I would like to begin this episode by acknowledging that I am located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and I am privileged and honored to live and learn on the unceded unsurrendered territory of the Anishnaabeg Algonquin nation.
Hello, you're listening to Trench Leadership: A Podcast From the Front, produced byiglen studios, a show for emerging leaders from all professions, to hear from other leaders who have led from the front, made the mistakes, had the triumphs, and are still learning along the way. And now, here's your host, Simon Kardynal.
Have you ever worked at a company that was hitting its goals and making money, but at the end of the day, everyone was miserable and secretly dreaming about becoming a yoga teacher? The reality is that when companies only reward financial performance, their cultures can and likely will devolve into nonstop defensiveness and cynicism, something called Toxic
Excellence. In this episode, we'll hear from Dr. Kim Perkins, a PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology and the author of Winner Take None, where we will discuss the concept of toxic excellence, what it is, how we can recognize it, and most importantly, how emerging leaders can face it head on and use our judgmental and competitive energy in positive ways. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the show. It's great to see
everyone around. And you know, today we have a really great topic, we're going to be discussing toxic excellence. And we're going to be doing that with Dr. Kim Perkins, a PhD in positive organizational psychology, and she's going to discuss with us how that impacts the workplace and how all those things move forward and whatnot, and we're just going to chat about that a little bit. Hey, Kim, how's it going today?
Hey, how's it going, Simon?
Excellent. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks for taking the time for this. I'm in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, I'm in the East Coast, and you're away out in the West Coast. So the time differences are pretty significant. So I really do appreciate you taking that time. Before we get at it. Did you want to take a moment and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at this point?
Sure. So psychology is actually my third career. So first, I was a writer, and editor and journalist. And then I discovered that I had a weird talent for speedskating and took few years off to pursue that as
a professional competitor. And then at the end of that my athletic career as all athletic careers must end, I decided I was more interested in motivation and performance and psychology and so I ended up going to graduate school for organizational psychology and here I am working with organizations and teams and individuals on their motivation and leadership and performance.
You are an author, you've written a book called Winner Take None. And the book you talk about toxic excellence, so, do we want to chat about that a bit?
Yeah, let me tell you a little bit about the book, the book is called, "Winner Take None: Rethinking Competitiveness, for the New
Economy." and it's based on my experiences, both as persons and non-athlete because I was kind of a geeky kid kid who couldn't climb the rope, and then as an athlete, where I became a very rabid avid competitor that lived through this, and then going into work organizations taught, you know, I studied this as part of my PhD, I studied interpersonal competition and what people love about it, and going into organizational work, the places where it doesn't really work for us to have this
game metaphor that guiding our business endeavors and our leadership endeavors and so I consider all of that and I talked to a lot of really interesting people and I have an interesting case studies in this book called, Winner Take None. That will be out in August.
That's fantastic. Congratulations. Is this your first book?
This is my first book, I've been wanting to write this book for about 10 years, and then the pandemic happened, and I got the chance to really just sit down and do it.
Oh, that's fantastic. Congratulations. I'm thinking about when we're discussing emerging leaders, you know, I would imagine that quite often, the new leaders, they're feeling that competition amongst inside themselves, you know, around their peers inside the team, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to do all of this and that stress has to be difficult, and in a lot of times, I would gather, probably don't even realize they're doing it to themselves. Is it something you might agree with?
Oh, I would definitely agree with that. So a lot of times when we bring a competitive frame with us, it's something that we we use to kind of simplify what we're trying to achieve. So we don't necessarily have to be the best ever the world has ever seen. But as long as we're kind of doing better than some of the people around us, well, we can feel good about what we're doing. And so that's really helpful for us reducing our own anxiety in a complicated
situation. But the problem with that, though, is that it doesn't, if we're not doing so, well, if we're learning something and we're floundering a little bit, then we can be end up being really unnecessarily hard on ourselves, and judging ourselves according to our where we stand with others on some made up scale of, you know, scale of our own making, as opposed to something that really
matters to other people. And I've heard from many people who were very clearly successful in business, saying that it was their own head that was really messing them up, because they were making it very complicated for themselves trying to be the best all the time. And at the same time, that's something that people really do in the beginning of their careers, because it's that that's the quest time when we're thinking, as we're merging as leaders, can we do it? Can we do it well
enough? can we do it well enough that people will want to hire us to do this? I'm almost done a master's degree at this point and it's a master's degree in leadership.
