Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to the Leadership Window podcast with Doctor Patrick Jinks. Each week through a social sector lens, Patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively. Patrick is an LSI certified leadership coach, a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, a best selling author, award winning photographer, and a professional speaker.
And now here's doctor Patrick Jinks.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Window podcast.
This weekend I am going to get out my shop Vac and I'm going to go out on my back porch and I'm going to vacuum all the furniture and everything and I'm going to get all this yellow powdery pollen out of my porch and I can't wait because I think, I think we're just about done with it.
But it falls every day. You can wash your car and ten minutes later like it's terrible.
Anyway, it's, that's what happens when you're toward the end of March in Columbia, South Carolina.
But I'm not complaining, I'm just saying excited about today's show, Doctor Carla Fowler. And when I say doctor Carla Fowler, by the way, we're talking MD and PhD and I won't even go into her academic resume, but it's a little intimidating to have her on. I'm going to tell you. She is like, you know, like super ridiculously smart and talented and experienced in general surgery and in performance science and just many other things. And she is, among other things, near and dear to my heart, an elite executive coach. And I think elite is probably the really the right word here and I think we'll find that out as we talk about performance because that's really what coaching is all about. It's helping people perform at higher levels. And for the last decade she's been sort of that secret weapon for tons of CEO's, entrepreneurs and other senior leaders. She does do some work also in the nonprofit sector. I think she told me in a previous conversation that about a third of her portfolio is in the social sector.
But her unique approach combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their goals. And when I, when we had this of exploratory conversation early on, I was really, my interest was really piqued by how performance science ties into leadership and I can't wait to talk about that with Doctor Fowler.
Welcome. Thank you for joining us on the program. I'm going to let you introduce yourself way better because I probably slaughtered this introduction, didn't get nearly what probably needs to be said about you, but welcome to the show. Tell us anything else we missed.
And by the way, from Wyoming, she's joining us. So a little bit jealous about that, but thanks for carving out time for us, Patrick.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: It's really great to be here. And I was just thinking as you were talking about the pollen that, you know, my job for this weekend is in March in Wyoming. You need to start shoveling out that, like, concrete cement that is encasing, you know, the stuff in the driveway. So I don't miss that. I'll be right there with you.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: I don't miss that. We lived in Pennsylvania for three years before we came down here in 20, 1415 to South Carolina. And yeah, we had a nice snowblower, but boy, just every day having to get out there and just seemed like forever. And you're right, then it builds up and it doesn't go away and it sits there forever and you got to dig in and, yeah, I don't miss that, that part. I don't envy Wyoming. I mean, what a beautiful place.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Well, I appreciate so much your introduction and I think you covered most of it. But just to give my own personal perspective on it, many people always ask me, how do you go from being in an academic medicine pathway to executive coaching? And for me, I think I've always just thought like a scientist, and I've always been fascinated by how people do challenging things. When you want to make an impact and there is uncertainty and risk involved, how do you do that? And so ultimately, that kind of behavioral interest and fascination really influenced the kind of practice I wanted to open. And it turned out that wasn't in medicine, but was actually in executive coaching. And so ten years ago, that is what really influenced that pivot into this area. And so as I was coming in, I really wanted to influence my practice and build it based on some of these principles of performance science. To say that there are great ideas out there and leaders have a challenging job, whether you are in the for profit sector or the social sector. And why would we not try and access those, distill those and really make them accessible for leaders? So that's, that's really what inspired my practice and how I started it and, and the process for building it and.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: A method that is very helpful and well said. It gives me even better context. So you're not practicing medicine today then?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: I am not. I am full time in coaching.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Wow. And what is a, I hate to say, you know, who's a typical leader? There's kind of no such thing. But who, who tend to be your clients, who, who do you find yourself mostly coaching these days?
[00:05:49] Speaker A: So my practice is industry agnostic. So, as you rightly pointed out, it includes a good number of people in the social or nonprofit sector, and even of those folks spread across different kinds of impacts and areas. And part of that is because as coaches, we're not consultants in the sense of our job is not to tell people about their industry, but really, when you can join their industry expertise with expertise around ideas about performance, what tends to help people do their best work, and then you can really partner and combine your lenses, your client's lens on their industry, and my lens on performance science. And that's where really powerful stuff happens, because you can start to say, oh, what do we see that's different when we, when we both can discuss and dialogue about these different things.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And the company, and the company is faxa. So first thing I want to know is, what does that name mean and where does that come from? And the second thing I'll ask, and then we'll start getting into this, what else does that offer? So you do executive coaching. Is that, is that really the bulk of the Thacs, a business portfolio? What, what, how other ways. What other ways do you help your clients with? So where does that come from?
[00:07:14] Speaker A: Backsa is a word that is in Latin, it means a task. And I liked it because, for me, I've been thinking about performance since about fifth grade.
That's the earliest I can remember asking the question, how do I be good at this thing?
Like, what? What's going to help me do that? And what were you doing in the.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Fifth grade related to performance? I'm curious. Was it music? Was it sports? What? When you said doing good, what was your lens at that time?
[00:07:47] Speaker A: So the specific thing that I remember is the presidential physical fitness test. Do you have to do this? This was a thing when I was in elementary school.
I don't remember that.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: I remember hearing it. I don't know if we, I do remember hearing that.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: It was this thing that in fourth and fifth grade, they'd put you through a series of tests. There was like a hundred yard sprint. There was like doing pull ups, I think there was like, can you touch your toes? And, uh, the thing that really got me was the shuttle run where you had to run back and forth between two points and, um, pick up beanbags and then put them at the other point and then turn around and go back. So, and, uh, it was sort of an agility test, and I just, I was pretty fast in a straight line but I just couldn't get it. And I thought, I got to go practice that. Uh, so I went up to the elementary school parking lot and got some pine cones. And my parents didn't tell me to do this. I mean, this was very clear. They didn't care.
But I went up and I practiced and so, and I did. I did get the physical fitness award just in case anyone was wondering about the punchline.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Oh, that's awesome. I guess we did that. It sounds familiar. The presidential fitness award. But I don't know. I don't know if we did it. I guess we probably did. But that's cool. So that's a really back to your question.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Totally didn't answer. So taxa means a task. And for me, I think I started to realize that most of the big and challenging things that we want to do are a series of tasks.
It's if you try and do the big thing all at once, it becomes really unclear how one does that, how one makes a big jump from a to z. And so I think I always intuitively thought, okay, well, if I can get from a to b, then I can start to think about the next step. And so for the number of leaders who both have autonomy and responsibility for making things happen, leading that impact, I think it's a really useful message because by the time we get to that position, we feel a lot of weight of the world on our shoulders. And I think this is particularly true in the social sector where not only is there something you're sort of charged with, but just because of the importance. Right. You know, the importance of the community, the importance to the people that you are serving to society. Wait. Yes, to society. Absolutely.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: So.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Well, you're.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: So that's what taxa means.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: So we've heard the adage, you know, how do you eat an elephant? The answer is one bite at a time.
