Kim, Erin and Jonathan Clark - Leading Through

behaving and organizing. A living paradigm that is flexible and adaptive . Today's book is a proposal for that new paradigm one wherein we are all leaders or at least can be, this is the soul heart and mind of leadership.

The new paradigm is designed to activate them throughout the organization this is what our guests call, leading through it is a very important book written by former dean of harvard business school his business school professor son, management consultant daughter , it is a pleasure to welcome all three of those authors of leading through activating the soul heart and mind of leadership, kim jonathan and erin clark. Welcome to the show

end with kim . i love the great adage of innovation that innovation happens at the intersections, it's the intersections of both your different disciplines and what you've seen both the challenges and the opportunities Erin maybe we'll start with you.

It's given me a living laboratory, if you will to look at this challenge of leadership. And I think that that experience is what I brought to this book is the opportunity to, to see that play out in so many different contexts.

And to recognize that there's To see it work so well in some situations and then fall apart to see it not get traction and not be able to see leaders and executives and organizations struggle, to find my own sense of frustration as a leader, as I've grown and taken on increased responsibility in the organizations that I've been part of.

And then just in life to bring the experiences of my own life and wrestling with that dynamic between living life and the challenges that life brings and, and, and, and work and the trade offs that you make, and how do you address all of those challenges, as a leader and, and try to create value for yourself and for the communities you're part of, for the organizations you're part of.

And I think I always tell the story about how did we come to write this book in terms of we talk shop as a family. And it went from family dinner conversations or party conversations. And then we started to see that there were these things that we would share that we and we'd seek each other out, to share them and, and wrestle with these challenges. And then we started to see patterns.

And, and so it became interesting to think about each of our different perspectives on a common issue that we were each seeing and that there might be something powerful there.

I just became so confused as to why so many healthcare organizations can do these unbelievable things, perform miracles even, while others just flounder and, and are just terrible. And so I spent a lot of time studying that issue , and doing empirical work, right? Using data to try to uncover what's going on here. And I just kept coming back. To the concept of leadership and and that pushed me in a direction of really trying to understand how much do leaders really matter, right?

That's actually a question. I think for most people, it's intuitive, right? Leaders matter. But in the academic world, there's actually this whole. component of organization theory, people who make the argument that leaders don't matter. Actually, everything else is determined by other things and that leaders play a largely ceremonial role.

And so I became interested in that and explored that, that issue and not surprisingly discovered for myself that in fact, leaders do matter and they matter a lot. But maybe not in the way that you might, you might think, naturally we're not talking about where we're not only talking about executive leadership. We're not just talking about the CEO or other C suite folks. What we've found is, , the kind of leadership that matters is the kind of leadership that permeates an entire organization.

Organizations of all kinds, right? Families teams, companies, communities, governments, , the organizations that really thrive, that perform their very best produce wonderful outcomes are those in which leadership permeates every unit, every corner of every unit. And, where that leadership helps the people in that organization to thrive, because at the end of the day, we've found that it's thriving people that create thriving organizations. And, and that's what I brought to this book.

And, and I hope it's part of the message that comes across and what we've, put together. aidan_1_08-02-2024_150023: will your your deep research send me down many many rabbit hole so i took a lot longer to read the book that i should have because i kept going to the footnote so that's you that's you that's on you. But thank you. You had this huge research and massive footnotes for each of the chapters as well.

So I, I thank you for that kind of Kim for you, you have been a leader for, of many organizations, but I thought we'd start actually for you in a different way, because the Genesis for you actually began many decades ago 1979 on a beautiful spring day in Detroit, Michigan.

But what was really striking was that people who worked on the line, on the assembly line, everything they did was basically choreographed by people in the industrial engineering group who were not on the floor, they're upstairs somewhere. They had about a minute to accomplish their basic tasks. And everything was choreographed. We then had the opportunity to see them, meet people and talk to people and learned what they did outside of work. It was astonishing.

