing with it.

Sometimes the other person across from the desk doesn’t take it that way and we can be surprised that it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. But it’s a lot easier to ensure that if we are going in knowing that we are gonna be able to safely steer this ship. It may not be a ship we’ve asked to steer, it may not be on a journey we want it to go on.

But ultimately it is our job and we need to do it as effectively as possible. And we need to have a mind for the crew. You know, everyone’s wellbeing counts here 

Lawrie Philpott: We are now beginning to hear an awful lot more about neurodiversity with the different ranges of people that neurodiversity brings, is that a, is that something that’s coming onto your radar more and more these days?

Silvia Foxe: Absolutely. Not only that, but I am finding that I get an awful lot of referrals of people who present as Neurodivergent on some level, which is great because quite honestly, you’re talking about people with a range of abilities that haven’t necessarily always been easily recognized if your lens for normality is a neurotypical lens.

So I think it isn’t just about neurodiversity. I think we are now seeing more diverse workplaces in terms of not every workplace is set up to be sort of suited and booted. We’ve got, you know, work from home days on Fridays. We’ve got whole organisations that have casual days and only go in suits for meetings.

There are a lot of changes that we’re seeing in the workplace, and one of the ones that we are seeing is that there’s a lot more diversity on every level. But I think leadership now needs to also consider that when you have a much more diverse workplace, you will have people who are neurodiverse and their potential, the potential for what it is they’re capable of providing in terms of skills for the business. It’s not managed in exactly the same way as it is with a neurotypical person. You’re like, it’s like dealing with left or right-handed people. You know? The right tools have to be adapted. Leaders are more able to recognize individuality and to have an adaptive leadership style.

Then it won’t really make a difference whether you’re, you are neurodivergent or neurotypical because how you present will be how you are responded to if the leader has the right skillset. I like things like a situational leadership model in that respect. We normally see that in the context of starting with somebody who’s relatively new and inexperienced in a role, going through an arc to the point whereby they’ve got full ownership of that role and we are staging the level of intervention in terms of leadership from show and tell right the way through to coaching and mentoring on the basis of their feedback to us.

And I think the same application needs to be applied when it comes to leadership, when looking at the more neurodiverse members of the workforce, because you know, they don’t necessarily work as well in the same kind of environment. They might have a different kind of requirement, but if you are giving into that different kind of requirement and making provision for that, you are gonna get an entirely different level of success.

One of the things I hear the most from neurodivergent leaders is that, especially as they’ve worked up. Is that when they were working their way up through the levels, very often people managing them were asking them how they were gonna deliver on what it is they were gonna deliver on. It was very easy to be able to set objectives, but then they would be pinned down specifically.

Yeah. But how are you gonna do this? How are you going to, and one of the things about people who are slightly more neurodiverse is they often can’t tell you how they’ll build that machine as they go along. But if you leave them alone to let ’em get on with it, they will actually over deliver. They’ll deliver better than they’re promising it.

But they can’t tell you beforehand because they’re still building it as they go. And that’s very different than what has been expected in business in the past where, you know, leaders have wanted a concrete path to how this is gonna happen. And if you don’t recognize that. If your leadership can’t adapt to recognize the individual in front of you and how to release their potential, then that is not good leadership.

So I think that’s where leadership’s got to begin to be more flexible going forward as we welcome a much more diverse community. 

Lawrie Philpott: So there’s the question, I guess, for the chief executive or the C-Suite member or somebody who’s on the way up, because Leadership Listening is for those people amongst others who are on their way up towards the leadership positions of the future, how are they gonna learn then about the various elements of neurodiversity? ’cause you’ve got introverts versus extroverts, and what are the other core areas of neurodiversity that they really should be thinking about in terms of, you know, establishing their own relationship with the, with those different types?

Silvia Foxe: Well, I mean. I think for me it’s all about, oddly enough, and this is gonna sound, after what I’ve just said, this is gonna sound like I’m contradicting myself, but actually I’m not. I think it’s about seeing people as people. The best example of this is right, okay. If you look at the schooling system now, the schooling system now is adapting.

So in the past, if we were talking about neurodivergent children, we’d be potentially talking about children who potentially might be on the autistic spectrum or children who might be somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, just for example. Okay. If we’re talking about neurodivergence

Lawrie Philpott: Attention deficit disorder. Yeah?

Silvia Foxe: And degrees of how much H or hyperactivity is in there. In the past, it would’ve been considered to be ADD or ADHD. Now it’s just considered to be the ADHD spectrum with either a very low level of hyperactivity or a higher level of hyperactivity. But if you take that just in a school environment, because formal diagnosis can take a long time because the waiting lists are very long, the schools are now being instructed to provide support or different circumstances for those learners based on how they present, not whether or not they’re formally diagnosed.