It's kind of, I think the principle you're talking about, I always think about, I love the Bruce Lee analogy, when people talk about how Bruce Lee used to fight up, you know, ten people at once. And the reality is he didn't fight ten people at once. He fought one person at a time and rapidly refocused, which is all great analogy. It's really a different thing because we feel like that sometimes we're fighting ten people at a time.
I remember coming up in the nonprofit sector. My 20 years in the nonprofit sector was in the United Way network. And as a, as a United way professional in small to medium United ways, you had to just kind of learn a lot, which was great. You had learned a lot about marketing and budgeting and programs and social science and everything, but you also have to do a lot because you don't have a big staff and you feel like you're doing ten or a hundred or a thousand things at once. But if you try to do that, you actually fail because you, you know, the whole multitasking, I'd love your take on that. So there's this, there's this thing that says you. We don't actually multitask like we think we do, because we can't, because the brain's only capable of, like, this focus. Is that, is that a tenet in performance science?
[00:11:48] Speaker A: I think many of the tenets of, uh, performance science are more, are a little more nuanced than that. So, in general, yes, like, multitasking causes some challenges.
That being said, there are some circumstances where you can have a double, do two things at once without losing a lot from either thing.
But what you said, I see being very true, particularly for busy leaders. And one of the interesting things is that when we can slow down and practice the art of doing one thing at a time, and it's a great exercise to go through, by the way, anyone can try it. You don't need a coach to try this.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: You had me slow down.
Really? I mean, just, just that right there, we don't. We're just full on. It's go. It's go. It's go, go, go. I just wanted to pause on that because the first thing you said is slow down so that we can, folks, sorry to interrupt you, but that. Yeah, you did that. That's a reminder that I think we need to tell ourselves, and not me in particular. I like to move fast. I like busyness. I like going and going and achieving and doing, and we, we hurt ourselves. I think, when, when we do too much of that and we're not focused.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: You're exactly right. And that there's this interesting thing. It's something that's said in the military, which is slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. And so that's something that I often kind of repeat to myself. But really, like anyone listening, this is an interesting thing to try for a single day or a week. If you're like, I want to. I want to really dig into this.
It's helpful to, you can look ahead at your calendar a little bit, but to make a commitment to say, I am going to do one thing at a time. And so what that means often is being completely present with what you are doing in that moment. And the reason I say look ahead at your calendar is just that you can probably identify already some places where you have not properly accounted for. What is the work that needs to be done and what is the time there is to do it? This is one of the tools I use in coaching is this idea of proper accounting. I'll give some examples. Proper accounting is saying, if there's a meeting on your calendar, there is likely some follow up work from that meeting. Meetings tend to generate action items and things.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: They're good meetings.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: Yes, thank you for that, Patrick. Good point.
And so it's worth looking at those meetings and saying, have I properly accounted? And said I need even just five minutes to record follow up items, even if it's just on a someday list, or do the follow up contact the people that need to be communicated with. And so it's worth looking ahead, because I'll tell you, if you go into a week trying to do one thing at once, but you have not properly accounted for, how long will this all really take? Then sometimes you feel a little set up for failure. And one of my things about coaching is I like to set us up for success. And so being realistic, not bullying, reality is something that I always try and look ahead for.
But anyways, try the exercise. And the point isn't to do it perfect, but just to have the experience of how do you feel, what's different about how you feel and what your perspective is when you're doing one thing at once?
[00:15:32] Speaker B: So this device in my hand right here, this smartphone really keeps us from doing that. I mean, because I can be in the middle of writing, drafting a proposal, completing one of my strategic plan documents, following up on a coaching call with a coach mail, and if this thing vibrates, I'm checking it and boom, there it goes. And I know the research behind the amount of time it takes me to get back into full focus with just a five second email check or text message check. So I'm still working on it out of pure honesty of laying it down, putting it away, putting it in the pocket, turning, you know, and trying to really focus on that. But it's not all we talk about how, well, you know, people keep coming to my door and they need this and they need that, and the phone keeps ringing, and I've got this grant and I've got when often it's really just you checking your email too often, or you checking your Facebook profile or little things that you're doing or I'm doing that. I don't realize I'm doing well, we want to blame somebody else. Well, this life is coming at me.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: It's interesting because what you just said, it points to this sort of philosophy that I think is interesting. And we don't have to argue about whether it's true or whether it's not. I just always like to say, is it useful?
And that's this idea that we are actually the ones setting the pace.
So we often think the outside world is setting the pace for us. And part of that is because we often determine what we will do based on outside inputs. So, for example, we use our email inbox as a to do list. And what that means is that anyone who has your email address has the ability to, like, make you do something.
If that's how we make decisions about what we're going to do, or anyone who can text you changes the schedule of your day. And so this is why I like to say we set the pace. And if we're setting the pace, then we can actually realize that many things do not need immediate responses. In fact, often our workload gets less if we give some things time to marinate. So an example of this could be like, a team member might be able to figure something out. You know, if you're not available for a few hours, they get a few more hours to think, well, actually, what if I did this? Or you know what? I think there's someone else I could ask for help on this, or. And then they get the added benefit of, number one, having figured it out for themselves and have, like, that development experience, that sense of self efficacy. But also, again, like, you, you save some time. And so it's kind of a win win. So that's just one example of how sometimes when we slow the pace, the workload actually gets less.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: I'm loving it. I mean, you're, you described it better than I did about our responsibility. We actually shape our entire environment.
You know, that. That really is. We don't think we do. Sometimes we, you know, it's so much we think is out of our control. Well, I don't get to decide this, that or the other. You get to decide a lot more than you think, is what I find oftentimes. But, yeah, I love that idea of it's, we control the pace.
Yeah. Personal accountability. I'll say this about accountability. I love your term proper accounting, something I've mentioned a number of times on the show, and it's, it's just been a big thing since it hit me. But the word accountability, we use it as like this weapon, you know, I'm gonna hold you accountable. And it's this. It's this punitive thing, right?
And how do we hold our people accountable? And I've started learning to help my coaches and myself reframe that, to say, how do we help our people account? Because accountability is a compound word. Account and ability. It's an ability. It's the ability to account for our commitments and our work and our goals. And it's. So what is that ability? What's the actual skill?