And one of the themes that we kept hearing a lot amongst ourselves inside my cohort was the story that we tell ourselves, We're not good enough for this, We're not ready for this, we're, you know, whatnot, and we just build it up or, and, and if in the event that a mistake was made, we have a tendency to turn that tiny little mistake into this massive balloon of shame and just disgust over in ourselves.
Yeah.
There's nothing there. It was a mistake. And people recognize that. Do you have any thoughts on that at all?
Oh, absolutely. You know, I see competitiveness as being another way of doing perfectionism. So that, you know, in competitiveness, you are seeing small vulnerabilities as problematic, because they might be things that completely go over other people's heads, or that people don't have any will to exploit, you know, when you're when you're doing athletics at a high level, any mistake you make is going to be noticeable and exploitable by
other people. But that's not really the same in leadership and in business, because that, you know, that's 24-7, when we're doing sports, it's just a very temporary performance on a very limited field. And it's, and the effort that it would take to be perfect for 24-7 is absolutely not worth the output
of energy and, and attention. So when you know, and I've seen this a lot with with new leaders who say don't return the email as fast as they would like to have returned the email and start off with like a bunch of stories I didn't, I thought I didn't get back to you, and take it really on themselves thinking that they are fending off any you know, this is a defensive position, if I take admit, if I say sorry, first, that you can't hold it against me, you know, but it's really not necessary.
And it actually pulled focus from what you're talking about with the other person onto yourself and that does not help your cause.
I've done that I'll send an email and I'll just, I'll replay it in my mind, I'll go, oh, maybe that was more harsh, harsher than I intended it to be. And I'll wait and wait and wait. And if I don't get a response back in whatever the timeline, I've decided is the appropriate time that I start telling this story to myself, but how they're, you know, getting ready to fire me and going to call HR and when it's nothing. Exactly, exactly these things looms so much larger for us.
Because honestly, I once I learned I mean, I really I really learned in my heart, that most people are really concerned about themselves, and only have a small window into what you and what you're doing, then that means most of the things that you're observing about yourself are you are either unobservable or just a total blip of nothingness to the other person. And then we can kind of get on with things and pay attention to what is important.
Do you have any ways that you might suggest or offer for for the new leaders out there to recognize when they're doing that to themselves? Because one of my favorite sayings is quite often in the moment, it's very difficult to see when we're doing something when we're starting to go down, a shame spiral. Yeah, so you know, sometimes I like to just deep personalize it. So it's, you know, if somebody did this to you, how
would you feel? So, if you and you can, this is a you know, I want to say oh, this is a muscle you can cultivate. So just if even if it's hard for you in the beginning, just by continuing to ask this, you can exercise that muscle. So one of its gonna draw upon. Peter Drucker, one of the founders of management consultant, as a science used to have people just keep a tiny notebook of predictions, so that you can fine tune your sensitivity as to what ends up
being important and not. So of course, you know, he was operating in the 60's. So he probably did have a small notebook that he kept in his suit pocket. But of course, there's a million ways to do this. I sometimes I have a Slack channel devoted to this, and it's not shared with anybody. It's just for myself, where I, if I find myself ruminating about something, that I make a little prediction, and I say, well, because of this, this factor led to this factor. So Hmm, they they did that
presentation last week. And there was this weird silence after I presented that slide. And now that's bothering me, so I'm going to predict that I'm going to hear about that slide from a client that they were wondering what was up with that or that they didn't like that part and then I'll just write it down. And then, like, weeks later, weeks will go by, and I'll be like, I haven't really heard anything about that. Nobody said anything about that, to me, everybody seems to be
treating me the same. Nobody seems to have lost respect for me in some way. Maybe that didn't matter at all, that was just me being really hypersensitive. And so making these little predictions can really help you help you figure out what matters and what doesn't. You know, and it's difficult, because unless we make the prediction on paper, it's very easy for us just to forget all about it, but by making it on paper or in digital form, you, it draws attention to it, and then you can really see
what that might be. And I found that to be a really useful tool for emerging leaders to see what people attend to and what they don't. That's a, that is a really great point, I've never actually heard of it from that way, in that perspective before, because it's like you said, you know, the shock will be there. But then when nothing happens, life kicks in, and we keep moving on, and we will forget about it. And because it generally isn't all that big a deal, really, we'll
forget quickly. But it comes back again, it'll haunt us.
But if it was something we had to pay attention to you know, for example, if we misspoke in a way that offended people, or if, you know, the plan we were making was truly inadequate, we'd be hearing about it pretty quickly.
