The New Landscape of Leadership || Jeffrey Hull

beta leadershi, a style that values emotion and collaboration. According to Jeffrey, the most effective leaders know which style to lead with depending on the situation. In addition to learning other ways of being, Jeffrey believes we need deleverage perspectives from the indigenous and neurodiverse communities. We also touch on the topics of emotional intelligence, coaching, creativity, and authenticity. This is a really great chat with my friend.

One is that the senior ranks of many organizations, especially global organizations, are much more diverse than they had been until, you know, a decade ago or so. There's more women, there's more people of color, there's more people from all different kinds of cultures all over the world that are part of the global leadership teams of many organizations. So that is a major change that's taking place over time, and it continues to diversify, which is a good thing.

And then secondly, in confluence with that, is this desire for most organizations to be much more nimble, much more agile, much more creative. We have a highly disrupted world these days, with technologies and economic disruptions, and you know, we could talk about all the different disruptions, not even mentioning a pandemic of course, which shifted things for everyone in the world. So you know, the world is that much more complex and the need for creativity and innovation is that much greater.

So having a one stop or one's you know, one trick pony approach to leadership is no longer going to be as effective as what is needed in today's world. And I think you know where I started doing research in this space as a coach is recognizing that over the last five to ten years, my clients were changing and they didn't necessarily want to be coached on how to be bossy, or how to be authoritative, or how to be directive, or how to be alpha as you

might call it. So that started me thinking about what are the other ways of being as a leader. And the emergent theme I call beta is really about building an environment where you hear that you get the best out of everyone. You really try to elevate the performance, the creativity, and the capability of everyone on the team.

And that requires a leadership style that's more flexible that maybe directive may be authoritative at times, but also needs to be consensus oriented, needs to be collaborative, needs to be inquisitive, needs to be a good listener, It needs to be empathic, and empathy is key, and so developing this much more diversified portfolio of capacities and capabilities is really key to success. So I don't think it's either

a it's not beta or alpha. It's, in my world, a development of a flexible portfolio so that leaders can actually choose what's appropriate in the moment or in the situation that we'll get the best out of everyone.

not going to get chosen. People that are naturally more beta are not going to get chosen. So that's one issue. And then secondly, what happens when you want to create an environment where where your goal is creative brainstorming, getting new ideas, new ways of operating. You're not going to get that from a top down, directive approach because you can't you know this because you know we've read your book and self actualization, this is a key theme. You

cannot direct creativity. It doesn't come from being told what to do. It's like you will go into the shower and when you come out of the shower you will have great new ideas.

And like you said, there are times like at the beginning of the pandemic when people were panicking and they were like, oh my god, what are we going to do and how are we going to get work done in this crazy environment? There was a need for some very strong directive. You will be okay, we'll go hybrid, people will work at home, we'll figure it out. You know, those kinds of authoritative leadership styles are useful especially in

an emergency. But it's no longer going to be appropriate, and it's no longer going to elevate all the key talent that you have to ask everyone to be that kind of leader.

very interested in as well. I wotted you very loudly at the recent Better Up conference when you were talking about that on the panel.

You know, I just I don't like that spirit. I want the Alpha. I do neither people with everyone else. You know, there's room for the alpha, you know, oh.

informed tools, methodologies, or approaches for helping clients thrive. For twenty years, I've dedicated my career to rigorously testing ways to unlock creativity, intelligence, and our potential as human beings. Now, for the first time ever, I've compiled some of my greatest insights to bring the new science of self actualization

to the field of professional coaching. This immersive three day learning experience will introduce you to self actualization coaching, an approach intended to enhance your coaching practice by offering you evidence based tools and insights from my research that will equip you to more effectively help your clients unlock their

unique potential. Self Actualization coaching is a whole person approach to coaching that aims to help the client find their most alive and creative center of being, connect deeply with themselves, and become who they truly want to become grounded in

the foundational principles of humanistic psychology. Self actualization. Coaching also draws from the latest psychological science, including the fields of positive psychology, coaching, psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, neuroscience, and the science of creativity. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity. Join us and take your coaching practice to the next level. Register today and get twenty percent off. Don't miss out

on this very special event. Go to sacaching dot org. That's SA coaching dot org and get twenty percent off today. I look forward to welcoming you in December. You cover a whole wide range of different skills that are important in this unpredictable environment that we live in today, the mental, the emotional, and the somatic. Would you mind if we went through this we went through them, and we could start with the mental and why those skills are important?