Is it self discipline? Is it managing our calendars? Is it our energy? Is it, you know, the rewards we give ourselves or the trust we build? How do we build the trust with our team? But when you said, we are helping our leaders do proper accounting, it really resonated with me because you're one of the few people, if maybe not, maybe even the first person, outside of this concept that I read recently and started thinking about it this way, used accountability very differently than most people use. It really resonated.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Thank you. Well, it's. I love it because, as you said, it puts some things back in our influence that I think sometimes we think are outside of our influence. And your point about account and ability. So what is the ability that allows us to properly account? And there are obviously a number of things you brought up that are a piece of it. So it's probably not just one thing, but one of the ideas that I think is really powerful. And again, this is something I talk to clients about because I think it is a fundamental piece of performing at a high level, and there's a lot to support it in performance science. It's this idea of clarity or focus. And I talk about it. I call it brutal focus in my practice, because for most people, when we start to talk about what it means to be focused, it's a level beyond what they might have said. Like, oh, yeah, I'm focused.
I know what I'm doing.
And they're like, oh, okay, this is more distilled. This is pushing on the focus front more than I have in the past. And this idea of clarity. I think it's clarity about two things to start. One is, what is it I actually want to have happen, or what is it that we want to have happen at an organizational level or as an individual leader, really spending some time thinking about it? And I often say to people, a great time for brutal focus is, you know, it doesn't have to be when something's not going well, but if something feels like it's not, kind of going the way you want it to. This is a excellent time to ask the question, okay, can I spend some time thinking about what is it that I want? And can I describe that with clarity? Then the second big question of brutal focus is what is actually most important to get there? What are the big drivers, the things that give me the outsized impact compared to the other, other things I could do, the long list of good things to do, what are those things? And I think this is a piece of that ability to properly account, because part of how we're deciding what do we need to do, what goes on the calendar, how much time needs to be invested in that thing all ties back to, well, that depends, what is it you really want to have happen and what's most important for that?
[00:23:13] Speaker B: That's an absolute tenet of strategic planning as well. And, oh, you know, we always say if everything's a priority, nothing is. And so it's finding out. We also say that strategy is as much about determining what not to focus on as it is what to focus on. You know, what are the. What's the trick?
[00:23:33] Speaker A: What's extraneous? Right.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: Right. What's, what's extraneous? What, what is not one of the key drivers?
You know, what. What's the icing? We want to get to the icing sometimes before we bake the cake and think about those ingredients. So everything you're saying, I'm all over that.
To shift gears, I'd like to find out about this performance science.
When I think about performance, I think sports. I'm a big sports fan, and I use a lot of sports analogies as a result, because peak performance and focus and discipline and practice and what's that competitive edge that, you know, we talked about it for years when Tiger woods was at the top of his game, this, this was a really interesting thing. I'd love your take on this. When he was at the top of his game, his average round of golf, if. If par is 72 strokes for a course, his average, let's say it was 68. Okay. His average score when he was number one, dominating, winning all the majors, winning everything.
The number 100 ranked golfer at that time was someone most people have never heard their name. And the difference in pay was the tens of millions that Tiger woods is making versus maybe, you know, half a million dollars that the number five, the number 100 player in the world makes, by the way, the number 100 player in the world, pretty darn good golfer.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: But the difference in scoring average between Tiger woods and the number 100 player was like a stroke.
It's like in a round of golf, on average, tigers beating the number 100 guy by one stroke.
So you're like, okay, so he's not hitting the ball farther than everybody else, he's not putting straighter than everybody, he's not stronger. He's not. So what is that competitive edge? What makes him one stroke better than 100 other players and thousands of others beyond that? What makes that? It's not the golf, is it?
[00:25:57] Speaker A: I think it's a number of things. I might take a different angle on this and just say, I love to think about math. I'm a total math and science nerd.
But it's the demonstration of the diminishing returns in performance of a lot of effort. So I would suggest that there are a number of things that could be involved in that difference. But I'll point out that difference was so small, it was one stroke. And this talks about this idea of to go from like 80% of impact to 90% to 95% to 99%, often the amount of effort that is needed to put in to get those next levels is way more than potentially it took to get to just the 80th percentile to begin with. And so I think that's really interesting. And of course, our society rewards those things in different ways. It depends. What I like about it, though, from what does it mean to the rest of us who are not professional athletes, is that in many of the games in life, it is not a zero sum game, it is not competitive in the same way golf is. So everyone knows who's the number one because you have these competitions. And so it becomes brutally clear. But in many games in life, there is room for more than one winner. And so what I take away from that is to say we can actually reach quite a high level of performance without necessarily like, if we are choosing those things that are most important to kind of get us that 80% of impact, that it isn't that we have to be perfect, it's that we need to pick the potent inputs that get us to that 80th percentile. And then, yeah, to get to the 90th, that's going to take some more effort, that is going to take more fine tuning.
But I find it to be a very encouraging thing now in the golf world that, you know, of course, if you're hundredth, you get paid half a million. If you're Tiger woods, you get paid 10 million.
But that's what I think is really interesting about it.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: That is really interesting. That's interesting perspective. And you're right. And I'm thinking of Simon Sinek's recent book, the Infinite Game, where he says that the object isn't to win. The object is to stay in the game and do well in business. And so.
But I think about. Okay, so let's say the goal isn't to be number one, but he's still shooting 68 when everybody else is shooting 69. So. So his best is 68.
And so whether or not there's a hundred other players to compare it to, if he gave less than the effort he's giving, he'd shoot a 69. Still pretty good.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: So, at what level do you accept that and go, you know, I'm pretty good? I'm not trying to be number one. I'm just trying to. I'm pretty good at golf. But, no, I want to shoot a 68 because I'm capable of that. And what would it take to get from my 69 to my 68? What would that take?
That's. That's like. But I like your perspective about. I'm going to think about that a minute. The. The effort it takes to get to the 80th percentile, that curve dramatically changes beyond that into the 90th, 95th, 99th percentile.
And again, when we say percentile, we are comparing ourselves to others.
Are we talking about our own?
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Well, or. Yes, it could be that. It could also be to compare to the percentage of my potential we want to have. Or you're. Oh, that's a good one, too. Right? I think what you're saying and pointing out here that's really important is we have to define what our feedback loops are. We have to define how are we going to measure ourselves, and that how we choose to do that can make a huge difference. So I'm so glad you brought that up.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: I think this is my doctoral study.
Carla was on mission measurement in the nonprofit. How do nonprofits measure their performance against their stated missions? So our mission is to end homelessness, or our mission is to improve. Improve the lives of young people. Okay. How are you measuring that? Improving lives? Well, in the literature review, one of the first things I found was that lots of nonprofits say we do performance measurement, but there's no standard definition as to what that even means.
What are you measuring when you're measuring performance? Is it individual? Is it productivity? Is it number of grants you write? Is it. Is it. You know, how engaged your board is? Is it how much you're. How much you've reduced homelessness in your community, if that's your mission? So, with no standard, the term performance. And even performance measurement is so subjective.
Okay. So everybody says they measure it. Show me the results. And when you look for the results, they're all over the place and actually not very, not very tangible at all. They're not existent. So it's really interesting, the word performance itself, it's a very subject. How do you define. I remember a commercial, Danica Patrick, the race car driver, when she was, when she was racing, she did this commercial. I don't know if it was penzillas, one of the oil companies. And the tagline of the commercial was, when you peak, you win.
