This is The Coaching In, a podcast from 3D Coaching. So I'm Su Blanch from 3D Coaching and I'm here today, I'm pleased to say, with one of my colleagues, Mike Williams. So nice to see you, Mike. Could you introduce yourself to us, please? Hi Sue, yes, I'm Mike Williams. I'm, as you say, one of your colleagues doing some part -time coaching with 3D, principally within the church setting. So my background is when I left school, I joined the Royal Marines as an officer.
served with them for about seven or eight years. I then went off to university and studied theology, which was a bit of a strange shift in emphasis. But from that I then joined the National Health Service, becoming a manager and then moving on to be a director and then chief executive of hospitals. And at the same time I was ordained a priest in 1992 in the Church of England and I've worked for the Church of England on a part -time basis. They haven't paid me.
for most of that time, ever since then. When I stopped being a chief executive, I went into the academic life and studied patient safety in hospitals as a complex social dynamic organization and trying to understand how to keep patients safe in such environments. So I like to say I've worked in a number of different types of institutions in this country in times of, shall we say, stress and complexity. which has given me some insights which I now try and pass on as a coach and as a leader.
Yeah, well, so that's a real movement through our country's key institutions really, isn't it? So I wonder then, as you look back and think about the work that you've done as a leader in those organisations, what's... stands out to you as some of the times where you've had some really key learning. I wonder if you can tell us some of the stories that you've kind of wandered through that time.
Well, I think the key thing when I look back over in all the different institutions is it's largely about people and about relationships and having good and trusting relationships and building up trust as a leader. is not always straightforward, but you know when you're getting it and you know when you haven't got it.
In that sense, it's just something innate within the relationship that I find anyway, that you know when you've got someone who's with you and someone who's not with you and therefore you have to work out why are they not worth you, what more do we need to do, how do you build that relationship to ensure that they are. But a key component of that for me has always been the sense of honesty and integrity. and being willing to share my thinking and work getting other people to do thinking as well.
So it's not as a leader, it can't just be you as a leader doing the thinking. And coming back to that point about people, people have huge skills and abilities if you allow them to express them. So I think that's been a key point for me all the way through my career is how do I get other people to engage in the thinking process? and really thinking through the options that might be available to us in complex situations. And so how do you get people to engage with that thinking?
And as you say, there's one component of that, which is about getting them to engage. And then there's another piece, isn't there, about the in complex situations. So, yes, what's your thoughts on that now? Well, my interesting is what if I added up the number of hours I've spent in meetings, I'd be horrified. So a big bugbear of mine is making meetings productive. And one of the things that drives me fairly insane is the usual agenda for meetings is just a shopping list.
So it's got a topic, but that's it. You don't really know what's the question. that needs to be addressed in that topic. So a key thing for me is thinking clearly about if you're having a meeting, what problem are you trying to solve? In what way are you trying to solve it? And what's the question you want the brains around the table to engage in?
And the beauty of working, and I've spent 30 years on and off in the National Health Service is you've got hugely intelligent people there who want to engage and you've got to ask them the questions. Yeah. And sometimes that's got to be quite innocent in the type of questions, so it's got to be quite provocative.
But it relies on you as a leader to do the thinking before you have the conversation and to engage with other people to get them to ask the question, what is the question we need to answer? So a lot of time spending really planning and thinking with other people and... And I think the way to engage them is to say, you don't have the answers. So you need other people to help you. Often leaders are seen to be people who must have all the answers. That's why they're in a position of leadership.
But actually sometimes a leader is about holding the ring. And particularly, as you say, when it gets into the complexity of issues, there is not always a right answer. There might be several possible answers. And... The idea of how you then frame the problem, or you make sense of the situation that you're in, is part of the complexity and part of the way forward is thinking, okay, so there might be different ways of looking at this. How do we get the cognitive diversity in the room?
People have different experiences, people have different, shall we say, ways of seeing the world can be very helpful. So a difficult meeting is... often a productive meeting because you had, shall we say, some differences of opinion. And that's what you need, I think, particularly when it gets to the complexity of situations. But the other aspect is that people quite often want to find a simple solution. And there aren't always simple solutions.
But quite often, if you can really get to the core of the problem, the core of the complexity, there might be something fairly simple underlying it. And that's a real skill, I think, for you to get people to really dig deep enough to understand, you know, what's the underlying dynamic within this complexity? And if we can get to that, then we might find a way through that situation more easily. There's lots that you've said there that I'd quite like to sort of dig a bit in.
I'd love to learn more about getting to the simple solution but I'm going to start by asking you a different question which is about this role of leader that you've described where you don't have all the answers and there's some vulnerability in that I suspect but how do you navigate? the I don't have all of the answers with also giving some confidence to those that you're leading.