intentional communication. There's a whole spectrum, you know, when you're thinking about what we would call like a traditional authoritative or alpha approach, it would be very rational, it would be very data driven, it would be very directive, it would be very goal oriented, and all of that, as we just spoke to, is absolutely appropriate under certain circumstances where you want to set a marker for where you want to go to in the future, what you want

to accomplish, having a clear vision, having a strategy, all of which is absolutely appropriate. But there's a spectrum that includes a whole other, more diverse approach, or an expansive approach that I call the beta side of things, which is really more positive curiosity, slowing down and really listening into the space of hearing all the voices in the room. Because sometimes you're mavericks, you're more creative. People tend to be maybe introverts, they're not quite so quick to speak

up against authority or in the face of authority. So that is where the decision making process can be more collaborative and more consensus oriented. And same thing with your communication style. If you're purely rational and data driven, then at some point you're going to kind of lose your audience because you're not going to be very inspirational. You know, people want to know why, what is the purpose, what are we driving towards, and what's the goal, what is

the reason why we're doing it, what's the value? And so that requires a storyteller, someone who can share their personal perspective and why it's really valuable for us to do X, Y and z, and maybe be able to tell a story or a metaphor. So those are the kinds of more flexible style of communication, which is really aspirational, you know, sharing why we're doing what we're doing. And again it's not an either or proposition, it's really almost like expanding the instrument as a leader.

And you know, if you want to create an environment where you have more creativity, people are more relaxed, a little bit more mindful than the you know, you have to create a safe space where people feel they're able to be calm, they can regulate their feelings and not

feel like it's an intense decision making rational experience. And that again requires a certain flexibility in a leader to know how to basically regulate their own emotions, but also to create a space for others to be expressed, to be able to feel safe enough to disagree or come up with a creative way of approaching things. So in

the emotional regulation or the emotional intelligence space. It's really crucial for leaders to have this more diverse or more expansive approach that we're talking about.

is I think it's quite novel. You know, a lot of coaching programs are so doing oriented and and maybe and you would say, I'll you know, and so the idea of emotional intelligence, you know, it can be very alpha. You know, an alpha can can have it can use a little bit of emotional intelligence. Can you tell us a little bit about about how you define emotional intelligence.

all IQ, it wasn't EQ. So you know, Dan and his colleagues, there's a number of them, Richard Biasis as I mentioned, and others that have brought that to the public sphere. I think have a real have added a lot of value. I personally am a big fan of the EQI two point zero emotional intelligence assessment, which I think goes back to Peter Sellaby and his colleagues originally.

But what I love about it, and it's funny because I was just coaching someone today using it, and it was a physician, a very rational surgical surgeon, and you know, he took this emotional intelligence assessment and he was a little confused as to how it could be so complicated.

And but what I shared with him, which I think he found valuable, was to break down the leadership activities that he's involved in leading a team right of nurses and technologists and anesthesiologists and all these other practitioners, all these other clinicians, and recognizing that in almost every single thing they do, there's an emotional component. You never completely escape the feelings in the room, the feelings of the people on the team, the feelings that you bring as

the leader, whatever. So emotions are always at play. And what this assessment does is it breaks it down into multiple categories like self awareness, self expression, independence versus interdependence, a sense of social responsibility. One that you would like, which is self actualization. Whether you feel like what you're doing emotionally in your day to day world brings a sense of satisfaction and contribution. There's also stress related emotional intelligence.