And I thought, wow, I like that phrase. When you peak, you win. But then what is peak performance?
Maybe that's the question. How do we define for ourselves, for our organization, for the teams that we're leading and trying to help them account what is peak? What is, what is potential? What is peak performance? What is performing at our highest level? How do you help your coaches get to that?
[00:32:05] Speaker A: So I love that you asked the second question around. Well, wait a minute. What does that even mean? I mean, it's a very pithy tagline.
What does that mean?
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: So I, one of the ways I do this, and this sort of falls under brutal focus is when I start an engagement, really some of the first work we do, and we actually spend 5 hours doing it, we have this long onboarding session. What really allows us to keep digging into the question, to keep after it, really, the questions are, what is it you want to achieve? How do you think about success?
What would peak performance look like for you answering that question? I think it's less important that there is a correct answer to it, but it becomes important that each client be really intentional with how they answer that question, because, of course, the question that follows, what's most important for that? What are your feedback loops for that? All of these things that are worth, as you pointed out, putting some words to, for performance to mean anything, we have to start with what's the continuum on which you want to think about and measure your success, and to be deliberate with that and then to match your priorities and your actions towards that. And so for me, you could think about the start of coaching is really about helping people get to clarity. And I have found the best way is to help people spend time thinking about it. And many of us haven't opened up time or practiced the skill of just thinking about something ambiguous on our own. And so I think one of the biggest benefits of coaching is to have a conversational foil who can help you stick with the topic, doggedly go after it, and then come out of the weeds to have some takeaways, not kind of not leave people in the middle of the. Oh, wow. We just talked about a lot of stuff. Now what?
So that's how we start, and that's how I help people get that clarity to start, or at least an investment in clarity. And we can, of course, update it as we go along, but that's. That's how I do that in coaching.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: Wow. Again, it resonates with our clients. We're trying to. We're trying to help them achieve three things, clarity, simplicity, and alignment. So, particularly in the nonprofit world, solving social ills is incredibly complex. Even. Even with some of the niche organizations who are trying to do one thing right. We're a food bank or we're a homeless shelter. Really simple. But the layers of complexity behind why there is a need for a homeless shelter in our city, that's a different thing. And so how do we simplify the complex so that we can get our heads around it, clarify what we're doing, get, get. Remove the cloudiness, and then align our action with that desired goal? I think. I think you're. You're definitely speaking my language here. And I also loved your question. I haven't used this, but I like this.
What are your feedback loops? I like that question because that's a. We ask it differently. We say, what are your indicators? What indicates to you? So, if you want to be a better delegator, I want to delegate more effectively. I take on too much, and I don't delegate to my people. Okay. What will indicate to you that you're becoming a better delegator? That's the way we ask that. I like your question either better or certainly in addition to what are the feedback loops you will use to deter. I'm thinking out loud here. I'm really loving that question. What are your feedback loops? We tell people, for example, one of the things that I tell people is one of the best ways to measure some of this stuff is ask your people. Like, ask them, how am I doing?
[00:36:06] Speaker A: It doesn't have to be complicated.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it doesn't. It doesn't. Just ask. Ask your people. All right. What are you seeing?
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Well, and this idea of feedback loops becomes really important when you think about how performance actually improves. And so I always talk to people about how do we understand the nature of what you're trying to do and what improvement typically looks like. What's the curve it follows, because I think if you look at this is talked about in the book mastery. Often what improvement looks like is sometimes you have a steep initial learning curve, like, if you go from zero to one at anything. If you read one book on, like, fundraising, for example, like, you'll. You will have a steep curve of. Of improvement. But often after that, there's an investment phase, like sort of a plateau where you are. You are working on it, you are practicing it, but not necessarily seeing a lot. And until enough of the things kind of align, whether it's in your muscle memory and your kind of ability to recognize patterns, but regardless, before you see that next up curve. And I find that one of the big sort of areas of performance is motivation. It's that psychological component. It can also be the mindsets that you have. So I find feedback loops are really important to say, how are we going to keep you engaged and motivated during all the phases of performance improvement? You know, during the steep learning curve part, that's a little easier. During the plateau, that's where it gets harder. Um, so I think that's interesting. The other thing, I just wanted to comment on what you said before about the simplicity, like the simplifying, clarifying, and aligning. I I just agree with you. So, um, much that these things are linked also. So I remember I did this onboarding session that I've talked about with a nonprofit director. And so we did it. We created a framework which had what, you know, his ideas and specificity about what he was trying to achieve, what was the trying to achieve, as well as the key priority areas that were the big drivers, the things that we thought were really going to do, the bulk of kind of the improvement and the impact. And he took this framework back to his team. This isn't necessary, but he chose to do it, and he shared it with them. And he came back to the next session, and, of course, I work with him individually. I didn't work with his team at all. And he came back, he said, carla, he's like, something happened in that meeting. Everybody, eyes wide, light bulbs went off. Because my team actually really could understand what, like, both with clarity, where we're trying to go, but more importantly, where they were involved in it, like, because these priority areas, each of his team members is able to say, oh, that's me. Like, that's where I am contributing. And so I bring this up as this interesting example of how clarity improves a number of other things that you might not think are a part of it, like communication, alignment of your team, particularly within nonprofits, as well, alignment of your board, helping your board come along and understand. Wait, but why aren't you doing all these things? And to say, no, because we're focused on this, and here's why. And really help them understand, then how they can contribute and be a piece of that. So this idea of how do those three things, like simplifying, focusing, you know, use your resources the most potent way you can, but also then clarifying and how that helps people align, I think, is such a good sort of one, two, three punch.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: I love the stories they give. They give.
They help us understand the concepts when you tell those. So I appreciate the examples.
Okay, so I mentioned that when I think about performance, I think about sports. How. What's the link? There is performance science. What is that field? Is that mostly about sports and physical performance or not? Or how. Where. What are the. Are there specialties in it? What's that field of performance science focused on?
[00:40:34] Speaker A: It's kind of evolving. So you were correct. You think of sports, and it really did start with more physical pursuits. And how. How are. How do we make athletes better? How do you really get the full human physical performance? And I think at some point, it became very clear that the mental game of sports was a piece of that, that it wasn't just about training our muscles or our lungs to be as fit as possible, but that you could have two athletes of sort of similar physical capabilities, and one might totally outperform the other based on mental elements.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And one might be working with a sports psychologist, literally. So there's a whole specialty of coaching just right there.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Mm hmm. There is. And so I think that is where it started. But rapidly, other fields that you could argue had both a mental and a physical performance element started to pick up on it. So the military was an early adopter, which makes sense.