These were people running the local parent teacher organization, their schools, they're running they're managing the soccer team or the baseball team, or they were restoring boats. They were, fixing up new cars. They're very talented and they had a lot of leadership skill, but when they Came to work. It was like those leadership skills became completely unused by the organization. They worked just nothing. They didn't do anything.

And then the astonishing thing was We found exactly the same thing everywhere we went in that corporation. If you go into a marketing group or finance or engineering or product development or R and D, you saw the same thing. You saw this focus on control, on compliance, and even the people, the striking thing was even the people in engineering.

And product Dylan who are creating new things, they had this very heavy structure on top of them and a very bureaucratic process that they had to deal with. And it was really quite remarkable so that was the genesis of, of looking at the, what we call the power over paradigm in action, this legacy paradigm that goes way, way back in history. And one of the things that has had a big impact on me.

And I've been in steel companies seeing the same things I've been in semiconductor companies, IBM, big, huge organizations that are in the technology world, big software companies, and you see exactly the same thing. So that's why we came to see, there's a there's a legacy paradigm. It's like a legacy computer system. It's like deeply embedded, very expensive, hard to change. And people take it for granted. This is just how you work organizations.

And I, I think that's one of the things I brought to the book is a, is a recognition that we were all immersed in this paradigm. We go to school, like your elementary school is run like that. And universities are run like that. And so we're all, all immersed in it and we need to change it. And fortunately, we've had some experiences. I had a lot of experiences being a leader myself. So has John. And so was Erin. And we took those experiences and we realized that we.

Had run counter to that legacy paradigm. Our feeling about what was right to do in an organization was to do something very different. And we began to understand and explore. And what's happened in the book is we've gone back and look at our experience, at our research, at our practice, at all the companies we've observed. We've been inside. I think if you make a big list of all of the, all of the different kinds of industries there are, we've been in most of them.

either writing cases, doing research, doing consulting. And so we've had this broad experience, pulled that together and then tried to articulate. What's this new paradigm that we think really makes a difference? And that's what became the book. And it started about six years ago, just in conversations with each other about maybe we should write a book. And I'll tell you, one of the great joys of my life has been to write a book with my children.

Cause I knew these people when they were teenagers, and if you'd said then, Oh, Kim about. 2025 years from now, you're going to write a book with these people. I thought you gotta be kidding me.

The one best way about Fred , Winslow, Taylor, and Taylorism, it's about the scientific matters, which is the, the, the bloody problem. , why we've had this power over paradigm because it was seen as the best way for efficiency, et cetera. And I just wanted to point out one thing, Kim, you mentioned there about , the automotive, industry, and. I still ask people today about this paradigm and they will say that, Oh, well, it's needed in manufacturing.

And you prove that's not the case with a great case. So you have CEMEX , in the book John, I'm sure this was your one Cleveland clinic as well, where people think there needs to be a hierarchy in somewhere like healthcare, which you've proved isn't the case , but because Kim, you said this, each of you share.

Your personal story of the old paradigm erin you with a client john yourself driving change and kim with byu idaho pathway program, maybe we'll share this because again i think this is great for context and as you know you talk very much about context and information and get it right from the start to help people understand what the vision is so let's get this in first and then we'll get to the paradigm.

They had spent a year preparing, going to school, taking courses and got good grades and they qualified to matriculate in a degree program or a certificate program in the university, but they drop out. And so we thought, what, what's going on? So we began to investigate and discovered that whereas the pathway program for them was very easy to access online, It was very simple, very friendly. When they got to university, it was like a whole new universe.

And it was incredibly difficult to navigate. For example, I'll give you one simple example. Everything they encountered was designed to support students on campus. And these students were online. Many of them lived in foreign countries. So they'd get a prompt. From the system would say, go to the registrar's office and sign this document. What? Because the registrar's office was in Rexburg, Idaho, and they were living in Ghana. It's just ridiculous stuff like that.

So we had to go to work and, we discovered that there were just this, all these bureaucracies, set of rules that had been designed over the years and years. to control what happened on the campus. And we just were immersed in this thing and we decided this can't happen. So two things happened. One, we changed it. For the pathway students and eventually create their own information system and then connected it to the university seamlessly so they don't have to deal with it.