There's problem solving, like how do you solve problems when there's emotions in the space, and then things like self esteem and optimism. All of these are components. And what my client, who tends to be very rational obviously as a surgeon, loved about it was because he could actually divide. He could see how the emotional components are so key to all of these different activities as a leader, and

so it made a whole lot more sense. For example, when we talked about problem solving, his initial reaction was, well, you solve your problems with rational thought, with data, with analysis, And I said, yeah, that's always true, but think about when you're interacting with a patient another human being, or when you're talking to your spouse or you know, you're making decisions in your life, is it really true that there's no emotional component? And he of course recognized, he

was like, you're right. I'm like, I'm always trying to think about the especially with my patients, like how do they feel about the data that I'm sharing with them? So, yeah, problem solving is an emotional activity anyway, Just to summarize, I mean, I think there are ways that we can break down intelligence into very practical, useful domains that then

can be coached and developed. And I left out probably one of the most important ones, which is empathy, right, developing your sensitivity to what's going on with other people. So those are just examples.

construct Right. But what's interesting about this spectrum we talk about alpha versus beta in the space of authenticity is that, again on the more authoritative or alpha side, you have authenticity that's very competent and strong and stoic, and you want that quality and a lot of leaders at certain times.

But then think about the other end of the spectrum, which is humility, vulnerability, relatability, and trust, and those are also key components of authenticity, but they require what we often think of as the softer side, right, And so the key to success is developing the entire spectrum and then being able to recognize when it's appropriate to be vulnerable,

to share your humanity. And what I always find is interesting for clients, you know, when I'm working with executives, they sometimes struggle with this because they think that if they share vulnerability, or if they open their kimono and share transparency about their own fears or their own insecurities, that they will be viewed as being weak or less powerful.

And the irony is the opposite is true. They'll be trusted even more, they'll be respected even more, they will be followed more willingly because their humanity is one of the core elements of their leadership capability. Right. People love to follow someone who's both strong but also human.

of r of how we show up. And the reason it's so relevant in the space of collaboration and engagement is because the neuroscience studies and other research that's been done around the way human beings interact with each other is that a lot of what happens between people that creates a sense of trust, connection, relationship is based not on the words, not on verbal but on your physical presence, your nonverbals, your eye contact, your smile, which I don't

do enough of. I think you know, all of those kinds of things. And even in zoom calls, you know, I coach my clients make sure they show their hands so that they don't look like they're just like from the neck up right. So it's all of those kinds of things that are really crucial to creating an environment of safety and connection and trust. And if you're alive, like in a room with people, then you want to

pay attention to the energy of the space. And I always give a simple example, which is the difference between a long, rectangular power oriented table versus a circle. And when people sit in a circle, there's no automatic boss, there's no automatic leader, so people relax a little more, they feel like they're part of a community, Whereas if you're sitting at a boardroom, there's someone at the head of the table that automatically physically creates an energy of power.

So that's just one example, but those are the kinds of things that leaders need to think about when they start to do to reflect on their somatic presence.

time oriented structure disciplines. You know, you have a perk chart you want to follow to get productivity, whereas creativity, as we mentioned earlier, requires a much more fluid space where people are more relaxed, they allow themselves to have daydreaming and kind of see what comes up. And the engagement space that creates one or the other. They're very different. They're very different. And I've worked with clients with leaders that tend to be leaning in one direction or the other.

And I think I wrote a couple of case studies in the book of both examples where I had one leader who really wanted to have it. He had a very creative team that was in the media space, but his team never got any projects finished. They always came up with new ideas. They were constantly brainstorming, and it's because he was so flexible and fluid and created this wonderful creative environment. But then they didn't have enough discipline

to get the work done. So he had to inject some alpha productivity approaches to his creative space and vice versa. You know, you have the highly productive, like get the work done kind of leader, and then he demands his team to be more creative and they all kind of look at him like, we're totally burnt out. You want creativity, we're exhausted.

in that space. But she started that project many years ago by studying the operating rooms at mass General Hospital and what was the reason that some of them worked well and some of them didn't. And there were a lot of more mistakes in the operating room than was acceptable. And the fundamental key was whether or not people felt safe enough to speak up. And that had to do with the leadership style that was created in the environment.