People are both having to make very high stakes life and death decisions at the same time as they might be rucking or in a very physically challenging environment. Environment, right. So. But also pilots, the airline industry, also the operating room, surgeons. There is clearly a physical art and component to performing surgery. You are also making decisions based on incoming data as you discover things in surgery, you know, or as someone's physiology reacts to the surgery. So these, I would say, in the work fields versus the athletic fields are some of the early adopters. And then, of course, from there, I think both the business and nonprofit sectors recognize that thought performance, there's less physical performance in those areas. But how we think, how we think under stress, how do we make decisions when we're faced with uncertainty actually, performance science had a lot to add there. And so I think that's been how it spread.
But you're right, it did start with athletics.
And so we can think a lot about sort of mind and body. And my take on this is that our mind and our body are not separate.
The physiologies are connected. And certainly in business, no one's going to make me sprint 100 yards and measure me on that. And yet, what's going on in our physiology does impact our performance. So I'll give an example.
I've worked with a number of clients who are very, very bright, direct, kind of very clear thinkers. And one of the things as leaders, they sometimes struggle with is that they come across as intimidating.
And so that has some negative side effects, including if people are intimidated by you as a leader, even if that is not your intention at all, they're less likely to come and tell you when something goes wrong.
And as a leader, actually what you most want is to have that trust and rapport that even if someone has messed something up, if they need help fixing it, you want that information, or if there's just bad news and it's no one's fault, you don't want people, like, saying, no, you go, you go.
And so one of the things that you can work on is actually not just how do you think about that? And what words can you say to help people feel more comfortable? So instead of saying, someone comes in and says, well, I think we really need to do x, y, and z, and rather than just saying why, which makes people feel like they need to defend their judgment to say something like, I would really love to understand your thinking. I want to be of help. And so if I can understand how you're thinking about it, then I'll know how I can best support you. Just as an example. So there's words we can use, but there's also, like, body language. So, for example, we can slow our roll. Now we're back to going slower. So we can actually slow our breathing. Like focus on, I'm thinking about my breathing right now, not my next question.
We can, which slows the pace of questioning, and that often has a tremendous impact. You know, we can lean back a little bit instead of sort of the leaned forward, leaned in kind of more intensity. So there are some things that do have to do with physiology and body language that can be of help as well. So I point that out just to say there's really a mix of things. It's not all mental, and the physical can play a role. But that certainly in coaching, much of what we talk about is about sort.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Of the thinking part, little nuances like, you're describing what you, this scenario you just gave about asking somebody why, that's a coaching tenet. Like, I have to be careful when someone tells me, yeah, I just, I don't do this or whatever. I have to be careful to go, why don't you? Because that phrasing makes them, makes it sound like, why, why in the world, like, what do you, what are you thinking? Right. So instead of, you know, why aren't you doing that?
You know, a, just a simple refrain. It's a valid question, but it's one, but it's one that brings on a defense mechanism right off the bat. And so how do you reframe that into, you know, tell me about your, your thinking. You know, that leads you to that behavior. Tell me, walk me through that path.
That's a different thing than why. Why are you doing that?
[00:46:41] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: And tone, you know, we learned in, when I was doing coaching training years ago, one of the coaches favorite questions is, what do you think? You know, someone says, you know, I don't know. What do I do about such and such? Well, that's a great question. What are your thoughts on that? Right. What do you think? But just the words. What do you think?
It's not just the words, it's the tone. You know, it's different when I say, carla, what do you think? Or if I say, or if you ask me something, I go, well, what do you think?
[00:47:12] Speaker A: Isn't that amazing?
[00:47:13] Speaker B: You know what? Same words, same four words. Just the tone. Either says, I'm really interested in your thoughts on this and your perspective before I give you mine. Another one says, you idiot.
You know what? What a dumb question. You know, it. Just the tone. Simple things, but those are things we often, as leaders, we're not thinking about. We're not micro aware. We're macro aware. If you tell us, you know, yeah, I get that. It makes sense. I probably do that. It's knowing in the moment. It's being, it's being aware and being able to recognize I'm in one of those, this is one of those moments to say it differently. This is one of those moments to practice new framing.
That's where we try to get our leaders, is that sense of micro awareness where they know now's the time to practice this new behavior to achieve this new result that I've been trying to achieve.
Is that the same thing you experience in your coaching?
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yes. And when you say that micro awareness, one of the things that requires to have that and linking back to something we talked about earlier in the podcast was slow things down, do one thing at once.
So as you're talking with someone, when you're doing one thing at once, it means, well, I need to listen to them while they're talking, which means I can't actually be thinking ahead about, like they said, this. That means it has this, this, this and this consequence. And I think for leaders, one of the challenges is that earlier in our careers, the ability to be proactive, to think ahead, like three steps, is actually something that typically is both rewarded and helps us do our jobs better.
And so this is one of those tricky things, particularly for leaders who are kind of transitioning into that, like, middle piece of career where they've kind of made it, they're in a leadership position, they've been successful earlier in the delivery of things, and they're now in that position of saying, I'm not going to deliver anything. I mean, like, my team is literally going to do it all. In fact, if I'm delivering something, I'm probably not using my time in the best way possible to support the team.
But what that means is that the dynamics with your team, really listening to what they said, and it's not that you're not, you're going to stop being proactive or thinking ahead, but it does mean your ability to scale your efforts by really effectively connecting with people, helping them feel empowered, stay presented to go, do you got to stay present?
[00:49:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
You're talking about something that we do deal with a lot in the sector. So I coach a lot of nonprofit CEO's who were really good fundraisers before they were CEO's, or they were really good program directors, or they were really good chief financial officers and or, or they were just really good. Even at a front line position, they were high performers. If you talk about performers, they were high performers. And one of the challenges that a lot of leaders face is making the transition from being the high individual performer to being a high impact leader of other performers. So the concepts of getting my highest performance is one thing. Now, how in leader, what's my role in leadership? To set an environment where people can achieve their peak performance.
And now I'm still performing, but I'm performing leadership. I'm not performing fundraising, I'm not performing grant writing. I'm performing leadership. So I'm still performing different metrics now. It's a different goal now, but now I'm performing as a leader and I'm trying to create an environment where my team can be high performing fundraisers, grant writers and other leaders. And it's a mind shift challenge for a lot of leaders who reach that CEO position. They're still trying to perform.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: And so they have a difficult time leading and letting their team perform.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: Yes. Well, and what's great, though, is, and this is why I love performance science as a framework to think about performance, is that. But as you pointed out, they're still performing. What we need to do is redefine with clarity. So going back to that clarity, what does it mean to perform at a high level as a leader, which is different than what it is to perform?
[00:51:47] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: As a contributor in a particular area. And what are my feedback loops? Because the feedback loops also change.