And then we went to work on the university to change that structure. So it became much simpler, much easier to use many fewer rules and ending up trusting the students. That was the key element that changed. So for me, that was an eye opener. That even in a wonderful place, and that's a wonderful university, that paradigm , was there we needed to, we needed to work on to change it. And we did.

And it turned out the, the key issue was power at the end of the day. For years, in fact, decades, the department had been mired in a set of power dynamics. that caused different factions in the department to just perpetually be competing with each other for power and control in the department. And it just led people in the department to do all sorts of things that that were unethical immoral, unkind. Lots of backbiting people, I don't know, trying to get in each other's way.

People trying to control decision making processes and it was making people miserable. And yet people didn't, they didn't quite grasp that that was the problem. This is the paradox of the power, power over paradigm is that people think that power over is the way to get things done. And in fact it, it perpetuates itself because you can use power in that way to get some things done. But in reality using power in that way is self limiting because you're going to make people miserable.

And what happens when people are miserable, they disengage. And that was the story at UTSA when I took over as chair. People were just disengaged. People, in fact avoided coming into the office. And so we set ourselves on a path and I, I got a number of my colleagues to work with me to, to try to change those dynamics and bring the faculty together to create a set of values and expectations for people and to create a vision of what we were trying to become.

And it was a lot of work and, and it took a few years to, I think, really bear fruit, but. But it worked. And I think now that department, our department is, is a wonderful department. In fact, we, we became an exemplary department when the university decided to stand for our one status from the Carnegie. Institute. And and so anyways, it I think it's a, it's a, it helped me solidify in my mind.

Cause this was all actually happening while we were working on the book that helped to, to solidify in my mind that the paradox of, of power over and, and really the, the detrimental negative effect that it can have aidan_1_08-02-2024_150023: That's elements and now i know who peppered the book with sports analogies as well there's a lot of them in there there's a i don't know if you saw this there was a speed skater i think she

was chinese speed skater and she used a totally unorthodox approach to win. In the olympics you want to go just the other day in the olympics and she just went early to win the race like and she end up laughing everybody and she was she looked like she was last but she had locked them all and they just couldn't catch her cause she ran so early and it reminded me of.

The bravery to break the mold and that's what you really did there because you can get results by following what everybody else does in sports. I've had coaches that come in new coach comes in and there's a huge fear for them to break the mold of what everybody has done.

They also need the support of a higher level like a board or our colleagues to go look this is gonna take time there's a huge step back before we take a few steps forward that's a huge challenge for people as well because you can you said, get results by hammering down milk the cash cow don't invest in the future etc that paradox.

Is is a huge challenge maybe before we go to erin and erin's experience of the power over paradigm you might share that because that would have been difficult for you i'm sure, Very difficult. At the end of the day, or you have to change people's mindsets. It's a mindset shift that has to take place. And they have to have to see and understand, not just the detrimental impact of power over, but also the beneficial effects of, of. a different way.

And at the end of the day it, it actually didn't, it turned out to not be that part of it turned out to not be as difficult as I anticipated because people, people want to be happy. And when people are not happy and you, and you help them to see why they're not happy and you show them, a better possibility, they, they get excited about it and they love it. And they, they want. They want it and they are willing to do hard things in some cases, to get it.

And and that, so that's what, that's what, that's what we were doing it at UTSA and people were very happy. I had, I had a a really important experience, a very simple experience last year when. One of my most skeptical colleagues, one of my most skeptical colleagues came up to me after a meeting and actually, this was a department meeting in which we, we had the best attendance we'd ever had. Department meetings for years were attended by 10 or 12 people. This, this meeting had 35 people at it.

She came up to me and she said. You were right.

And I, I gave talks about how, look, if we invest in each other and take time to work together and actually help each other and work together, Even at the expense of our own work in the short run, eventually we'll create an environment that's so powerful. All of us will be more productive than we would have been had we behaved selfishly. That was really, really hard for a lot of people to grasp. And but the parts of the school that really got it actually it works. It works.