Yeah, so the fact that it feels so I like to, that's something you know, I'm a fairly high anxiety person, I have a lot of leaders have kind of a more anxious style and thought sometimes people think that that's sort of a component that makes people emerge as leaders is because people who have a little bit of anxiety about the details often really care a lot and look like, okay, they're a person who's going to sweat the details and make things happen, let's have them in charge of
this. So you know, displaying a little bit of anxiety about how things are going can can help put you in a leadership role. But then in order to deal with yourself and not go out of your mind, you have to see what is actually important to other people. And just go on your own instinct.
I love how you talked about, you know, we can turn this into a muscle and by people actually writing it down, putting it in their phone, creating a little video for themselves to go back and look at that and remind themselves, "This was nothing." If you are a somewhat anxious person, you never run out of things to worry about your because as you learn, you always
learn about new things. And oh, my goodness, I didn't even know about this two weeks ago, that in itself feels like data rather than noise, the fact that you didn't know about it two weeks ago, and then you can go off on this whole spin with that, but this way, you know, hopefully you don't hopefully, you can help yourself, you know, learn the fact that you learned more, and you haven't died yet. You know. (Kim laughing) it's a good sign!
I didn't three years ago, but you know, it somehow didn't kill me. So here I am. And but now I know, that's even better, you know, to reframe in that way. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Now, that's really great. I'm wondering, as you know, when we're thinking about the newer leaders and emerging leaders and whatnot, and they're in charge of other people, and you know, they're they're handing out assignments, or taskings, or whatever the terminology we want to use, how can we help them help others see when they're starting down that spiral role and help the emerging leaders help their team avoid that as well? You know, I have one silver bullet for this, that it's kind
of, and it's called a Retro. I mean, some people call it an after action review. That's what they, at least in the American military, that's what they call a lot of fun. But the idea is to have a regular meeting that X number of days or weeks after a project, everybody gets together and goes through a structure this is important, not like a general conversation, but a structured conversation about what went well, what didn't go so well and what you want to try
next time to do about this. And that's really all it is those three aspects. And this way, you know, we like, I've doneRetros before like to do it not like the second something shifts, but a little while after so it has a minute to settle so that all of the things that go through people's head where they say, "Oh my goodness, the project manager didn't do this, and new clients and they're that", those moments for people, for people
to forget about them. And that way people can see what really did make a difference in getting this out on time. For example, on time on budget, or I'm thinking of this specific project here. But what what I found to be useful with that is not so much what people say, because we, if you're in a group, people will disagree, people will say, "Oh, well, it was terrible that we had that setback from the client, because the client hated our first
prototype. But now we have a better, we got to, but then we got a better prototype. And it really brought us together when we had to do that." And some people focus on the brightest together. And some people who are, "Oh, the client was terrible!" you know, but you, you want to focus on what you control what you can do about
things. So the fact that everybody had a comment or a feeling or noticed that point in the cycle is really the important part, not the exact the reactions that people had, or even necessarily what you did about it. But this is what guides your thinking for next time. So there's again, you can keep those really bare bones of the beats of the story in mind, and not get attached to well, Jane said that I she didn't like
the colors that I use. So I guess she doesn't like pastels, or whatever it is, you know, which is not really useful information going forward, you know, we have a natural tendency to attribute everything to personality, to that's just how gene is or you know, the client is tough, etc. That's kind of an inborn thing. But most of the situations we find ourselves in are actually more about systemic
functioning. So it's not the Jane doesn't like pastels next time, she might totally like pastels for for this clients, you know, but so that kind of knee jerk attributions we make aren't really that helpful. But instead saying, apparently, color choice makes a really big difference for the client. So let's be able to pay more attention to that and then it turned out that they really didn't care about, you know, how many bullet points are on that
slide. So that turned out to be not something that anybody was very attached to. And it's those patterns that you really want to look for. That's really interesting, so in the Canadian Air Force, we call it after action reports. Yeah. And a lot of the different things that we do revolve around helping us not do something wrong again, or see an error or not, not look for negligence. Yeah, but look, look, look for the patterns to help things go better and smoother going
forward. And I've experienced at different times, there were the new new leaders in charge, and they don't want, almost don't want to admit that there could have been a mistake or an error, because their own pride, their own internal competition, interpersonal competition, isholding them back. Yes, right. And that's so much to do with identity, you know, and our vision of ourselves as a
person who makes the call. And, you know, that's one of the reasons I say leadership is actually intensely personal, because if your vision of who a leader is, is an unerring visionary, then it's going to be very hard for you to deal with the fact that you're learning how to lead. And that people may not just want you to bark orders
at them. But instead to be able to see the complexities of detail, to be able to tell that you can see the complexities of the problem and that you are weighing in about that rather than just, you know, doing doing like 40s movie war hero. And so and having this mastermind approach to everything.