Certainly, if the business is going well, you're hitting the targets and you're hitting your impact targets. That's a good sign. But often we need to also define some intermediate feedback loops, because, of course, what you don't want is someone to say, well, I know I'm a good leader if we're hitting our targets. Therefore, I'm making my fundraising director meet with me every day, and I'm really micromanaging them.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: That's so good. That's so good. Yeah. Because an arrogant leader, and I mean that actually in a nice way, like a leader who's not thinking about their people, will tell you if you. If you challenge them on how they're behaving and leading and what their people are telling them, and maybe they're 360, for example, they'll tell you, hey, all I know is it's working. All I know is we're hitting our goals. I mean, we're doing more than we did, you know, so I'm having a hard time changing my leadership behaviors when the organization is producing these great results.
But they might not be, see, they might not be seeing the deterioration that's happening behind the scenes of people that they're burning out or stakeholders in the community that results be what they may, they're not the results that the community's looking for. So you can get blindsided by, you can have these blind spots where we think the results is the feedback loop. I love that point because you're so right. That's one. It is an indicator, but it's not the only one.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Well, and we talked about plateaus. There can be both plateaus on your way, on an upward curve. There can also be plateaus on a downward curve, like where, as you pointed out, there's cracks are starting to form. You haven't lost structural integrity yet, and yet the cracks ultimately will lead to a failure point. You don't know what part will fail, but. So it's this important thing about really thinking and being curious about other feedback loops that you could use to understand, like what's going on behind the scenes. Is this a plateau on the way up? Is this a plateau on the way down? It's really interesting.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: It is. I love frameworks. And so I'm interested in hearing, can you walk us through the key three or four or five sort of performance tools that you use most often with your clients? What's a good framework that you use a lot? This sort of here are some key tenets.
[00:54:26] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the first framework I use is really related back to brutal focus, and that's just a way to help us get back to that simplified part to say, okay, so in our onboarding session, I ask all sorts of questions. We talk about all the weeds. We just kind of get it all out on a whiteboard. You can probably see there's a whiteboard behind me. So we use that. We fill up both sides. And the framework, I call it a one three nine strategic framework. And you can do this at home on a post it note.
So it's really a way to say after you've spent some time thinking about what do you really want and what's most important for getting there, to start to say, how do I put that into words in a really simplified way and even into a visual that is easy for anyone to understand. So really what we do is try and have very clear, simple, understandable statement about what's your goal? What is it you want to have happen? What are some ways you might think about measuring that or some key milestones along the way? And then the three stands for three critical priorities. And I like three because three is easy to remember. Like, you can wake someone up in the middle of the night and ask them what their three critical priorities are, and they'll be able to tell you. And those are obviously a little more broad.
But we break each of those down into the three most important factors that feed back into each of the priorities. And that's where we get nine factors. And so it's just a structure. It's a way of pulling together what have you decided is really important? And it makes it very easy to communicate it to other people, but perhaps more importantly in your own brain, as stuff is coming at you quickly. But it's a way to really put it front of mind to help you say this thing that just happened, how does it actually relate back to what matters most? And it might not be good, but is it actually critical or even a great opportunity that comes along to ask the question, okay, but how does this really relate? Is this kind of adjacent, but not really in the true path that we're trying to go in terms of priorities? So I think it really helps with decision making.
The second tool we talked about was proper accounting. And, you know, this one three nine framework helps us with proper accounting because when we start to look at where we spend our time, then, well, that has a lot to do with what have you decided is most important. And so the tool I like to use with proper accounting is often like a calendar audit.
So I love to have people do some planning rituals around their calendars to help them start to set the pace. So we talked about this earlier in the podcast. The way you can set the pace is to start having some ritual where you spend time planning. And I find weekly is a helpful rhythm for that. But you don't just look at the week ahead, you look actually two and three, maybe even four weeks out. It depends a little bit on the timelines of your organization and how quickly things move. But I find it's really helpful because, of course, when you look at the week ahead, often there's not so much you can do about that.
So when, and I encourage people to both ask the question, is this feasible? Have I properly accounted for the time it will take to do the work for the meetings I have scheduled, for example? If not, that is a wonderful time to communicate. So sometimes we think, oh, I can't do all this, but like, I'm just going to try. And what ends up happening is we cancel stuff anyways, but we cancel it late, which means that, like, it's not so great for your stakeholders and it just, and it feels worse to us, versus proactively calling your shot ahead of time and saying, this is not feasible, I'm going to communicate early and often and make it so that it is feasible to do the work.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: So I've got to pause right there because, wow, this is so powerful.
We know deep down this isn't feasible. Yes, but we still, I love how you said it, this is, I can't do this, but I'm going to try anyway. Like, I know I'm going to fail, but here I go. Like, I'm not, instead of changing the framework, instead of changing the plan and adapting and creating something that is feasible in advance, I know it's not feasible and I'm still going to move forward. What an incredible denial.
And I mean, it's natural. I do it. I mean, this is why we've all done it. This is why it resonates. I'm going out. Right. We just go, ah, this isn't feasible, but go. Just go. Don't have time to sit here and say it's not feasible.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: What kind of rational thinking is that?
[00:59:33] Speaker A: Well, sometimes what happens when we're thinking about performance is we kind of go to an extreme. So, for example, when we say, I'm going to plan, many of the people who are super planners end up being very rigid with their plan. The idea that planning is supposed to control the universe, I can tell you right now, like, your plan does not control the universe. There are so many other moving parts and people involved. The point of a plan is that it's an intention. And when we put intention into things, number one, we feel much better about the work we do. So, for example, I could sprint all day, and it's not just me, I mean, any number of clients have told me this, but I could sprint all day and say, I'm going to do as much work as I can and I will reach the end of the day and I will have some judgment about how much of my to do list did I get done. There's still a to do list. Guess what? There's always going to be a to do list.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: Yeah. The work's never done. Done.
[01:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. But when I say, here are the priorities that I want to get done today, and I set an intention around that and I complete those priorities, even if it was the same amount of stuff, even if it was actually less stuff.
It turns out that how I feel, having met my word, had my intention come to life, creates a sense of well being, because as human beings, we like to have influence. And so it's sort of completing a loop or a cycle in our brains. And so I like to help people use this tool and say, your plan does not determine what will happen with the universe, but when we set a good plan, it sets us up to be able to deal with the uncertain things that come up and then make a new plan. And so this is how I talk about planning. It's not have no plan and do much, as much as you can and have no plan because, you know, you don't control the universe. That's not the best item either. It's kind of being in the middle. Have a plan, but also understand that it's, that plan allows you to be nimble and agile and communicate ahead of time so other people know what to expect from you. And also so you know what to expect.
[01:01:41] Speaker B: So why is this so hard for people to. I mean, you talk about three, my Michael Hyatt talks about the three big things of the day, the getting things done framework that we use it in strategic planning. What we use the number five a lot, but priorities. Think about the big things and moving and I mean, there are calendar hacks and time management is this whole thing that I won't even go into. But it's like this stuff is so simple and there's a million frameworks out there that all, many of them basically are saying the same thing. And yet it's just so why is it so hard for us to adapt these simple things that would create so much power? What's the psychology behind that? Doctor Fowler?