And I guess I'm thinking about particularly at this moment in time when none of us knows really where we're heading. How does a leader balance out that I need to give confidence that there's a direction here as well as enabling, well, giving vulnerability and enabling. us all to come up with a solution. There's something sort of about what is it, yeah, my desire Mike is for you to tell me where we're going, you know?
Yes, yes, I once remember doing a course with the Tavistock Institute and talking about psychological safety and sometimes that's about having marker posts on the route. We don't necessarily know where the end point might be, but we might know where the next marker post is. So putting that marker post in the ground for people so they're able to congregate around that or at least see that that is a visible solid platform from which the next step might then be taken.
So I think part of that, and I'm a great fan of the concept of servant leadership, you know, advocated by Robert Greenleaf and others, that sense of you're here as a leader. to be of service and in being of service, people allow you to be their leader. So the sense of that, because you're meeting their needs, as well as the needs of the organization, they give you that trust and allow you to take on that role on their behalf or with them.
But I do think part of the leadership responsibility in that point of uncertainty is having some certainty about the process and some certainty about actually this is what we're going to do and this is how we think we're going to do it. Are we all agreed and happy to make progress on that way? And then stop and review, is this meeting our expectations or do we have to change something? So I think it's something about having that confidence in the process.
I come back to that, the point I made earlier about meetings. Often meetings are poorly structured, poorly led and poorly in terms of the outcome. And if there's some confidence that if you're meeting and it's going to be productive and some clarity at the end of that, then I think that matches that. Well, for me, it holds the ring, as you say, between the vulnerability on one hand and the need for certainty on the other.
Yes, it's a... I see it all around at the moment, that difficulty, that tension, but it sounds like small steps and enabling people to work around one thing rather than have to solve the big answer, you know, get the big solution. Yes, and the other experience I had, and this was a particular experience when I was put in as a chief executive for a hospital that had been really struggling.
And what I noticed in the first few weeks was everyone wanted to revisit the decisions they made the week before. So you'd have a senior management meeting and it was replaying the meeting you'd had last week because there was a real worry that having made a decision that might be a wrong decision. So we better go back and revisit the decision. And that will give us some safety because actually we won't then be making any decisions. So we'll all be okay because no one can blame us.
And certainly in the National Health Service and in what we're going to see, I think, coming out of this pandemic is a huge blame culture coming along. And the last thing you want is people constantly thinking, well, it'd be better if I didn't make a decision because then no one could blame me. So there's something about actually we've got to have the courage to keep moving forward. And that...
That thing that you described in terms of having the same meetings several times feels so very familiar. You know, it's something organisationally, isn't it? In some places where actually, come on, we need some courage. We need to get tracking on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another thing that you said that I wondered if we could just spend a bit of time thinking about is... How to enable people to find the simple solutions? So complex problems, complex situations.
But you were describing if we can try and get people to focus on the simple. Can you kind of describe a bit of what that means and how we might do that? I often use the analogy of birds flocking. When you look at birds and the way they flock, that looks like a hugely complex process, but actually it's a simple rule or two that appears to underlie that complex behavior. And there's a lot of that that we find in nature that actually underneath the complexity, there's something fairly simple.
There's the guiding principle or guiding rules that are there. Now in a social, technical, dynamic human systems, Those things are really difficult to get to the base of. But sometimes if you just stop and think, actually, how do we dig a bit deeper here? If we begin to think, is there something underlying here? Then we might have a chance of discovering it.
If all we can see are the, you know, we can't see the wood for the trees, all we're seeing are the trees, we've forgotten to look for the wood. So part of it is framing the question in such a way, okay, so what's underlying this issue? If we can ask the questions in that way, then we might begin to frame it differently, see it differently. And if we see it differently, we might come up with a different perspective and a different answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the framing of questions is really important. It's the framing of the inquiry. I mean, I was struck. There's a wonderful book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and it's by a chap called... Richard Rumelt, good strategy, bad strategy. And he talks about the kernel of a good strategy, having at its basis, three component parts, really one is the diagnosis, what's going on in this situation.
The second thing is what's the guiding principles you as an organization are going to use that might bring an advantage from your organization to solve the problem. And the third component being, what are the actions that relate? to that. But the point he makes and the point I've in a sense experienced is if you don't truly understand the issue or the challenge that you're facing, then whatever principles or whatever actions you come up with won't necessarily work.
And the other thing I experienced and we had this a lot, various points in the National Health Service is what you might describe as the shotgun solution. So if we fire enough initiatives at something, something will work, but we're not quite sure what might work. We also see that coming from a sense of anxiety by politicians, by society, by the press. The anxiety drives the necessity for action.
Actions are proliferated and we have this shotgun approach of, well, if we just are seen to be doing something, that's better than doing nothing. But actually if we spend some time standing back and saying what's the real issue, what's the real challenge in this, then we might have fewer actions, but those actions would be far more effective and the outcome would be far better.