Now I think this is something that business, the business arena, needs to learn from, and that is that people are people. Your workforce is your workforce, and there are individuals who will do better some ways, and individuals that’ll do better other ways. But if we are recognizing how this person is presenting, if you have a brilliant accountant or a brilliant whatever, okay, who happens to be maybe a little socially awkward, doesn’t deal well with an overstimulating environment. Prefers to be tucked away on their own. Can’t necessarily specifically tell you how they’re gonna deliver, but always delivers. Let ’em get on with it. Change the way you manage them. Get feedback from them so that your management style fits them, and then your management style, your next direct report fits them and so forth.

That way we don’t need to necessarily label who’s who. We just need to look at the individual and develop our leadership style so that we can respond to the people in front of us. That’s not to say that we can’t have some kind of a sense of groups. People that are great with teams and people who work better on their own.

People who like a loud, noisy environment, people who don’t. There’s always gonna be difference in our group, so we cannot have leaders where one style fits all any more than we can have teachers where one style fits. The thing that teachers and leaders have in common is they are all taking people and they are optimising what it is they’re capable of achieving.

There’s a common link, and that is in a sense what you and I do as well. We lead and we teach, and you know, sometimes mentoring is a form of teaching, but it’s because we have specific skills that are needed in this instance. In that case, we have to lead, we have to be good leaders. We in turn have a duty to lead well.

Lawrie Philpott: Is it fair to say that quite a lot of sort of unhappiness walks through the door? To see you, I think my own view is that there’s an enormous amount of stress at the top levels. Arguably, I think because people are doing too much as CEOs or C-Suite people. Arguably because they self recognize that they’re not as good as they would want to be at fulfilling the role and dealing with all the fast balls that come along and so on and so forth.

So their net position is to find somebody who is really not fulfilled in the happiness sense, which is something that I think is fairly prevalent out there at the moment. And if the world is gonna develop in the way that I think it is at the moment with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, all of that kind of stuff coming down the road fast, then that’s only gonna kind of make for a less happy environment. How does the senior person deal with the sort of happiness quotient? 

Silvia Foxe: Okay, that’s really interesting. So happiness is not a goal in and of itself. Happiness is a byproduct. So I think no one is happy all the time and no one should have the expectation that they will be. Happiness is an ephemeral thing.

You know, if we had it all the time, it would cease to be happiness. It would become the norm very, very often, or not very often, but at least a good percentage of the time. Happiness is the quality of not being unhappy. Sometimes the greatest happiness is that nice midline of contented, but in order to be able to get to that place, we have to go through the doorway of fulfillment.

And my view of fulfillment it’s a gorgeously, kinesthetically onomatopoeic word. In other words, fulfillment – to feel filled full. It’s the absence of that empty space where we feel like we’re together with ourselves. Ultimately, happiness is born out of that. Happiness is born. Sometimes it’s a bubble that pops quickly afterwards.

We don’t ever get to hold onto it. It’s a bit like a soap bubble, but we can keep generating more. We have to keep moving through our life, and we have to have an understanding of what or who we uniquely are and therefore, which things make us happy. I mean, if you were to ask me, you know, well, what makes a person happy?

Well, who’s asking? It’s really comes down to who is the individual. There is no one recipe for happiness. It’s very person specific. So a big part of what it is that I do is help people figure out who they are so that they will know what it is they want, so that they will know what skills they then need, because the skills are relevant to what it is they wanna do with them.

Nobody collects tools for the sake of having them in the box. You have to know what skills you want, what tools you want. You have to know what you wanna achieve with that, and when you achieve the things you set out to achieve for your own sake. Happiness is born out of that, but you will not get to keep it. You will not get to hold onto it forever. You will have to keep doing things in order to keep getting happy, and those goals will change as we change and as we age. Our wants from life are different, but ultimately, you know, I use a lot of chess analogies. When I’m working and I use the chess pieces as a metaphor because I think chess is a really good metaphor for life sometimes.

It’s very strategic. It’s, there’s no real war. Ultimately, you know, nobody really dies for me as well. The two different sides you’re talking about the two different colors on the board. You’re talking about motivation, you know, drive and ambition when the game is played. Ultimately the queen and the pawn, they both go in the same wooden box when the game is played.

And so what is happiness? It comes down to what matters to you. Whether it’s we’re talking about just human beings, whether we’re talking about leaders, whether we’re talking about people being led, whatever it is you are looking for, happy is the byproduct of you achieving it. But in order to achieve it, you have to know who you are and what you want.

So it raises the question of what does good look like and what is enough? Very often we’ve talked about the fact that, you know, leaders are often doing too much. Well, don’t you think there’s a bit of a culture of I must be seen to look busy, otherwise people will think I, I dunno what I’m doing. Well, we don’t necessarily always have to be busy all of the time.

I always think great leaders are leaders that have set their organisation up so well. They can afford to be missed. You know? 

Lawrie Philpott: Agreed. Absolutely. 

Silvia Foxe: And leaders don’t need to be glued behind their desk. You don’t want to be irreplaceable, otherwise you’ve got dead men’s shoes. You’re gonna be stuck behind that desk forever.

What about what you want next? You’re not gonna want this forever. The minute you are in that chair, start figuring out who’s gonna replace you so that you can set yourself free and move on. Legacy is not what people used to think it was being irreplaceable. You wanna be replaceable. Leave your mark in a different way.