It comes back to, and it seems to me, the WHY of something, the ability to get information is so easy now that if we don't provide the why they're gonna go find it, they'll go into Inter-Google, which I love to call it, and they'll tell you the first hit is the thing that will be the new truth, whether or not it is it's the new truth. So if we don't provide that why, it's important to people, and generally, generally, people tend to be a little more
educated now. And then, you know, 60-70 years ago and whatnot. So there's more of an openness, my experience has been to understand the why of things. And from a military perspective, it was just shut the hell up.
That command and control leadership style, works great for some things and is terrible for other things. And what has happened is that the kind of businesses that we have now, it's terrible for it's not that everybody's gotten nice or gotten soft. It's that businesses need to be able to change on a dime, they need to be able to have information coming up from the front ranks up to the leadership. That's
called employee voice. And that information flow from bottom to top is actually critical because it's the people on the bottom who have client with the customer who have contact with the customers and clients and who really know what people are what's on people's minds. So if they aren't able to have a voice and things if things are only coming from the top things that people are going to be the product is going to be a place Service is going to be out of
touch. And because the people, the executives are generally not the ones with the on the ground client contact, and also think things are more decentralized, we stay in companies for less time, there's not a hierarchy to climb in most organizations. Now there's some that is still very militarily organized. So you know, medical teams tend to be have a more military
hierarchical thing. Here in Los Angeles, the movie industry is very military precision hierarchical, where if you were in certain positions, we do not care what you think you do what you're told, and you will put in your time before you're allowed to tell anybody else what to do. Much more said, yeah, it's really funny, because a lot of it is like, you know, places where we're sort of performance on, on a timeframe is really
very critical. And they tend to then and so it's not like out of the blue, there's a reason why teams are organized this way. And, but most other industries you need are a lot more decentralized and people are a lot, people need to be able to have a voice both directions be and also because of the march of technology going very fast and it tends to be the younger people who get are more aware of what else is there on the horizon, rather than getting
attached to one tool. So, so that's part of why the command and control culture just doesn't work for most businesses anymore.
As I was preparing for this, I was looking at your website, and I came across your blogs, and one of the ones you talked about is well the title is, "Do I have to be a jerk to be a good boss?" (Kim Laughing), and you and I loved it, because it brought up some really great points. You know, you talked about the, the great man theory, and and how there's these expectations of, "I'm the great man, I'm gonna stand here with my hands on my hips. And clearly I'm in charge because my hands are on the
hips." And I'm a man, and I"'m going to be a jerk because I got away with that". Yeah, no, that those days? You know, sometimes my, my thought to this would be that sometimes people, you as the boss, you have to make the unpopular decision, the emerging leader, you're gonna have to make the call where people need
to stay late. That doesn't mean you're a jerk, though, that just means that you're making the decisions based off the position that you're currently in, or you the role, the function you have is to make those choices. Right, that might not be popular, but that's okay.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a, there's a quote that I always loved about leadership that is in order to, you know, I, you know, what I'm spacing on this quote, so nevermind, but, but the idea is that you if anytime you're going to make a decision, you're turning your back on a bunch of other decisions, and anybody who's allied with that, and that's, that's inevitable, because you have to face the direction, you have to take a
stand. And that's something that I think is hard for emerging leaders, especially people who want to make sure that everybody's happy or feel responsible for the flock, you know. But that's also something that needs to be done for the good of the group, who, you know, and I don't mean this in a paternalistic sense. But I mean, the leader has a little bit more vision, and is looking out over the unit in a way that any individual member of that unit
is not. And sometimes you have to be able to do that.