It's a much better environment. You're more productive, actually. So I had, when I left the school, I got a letter from the most skeptical guy and he wrote me a little note and a little letter. And he said, I just have to tell you, when I first heard you talk about that, I thought, am I at Harvard university? Is this guy crazy? Like, what is he talking about? And they said, but then later I decided I'm going to try this.

Not just at school, but I'm going to try this in my personal life, my family, so forth. He said, I just have to tell you, you were right. It works. And I've never been happier. And I'm so grateful that you taught me that principle. So the principles are true, actually. And when you practice them, good things happen. It happens. And that's part of the message of the book, that leading through is what you want to do.

As you adopt these ideas, it's have the courage and the strength to just move it and move it until you hit that point and all of a sudden it just develops its own momentum and it's awesome because what happens, this is, this is one of Erin's phrases, but what happens is a thriving human being is a powerful force And when you get a bunch of thriving human beings working together, it's absolutely incredible what happens. It really is.

So what we say is the legacy paradigm and the power over paradigm doesn't mean those organizations never do anything. Because they do things and they, they improve and they deploy stuff and things happen, but the potential in them is so much more. That's what this paradox is about.

And this, I just sent a, and she says, hi, by the way, Wendy Smith. I sent her an excerpt from your book because she just wrote a book called both on thinking the power of, yeah. And I was talking about the, I sent her this and I said, this, this will speak to exactly your point that there's a trade off between a certain amount of control. And then unity. So how do you actually, how do you, how do you create unity and freedom ? And it's really, really difficult.

That unity, freedom paradox is actually throughout the book and it's something that can be achieved. And we'll come back to that in a moment, but I just wanted to just remind our audience. We'll come back to that. That is such an important element, the way I think of you all now is you've created this lens and now you see it everywhere. Scott Anthony, was telling me that one of the things, Christine Clay Christiansen's, his wife used to laugh about what she said.

I think Clay has an S curve carved into the inside of his glasses and he sees them everywhere. And I was thinking, that's what's happened to you. You've created this power over paradigm framework I should say, leading through paradigm framework. And now you see it everywhere. And Erin, you see it. not only in your own life and in your own organization, but we are clients all the time.

And a lot of times in consulting, , especially in strategy, the project can can sometimes be short and, this was a situation where we were in it for a little while. So we had that benefit, which was, an advantage, , being able to actually see some of these dynamics start to play out and recognize that while we weren't actually there to solve this particular issue.

That I highlight in the book, , that we had an opportunity by, being there to, to support that, because it was, it was important to the overall outcome that we're trying to create for that plan. But what we saw was a new leader, new to the organization, also new to this particular area, coming in, inheriting a team from somebody who'd been there for a very long time. An organization that was very siloed in its operations.

but entering a new, , area and I'll share because I think it's important. I don't say this in the book because trying to protect, , client confidentiality, but this is a pharmaceutical company entering a new product area, a new therapeutic area. And I think that helped in some respects, because one of the levers that this leader was able to pull was, I think part of the, what allows you to create unity is tapping into.

, The soul, heart and mind of the humanity of people and, , inheriting this very siloed, , very competitive, which I think Jonathan talked about as well, my dad referenced, right? We're very competitive, , high , achievement oriented organization with a, with a pretty clear set of, this is the way to success. And it's a little bit cutthroat. I guess this is what you could say.

, And recognizing that actually for us to, to move into this, this area of opportunity for the organization , was going to require us to do some new things. differently and those things are really things we do well. So how do I, as a leader, how do I get folks to choose , to do that? , when there's nothing structural giving them that incentive to do that.

The other thing I'll mention, I don't know that I mentioned this part in the book too, is that their team was very small, , but they needed the support and collaboration from across a whole other set of areas. This is increasingly true in many organizations, right? Where my span of control or direct authority is very limited.

And so in order to actually get things done and collaborate in the ways that we need , to be effective, I have to partner with and collaborate with a broad set of folks and there was this recognition that there's really, , some structural , and cultural challenges to overcome. And I think the lever that was pulled here among a number of other things, but was really tapping into what some of what Jonathan and my dad mentioned too, is tapping into the, the humanity of those.