Lawrie Philpott: So Silvia, one of the things that occurs to me when I see people in the general coaching process is that I’ve got two different people in a sense. I’ve got the Grand Fromage in the office, whether that’s a man or a woman, chief executive, male or female, and I’ve got somebody else then outside the world of work, ’cause there’s another life, a home life, and very often I think there’s merit in the one liner.

Nobody calls me sir or madam if it’s the chief executive at home and that chief executive can be going home in the evening and finding they’ve got. A 16-year-old daughter or a 16-year-old son who’s giving them hell for one reason or another. And they’re certainly not the chief executive then. 

Silvia Foxe: Well, yeah, absolutely.

And as you well know, over the years, not only have I spoken with a lot of our leaders, but I’ve also spoken with a lot of their partners and you know, whichever one has been CEO of the household all of this time is certainly not retiring just because the other one is. So, yeah, that’s very often the case.

There is no sir or madam, and again, down to the 16-year-old. I mean, very often they end up being the right madam or sir in the household at 16. I know from my own adolescence who was running our house for a while. But again, it’s one of those things where it comes down to a question of what is and isn’t appropriate.

You know, when the chief exec puts on their business clothes and walks into the office, then I think what they’re doing is they’re taking those skills with them and that it. Should also be possible when leaving the office to leave some of those skills behind and enter as a private individual into your own home.

Much as, for example, if you opened your own wardrobe, you would see that there are a bunch of suits and then hanging next to them, there might be the odd Hawaiian shirt and a pair of bathing shorts, and it’s a question of them all being congruently you. But at different times, there are many versions of us and I think we have to have a professional version and we have to have a personal version. But it would be really good if all of our leaders could remember that they are first and foremost people. They are people with this skillset. And when they’re dealing with other people to remember that they are also fundamentally people.

They are dealing with people. And the whole principle of leadership is it’s all about the people that are being led, because without those people, what is leadership and what is a leader? 

Lawrie Philpott: It might just be somebody who’s going for a walk and looking over their shoulder. There’s nobody following them.

Silvia Foxe: Precisely so.

Lawrie Philpott: Silvia, as we come towards our close and we look towards the future of leadership, then what are the kind of things that a leader who’s in the making at the moment, or one that’s there at the moment, whether it’s male or female, what are the kind of really important things of what you do and what you’ve seen and the highlight, the high points of.

This wonderful conversation this morning. Thank you. 

Silvia Foxe: Oh, you’re welcome. I mean, okay, so in a sense, if you’re asking me what can I leave you with in summation, I’d say that leaders, emergent leaders, or even actually leaders who are in situ at this point in time, should really be considering the level of comfort they have with their own identity.

Being able to be honest with themselves about who they are. You know, I liken it to empty your pockets out completely on the table. Some of the stuff you have in there is gonna be valuable. Some of it’s gonna be rubbish, some of it is gonna be stuff that you might think is rubbish, but actually, if you acquire a few more skills and add it to that, you’ve got some really workable good bits.

Don’t be afraid to empty your pockets out and look at everything that you are made up of. We’re not just the cherries on the tree, we’re the whole tree. You know? So get good with who you are and be prepared to be really honest with yourself. Have an idea of what good looks like, and more importantly, what it will feel like when you get there.

So you know how to recognize it in terms of what skills should they have. Well, it’s the same thing, I guess, for emergent leaders and leaders in situ develop. Your social intelligence improve your ability to communicate. Pay careful attention to the people who are talking to you, the people who are directly reporting to you.

Listen to what they need from you. Don’t just give them what you have. It’s a bit like, it’s the old sales motto, isn’t it? Are you gonna sell what you have or are you gonna sell what people need? Well, leadership is much the same way. You know, lead where people need leading and give them ownership where they’re ready for that ownership. Don’t just give it to them because you think they’re ready. That’s how over promotion happens. People will fail you. They have no other way to moderate your expectation of them down to one they can cope with. Those are probably the most important points that I would say, but you know, these are people leading people, so let’s keep it real.

Lawrie Philpott: I fancy that we may well be having more conversations because I think Leadership Listening people having heard what we’ve said today, what you said today are gonna want to ask specific questions and come back in, and I think we’re going to have future conversations. But in closing today, a couple of three things right at the end.

Your secret passion, Silvia. 

Silvia Foxe: Okay, so you heard the word secret then, right? Lawrence? I think it should stay that way. Next. 

Lawrie Philpott: That’s too clever by half your pet hate. 

Silvia Foxe: I think that would have to be an excessive certainty, married to insufficient curiosity. 

Lawrie Philpott: Marvelous and advice to your 20-year-old self. And this can’t be secret.

Silvia Foxe: Be more present. The worst day in the world is only 24 hours long. Unfortunately, so is the best. 

Lawrie Philpott: Silvia, what a great conversation. Thank you so much. I think we’re gonna be talking again, and I hope it’s in this mode. Thank you ever so much. 

Silvia Foxe: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Byebye Laurie.

​