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One of the things I talked about in my book, I talked about this concept of Toxic Excellence, and this is something that I've seen emerge in a lot of different cultures where people are very efficient at getting results, they're very results oriented, results are the only thing that matters and people are so therefore a company might be making a lot of money and doing and having the growth they want and everything is fine, except for the fact that everybody hates each other and they hate
their life. That was a really big impetus for me to write this book, Winner Take None, because I've seen that over and over again, where people are like, well, we're doing fine. It's like but are you because everybody's about to quit and go work for your competitor. Not a good sign. Not a good sign. Or they're all contemplating, you know, I think I might really want to be a yoga teacher. I'm gonna go be one with nature. I'm gonna go be one with nature, you know, what if I just and so
so what happens then is that? Do you know, did you know Simon, how much time people spend on office politics on average? I'm not sure. About 40% in the average corporate large corporation, large corporation is just thinking through strategy so that people will not nice them in the bag or kill their projects or will slow off their projects. And like, if you could even just get back 5% of that, how much better ahead of the game would you be?
When we're talking about, you know, companies that are meant, that exist to make a profit 40% ofthat time is now not being spent trying to make a profit. That's huge! That's right. It's just spent working on internal politics. And so that's one of the reasons why communication is so important, why that that interior view that you have of leadership and what you're doing here, and why you're doing it ends up taking up so much space, because why you're doing it
comes out. And if you're doing it just to get a paycheck, then you're really likely aligning yourself with sort of a toxic excellence model, where we're all here to make money and whether we have a good time, or whether we enjoy each other, whether we learn anything, you know, we're all playing very defensively. And then we're losing out on the possibility of a lot of creativity, innovation, and ultimately, we might be making money now. But that's not really going to be happening forever.
It seems to me if that, that toxicity, is there the ability to create those cohesive teams to move forward to be more.... Yeah, yeah, exactly. So a bit. So basically, people get into this thing that I've learned that and this is the thing, this is something that I feel happens with middle managers, and people who've been in corporations or certain industries for a while, especially if it's highly technical, is that they say I've learned how to work this system.
So we're going to just keep this system, because I know how to work it. And I'm not going to support any new ideas. And I'm not certainly not going to share power with anybody. And yet, figuring out how to support new ideas and share power is the only way toward a longer term resilience. And where, you know, strategically.
I've seen it time and time again, where you know, the the person stays in the role for years and years and years and then all of a sudden, they leave for whatever reason, and there's this big giant vacuum, or other side of that you'll get the people where they're like, holy wow, what's going on here? And it's just it's just a mess. And everyone's confused, and everyone gets upset. And it's, it's, it's dangerous. Dangerous.
Yeah, yeah, it means that when something when some black swan event happens, like the pandemic, for example, then suddenly there's chaos and there's no, like backup plans or backup, ways of thinking about how to deal with this. So there's a lack of creativity, and there's a certain rigidity around it. And that's when people back in, that's an organization scrapped.
I think maybe we see it a lot, I can't speak for in the United States, but in Canada, we've seen more retail stores like big box stores, retail stores, just stop,
Yes.
You know, of course, everyone's close, but like we're talking to like major stores that you would never consider just going away, and they're just gone now. Because they weren't prepared at all, for what COVID might happen. And I think they, you know, a little bit of, it's easy for me to say this not being in any one of
these companies. But, you know, maybe some quicker reaction time to understand how, you know, see the broader spectrum might have been helpful, but yeah, I don't know, like, different, maybe some more reactive leadership might have been?
Yeah.
But we're talking about, like, you know, you talked about winner take nine and the importance of that, and inside that we're discussing this toxic, excellent, is there any ways that you would think that you know, as the emerging leaders, they could see that this might be happening, so they could, you know, recognize it, and then take whatever steps you might recommend to be able to rectify whatever the situation might be?
Yeah, good question. One of the things that I found really telling is how people react to new ideas. If people go straight to I mean, there's a lot of cultures where everybody goes straight to well, that won't work because and a lot of those reasons are well, because we tried it in 1985 and it didn't work then. or so until will never go for it. You know, I feel behind the organization's for me trying to make change now. Like let's see, oh, no, about this. Of course, I see
your notes about this. That's why I'm here. But the question is, you know, meant to be you know, who based on personalities and and imagined credit elections. Right, you know, that makes sense. Yeah. And so when things are that entrenched that you can't consider a new strategic idea. Because Joe might have a problem with it. And that's your first thought that to me is like Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, red flag count how many times I've heard Wow, we thought of that before it didn't work.
Yeah.... 30 years ago...