People involved , and speaking to a higher sense of purpose. , and recognizing an opportunity to build alignment, not through structure, not through hierarchy or authority or any sort of, typical method that had been in place in this organization, but through , our general desire as human beings to do better. And in this case, save people's lives. And to tap into that and to find the opportunity build momentum around the chance to have a real impact in the world in that way.

And then to tie that back to the individual actions that I as a team member or as a participant in this process have to play. Over time, part of what played out was what we've discussed is a recognition that, , people want to be happy, right? And the dynamics of organizations often set us up to feel like we have to play this game and participate in this. This dynamic , that the way to succeed is to play a certain way to the example that you mentioned.

And I do think it takes incredible amount of courage , to choose to break out of that, , and to tap into something that, , on the surface may or may not have anything to do with the day to day of the work we do. but if we can really if we can broaden the aperture and, and take a step back and really consider, , from a, sense of purpose and meaning, , then I think there's, there's something there.

And I find that that's really , where we can tap into a shared sense of, of alignment, , where , I don't need to have formal authority over a group of people in order , to build alignment. and actually to have that alignment while also giving them the freedom of action to innovate and create in the ways that they need , to create value, , in the ways that they see and take that opportunity. That's, I think what we're, what we're talking about with this, with this new paradigm.

And, I love what you say about putting on those, those glasses and we now now that we framed it, we see it everywhere. And it's true. I see it everywhere. And I think in the book, we, we try to make this point, but it can feel overwhelming. Like, how can I possibly take this on? And at the same time, and I think this example that I share in the book is, , it's actually not that hard.

it's a lot of things if you look at it at the more broad systemic level, but if you look at it just at what's the first step or the first thing that I can, that I can do, , we're all human and we share common, , traits and, and tapping into some of that, I think is where some of this starts. i was thinking about when you were saying that that one of the biggest challenges is the bravery.

what also the persistence of the power over paradigm and by that i mean that, many and many of them are men are still in board positions but they're also over certain age and that age is often from the paradigm the previous paradigm and then even the origin of many managers i'm sure you saw this came in in the factories you visited in the seventies and eighties, were ex-military and that paradigm was very much power over cuz i probably needed to be even more maybe

i don't know maybe it needed to be more but the paradigm is there and then, you have somebody coming in i always think of the case study of paul o'neill the former ceo of alcoa coming in. First big meeting town hall meeting. He announces that Alcoa is going to be the safest company in America. Some stock analysts sold their stock. They're like, Oh, and there's a no job coming in as CEO of the company or sell your stock, this place is going to tank. And then it takes off.

And by focusing on this habit, this organizational habit, and I'm saying that to set up , the challenge is your book talks about very human stuff. heart mind love and they're languages that were not used to in the business world we still have this dominant gordon gecko and wall street kind of character and even if you're an executive having the bravery, like you did jonathan bringing in a new paradigm.

You will have people who are the detractors originally have lots of those skeptics and that's where it takes this immense bravery to step above that and go you know what i'm taking off the mask i'm gonna be human i'm gonna expose my heart i'm gonna make mistakes all this kind of stuff.

Business does not like that I had a chance to speak on some of this this week , and literally said to the audience, I said before I go on to this next section, I'm just going to let you know, this is typically the moment where I start to see the eyes roll in the audience. When I start to use words like love and, and humanity and tapping in really, really the soul, heart and mind, right? We sometimes write specialist sports analogies, we can get over that and, use those still.

But when you add the soul piece to it, it adds another dimension that again, starts to lead into that the walls that I think we've started that this the legacy paradigm is Enabled us to put up it between who we are as human beings and our work selves and our work lives And, , at the end of the day, , we are humans, I'll, I'll share just really briefly this particular conversation that I was part of this week was all about generative AI and the

journey that we're all embarking on in navigating change and transformation and how we work and opportunities to create incredible value with these new tools. And, , depending on how you approach it and how you look at it and I said , to the group that our success in this journey collective as a world society will depend less on our ability to tap into the value of the technology than it will to tap into the value of our humanity.