[01:02:30] Speaker A: I think, and this is true of a number of different areas of performance, but I think it's because the sweet spot is actually in the middle, which means the sweet spot is actually sort of ambiguous. So I think as human beings, we often are better at doing an extreme that is very fixed and rigid. But we know that the best performance generally does not come from being rigid. So I'll give an example.
Some people have trouble stopping to do the planning or a small amount of organization that helps free up the bandwidth to then be present and kind of do what needs to be done. So because they're like planning. Planning is not getting anything done and I have no time. Sort of scarcity mindset.
[01:03:11] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:03:12] Speaker A: And so I don't have time to plan, I just need to do so this, like, I have a client where that's one of the things we're continually working on, is how to open up time for her to think and to do some planning, because when those things are clear, everything else falls into place a little better. And yet, because her to do list is so long, it's really difficult to not feel anxious about the stuff not getting done as you're planning. So that's one scenario, I think, on the other side, you pointed out that there's a ton of literature on this topic, classics like getting things done. And one of the challenges is people who get into that sometimes go to the other extreme, which is they overbuild their system, and then the productivity system starts to take more time than the benefit it is actually giving you.
[01:04:07] Speaker B: So good.
[01:04:09] Speaker A: I talk a lot about it's good to have some structure, it's good to have some planning, but we should right size it. And, like, I've found that often a good right size rhythm is, like, some kind of weekly, like, check in and think ahead about what's coming, what's most important, and have you protected time to actually, you know, properly count for what you need to do to not just deliver things, but to have done the thinking that allows you to have the clarity of what, like, actually needs to happen.
I also find a little bit of a daily check in, which literally can be five minutes. Again, I'm not saying you need an hour every day to do this. Five minutes to put your day to bed, which is often where you say, what happened today? What does that change about tomorrow? It's a moment to feel good about what you did accomplish and to make the adjustments in tomorrow that need to happen and then to put it down.
And this ability to put your day to bed is, I think, a little bit at the root of something. Both in the for profit sector and the nonprofit sector is really important, which is, how do we not burn out?
Where does burnout come from? And how do we have moments where we get to be living life and thinking about things and doing things outside of our work so that we can have a fresh brain for tomorrow? And because that's part of what life is about.
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Wow. I love the word put the day to bed.
We think about putting ourselves to bed, and we don't sleep well because we didn't put the day to bed. So I really like that. I really like that frame that resonates as well. I also like the question is, what implications does what happened today have on tomorrow?
That's a good question, too.
Yeah, these are great, man. There's so many other directions you got me wanting to go, but I don't want to derail you off your tools. So your powerful tools are there. Are there any others?
[01:06:22] Speaker A: There are some others. So one tool or one thing that comes up for people as they're leading, but also for their teams, is helping people start something new, helping people learn something, help people wade into something that they're not experienced or practiced at. And a tool I like to use for this is, I call it the 90 90 90. And I'll just explain the principle first and then how we go about it. But it's to remind people that at the beginning of something 90% of people often don't start, we find all sorts of reasons to just not do the new thing that is uncertain, that we don't feel good at, and so it's just to recognize the accomplishment of actually starting and sometimes starting is, I need to read a book about that. Like, I literally know nothing, or I need to talk to the three smartest people in that area that I am connected to to understand this better. But getting started is really powerful, and it shouldn't be. Often we're thinking so far in advance that we both undervalue starting and don't give ourselves credit for the fact that most people don't ever start.
And so we sort of discount it, and then that removes our motivation to get started. So that's the first 92nd 90.
Like, of the people who start, many people don't keep going.
And I think there's a lot of things. I'll use fundraising as an example. That is this ongoing pipeline process that compounds on itself and that rarely is going to start with a bang. I mean, once in a while you get lucky and you have, like, a massive donor who so believes in what you're doing that they give you a boatload of cash and that helps you then spin other people who socially follow. But typically, um, it's more that. No, it's grassroots. You're, like, building those connections that will compound over time. And so you really have to keep going. And so 90% of people at some point are like, it's not working. I feel like I'm not going fast enough or I'm not seeing the results early enough, and so they stop.
The third 90 is. So let's say you started, you kept going, but maybe you're just kind of doing the same thing over and over again. And so you haven't really put any thought into, could I improve what I'm doing? So, for example, in fundraising, how. Let me spend some time reflecting on my donor conversations. And, you know what? If I have a trusted donor, like, I could ask them for some feedback to just say, what do you think about how well I'm communicating what we're doing? Like, you know, if you were someone who wasn't totally devoted to us for other reasons, like, how would you find that? You know, how's my pitch? How well am I connecting? Like, how well do you feel seen as a person? These kinds of things. So. So I bring up that's why it's called the 90 90 90. And I think it then helps us understand and what's most important to help people get started. And so one thing is make a plan for what starting looks like and don't judge yourself on the fact that, no, of course, that's not going to get you all the way there, but that's not the point. Judge yourself on starting.
So it's defining what success looks like for starting, then the next step. When you're thinking about how do I keep going when it's uncertain, I don't feel good at this thing. So sometimes the feedback is like, I totally bombed that pitch. Like we were not connected at all.
[01:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah, this isn't working.
[01:10:00] Speaker A: This is not working. And I feel dumb or I feel embarrassed. Right. Because I'm a beginner and I'm not very good at this. These are common emotions that come up and that often make us want to stop. So I love creating structures where we agree ahead of time on how are you going to help yourself keep going. So a great example just from life is if you sign up to work out with a trainer and you say, I am prepaying for three months and it's for two sessions a week for three months is a wonderful way to help yourself keep going. You literally set up an incentive structure to say, I just need to keep showing up there or you agree to meet a friend to go do something. So thinking ahead about, don't worry too much about improving yet, but just ensure that you are continuing to keep after the thing. So that's sort of for that second phase. And then I think the third phase is once you really feel like you've developed the habit and sometimes you can even say, I'm not going to think about improving what I'm doing for two months. I'm just going to get at least 60 days under my belt of, I send emails to potential donors every day, like, maybe you have a certain amount you do, or every week. And I try to make sure I have at least three coffees. Right. You said that's just. That's all I'm measuring myself on is just keeping going. You could then say, okay, two or three months. I'm then I've had a little chance to practice. I'm then going to get some feedback and I'm going to reflect on my pitch, how well that it's going, and then I'm going to start to say, what do I want to try that's different to improve how this is going? And that's the phase. So you don't let phase three derail you from phase two. Because sometimes what people do is they get so caught up in doing it better very early that they feel demotivated, they don't feel successful, and so they stop. So that's 90. 90, 90, 90.