When everything was completely different before the internet, when expectations were completely different when we weren't changing on a dime, when we were when it wasn't normal for an organization to pivot every couple of years, stay in touch with the market. I mean, yeah, that's a wholly totally different world and so in a really processed story oriented organization, that will seem like a reasonable proposition until you kind of push on it for
a second. So I like to so as a kind of a bellwether, I like to think about what's the nature of the pushback I'm getting here? So if the nature is well, how would you know, we can't do that? Because we aren't sure how that would affect the supply chain or something. You know, that's like, that's a real objection. Let's think that
through, okay. But if it's just personality based, or if it is we, we tried that and it didn't work, and it was in a completely different situation, then that to me is that to me is okay, there's something happening here where people are spending more time protecting the status quo, then they are thinking about the possibilities. Yes.
Oh, there you go, I cut you off. Sorry.
Oh, yeah, yeah, you know, in an organization, that's, that's ready to think about the possibilities, they actually will entertain it, they may still decide that this is not something they want to support, and that's fine, but at least entertaining the idea without shutting it down based on personality, or, or previous experience. That's a big, that's
a big deal. You know, and I did a big project on cynicism last year, to really understand the idea of organizational cynicism, which is one characteristic of burnout. And if people just reflexively saying, oh, that'll never work. Because, you know, this organization doesn't care
about that. That's, you know, it gives you it's kind of like eating a bunch of Pringles potato chips, you know, it makes you feel good and makes you feel special in the moment, because you it's very easy to predict that something will fail, you're
probably right. things being the way they are, I mean, that's part of my point with loser, take none is that winning is actually rare, winning in any way that you can really point to, it's pretty rare and most of things, people and things are losing, you know, in an objective sense, losing consistently, but that doesn't mean that they're dead. So that ability, that ability to try stuff and think about trying stuff, it's really what, what
what you want. And so, I... A lot of times people don't question cynicism, when they hear it, they just go around, and then they entrench about it. You know, well, "Joe is pretty cynical, so he won't go for anything." And, and that's I like to question cynics. I find that cynics are disappointed idealists.
I like how you worded that, you know, and it's interesting. So when we're talking about how can we get the help the emerging eeaders see when it is you know, observe those cynics and see those. And I like that I like how you worded that? Could you hit that again? Already, I'm just gonna write it down what was
Yeah.... cynics are disappointed idealists. They feel like they feel strongly about how things should be and the current situations are definitely not living up to that for them. And so they find it more emotionally safe to just toss the baby out with the bathwater.
It's easier to just be upset about something than actually try and be part of the positive solution in moving forward. Because it's easier to sit there and be upset.
Right, and you can kind of trauma bond with people. I don't know, you know, people don't always talk about that as a leadership term. But I feel like that's something that happens in offices all the time, or in other workplace environments. Where going, "Yeah, this sucks, doesn't it?
Yeah, you see as much this sucks, so therefore we're on the same page, right?" And so that's, that can be, you know, very useful, bonding, but at a certain point that keeps you stuck and smaller, because you can't go the next day to the person and say, hey, that's really good thing happened. Because then they have to say, Yeah, but this sucks, right? Because that's where your bond is.
Exactly right. And once you started down that path, like it's it that leadership leader follower relationship theory now has just been, oh, it's just been crushed. And it's hard to get any real, I don't want to say get any real respect, but definitely that, that deep seated respect isn't is not going to be there.
And then yeah, and then we're all you know, the cool kids in the back of the bus making fun of the stuff we have to do and then yes, we're all cool, but where's the Bus go? Who's driving the bus?
I was just gonna say that right like and, you know, I don't need to be the cool kid, that's exactly what I just gonna say. But someone's got to be the person in charge. And yeah, odds are you're in that role because you wanted to be in charge,
Right and a lot of times, leaders emerging have been, bad trauma bonding with people that they're now in charge of, and they can't have that same relationship. It's just not going to work. You cannot be cynical and actually move anything forward. I've thought about that a lot like, could you but maybe are there circumstances and I have yet to find a circumstance where a person professing cynicism can actually lead? And I don't see it.
So I have a question then. So let's say, I'm going to drop a scenario and then lead into the question. So let's say we're all part of the same team, you and me, we're all part of the same team. And our boss comes down says good news. Kim. You're You're in charge. Jim, retired. You're in charge. Tomorrow, you start tomorrow. So for the rest of the day, you and I are peers. And tomorrow, you're bam, you're the new emerging leader. But we've been, you know, slamming everyone
together as peers. How, how can we work with that? That's got to be tough. Would you have any advice for those?
Yeah, you know, might get out of jail free on everything, is to call it out. Say, "Hey, you know, maybe I've been making the assumption with my co worker that he's gonna know the score. It's not today that tomorrow, right?"
Yeah, exactly. It's right away.