And so if you extrapolate that research that she did into other organizations where you want to create collaborative space, it starts with psychological safety and people having permission to say what they think and not feel like they're going to be chastised or criticized. And then I think the second component, and I spent some time on this in my book, is to have leaders recognize the difference between being an advisor and a delegator and a coach, and

they need to do both. There are times when you need to delegate and advise and give direction, but if you want to create collaborative spaces, then you also need to coach. And coaching is not about having power over other people and being directive or advisory. It's really about creating more of a sense of equality, right, And so asking questions and listening and and sort of making the space equal among people so that everyone participates. And that's

more creates a coaching dynamic. So those are some of the key elements of creating the collaborative energy.

like like using psychoanalysis for yourself. But I think the new age, the newer version of it is self coaching. So what is self coaching?

his whole fundamental theme was individuation. Right, that life is a lifelong process of first developing an ego as a child, as an adolescent, as an early young adult, you develop your ego, which is giving you a sense of competency, capability, being able to operate in the world, right, And you get that mostly from your family, traditional parents, your family system,

your school system. But at a certain point later in life that can become problematic because it becomes rigidified and you get sort of stuck in your personality, your belief that this is the way the world is, this is the way I am, and so young would always say, you know, part of your challenge in life is to get over your childhood right and to constantly be looking for opportunities to break through into what he called like

a more permeable transcendent space. And I think that that it's it's interesting because that's from like twenty thirty forty years ago, but I think self coaching is very much along those same lines. It's recognizing that you're on a learning journey and that you know your personality is not a rigid it's not etched and stone. You know, studies have been done that brain is a great deal of

brain plasticity, that we're constantly growing and changing. And so if you want to develop yourself, you think of yourself almost like a musical instrument, and you learn to see it as a lifelong expansion of your capacities, and you want to keep an open mind, and fundamentally to self coach, you want to create feedback loops. You know, where do you get feedback from your colleagues, from your partner, from

your friends, from your employees. You know, are you willing and open to taking feedback from wherever it's offered, especially if it's done with the best of intentions, But you know that is that is a key element of self coaching is and my my colleague Marshall Goldsmith, who's you know, the number one coach in the world so to speak, you know, and he's a great human being.

where you and I use it all the time. Where you literally whenever you do something, you give a presentation, or you put together a new paper, or you do something you know where you're producting presenting a product of some sort, and you just ask the people you respect, people that colleagues or the audience, you know, people then that you know that you respect their opinion, to give you you one specific thing that you could do even better.

That's called feed forward. What would I if I do it again and I do it even better?

it was just he was, this is really funny. You know, he's just a you know, I assume he's like that sober, but just we were just really funny.

That we now live in a global village. Were literally a global village.

We bring thousands of years of Western civilization and knowledge, but there's also a lot to be gleaned from Eastern approaches, from indigenous approaches, from the wisdom traditions of indigenous tribes in South America, and the Aborigine Aboriginal tribal approaches. I read a book by Tyson Jung Komporda recently called Santok, which I highly recommend.

And then the second one that I brought up that I think is also kind of emerging on the scene is how can we leverage people that have what we call neurodiversity, you know, that are bringing in a wide range of intellectual capacities that may not always look sort of mainstream. They may be and I'm always worried about labels, you know, people that are on the spectrum or autistic

or have aspergers or whatever. You know, it's a little bit of a double edged sword because on the one hand, they need to have some recognition, and our psychology communities have a tendency to diagnose and then label. But it does bring those things into the conversation, which is probably a good thing. But I also want to be careful not to label people and then have them feel denigrated

or judged because there's so much potential. There's so much brilliance, there's so much wisdom, there's so much creativity, and I did share that on the panel. I think that what is it, ten or fifteen years ago, we had the American Disabilities Act in the US and mainstreaming of people that had been left out of work, the work world, the education systems, all of which was really great. But now we need to go to the next level, and we need to not just allow people that are different

into our mainstream systems. We need to leverage their talents and their capabilities. And so this is an opportunity for coaches because I've seen the power of where coaching can really bring to life someone who has perhaps a different way of seeing the world, and it's just powerful, and