[01:11:56] Speaker B: That's good. When you talked about the starting, the first thing that came to mind is, well, what are the barriers for people to start? And the first thing that came to my mind on that is starting means losing. Starting something new means it's going to consume some bandwidth that's currently being consumed by something else. And so we talk about the loss that occurs with change or the, you know, you know, when we start a new job, it means we lost the old one. And so there's this, there's this departure of something. And oftentimes what happens with organizations is they want to start all these new things, but they're not willing to lay anything else down to open bandwidth for that. You said open time up for that. I think about open time for planning, but we use the term bandwidth a lot, but opening bandwidth for something new is, I think, where a lot of people struggle. It's like, where am I going to find time to do this?
And I tell people, you can't find time. It's not lost. You just have to reset your priorities, manage your priorities.
What do you think about that? Feel free to disagree. But to me, the biggest barrier for me starting something, let's think about myself, is that I'm often not willing to lay something else down for it.
[01:13:16] Speaker A: This is great. And I think about this as sources of friction.
So if you have clarity about what you need to do, that, I think is sort of the first step, but then the other thing that then gets in the way. And so part of coaching, I think, is removing sources of friction. And you brought up one of the big ones, which is time. And so properly accounting for saying starting something new both takes time, also takes energy and often resources. And so those are three areas that we have to think about. Yeah, it's, you're not going to cram it in particularly something new because it's more tenuous. And so what's the first thing that will get dropped? It's usually the new thing.
So there's that. The second source of friction that I think prevents people from starting is it's about skill and people's perception of do I know how to do this thing?
So often we don't have as much trouble starting something that we already fundamentally know how to do it. So I don't know if you already had background at fundraising, coming into the CEO position.
Yeah. Going to do the fundraising isn't going to be an issue for you. So even if it's, you haven't done this thing before, but you have all the parts, all the skills needed to do this new thing, that's not a problem. So sometimes what we need to do is help people build their capabilities and get some more information. So read a book, talk to some people, get a coach for it. So that's the second category.
[01:14:51] Speaker B: The influencer model that we use says people do things for two reasons, two reasons only, and both have to exist. They want to and they can.
[01:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:01] Speaker B: So the motivation has to be there and the ability has to be there. And we have found that often when we're leading leaders who are struggling with some of their team members, they. They often diagnose a motivation problem, when really it's an ability problem.
Interesting, because if somebody doesn't know what, they never knew they were supposed to do this, that's a lack of ability. Lack of knowledge equates to a lack of ability. If I don't know it, I can't do it. So sometimes an appearance of disinterest or even apathy or indifference is the word I'm looking for, appears such when really it's a frustration. It's someone not knowing how to act and not even realizing what it is they don't know. So that ability piece, that competence piece, that really rings true.
[01:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad. It's really interesting to hear how you break those two things down. And my third one actually probably falls into that motivation piece, and I like to call it out separately, but the last piece of friction is psychological, and I think it's this fear of failure, of walking into uncertainty. So even if you have the skills, if you're doing something really challenging, there's this question of, will we be able to pull it all together?
[01:16:25] Speaker B: Will it work? What will happen if it doesn't? Will it work?
[01:16:28] Speaker A: And that really leads to my last tool that I really like to talk about, which is, how do we help people relish uncertainty? Because in the area of uncertainty is where all the impact lies. It's the place where we can do the most to sort of support our communities and society is in all those uncertain areas. And the tool I use is I help people think like a scientist and approach it that way and to run good experiments so scientists don't make themselves wrong for showing up every day not knowing the answer. In fact, it's like the whole purpose of their job. And so I use this as a framework to help people think about a situation differently, as, oh, if I don't figure this out, I'm going to fail, and instead approach it from a place of curiosity and say, well, this will be interesting. Like what? Could we try and learn more about how this works? Like what are the, how does this problem put together and what may be good solutions to it? So that's kind of my last big tool.
[01:17:34] Speaker B: Well, I kind of feel like, I kind of feel like I'm cheating here. I feel like I'm taking advantage. I'm getting this, I'm getting this one on one coaching and disguising it as, as a podcast. This is great. Our listeners are getting tremendous value out of this. I am, I'm going to wind it down. There's so many places that we can go and I want to leave. I want to leave people wanting to, want to find out more. So the first thing I'm going to say right now is go to thaxa.com, thaxa.com to learn more about these frameworks and how you can engage with Doctor Fowler.
I certainly want to talk with you more about this, but I want to get to a couple of questions. I want to make sure we have time for a couple of questions that I like to ask all of my leaders, all of my guests, rather. And this is a show about leadership. So the first question is, who's a leader in your life that comes to mind immediately as a person who's just had tremendous influence on your point of view on leadership and why.
[01:18:44] Speaker A: So my PhD advisor is one of these people, and he was the person who really pushed me in my ability to think and to be real clear on what is most important to the field in the, in this case. So he was the one who said, carla, don't go dotting other people's eyes and crossing other people's t's. Like just doing the transactional stuff. Like you need to ask yourself what is going to be impactful? What will the field value go after that? And that's a hard thing because it's very easy to see what's in front of you and say, well, I know how to do that and I know how to do that, so maybe I'll just go do those things. And instead, and I think as a leader, helping our team learn to think is just a piece of this growth and how to really prioritize and start to understand what matters is one of the biggest gifts you can give people throughout their careers.
[01:19:44] Speaker B: I caution organizations on their use of the word best practices because, you know, they'll say, well, we want to find out what the best practices are on this. On this. And you just reminded me of there's value in that, right? We do a literature review in our doctoral study for a reason, but the idea is to contribute to the field and so I caution organizations, that's great. Look at the best practices, but don't just pick one you like and duplicate it.
What's the new space? How do we build upon a best practice to make an even better practice? Will this best practice necessarily work in your community, with your team, with your stakeholders?
What might, what might your community and your team and your stakeholders be able to do differently or even better? So I think putting two of those together, I love that. What a great story and what a great analogy to that. Thinking about, you know, how a scientist thinks and adding, adding to adding value. I love that. I love that. My last question for you. What is your number one piece of advice for leaders in general? If you had a megaphone to all of the leaders in the world, an audience listening to you for 15 seconds, and you had one thing to tell the leaders of the world, what would that be?
[01:21:08] Speaker A: I would tell them that keep growing.
Keep growing. How you grow. How you grow really should be in ways that, again, continue to improve your abilities as a leader, but give you a chance to be a beginner again. It produces empathy for where your team is at and it keeps you sharp. And it is a way to just not stagnate. And I think this is one of the most important things we can do as leaders.
[01:21:39] Speaker B: Wow, Carla, you just mean you just modeled clarity, which is one of the things you talk about a lot. This has been super rich.
I know our listeners have benefited from it because I have. So I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for being so generous with this content and with your expertise. Really fascinating. It makes me want to know more. So I'll probably be reaching out to you folks. Go to thaxa.com, thaxa.com to learn more. Doctor Fowler, thank you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Lead on, folks.