So say, hey, look, I forgot what my coworkers name is the gym though. That's the other guy who's retired. So Joe.
Yeah, I think it was Joe, Joe. Joe, Joe. Joe.
Joe. So hey, guess what, I got some news. So I, I've been promoted to be in charge of this thing. Right. And I've really liked working with you so far, and I really enjoy a relationship. But I you know, that dynamic is gonna change a little bit. I don't know exactly how it's gonna change, but it's probably gonna change. And I really want and I'd really love to be able to have your support.
I love how you said the dynamics gonna change. I don't really know how it's going to change yet. Because that that that is the basis of all the honesty in there. This is things have to change.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you don't know how but you want to invite them to help change it with you and make it something everybody likes him something that's cool. And not you telling him how it's gonna be? Because you don't know. Right? You know, he's gonna deal with this, but you do but but basically, that just that way, they can see that you value relationship and you respect them, and invite them into, you know, play with you in a new way.
It's gonna be awkward. As long as that's part of it, that's, it's gonna be awkward no matter what. But this has has a lot to do with the toxic. Excellent, we were talking about in a ways that we can help avoid that, or at least manage part of that, would that be accurate?
Absolutely. Because again, What you don't want is for like, I have been chosen as leader, and therefore what I say goes, because what I say is, right,
Because I'm such a great man are great.
Because I have been tapped for leadership, and not you! (Kim and Simon laughing) For leadership. Exactly. Yeah, that's what you want, you know, and, and, you know, hopefully, if Joe, as some emotional intelligence will be like, Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Good for you. And then hopefully, Joe will notice like, Hey, I'm friends with the boss, that can't be bad.
Right? That's fantastic. For you know, the sake of this, this scenario, what if Joe doesn't have that emotional abilities to handle that? What would be some ways you might offer that people could deal with that?
Yeah, well, it's very possible that Joe could be like, "They chose you, for me to keep on leaving, this is terrible. What do you got?" It basically after you remember that Joe is making it about himself in a situation like that. So this is one where you kind of internally roll your eyes, and you let him speak for a minute, and let him process through it. Right? And then say, "Well, this seems to be what's
happening. Like I said, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm hoping that we, you know, looking forward to see what we do." I tried to invoke curiosity, basically, you know, as opposed to the curiosity, it's kind of like the opposite of defensiveness. In general, when people react badly, it's pretty much because they're thinking about what this means for them, which means they stop
thinking about you. And I think it's important to remember that, that they're really not thinking about you, when they react badly. They're thinking about them. And it may be related to all kinds of things that you can't even see at that moment. You know, this might be something their dad said, when they're eight that is separate, you know, setting them off and not you. I don't know if you've ever seen the spacing on the name and what's the baseball movie with Jonah Hill and
Moneyball!
Moneyball!! There's a firing scene in there. That is awesome. And so you know, the manager and training is being is like, I have to find this guy. It's gonna be terrible, and I was doing it. So the experienced manager is like, Look, you just do it, pull the band aid off. And so he goes in there, and he just posts about you being traded. And the guy goes, the actors fantastic on this player is being traded he, he can see him being like, really upset, and then thinks it over for
himself. And then it's like, okay, and leaves the room. And I find that sometimes beginning leaders say what That's so mean, he didn't like help him process or do anything like that. It's like, no, that's like your job, your job as the manager is to not be a jerk about it, but basically say what's gonna happen and let them and then oftentimes just shut up and let them deal with it on their own, and they will often come to a better thing. And if you try to manage their reaction.
Once you start acknowledging all of their, whatever the emotions might be going on it, it always, always, always blows up into this big massive thing. You know, like, if Joe has a bad, a bad reaction, like don't worry about it buds, I gotcha. And you're going to give them a fist bump, you're basically acknowledging everything that he's just said, or thinking about himself. In those that particular situation. And now it's just a mess, right?
So and yeah, being the new leader in charge, all that much harder right from the right from the get go.
Absolutely. So the reaction is their reaction, and it's about them, and it's not about you. And basically, if you can just sort of sit through that small hurricane, like, you know, on the baseball team, everybody's pretty much so they're not gonna say it out loud, they're just gonna leave. And they might in real life,
they might not do that. And if you're a female person, as a leader, people often want to tell you things that they might not want to share with the dude's for example, but your your, you know, your, all you can do is do let you let them do what they're doing without feeding into it, or trying to minimize it or trying to manage it in any way. And they will eventually come to their own conclusions.