But we sometimes, quite often, don't allow ourselves the time, or society doesn't allow ourselves the time to really do the thinking about what's the challenge here, what's our diagnosis. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We want to speed into doing something. I guess that makes us feel a bit better or something. It's something like that, isn't it? Sort of urge to do something. Yes, I mean, and that's the anxiety part of it.
We're all, it's natural for us to be anxious in a moment of uncertainty or in a time of uncertainty. So one of the ways we deal with that is we take actions. Yeah, yeah. And in taking action, we feel that's okay. We're doing something, we're being seen. we're doing something that's better than doing nothing. Yeah. But sometimes it's worse than doing nothing. Yes, absolutely.
Yes, I'm thinking of this current moment and how very apt that is, the potential for us to be anxious and to just do stuff. I'm sure that this could well be a moment that typifies that. Yes, I think the face mask debate is a good example of that. It must be better that we're wearing them. Why? Well, because it must be better. Actually, it's better in certain circumstances, but you can just see the social pressures building to do something.
And in doing that, we'll all feel a bit better because we'll feel a bit more protected. but evidence isn't there for that really. Yeah, interesting isn't it? Yeah. And if I can buy a mask that might make me feel better about something. Yeah. I'm also wondering about this kind of current moment in time.
I'm thinking about the leaders, many leaders, whether they're leaders of big organizations, small organizations, a leader of a family that have a lot of anxiety perhaps pushed onto them at this moment. And I just wonder, over your experience, over your many, many years as a leader, I just wonder if there are, if you've got something to tell us about how it feels to be in the moment of feeling really anxious about my role as a leader and what has got you through.
So in times of crisis, I guess, is probably what I'm asking. How does that feel? How did that feel for you? And how did you summon what you needed to, to get through? That's a good, interesting question. I think there's two, two reflections I have on that. One is about being a leader in organizations where there is that, where you are the leader of leaders. And, what you spend a lot of time doing is taking the other leaders anxiety on their behalf.
So you say, I will take that and hold that in a sense. You don't quite use that phrase, but you give them permission to do so, to get on with what they're doing and not worry about it and say, I will take the responsibility or whatever it may be. It's that sense of it's okay. You're not on this. You're not in this alone. we're in this together, I will be there with you as it were.
So that sense of, and I used to make a joke of it, but I used to say I spent a lot of my time as a chief executive in hospitals, wandering around the place, giving people permission to do their jobs. That sounds a bit bizarre, but actually they were always worrying that someone else would have to give them permission. And part of my role was to say, no, actually this job that you have, you have the permission. to do this, this and this.
Please be assured that you have my support, you have other people's support in doing what you're doing. It comes back to that sense of fear that if they seem to be doing something and it's wrong, they'll get blamed. So it's how do you change the culture, which is to be supportive of that. Coming back to the impact on me as an individual, I think part of what I learned in the Royal Marines.
was that having been through what I've been through with that, that nothing else could come near it in terms of psychological pressure, physical pressure, the combination of those two things together. So I knew that whatever anybody threw at me subsequent to that, I could more than cope with. I don't advocate that everybody has to go through what you're... Romering Commander training to get to that point, but I think that's what stood me instead because no one was cycling in my life after that.
Really fundamental stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Okay. Well, it's been interesting to listen to you speaking as a leader, having had so much experience in complex organizations, having crisis. crises that you've been through, how you manage people, you've talked about trust, you've talked about honesty, the diversity, really significant, making things simple.
I wonder if you've got one, this is really unfair to just throw this at you at the end of this conversation Mike, but I just wonder if there's one piece of advice you would offer up to... new leaders right now, something from all of that experience that you would love to pass on. That's a, as you say, a difficult one.
I think it's about trusting other people and I come back to that concept of servant leadership which I think has been, because when I stopped and asked myself the question, what difference does it make being a leader and being a priest at the same time? And I came to the view that actually it's the fundamental values that you hold as an individual and how you... work those through in the way you conduct yourself in life and in your leadership position.
So I took the view that I was there to serve others, but in serving others, if they were allowing me to lead them, that was the role I was being asked to do. How interesting that same thing about permission, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, well, Mike, thank you very much for spending this time with me this afternoon to understand more about all of the great experiences that you've had and the learnings that you've got from that and so on. I've found it really interesting, so I really appreciate that.
Thanks very much, Mike. Thank you for your time Sue. And I wonder if people wanted to get in contact with you, 3D email address, could you tell us what that is? It's mike at 3dcoaching .com. Perfect, great. Well, thank you very much, Mike. Thank you. You've been listening to The Coaching In. Find out more about us at www .3dcoaching .com slash B hyphen developed.