We have to make the most of our humanities for this to really be successful. You just look at the last several sort of transformative. Gifts that have happened in the world over the last just 30 years that I've been alive. , Are we better off? We can say that the more value has been created in the world because of the Internet and because of cyber, because of cloud and all of these things. And certainly we will likely look at this next AI and say more value has been created.

Wouldn't we really want to also look and be able to say humanity is better off? I don't think we can say that right now about this sort of, the path that we've, I think we can say pretty firmly humanity is not better off. More value maybe, but people? Are miscible. So it doesn't have to be that way. I think that's part of the part of what we're hoping to get across with using that kind of language and really being more human and how we talk about leadership and organizations

So what you've articulated there is exactly why we wrote this book. It's to create a kind of paradigm of leadership that brings about exactly that kind of very productive change for the people. involved for the organizations and ultimately for the society in which they live.

, Erin has a great story that she tells about a colleague, I think it was a colleague who realized one day that he was coming to work and speaking in a different way, literally like using different language and speaking in a different tone and voice at work , than he, he did at home. Maybe Erin, you can, you can share your thoughts about that?

not just I use different words, but my tone is different. My whole way that I show up and present myself is different at work than it is at home. And that really struck me. That for him black man and a black professional, how challenging that, that must have been and must be. I think I'm sure it continues for many of our colleagues.

But it had me also recognize that there are aspects of that that are true for me too, and, and that are true for all of us in some respects and, as we've written this book one of the things that it's really shown me is the opportunity for us to really strip away some of that. It's sort of part of this deeply embedded legacy paradigm, but to feel like you have to really be someone fundamentally different in order to be successful.

Or in order to fit,, in a particular dynamic is to me, part of why we're so miserable.

It's something i feel incredibly grateful now that i work for myself cuz i don't have to put on that mask anymore but i still see most of the planet having to do so. And it really saddens me.

And you know, what's why I love supporting work like this and the bravery to write a book like this as well, because not enough people talk about it, not enough people share it, but we all know it, we all know it deep inside as well, , but my wife said to me, and this is my point in telling you the story, she goes, That's just work and she meant it which was actually incredibly sad she's like that that's the way it is you know you've been lucky you've been you've worked for a sports

club or many over your time and, people wanted to go to work but most people don't and then the other thing i discovered in my research is that people who really hate their jobs have incredible hobbies.

Because they live for the hobby after work and it's like you said about automotive company these people had lives outside and that's what was getting them through the drudgery of the day was knowing that this was at the end of the day and unfortunately that's sometimes that's alcohol for some people.

it's going to the bar whatever it is to drown the sorrows before having to do it the next day as well but i wanted to tell you so because i was gonna be sarcastic about this and go well thank god that paradigms gone and, it doesn't persist in relatively modern in of organizations doesn't happen in place like amazon for example if you talk about this in the book that amazon, had adopted it all these ways.

Absolute efficiency everything is measured i even read recently that they have, monitoring in the vans of the fulfillment guys and girls that to see if they're on their phone and they could be scratching their neck and it will pick up actually they were on their phone so everything is measured, just like Taylorism before jeff bezos as you tell us left.

Amazon he recognized this and he's trying to instill the change of the power over paradigm to a leading through paradigm i'd love you to share this cause this shows that there is Light amidst the darkness.

It's pretty amazing actually, but the human cost was considerable. So that's one part of the story. They also did the same thing in the part of the organization. That's very creative where they're innovating and so forth. And there it was in any way, in some ways, even more cutthroat and. and damaging to people than it was in their distribution and, and fulfillment center operations. But then there's this other part of the story, which is a recognition on the part of Jeff Bezos.

And I think in lots of, lots of other people in the organization that, whereas they had a great run. In their business, the future was not going to be as bright if they didn't change. And he left this sense that leadership is not the hard edge. Pushing people and really crushing people. It's just not the right thing.