And this takes us right back to the beginning of what we were talking about when all these different things are happening. And realistically, it's not about the leader is not about themselves. It's about, you know, whatever is going on with the other person when we're talking about sending emails and the shame spirals and waiting
for those responses. It's not about us if we're not being judged and I think it's important to remember that when we have to have those tough conversations about you know, hey, look, I'm I'm your boss tomorrow. I'm the leader tomorrow. It's still not about me, like you had mentioned. That's important. You know, it's, I think we've taken this full circle. with that. I think maybe this might be a good time for us to move into the lightning round. Would that be okay with you?
Lightning round? Let's do it!
Okay, so folks, for those of you who don't know, I'm hoping a lot of people are listening to this podcast, and they they're well versed in what the leader, the lightning round is. But here's the thing, in case you don't know, all I tell the guest is that there will be five leadership related questions. I don't tell them what the questions are ahead of time. And because that is personally honestly, it's kind
of funny for me. And if the idea is to put everyone on edge, just a little tiny bit, but I promise they're not they're not crazy questions. Are we ready for this?
I, why not? Let's do this.
Let's do this. Okay, So question number one, as a leader, what do you consider to be your greatest strength?
I've been told that I'm good at telling people the hard truth without making them feel unnecessarily bad about it.
Question number two, cup half full, or cup half empty?
Haha, that's a tough one, my style comes up consistently defensive pessimists, which means the cup is half empty. So we're gonna have to do some work to make sure this is full enough. But lately, I've been kind of letting go of a lot of data. And I feel like I'm ready for a cup half full.
I love that question. A little quick sidebar was the lightning round. Not so lightning fast. But I love that question. It's my favorite of all the five of them, because it's interesting to see what their reactions are. And it's very, very rare. Will someone say half empty? half full? And that's it. Right? There's Yeah, there's it. I love it. I just I love that question.
That's fun.
Oh, it's great. So question number three. If you could ask a leadership advice from any leader alive or dead? Who would it be? And what is the question?
So many things. Oh, wow. This is a very tough one. Give me one second here.
No, no problem at all.
My temptation is that I kind of know it. My temptation is to say I'd like to take somebody who I think of as not a good model of a leader, you know, somebody who is has a very competitive command and control attitude and find out you know, how what they think they're doing that helps them
get away with it for so long. So I think I'd asked I would probably last like Mussolini probably asked them, you know, how did you manage to keep this and what do you You're doing that makes people follow you, you know?
Yeah. I love that no one has ever taken that approach before. Question number four, in one word, describe your feelings fhe first time you were placed in the role as the leader.
Ah, terror, actually, no, let me try that again. First hubris. Of course, I'm the leader. And then, and then terror, when I realized that that meant was going to mean to disappointing a bunch of people, and that there was nothing I could do about it. And so I had a real, you know, dark night of the soul of like, do I really want to do this Is this what you have to do? And I was like, now this is what I got to stand up for. And it was a values based thing is I've got
to stand up for them. I'm here to stand up for the values got to stand up for the values got to do it. And and that was that felt like trial by fire?
And the final question in one minute, describe what you believe is the most important idea or concept for a new leader to consider as they take on their role.
So I want to go macro here. So generally, in kind of the leader development journey, in the beginning, it's Can I do it? in the middle? It's kind of like, I mean, I can, but do I have to? And where, where do I have to be here? And who are my people? And then as the most the most experienced leaders, okay, here's my people, what do I want to do for them? What do I how do I want to get
back? What's my legacy? And so I think that I would want new leaders to know that they don't have to do all of that all at once. That there is a progression and that there are some things. There are some advices gonna stick with you in the stage you're at and a certain end later, and you're going to be somewhere else with it. So you know, allow, allow yourself to naturally evolve as a leader and not try to be perfect out of the gate.
And that's it. That's the lightning round. It's not so bad
Good question. That was hard. That was fun.
Did you have anything else you want to pass on to anyone while we're still chatting? My week, my website is www.kimperkins.com. You can find my book Winner Take None. I will be sure to have your website an a link to your book inside he show notes. And thank you so much for all of your time or this today. I know for a f ct that anyone listening as learned a lot some valuab e, useful tools to help m ve forward.
My pleasure, great conversation.
Well, that's a wrap from the front. In this episode, we learned that our competitive energy can be channeled in positive ways, giving rise to even higher levels of personal and professional excellence. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.
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APodcast From the ront, produced by iglen studios, music provided by Ashamaluev M sic.