I'd like to see more of it. I'd like to see, you know, rather than giving a lot of pharmaceutical approaches to like ADHD and things like that, which may be appropriate under certain circumstances, yes, but I'd love to see more coaching, yes, and brought into those spaces of add ADHD, autism, all of those kinds of things. So neurodiversity is an area that I think is one that we could do better research and also equip our coaches to be more capable and comfortable.

And her name is Lana Yelenev, and she's a Filipino, but she also comes from a indigenous tradition in the Philippines. And what she brought to us was this idea that in many indigenous traditions, if you look at African traditions, you look at North American Indian traditions, you look and I learned from her about the Filipino and digit I

didn't even know there was such a thing. So even I was taking notes, in many of those indigenous traditions, people that are considered odd or unusual, or what we might call even retarded, which is a really inappropriate term, or disabled, right, those individuals are actually included in the community because they bring talents, they bring gifts, and so those indigenous communities actually ask the question, what is the gift that this individual needs to bring to our community?

Why we have someone Yeah, it's like, why do we have someone who has this so called inability or disability? Or different ability in our community? What is there? What is their gift? And that is a wonderful way of reframing what in the West has led to almost a monochromatic approach to normalcy.

politics right now, everyone's ripping their heads off. You know, if you disagree with my political viewpoint, you're dead to me.

You know, it's as opposed to, like, I don't know, like, would it be cheeky to be like, let's say you're a Democrat and you're talking to a Republican, you know, asking the Republican, Oh, what are some of your gifts you can bring to the table with your unique perspective on the matters, you know, like as opposed to just immediately saying, oh, you're a Republican, get out of here, you know, or vice versa, you know, the Republican looking at a you know, a Democrat.

deepest aspiration might be, their deepest desire might be. And at the end of the day, what we often find when we have enough safety created in the listening space, is that as human beings, we all want the same thing, right, We're not really as far apart from each other as we think. I often go back to my political science classes where when they talked about the far right and the far left, and then you realize that the far right enough to go around and they end up being in the same players.

that's a very unique spin on the situation. Can you elaborate in that and kind of us end us here today on a positive hope for humanity?

all of which is incredibly valuable on one level. Yeah, but it's also pointing to sort of a black and white mindset. And if we want to transcend that again, I'm so much of a Jungian. It's always about breaking through the ye you know, the splits, right. If we want to transcend it, we have to recognize that the only thing that keeps us from moving through the fluidity of those dichotomies and bringing them together is fear.

You know, we're afraid of each other. We're afraid we're going to get hurt. We're afraid that we're going to lose something, We're going to lose the Great American Dream or whatever it is. If we can shift our mindset, and this is where coaches can help, if we can shift our mindset to recognize that we're all the same, We're all human beings. We all want to feel safe, we all want love, and if we can love each other across the table, then that opens the energy to listen.

And when we start listening to each other, we begin to realize that we're not really all that far apart. So that's my note of optimism, I guess, and maybe some people will say I'm doing the rose colored classes, but I am an optimist. What can I.

their eyes. But but your perspective is incredibly valuable. And that's and I think that's what I want to highlight today. In this world. There's a great place for there's a great place in the coaching world to you know, it's almost wide open to the coaching world. We need to you know, we need to put this more in there, you know, emotional intelligence and all the things you talked

about today. Seriously, thank you so much for I'm so glad we finally recorded this, and I'm so glad I can't wait to share this with our listeners.

Maslow's work. And I love your sailboat metaphor. And you know a lot of the themes that you write about in terms of self actualization, they just resonate so powerfully with me that you know, maybe there'll be people out there that don't just disagree with us, but I think what we're trying to do is positive for the world, and I think your work also represents that in a really powerful way.