And I think you can read between the lines and what he was, what he said is that the words that we need to hear about leadership and Amazon are not only high standards, pressure so forth, they need to be joy and fun and fulfillment and energy at work. And he also, you could read it to say, that's the future. But I think he was also saying, we've done great. We could have been even greater had we had this earlier. And you can see in you don't see a lot of the failures in Amazon.

They don't talk about them that much. They had some very, very good. Productive innovations, , but they had a huge number of things. They tried, it didn't work and , we're pretty significant failures. And I think part of the story is that they've tried to say, like, we're going to, we're going to run this place differently in the future. So it's a, it's an example of the legacy paradigm being deeply embedded.

So embedded in the ethos of organizations that a startup starts at a startup becomes mired in it. And yet, the counter story said, realization, we've got to invest in our people, we've got to lead differently because the future is going to be different.

So Jonathan's a scholar of organizational dynamics but Kim is also the person who brought to light the concept of modularity and modularity is very much at the heart of leading through paradigm, Jonathan, you're going to take us through this diagram that are shown on the screen. With the lens of modularity. And because this is how you get started, this is, as you said earlier on, you can get started. You need to take the first step, and this is a great way to do so.

And unfortunately, Unity wins the battle most of the time because when people start thinking about giving people freedom because they're so mired in the power over paradigm, it's just so hard for them to imagine that they can achieve the integration and the innovation and the outcomes that they seek by giving people freedom. modularity breaks that trade off. It it ends that, , it's possible to end that tug of war using the principle of modularity.

And , we highlight three, characteristics of modularity, that really touch every part of an organization. Those three characteristics are the framework for action. The approach to integration and the power dynamics and the approach to these dimensions of the organization is very different in a leading through context than it is in a , power over context.

The frame framework for action is really about how you design the organization, the role of hierarchy, , how you get action, how you make decisions. In a power over paradigm, the focus, the mindset is control, control through, through compliance. And , this really involves the beliefs that you harbor about people too, right? There's this belief that people are, it's not just that people are slothful or inherently lazy.

It's also that There's this mindset that people can't do their best work and don't really know what to do without the, without the intelligence and decision making capacity of some small group of people in the organization. And Leading Through breaks through that. Leading Through recognizes that there's power and potential in people. People are not a variable to be limited and constrained and managed. People are a source of inspiration and talent and ingenuity.

And Leading Through is aimed at unleashing that. And the framework for action that underlies the Leading Through paradigm is all aimed at unleashing that potential in the people. But when you give people freedom, right there is the risk that things will fray, that you won't be able to retain that unity that you seek as an organization. In fact, unity is the very reason that organizations exist in the first place, right?

Organizations allow us through that unity to accomplish , things that we couldn't accomplish on our own. And so you need mechanisms to integrate. the work that people are doing throughout the organization. And and the key to that in the leading through paradigm is what we call visible information.

, it's an approach to integration that relies less on executive authority and hierarchical supervision and more on shared commitment to values and purpose, shared understanding of the strategy of the organization and and the other elements of the organization. And it, it's a sharedness that results in commitment and people bringing their work together and choosing using their agency. And their talents to to do the work of the organization.

And as, as our reference to power and the power over paradigm suggests, power is a central element of all of this. If you can't get the power dynamics, even if you have a great framework for action and , you're moving in the direction of visible information without those power dynamics, without the right power dynamics, it's going to be a losing battle. And the power dynamics and leading through again are really all about activating the potential, power that is already in people, right?

So it's not just about, I have power, I need to learn how to give it to people. There is an element of that. It's also about understanding that people already have power within them. what we need to do is unleash that power.

If you, for example, have a bad apple, one has snuck into your organization, or you have a colleague who's not pulling their weight you can deal with that again with empathy. And this is a story that you share from the book.

And one of the, one of the principles that's so important in the leading through paradigm is that every action you take, whether it's a decision you're making or supporting people or dealing with problems, you need to do it. With soul, heart, and mind, which means you, you do it in a different way. You don't take action. For example, you might need to remove somebody from, from the organization or help them in some way to get out of the situation there because they're, they're, they're.

proving not to be productive, but you don't do it in a, in a, in a way that creates more darkness in the organization. You just don't you do it in a way that brings more light in and that way you have to treat people differently. The example that you refer to is, is really a, A very powerful experience that I had, which was somebody in my department that I lived in before I became Dean was just, Oh, the only word I can think of is poison. This person was angry all the time.

Cantankerous, contrary and didn't do very good work. And it was, it was like a nightmare for the people who had to work with this person. And it went on and on. And we tried to get help from our HR group and try to figure out what can we do? And, and there was a lot of documentation and there were efforts made to train, to help people and help this person understand this is what we expect and so forth. So it was a lot of work with this person. It wasn't perimetry, but it never happened.

And so I became Dean. And one of the first things I did is I, I talked to the head of HR. I said, tell me about this situation. Like what, what is going on? Why is this? He said, well, fundamentally. We just can't take action because we're afraid of the union. So this was a unionized workforce. And I said, well, what, what do you mean? He said, well, if we, if we get rid of this person, they could, they could sue us, they could Extend this out.

I said, okay, so how long do you think it will take? And he said, Oh, it's about three or four years. It could take three or four years go to court and we could lose. And it costs us a huge amount of money. I said, okay, so you're telling me there's two states of the world. One, we go on, the person leaves, we fire them, and then we get sued and it might take three or four years and it costs a lot of money. Meanwhile, the person's gone.

Or we have this person here for a long time and everybody's dying. I pick the first one. So we've done everything we could to help this person. But this person is not well, something fundamentally wrong. They, they can't be in this environment. It's not good. So they did, they took action and you know what happened? The union leader came back to us and said, what took you so long? Cause they knew they weren't stupid. They're smart. They knew this was a bad situation.

And this person was just not in a good place. And so I learned a good lesson. You gotta be careful. You have to take care of people and try to help them. So we did everything we could to help. But in the end, we had to take action. We should have taken action a year before that because it's been going on for a couple of years and I just learned a good lesson.

You, you'd have to treat people well, be careful how you do things so that you follow leading through principles, but you have to take action because there are lots of people who suffer in the organization if you don't. So they become discouraged. When you don't deal with problems, they wonder like, what are you thinking? You're telling us all these good things, but you're not doing things that we need you to help us with. So that was a, that was a good thing.

And it, it harks back to the fundamental principles that, We were talking about it, Jonathan took us through so well, which is fundamentally, you have a view of people that people are human beings. They're pulled to do wrong. Sometimes they're, they're, they want to do good. And you got to create a context where they choose good. And you help them do that. And you trust them.

And you build relationships with them of trust, and you empower them, not by giving them power, but by activating the power that's already in them, and then training and educating and helping them grow. And when you do that, the organization, they thrive, the organization thrives. That's the point. That, that's the fundamental point. And you create a structure in the whole organization that enables that to happen.

So you get rid of a lot of the barriers to innovation, but you still maintain a structure and a set of principles and values that give people a framework within which to work. Then you give them information about what's going on. How does your project fit with everything else that's going on? And what do you need to accomplish, not only in your own group, your own project team, but do it in a way that feeds the whole. And people, people love to work in that environment. I'm not kidding you.

Once you get a taste, of living and working in a leading through environment. You never want to go back Because you go to work and it's a good place and you go home. Yeah, you're tired. You've worked hard, but you're fulfilled. You're happy. You feel like you're making a difference. You have meaning in your life because you're spending so much time at work. You should be, it should be a meaningful experience. People never want to go ever to that old way.

And that's what happens when leaders get that vision that we can create something here that is so powerful. People never want to leave. And they give us their best all the time. Then it becomes, okay, we're doing this. And then you do what you need to do to bring it about. That's leading through.

I'm sure when I get in touch with you or find out more, where's the best place?

I was showing them what it looked like and the size of the book, et cetera. Authors of leading through activating the soul, heart, and mind of leadership. Kim, Jonathan, and Erin Clark. Thank you for joining us.